Although Berdiaev has subsequently become better known in the West, Ivanov was in many ways the more seminal thinker. A student of Mommsen in Berlin who had become converted to the Nietzschean idea that "a new organic era" was at hand, Ivanov bade his associates join him in plunging "from the real to the more real"; to leave behind the prosaic realities of the present for a future that will bring with it a new tragic sense. Ivanov insisted that he longed not for the unattainable but simply "for that which has not yet been attained."80 "Viacheslav the Magnificent" was the crown prince and chef de salon of the new society, which met in his seventh-floor apartment "The Tower," overlooking the gardens of the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg. Walls and partitions were torn down to accommodate the increasing numbers of talented and disputatious people who flocked to the Wednesday soirees, which were rarely in full swing until after supper had
been served at 2 a.m.
Nietzsche was in a sense the guiding spirit, for Ivanov looked nostalgically to the lost world of classical antiquity through the eyes of Nietzsche's own academic discipline-philology-and worshipped at the shrine of the vitalistic Dionysus: the god of fertility and wine and patron of drama and choral song. But from the time of his early studies of 1904-5, "Nietzsche and Dionysus," "The Religion of Dionysus," and "The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God," to his scholarly dissertation on Dionysus defended at Baku in 1921,81 Ivanov tended to see in the Dionvsian cult a prefiguration of Christianity; and he became after his exile
in 1925 a resident of Rome and convert to Catholicism. Berdiaev, who later became an emigre apologist for Christianity within the Orthodox fold, was in pre-Revolutionary days closer to Nietzsche in such books as The Meaning of the Creative Act of 1916.
Rozanov went much further, insisting that there was a basic conflict between Dionysus and Christ. In a famous speech to the Religio-Philo-sophical Society, Rozanov attacked Jesus as a figure who never laughed or married, and pleaded for a new religion of uninhibited creativity and sensuality.82 Rozanov's proposal was given support by Nietzsche's suggestion that all morality is rationalization and that a new type of superman is needed with the courage to live beyond the stultifying categories of good and evil. Shestov's Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy saw these two figures as the twin prophets of a new world in which the tragic spirit was to be freed from the shackles of morality for a new life of sensual and aesthetic adventure.83 Shestov later sought to contrast the German with Tolstoy, the bete noire of silver age aestheticism, in his The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche.84 The tendency to identify Dostoevsky with Nietzsche rather than Christ was particularly marked among those of Jewish origins like Shestov and A. Shteinberg, who tended to see in Dostoevsky a revolutionary new "system of freedom," to cite the title of a lecture series he gave in St. Petersburg in 1921.85
Another important source of the new sensualism was the return to primitivism in the arts. Kandinsky had turned to the lubki, or popular wood cuts, of Old Russia for inspiration, and published in 1904 his Poems without Words, a portfolio of his own cuts, en route to his more abstract and experimental compositions. Malevich also went through a primitivist period; as did Michael Larionov, who turned to folk themes, simple figures, and distorted anatomies in a desperate effort to find a truly original Russian style of art. He eventually created a purely abstract style of "rayonism," which sought to base painting on "rays of color" rather than lines and fields of color. But in the experimental, interim period that followed the Revolution of 1905, Larionov championed the introduction of pornographic material into painting: salacious slogans in his "Soldier" series and ingenious improvisations on sexual shapes in his subsequent "Prostitute" series.86 These and other primitive and suggestive paintings were exhibited in Moscow early in 1912 by a group with the deliberately shocking name "The Donkey's Tail," which represented "the first conscious breakaway from Europe"87 within the artistic avant-garde. A similar movement through primitivism to modernistic innovation can be traced in music. Stravinsky's revolutionary "Rite of Spring" was suggested to him by an unexpected and erotic vision
of a solemn pagan rite in which a circle of elders watched a young girl dance herself to death to propitiate the god of spring and fertility.88
The bawdiness of Larionov endeared him to the literary futurists, who used him and his friends as illustrators for their works. The use of erotic motifs, infantile forms of expression, and vulgar epigrams became common to painters and poets alike of the "futurist" persuasion, who were in pre-war Russia generally more preoccupied with the sensuous and personal than the original Franco-Italian futurist Marinetti, who had been more interested in "the aesthetics of the machine." Russian futurism represented, in the title of its most famous manifesto, "a slap in the face of public taste." Rather in the manner of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes and dandies of Edwardian England, the Russian futurists delighted in bizarre attire-appearing on the street with abstract signs painted on their cheeks and radishes in their buttonholes. The painter-poet Burliuk brothers, who organized the futurist tour of 1913-14, typified the egocentric exuberance of the movement. Vladimir, a professional wrestler, carried mammoth weights with him everywhere he went, and his equally gigantic older brother, David, appeared with the legend "I am Burliuk" painted on his forehead.
If one can speak of a synthetic proclamation of liberated sensualism comparable to Scriabin's Promethean proclamation, it would probably be the futuristic movie "Drama in Cabaret No. 13," which was filmed late in 1913. In contrast to the melodramas set in remote times and places which were the standard fare of the infant Russian movie industry, this film was simply an average bawdy day in the life of the futurists. Its actors were the artists themselves-the Burliuk brothers, Maiakovsky, and Larionov- behaving in particularly shocking ways as they satirized the movie industry, the society that patronized it, the world itself, and the entire subject of sex, through which one senseless generation leads on to another.
By late 1913, sensualism was giving way to Prometheanism, and the subjective side of futurism ("ego-futurism") to a more dispassionate and formal "cubo-futurism." Malevich was the harbinger of the new, designing cubistic sets and costumes in December, 1913, for the futurist opera with the appropriately Promethean title, Victory over the Sun. People were transformed into "moving machines" by costumes of cardboard and wire. Some actors spoke only with vowels, others only with consonants, while blinding lights and ear-splitting sounds rocked through the theater in an effort to give man "victory over the sun": freedom from all dependence on the traditional order of the world.89 Freud, too, make his impact on the new art; and plays were written in which the various roles did not represent different people but different levels and aspects of one person.90
In the manifesto that accompanied his first Suprematist exhibition in December, 1915, Malevich insisted:
Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes has disappeared, shall we see a pure-painting composition.91
Shameless nudes had, however, not altogether vanished from Russian culture. They dominated the literary debut late in 1916 of one of Russia's great storytellers of this century, Isaac Babel.92 His description of a seduction in the manner of the French naturalists, whom he admired, attracted the wrath of the government authorities, who transferred to the inventive young writer from Odessa the puritanical denunciations and threats that could no longer be visited upon the absent Larionov. Yet nowhere was sensualism more in evidence than in the inner circles of the imperial government itself. The imperial family was under the sway of the notorious Rasputin, and the rival court figures who succeeded in killing this "holy devil" in December of 1916 were if anything even more corrupt than the remarkable peasant holy man from Siberia. Protopopov, the minister of the interior who was Rasputin's friend and protege, was a sensualist thought by many to be a practitioner of necrophilia. Prince Yusupov and the Grand Duke Dmitry (the high aristocrats who carried out the poisoning, shooting, and drowning of the rugged Rasputin) were widely renowned for their sexual exploits and intrigues.93