New literary "hypotheses" often seem to draw less inspiration from literature than from other art media. But, whereas the hidden source of inspiration for the new literature of the silver age was music, the controlling medium now tends to be the visual arts. Akimov is a gifted painter; and Voznesensky, who was trained as an architect, has stated:
I do not think that closeness to his literary predecessors is very good for a writer. "Incest" leads to degeneracy. I have got more from Rublev, Joan Miro, and the later Corbusier than from Byron.55
The importance of painting lies not so much in the large numbers and occasional virtuosity of the experimental canvases that are unofficially painted in the USSR, but rather in the fact that visual art tries to do what the most gifted new writers are also trying to accomplish: depict objectively the real world. The Promethean visionaries of the late imperial period sought to leave the material world altogether, and fled into the world of music, the most immaterial of all the arts and the only guide man could hope to find in his quest for a new language of outer space. In the post-Stalin era, however, when the philistine "metal eaters"56 have thrust their wares out into space, the creative imagination has moved back to earth and sought to grasp once more Russian reality. Thus, young Russians turn to the visual arts for guidance, but they instinctively look beyond the conventional realists to the "more real" art of ancient Russia and the modern West. Hence Voznesensky's juxtaposition of Rublev with Miro and Corbusier, and his powerful anti-war poem that begins "I am Goya" and describes his paintings by means of plays on his name.57 This disturbed and often grotesque Spanish prophet of artistic modernism also appears in the small list of those whom Tertz commends as guides toward the new "phantasmagorical art which . . . would best respond to the spirit of our epoch."58
May the unearthly imaginations of Hoffmann and Dostoevsky, of Goya and Chagall, of Maiakovsky (the most socialist realist of all), as well as those of many other realists and non-realists-,may these teach us how to express truth with the aid of the absurd and fantastic!59
Akimov speaks of the influence upon his theatrical conceptions of pictorial images from Russian icons, Daumier, Van Gogh, and the post-war Italian cinema.60 Yutkevich speaks of the ideal Soviet movie of the future as a "synthesis of the style of Watteau and Goya."61
One of the most remarkable of recent Soviet short stories, "Adam and Eve" by Yury Kazakov, tells of a young painter and a girl going to a deserted island. It is a kind of return to Eden in search of artistic truth. Yet the painter is as restless as the Soviet youth he personifies. He sees himself as "a prophet without an idea." In a deserted church, however, he has a kind of vision of rediscovering "the genuine life of the earth, the water, and the people." He climbs the belfry, and looks down from the sky above to "another sky . . . the whole immeasurable mass of surrounding waters luminous with reflected light."62 In the last scene, he departs over those waters amidst the strange, unearthly whiteness of the northern lights.
One is left again with the image of a ship at sea and no fixed destination. But one feels certain that the destination is not to be found on the approved itineraries of the state travel agency. One can almost imagine a middle-aged Communist official rebuking him with the words addressed by a Pravda editorial five years earlier "to all Soviet workers in literature and the arts":
He who tries to reject the method of socialist realism imitates the irresponsible captain who throws the ship's compass overboard on the high seas so that he may guide his ship "freely."63
The title and imagery of Kazakov's story are but one illustration of the fourth, and most surprising, aspect of the cultural revivaclass="underline" the renewed interest in religion.
There is, to be sure, no dramatic religious revival in progress; and regular churchgoing continues to be primarily an activity of women and elderly people. But there is a continuing fervor in the liturgical worship of the Orthodox Church which attracts a steady stream of brief appearances for baptism and Easter services.64 The growing appeal of church marriages has forced the regime to set up its own grotesque "marriage palaces" designed to provide all the material accouterments of a church (music, flowers, and solemn decor) for the approved civil ceremonies of the atheistic state. The number of those seeking training for the priesthood in the post-Stalin era increased to the point where a correspondence course was even introduced to accommodate those who might otherwise have been barred by distance, poverty, or bureaucratic obstruction. A program of sharply increased persecution built around the requirement that all would-be semi-
narians submit to a preliminary interrogation and discussion with specially chosen committees of the Young Communist League has enabled Soviet authorities to report with grim satisfaction that the numbers in seminaries have sharply declined since 1959 as a result of "extensive individual work with the students."65
But there still appears to be some validity to the old comparison reputedly made between religion and a nail by Lunacharsky in the early days of atheistic propaganda: "The harder you hit it, the deeper you drive it into the wood." Some of the continuing excesses of atheistic evangelism-the noisy interruption of church services, the offering of rewards for unearthing secret prayer meetings, and the official glorification of those who break with religion and publish lurid exposes-all serve to arouse a certain sense of sympathy even among the atheists and agnostics who still predominate within the younger generation.
In an ironic inversion of the classical conflict between fathers and sons, the younger generation now often picks up religious interests as a means of shocking their atheistically conformist parents. Young Russians seem particularly fond of ridiculing and embarrassing the stereotyped party lectures on scientific atheism, which were increased in number some threefold in 1958. A favorite cartoon in the Soviet humor journal Krokodil shows believers praying for the return of another anti-religious lecturer to their region.66
On a deeper level, the story is frequently told among the younger generation of the old peasant woman whose stubborn religious convictions were impairing the ideological training of the young. A leading party propagandist was brought all the way from Moscow to give her a highly technical illustrated lecture on the material origins and evolutionary laws of creation. The old woman listens intently to this brilliant performance designed to demonstrate once and for all the irrefutable wisdom of scientific atheism; and at the end she nods her head and says: "Yes, comrade, great indeed-greater than I had supposed-are the works of the Lord."
The new interest in religion is more than casual curiosity. It arises in the first place out of the re-examination of the Russian past that has been quietly going on among the young in the wake of the denigration of Stalin. The high price now placed on religious art, the staging of Dostoevsky's novels, Melnikov-Pechersky's tales of Old Believer life, and Rimsky-Korsakov's long-proscribed Invisible City of Kitezh-all respond to the extraordinary interest of the young in rediscovering these "survivals of the past." A new community of interest began to develop in the fifties between the very young and the very old at the expense of the middle-aged "heirs of Stalin."
Solzhenitsyn's use of the vernacular in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich gave an evocative power to that pioneering revelation of suffering under Stalinism not unlike that which Awakum's use of an earlier vernacular had imparted to his harrowing autobiography. Solzhenitsyn subsequently turned more calmly but no less passionately than the arch-priest to the forms of the Old Russian Church for such consolation as he was able to find.