The Icon and the Axe

I am what I have always been, and shall be evermore Neither cow, nor tree, nor slave, but a man.73

When he returned from Siberia after Catherine's death, his last years were spent in drafting a republican constitution for Russia which he hoped young Alexander I would put into effect. Radishchev committed suicide in 1802, leaving behind unfulfilled hopes for social and political reform which continued to agitate the aristocracy throughout Alexander's reign. Interest in his ideas was revived again only during the reform period of Alexander II's reign, when Herzen brought out a new edition of his Journey in 1858, on the eve of peasant emancipation.

Skovoroda and Radishchev stand at the headwaters of two mighty streams of thought that swept through modern Russian thought. Skovoroda was the precursor of Russia's alienated metaphysical poets, from Tiutchev to Pasternak, and of a host of brooding literary figures from Lermontov's Hero of our Time to Dostoevsky's Idiot. Skovoroda is the untitled outsider in aristocratic Russia, the homeless romantic, the passionate believer unable to live within the confines of any established system of belief. He stands suspended somewhere between sainthood and total egoism, relatively indifferent to the social and political evils of this world, thirsting rather for the hidden wellsprings and forbidden fruits of the richer world beyond.

Radishchev was the privileged nobleman with a European education, conscious of the artificiality of his position; he was conscience-stricken by the suffering of others and anxious to create a better social order. His preoccupation with social problems foreshadows the civic poetry of the Decembrists and Nekrasov, the literary heroes of Turgenev, and even the

search for family happiness and social adjustment from Eugene Onegin to Anna Karenina. At the same time, there is in Radishchev a heroic Pro-metheanism that anticipates the ecstatic, secular belief in the future of Lunacharsky and Trotsky. In his last book, On Man, His Mortality and Immortality, Radishchev rejects the prosaic materialism of the French Encyclopedists and sees man attaining perfection-even immortality- through heroic effort and a creative evolution that includes a regeneration (palingenesis) of the dead. His conviction was that "if people feared death less they would never become slaves of superstition. Truth would find for itself more zealous defenders."74

Radishchev and Skovoroda were precursors rather than decisive influences in their own right; and it is dangerous to lift their ideas out of the complex context of their own life and times. Nevertheless, they stand as pioneers if not prophets: they were the first to set out on the argosy of alienation that would lead to revolution. Almost all Russian revolutionaries have seen in Radishchev the founding father of their tradition; and it has now been revealed that Skovoroda was one of the very few religious thinkers who was read and admired by Lenin himself. There are many memorials to Radishchev in the USSR, and Lenin planned also to erect a monument to Skovoroda.75

Novikov and Masonry

Far more influential than either Radishchev or Skovoroda in Catherine's time was Nicholas Novikov, who shared both the philanthropic reformism of the former and the religious anguish of the latter. Novikov was a serious thinker and, at the same time, a prodigious organizer who opened up new paths of practical activity for the aristocracy. A member of the exclusive Izmailovsky regiment and of Catherine's legislative commission, Novikov imitated Catherine in the sixties by founding his own weekly satirical journal, The Drone, named after the dull pedant in a play then popular at court. In this journal-and even more in its successors of the early seventies, The Painter and The Purse-Novikov voiced the increasing dissatisfaction of the native Russian nobility with Catherine's imitation of French ways and toleration of social injustice. Novikov's journals became the first organs of independent social criticism in Russian history. Like later "thick journals," each of these was shut down by imperial authority. Novikov then linked his publishing energies to two other institutions which

were to play a key role in the cultural development of the alienated intellectuals: the university and the small discussion group, or "circle."