Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

The Englishman did not believe me, so I went and explained the whole difference to him: nowadays, I said, worldly artists didn’t make the same kind of art; they used paints made of oil, while the old artists, they used pigments dissolved in egg-yolk. The new art, that means you smear the paint on so it only looks life-like in the distance, while in the old kind the work is smooth, and even close to, you can see it clearly. And a worldly artist, I said, won’t even get things right in the outline of his drawing, because he’s been taught to represent what’s hidden in the body of the earthly and animal man, but in holy Russian icon-painting is represented the face that dwelleth in heaven, which a material person could never see even in his imagination.

Yet this other-worldly art, as the detailed description here makes clear, is also one of exact representation. As evoked by the Red-Haired Man, the angel icon at the centre of the story has an individual and distinct physical presence. His face is not only ‘radiant divine’ (svetlobozhestvennyi) but also ‘kind of ready to help’ (edak skoropomoshchnyi).

‘Domestic Orthodoxy’, then, consists not in a rejection of the material world, but in the notion of a fusion of the material and the spiritual as the ideal. In this it has something in common with another salutary response to the clichés of other-worldliness, the construction of a theology of the body. The origins of this can be traced back to some writers associated with the national-conservative Slavophile movement. In Tolstoy’s eulogies of procreative family life in War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the rare moments of perfect happiness are associated with a celebration of physical intimacy – Natasha waving her baby’s nappies in front of friends, or (more decorously) Lyovin watching Kitty bathe his son. To be sure, Tolstoy’s energetic love of the physical was determinedly anti-sexual: it is child-bearing rather than copulation that is a source of true joy (the fact that Lyovin and Kitty find sexual contact embarrassing but child-rearing unambiguously enjoyable makes this perfectly clear). But a later Slavophile writer, the brilliant essayist Vasily Rozanov, created a world where there was no separation between body and spirit, flesh and intellect. As the scholar Stephen Hutchings has pointed out, Rozanov’s was an existence where ‘the most exaggeratedly profound formulations are arrived at “over a cup of tea” or “in the lavatory” ’. The writer firmly believed that ‘a hole in a sock that never grows larger, and never gets darned’ was a better expression of everlasting life than ‘the dry and abstract term “immortality of the soul” ’, and believed sexuality was an essential, indeed perhaps the essential, form of spiritual expression. In his People of the Lunar Light, Rozanov insisted upon the perverted nature of religious celibacy (monasticism was for him a form of displaced, or not so displaced, homo-eroticism); procreative sexuality, preferably ritualized in the way that it was by Jews (who reserved copulation for the eve of the Sabbath) was a godly act. Sexuality, too, was the only way of resolving the otherwise unresolvable problem of how to produce a dialogue between self and other, retaining the identity of each yet allowing free communication between them.

20. ‘Don’t Weep for Me, Mother’: The Saviour not Made by Human Hands with Saints. Icon for Holy Week: a Muscovite version of the Greek

acheiropoietos

, as evoked in the first line of ‘Monument’, showing the triumph of the resurrected Christ over the tomb.