Ivanov recognized that he was plunging on to something entirely new. He insisted that the murals did not belong in any existing church and disavowed all links with the pre-Raphaelites, with whom he is often erroneously compared. He was, he insisted in 1857, the year of his visit to Strauss in Tubingen, attempting to "unite the techniques of Raphael with the ideas of the new civilization."117 He wrote to Herzen (who like Gogol before him and Chernyshevsky after him was attempting to enlist support for his efforts) that he was "trying to create a new path for my art in the sketches," and later confessed that "I am, as it were, leaving the old mode of art without having any bedrock for the new."118 In 1858 he set off, after twenty-eight years of absence, for St. Petersburg to exhibit at last his "Appearance of Christ to the People" and to solicit the support of the new Tsar for his temple. Disappointed by public indifference upon arrival and exhausted
morally and physically by his strange quest, Ivanov died only a few days after the first showing of his work in St. Petersburg.
Ivanov's "Appearance of the Messiah" must be judged as a failure by almost any standard. The corrupt figures in the foreground dominate the picture and seem totally indifferent to the distant figure of Christ, who seems strangely insignificant and almost unrelated to the picture. The much-labored face of Christ lacks any clearly defined characteristics and conveys an expression of weakness and even embarrassment.
It is perhaps fitting that this final artistic legacy of a monumental and prophetic age should be dominated by the figure of John the Baptist, who stands at the center of the canvas as its most majestic personality. The day of John the Baptist had been the most elaborate official holiday of Russian higher masonry. Chaadaev had encouraged Russians to believe that "great things have come from the desert" and had written on the title page of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason that "I am not the savior, but he who announces his coming."119 Ivanov had tried first to create and then to become Christ, but he had left behind only sketches of human suffering and a noble failure dominated by the ascetic prophet who can do no more than announce that someone mightier is coming.
John the Baptist was known in Russia as "the forerunner" {predtecha), a designation that seems particularly appropriate for Ivanov. His vision of universal Russian rule aided by "public artists" and adorned with "temples of humanity" seems at times like an anticipation of Soviet ideology. His initial stylistic experimentation anticipates the emancipated search for new art forms in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. His final realism and preoccupation with suffering helped usher in the bleak, semi-photographic style that was to dominate painting until the 1890's. Nonetheless, for all his qualities as a prophet and precursor, Ivanov stands at the end rather than the beginning of an age. His life and work represent a final heroic effort to attain a kind of moralistic self-transformation into the likeness of Christ.
Ivanov's failure to find a new religious philosophy-or a philosophical religion-represents the frustration of a pursuit that had begun in higher order Masonry. Higher order Masonry was known to its adepts as the "royal art";120 and the prophetic artists of the Nicholaevan era had sought to find the art forms for the new kingdom. But no one was yet sure what kind of a kingdom it would be, and artists tended to become either haunted by the God they had lost or driven to madness in pursuit of His inner secrets. Ivanov's failure only posed in more dramatic terms the nagging question that Herzen had asked as early as 1835:
Where is our Christ? Are we students without a teacher, apostles without a Messiah? 121
In their anguish, thinkers of the late Nicholaevan era looked for a messiah almost everywhere: in the person of Nicholas I (Ivanov), the holy wanderer Fedor Kuzmich, suffering Poland (Mickiewicz), the Ukrainian peasantry (Shevchenko), or among the ascetic elders of the Optyna Pustyn (Kireevsky). The religious works of Gogol and Ivanov made Christ no longer appear to be a source of deliverance or tenderness. Ivanov's picture of Christ as a lonely, suffering, and uncertain man was reflected and magnified in subsequent nineteenth century paintings: suffering predominating in the work of Ge, brooding loneliness in that of Kramskoy. The seductive thought that the aristocratic reformer himself might prove to be the messiah was suggested by Pleshcheev, the prophetic "first poet" of the Petrashevsky circle in the late forties, who exhorted that confused circle of reformers to "believe that thou shalt meet, like the Savior, disciples along the way."122
As if to clear the stage for new and less narrowly aristocratic movements, the brief period from 1852 to 1858 claimed the lives of a host of gifted figures of the Nicholaevan age: Nadezhdin, Chaadaev, Granovsky, Gogol, Ivanov, Aksakov, and Kireevsky. None of these were old men; but they had burnt themselves out like those who had died even earlier and at much younger ages: Venevitinov, Pushkin, Stankevich, Lermontov, and Belinsky. Out of their collective effort had come an art that was truly national and rich in prophetic overtones. Khomiakov, who was himself to die in i860, wrote the epitaph for this chapter of Russian culture in a letter of 1858 on the occasion of Ivanov's death:
He was in painting what Gogol was in writing and Kireevsky in philosophy. Such people do not live long, and that is not accidental. To explain their death it is not enough to say that the air of the Neva hangs heavy or that cholera enjoys honorary citizenship in Petersburg . . . another cause leads these laborers prematurely to the grave. Their work is not mere personal labor. . . . These are powerful and rich personalities who lie ill not just for themselves; but in whom we Russians, all of us, are compressed by the burden of our strange historical development.123
The Missing Madonna
The waning of classical form in art and life was one of the many fateful results of the reign of Nicholas I. His official ideologists-Uvarov and Pletnev-had found the literary heritage of classical antiquity largely
incompatible with the new doctrine of official nationality. The continued loyalty of the aristocratic intellectuals to the distant world of classical antiquity and the neo-classical Renaissance became a sign of their estrangement from official ideology.
The most gifted creative figures of the late Nicholaevan period- Gogol, Ivanov, and Tiutchev-had gone to Rome in hopes of forging some kind of link between the awakening culture of Russia and classical antiquity. Slavophiles sought these links no less than Westernizers; Shevyrev's lectures did much to introduce Russia to the wonders of classical literature. Herzen called his oath to avenge the Decembrists "Hanniballic." Catherine was the "Semiramis" and St. Petersburg the "Palmyra of the North." Most masonic lodges bore names from classical mythology, and there was an abundance of classical statuary, Latin and Greek anthologies, and classical captions and titles. A century of aristocratic poetry was in a sense framed by the figure of Homer. The first poem to enjoy real popularity was Fenelon's continuation of the Odyssey, TeMmaque, and the first important Russian epic poet, Kheraskov, was known as "the Russian Homer." The most eagerly awaited poetic accomplishment in the late years of Nicholas* reign (after the death of Pushkin and Lermontov) was Zhukovsky's translation of the Odyssey. Both Skovoroda and Kireevsky were called "the Russian Socrates" by their followers.