The Icon and the Axe

Skovoroda never joined any sect, however, and is properly described as "a lonely mountain on the steppe."69 He foreshadowed the romantic, metaphysical Auswanderung of the Russian intelligentsia. For he was discontent not so much with the Russia of his day as with the entire earthly world. He was driven on by Faustian discontent with all formal and external knowledge. Favored with positions in all the leading theological centers, he never took holy orders, and he eventually left the Church altogether. He sought to teach religion through poetry and a symbolic study of the Bible. He described himself as "not a beggar but an elder"70 and became a kind of secular version of the medieval mendicant pilgrim.

The sincerity and intensity of his quest-like that of many Russian thinkers to follow-commanded respect even among those unable to understand his ideas or language. In his native Ukraine he became a legendary figure, whose manuscripts were passed about like sacred writings and whose picture was often displayed as an icon. Not least among those who stood in awe of him was the tsarist government, which refused to permit any collected edition of his voluminous (and largely unpublished) works to appear until a century after his death. Even then, the edition was incom-

plete and heavily censored; and subsequent editors have drawn only very selectively from this profound-and profoundly disturbing-thinker. Many of his writings he called "conversations," and they were apparently the outgrowth of his many oral disputations on metaphysical matters which helped launch the seemingly interminable discussion of cosmic questions by modern Russian thinkers. Skovoroda sought a kind of syncretic higher religion, the essence of which is revealed in this characteristic "conversation" between Man and Wisdom (MudrosO:

Man: Tell me thy name, tell it thyself;

For all our thoughts are corrupt without thee. Wisdom: I was called sophia by the Greeks in ancient days,

And wisdom I am called by every Russian.

But the Roman called me Minerva,

And the good Christian gave me the name of Christ.71

Radishchev's alienation from Catherine's Russia assumed the more familiar form of social and political criticism. The first of Russia's "repenting noblemen" to propose a thoroughgoing reform of Russia's aristocratic absolutism, Radishchev was a pure creation of Catherine's Enlightenment. While a boy of thirteen, he was chosen at Catherine's coronation to be one of forty members of her exclusive new corps of pages and was later one of twelve sent to study abroad at Leipzig. He returned to occupy a series of favored positions in the imperial service, culminating in the lucrative post of chief of customs in St. Petersburg.

Almost from the beginning of his career, Radishchev sought to temper despotism with enlightenment. His early satirical writings were critical of the institution of serfdom; and he soon began arguing for some form of responsible popular sovereignty: particularly in the introduction to his translation of Mably's Reflections on Greek History in 1773, in his Ode to Liberty of 1781-3, in praise of the American Revolution, and in his essays on legislation in the 1780's.

His famous Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, which he printed at his own expense in 1790, was the first in a long series of literary bombshells which the privileged aristocracy was to set off against the established order. Yet it was in many ways a typical product of Catherine's time: moralistic in tone and pretentious in style. Imitating Sterne and Volney, Radishchev couches his social criticism in the philosophic language of the European Enlightenment. Evil comes "from man himself, and often only from the fact that he has not yet seen surrounding places in the right light." Artificial divisions and restrictions rather than inherent limitations keep man from realizing his "inviolable worth."72

Even his criticism of serfdom, which was the most novel and daring feature of the book, was in some ways only a kind of delayed response to the demand for social and economic criticism which Catherine herself had made to the Free Economic Society a few years before. The basis for Radishchev's objections to serfdom were, moreover, in conformity with those of Catherine's Enlightenment. His protest was based not on practical or even compassionate grounds but rather on the high philosophic plane that the system prevented serfs from using their own rational faculties to conceive of any alternative to their degrading lot.

Appearing as it did without official approval in the first year of the French Revolution, Radishchev's book alarmed Catherine. She arrested him for treason and sentenced him to decapitation, which was commuted to exile in Siberia. In distant Tobol'sk he reaffirmed his faith in human dignity with verse written in the inelegant singsong style that was to become fashionable among the radical "civic" poets of the nineteenth century: