The Icon and the Axe

responsibility of an aristocratic couple preparing for marriage. But most of the play and all of its interest centers on the education of "the adolescent," a brutish, sixteen-year-old provincial aristocrat, Mitrofan, by an unforgettable galaxy of characters "in the village of the Prostakovs" (literally, "Simpletons"). Three fraudulent teachers, a worthless father, a pig-loving uncle, and a gross, doting mother, all hover around the sulking Mitrofan and contribute to his mis-education. Those who preach the gospel of aristocratic virtue are made to appear boring and faintly ludicrous in a world where unvarnished barbarism is still the norm.

Thus, Fonvizin turns Catherine's world upside down in a way he never had as part of Panin's political opposition-and in a way he may not entirely have intended. Western education does not lead to the grail of enlightenment in adolescent Russia. At the end of the adventure, there is no "thorn-less rose that does not sting," but only a sea of brambles. The last line of the play is: "Here are the worthy fruits of an evil nature." Perhaps human nature is not perfectible after all. Perhaps there is no point in cultivating one's garden, as Voltaire advised, because nothing but poisoned fruit will grow.

But such splenetic thoughts were to come later. Fonvizin's perspective is still one of life-affirming laughter. He shared the breadth of interests that was typical of the Russian Enlightenment, and the sense of confidence and pride that comes from being a privileged member of a rising power. For deeper disaffection one must look to three other figures who deliberately set out to find radically new answers to the problems of the day: Gregory Skovoroda, Alexander Radishchev, and Nicholas Novikov. They were probably the most brilliant men of the late eighteenth century in Russia; and the depth and variety of their searchings illustrate the true seriousness of the alienation of the intellectuals under Catherine. The only common feature of their divergent careers is the intensity with which they all rejected the dilettantism and imitativeness of court culture and the finality with which their own new ideas and activities were, in turn, rejected by Catherine.

Skovoroda represented the most complete rejection of Catherine's ethos with his ascetic indifference to things of this world and his search for the hidden mysteries of "true wisdom." Of Cossack descent, Skovoroda studied at the Kiev Academy and attracted imperial attention in the 1740's as a vocalist in the baroque choirs of Kiev. A brilliant teacher at the Academy, he soon turned to seminary teaching and then left for a life of lonely wandering and reading, relieved only by endless philosophical dialogues and a few close friendships.

He taught for brief periods in all of the great centers of theological education in eighteenth-century Russia: Kiev, St. Petersburg, Kharkov, and

the Moscow Academy in the Monastery of St. Sergius. He concluded that happiness lay only in full inner knowledge of oneself, which in turn required a highly personal and mystical link with God. He wandered throughout Russia for most of his last thirty years, with no possessions except a knapsack containing a Hebrew Bible and books in many languages. He wrote haunting poems, letters, and philosophic dialogues rather in the style of Blake, rejecting the high culture of the Enlightenment for the "primordial world which delights my heart's abyss."65 Influenced by Stoicism and Neo-Platonism, he taught, in his Dialogue of the Archangel Michael with Satan, that there was a fundamental conflict between the spiritual and material worlds. Carnal lust and worldly ambition are the principal lures of the devil; he inveighed against the one in his Israelite Snake and the other in his Icon of Alcibiades. He died in 1794, leaving behind as his epitaph: "The world hunted me but it did not catch me."66

Skovoroda called himself the Russian Socrates, and he was one of Russia's first original speculative philosophers. He shared, moreover, the Platonic qualities of dedication and perhaps also homosexuality. His songs of praise to "father freedom"67 reflect the anarchistic sentiments of his Cossack forebears. His mysticism and dualism made him feel more at home with religious sectarians than with the official Orthodox Church, which was particularly infused with scholasticism in the Latinized Ukraine. Skovoroda helped compose a declaration of faith for the "spirit wrestlers" and music for the psalm-singing ceremonies of the "milk drinkers."68