The Icon and the Axe

attached themselves to a second Polish-sponsored pretender, but more followed the leadership of a former serf, Cossack, and Turkish prisoner, Bolotnikov, who was rumored to be the nephew of the true Dmitry and the son of Fedor. The chaotic and violent uprising led by Bolotnikov in 1606-7 came close to capturing Moscow and is properly considered the first of the great nationwide peasant rebellions.80 The peasant insurrectionaries appear thus as a throwback to the old Muscovite ideology: their true tsar was to be the leader of an organic religious civilization. At first the idea was also maintained that such a tsar must be descended from die old line dirough Ivan the Terrible; but it soon became enough merely to show that the pretender's claim was more ancient and honorable than that of the incumbent. Much emphasis was laid on the fact that the self-proclaimed leader of rebellion and claimant to the throne was to be a holy tsar (of which there could be but one) rather than just another king or emperor, such as abounded in die corrupted West. The peasant rebels often echoed themes sounded by tile Old Believers: that the title "emperor" came from the "satanic" pope, that passports were an invention of Antichrist, that the emblem of the two-headed eagle was that of the devil himself (because "only the devil has two heads"), and that the special identifying cross mark placed on the left hand of runaway soldiers was an abomination of the holy cross and the seal of Antichrist.81

There were fourteen serious pretenders in the seventeenth century, and the tradition developed so vigorously in the following century that there were thirteen in the final third of it alone. There were some even in the early nineteenth century--the legends about Constantine Pavlovich as the true tsar rather than Nicholas I providing a kind of uncoordinated popular echo of the aristocratic Decembrist program.82 One reason for the boost which the tradition received in the eighteenth century was the sudden development of the belief in a "substitute tsar." Properly sensing that Peter's reforming zeal was intensified by his trip abroad, partisans of the old ways began a series of apocryphal legends purporting to explain how someone else (usually the son of Lefort) had been substituted for the Tsar. As a result, the claims of Bulavin, die leader of peasant insurrection under Peter, to be rightful heir to the throne were more widely accepted than those of earlier rebel leaders. The Tsar's cruel treatment of his son Alexis a decade later enabled even the weak Alexis to appear to many as the rightful heir. Special opportunities were created for a belief in a true tsar after Peter's death by the fact that women ruled Russia almost continuously until 1796. The peasants tended to equate the worsening of their lot with the advent of feminine rule. "Grain does not grow, because the feminine sex is ruling"83 was the popular saying; but by the time of the Pugachev rebellion

ment Trinity" (Plate V) that the Church Council of 1551 prescribed it as the model for all future icons on the subject. Painted in about 1425 for the monastery founded by St. Sergius on the religious subject to which that monastery was dedicated, Rublev's celebrated masterpiece is a fitting product of the intensified spirituality and historical theology of Muscovy. It depicts the concrete Old Testament event that foreshadowed the divulgence of God's triune nature rather than the ineffable mystery itself. Three pilgrims come to Abraham (Genesis 18: 1-15) in accordance with the sung commentary of the Orthodox liturgy ("Blessed Abraham, thou who hast seen them, thou who hast received the divine one-in-three").

The spiritualized curvilinear harmony of Rub-lev's three angels gathered about the eucharistic elements contrasts sharply with the cluttered composition and gourmet spirit of a mid-fifteenth-century icon on the same theme (Plate VI). Based on a Byzantine-Balkan model, this painting of the Pskov school subtly betrays the more worldly preoccupations of that westerly commercial center.

The third representation of the theme of the Trinity (Plate VII), an icon by the court painter Simon Ushakov in 1670, illustrates the decline of Russian iconography under Western influences in the late years of the reign of Alexis Mikhailovich. The outline form of Rublev's three figures is maintained, but the spirit has drastically changed. The symbolic tree of life, which gave aesthetic balance to both the Rub-lev and the Pskovian icon has become a spreading oak, balanced now by a classical portico with Corinthian columns. The semi-naturalistic, faintly self-conscious figures and sumptuous furnishings suggest the imminent arrival of an altogether new and secular art.

PLATE VI

'LATE VII

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placed icon-painting in the eighteenth century as the

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most vital form of the visual arts is the picture

(Plate Vlll) of the merchant-aristocrat F. Demidov. plate viii