colnHdencis."™"""" *-«---"^-
Particularly after Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman," the image of a flood
consuming St. Petersburg recurs frequently in the literature of the late imperial period. Whereas fire was the enduring fear and symbol of judgment -j in the wooden_w£dd_r^_Moscoffi,. the sea prWMea]^chasymbbriOTTne~i2^ cityj3nthe_NgX£.
The man_wdioperhaps__didjsast to bring Russia both visually and imaginatively in_xontact with_the_ sea in the late nineteenth century was the gifted and prolific painter lyan^Airazoysky. Born by the sea in the Crimea in 1817, Aivazovsky was fascinated by the sea and ships throughout the eighty-three years of his life. As a favored painter for the St. Petersburg academy, he traveled widely during the Nicholaevan era, and became a personal friend of its most gifted creative figures: Glinka and Briullov, Ivanov and Gogol. While visiting the latter two in Rome during the early 1840's, he sold one of his early canvases to the Vatican-on the appropriately romantic subject "Primitive Chaos." He followed one of Ivanov's early leads by painting numerous scenes of the idealized Italian sea coast and has been credited with introducing sea painting to Italy and influencing the work of Joseph Turner.
Almost all of his more than five thousand paintings were scenes of the sea, and,pafficuTarly after his return to Russia, the majontyshowed either violenT^tormsor~rTattles. Following the tradition~f~Brrullov ????^????? Aivazovsky painted his major works on a gigantic scale, many of them well over fifty feet in width. The sheer size of the sea in his canvases creates a sense of human insignificance both for the figures tossed upon it in the picture and for those looking at it in the gallery. His most influential paintings were his largest and most dramatic: "The Storm," which shows a ship sinking and a lifeboat bobbing in the midst of a vast panorama of contrasting light and darkness; and "The Ninth Wave," which lends a kind of incandescent glory to the last wave of the final flood predicted in the Book of Revelation.
Despite continuing success an^pc^u|arity_JAiyjzovs^yremained consumed by romantic wanderl?£?h??ghj?tJlisJife¦ In his last mgnthsji£\yaji_ contemplating another sea journey in search of new inspiration; but he died in _i2£0_wnile working on Irislastj^ajwjis^^
Warship." Just as poets had often sought to express themselves in painting durrngTKe age of Lermontov, so did this last leaf on the tree of Russian romanticism sometimes turn to poetry to express his feelings:
The great ocean heaves beneath me.
I see the distant shore,
The magic regions of a sunlit land:
With agitation and longing, thither do I strive.32
i\j nnw anuKts
In his latej jeajs.j^vamvsk^^became in-
tensely_nationalistic. He dreamei_Qf_a_gloriousjgiie^^£^^5nliav^l'ic-
tories, which he hoped to record on canvas-just as Briullov had once en
visaged!" designing murals of Russian m^TtanTvictories. ^,u,ssian~vigto"figs
in me~"new^15ror^directions;
jrorrxsE^^^gJU^^^Ldjf^tJSS^i^ Soviet strategisTswe7e~tolransform the Russian navyfrom^ojr?what_futile surface fleet to a somber submarine flotilla within half a j^ejoturyjgf_???? sky^sjdteath. Yet in the folklore of the new regime, two surface ships lived on as symbols of the revolutionary hopes of the new order: the battleship Potemkin, which mutinied briefly against tsarist authority during the Revolution of 1905, and the Cruiser Aurora, which provided perfunctory support fire for the Bolshevik insurrection of 1917. Thus, two ships became \j»WBibols,oMeUverance in the new Soviet ideology.38 TTiiesynibol oicreative ^^curnfiejn.iJie_2owet periodwas, howeverTproyjded by a persecuted~poet, Osip Mandel'shtam, wEoTIEened his~verse to a message cast out in a bottle on melrighse^s^yTningmia£.nTan inT5i^5ope*oTreachjfl£jcS£ISFnB^ distS^rgader.34 Beforesejthigout-OTjhjase watejj_a^dscannirig the new horizons of Soviet Russia, one must chart the course which Russian creativity followed across the troubled seas of the late imperial period.
i. The Turn to Social Thought
A distinctive FEATURjLJ±JBassijEm-a^^t0 the ???1?
fiUpatiflB with, what the Russians "??
iSeo^s was its_extrag^__r ?
"social thought" (obshchestvennaia mysl'). There is no exact equiyalentjor
^s £g^gEorX.of thougIrirTn~"^yeliterr^^and
literary to be discussed fairly in the language of traditional moral philosophy or of modern sociology. Its concerns were not primarily political, and may be best understood in terms o£jisychoiogy or religion.
In any event, Russian social thought is a phenomenon of the late
imperial*'peTioa". It represents in many~ways an artificially delayedTlmcC-..,''
chflSefTsWally"pas^ionate, Russian response to the rich ferment ofre^ ^
fornusTiaE^in"TTiaTggrtat^^of 1830 and 1848. Social^
thought provided a kinxL^rf intdls^tualbridge between aristocr proletarian Kussia^lf reflects the impracticaTfiy^m^Itopianism^rj amp;ig. ari^'^!^3^!^i^ys a "™'"awMeness *hat ?£ time had conie~tomove from philosophical to social questions-or, in Belinsky's words, "from the blueTskies info theliItctoen."^5oniorally pure was this tradition that almost all subsequent radical reformers felt constrained to represent themselves as heirs to its aspirations. Soviet ideologists have constructed for their citizens a kind of hagiographical guide that places Herzen and Belinsky, Chernyshev-sky and Dobroliubov, Pisarev, and (with some reservations) Lavrov and Plekhanov in the prophetic line that allegedly reached its fulfillment in
Lenin.
ButjjO£iaJjbougMin the middle and late nineteenth century was f ar_ more thanamere anticipa5i^^f^oIsEvismor ajneis critique of tsarism. It involxeda freejakyof tiie mind and heart: an uncompromisingearne^F"-ness that reflects the projection- ouTTrTto" the^broader arena of society of many of the deeper questions that had long been disturbing the aristocracy. The longing for a better world so evident in Russian social thought became_ subversive TfficTTnTmrln the STalin era; ".??????^the profound^ searchmgsense ceased to be tolerated in the_public culture of the USSR; and
1. The Turn to social inuugm
T
b.
even canonized prophets like Herzen and Chernyshevsky were expurgated or reinterpreted.
In a general sense the distinctively Russian tradition of social thought began with the economic and political discussions of Catherine's time, with Radishchev's anguished critique of serfdom, with the various proposals of Bentham, Owen, and Saint-Simbh for including social reform in the program of Alexander's ????"???????, with PestePs™pfoposals _for__agrarianucPr distribution in the 1820's, and with the Russian interesHn_Sajnt-Simojiin,,the thirties^ But these were all subordinate or episodic concerns of an aristocracy still dominated by religious and aesthetic questions. Indeed, the only important socialist-style experiments on Russian soil during this period were the non-aristocratic communities of foreign sectarians, such as the Hutter-ites of southern Russia, who practiced a form of egalitarian communal living that has yet to be approached in the USSR.