The Icon and the Axe

Of course, the flight into occult methods of exegesis was partly the • result of virginal enthusiasm. Holy chants of the Church were replaced by new declaratory hymns consecrated to abstract virtues and mythological deities. Icons were replaced by statues-above all busts of great philosophers. The pseudo-science of physiognomy was flourishing in Russia thanks to the extraordinary influence of the Swiss mystic Johann Caspar Lavater; and the belief was widespread that one could divine the inner characteristics of a man (and by extension the essence of his ideas) from a careful study of his facial contour and features. Gardens and rooms full of realistic busts or portraits were increasingly common; and Catherine's famous smashing of her bust of Voltaire as a result of the French Revolution was almost a totemistic act.

But what did the "lovers of truth" expect to find inside their circles and behind the sculptured masks of philosophers? The answer may be

partly revealed by the Russian word for "truth," pravda. As one nineteenth-century aristocratic intellectual said:

Every time that the word pravda comes into my head I cannot help but be enraptured by its wonderful inner beauty. Such a word does not, it seems, exist in any other European language. It seems that only in Russia verity (istind) and justice (spravedlivost') are designated by one and the same word and are fused, as it were, into one great whole. . . . Truth in this wide meaning of the word has been the aim of my searching.117

Truth thus meant both knowledge of the nature of things and a higher form of justice. Some indication that it had both meanings for the aristocrats of the Russian Enlightenment can be found by looking at the classical divinities they substituted for the saints of old as revered intermediaries between ultimate truth and the world of men. Two goddesses stand out in the pseudo-classical pantheon of the Russian enlightenment: Astrea and Athena, the goddesses of justice and of wisdom; of pravda-spravedlivosf and pravda-istina. Elizabeth had a large statue of Astrea built for her coronation and a temple to Minerva (the Latin form of Athena) placed in front of the Winter Palace shortly thereafter. Catherine had a masquerade, "Minerva Triumphant," performed for her coronation and had herself depicted as Astrea when she drew up her legislative proposal. The first higher order Masonic lodge to establish a chain of dependencies in Russia was the Berlin lodge Minerva; and the last and most influential chain of higher order lodges was that of the Russian lodge Astrea.

The influence of higher order Masonry on the development of Russian intellectual life can hardly be exaggerated. The concept of small circles meeting regularly, the idea of a corporate search for true knowledge and higher justice, the love of esoteric ritual and readings, the tendency to see moral, spiritual, and aesthetic concerns as part of one higher concern-all this became characteristic of Russian aristocratic thought and was to leave a permanent if ambiguous legacy of chaos and intensity. These circles- rather than the government chanceries or the new universities-were the main channels for creative thought in early-nineteenth-century Russia. Mar-tinism had charged the air with expectation and created a sense of solidarity among those searching for truth, even if they differed as to what it was. Most important, ideas were creating a thirst for action. As one speaker put it at a "creative gathering" of a new "fraternal literary society" at the turn of the century:

. . . The good lies in the order which we bring into our meetings; the beautiful in the union of friendship. . . . What is to be done? . . . how and

who will open this rich treasury which sometimes lies too deeply hidden in the invisible future? Activity. Activity is the guardian and mother of all success. It gives us the key and shows us the path to the sanctuary of nature. Labor, unhappiness, and the crown of victory unite us closer than all our speeches.118

The Frustration of Political Reform