The Icon and the Axe

By the late Muscovite period, the composed, semicircular Byzantine dome had given way altogether to the soaring, pointed forms of tent roof and onion dome, first developed in the wooden architecture of the North. At the top (Plate XI) is depicted the relatively simple Church of the Epiphany, built in 1605 in Chelmuzhi, Karelia. The increasing importance attached to bells in Muscovite worship accounts for the large bell tower, which is characteristically joined to the church itself. The sharp slope of the roofs and towers shed snow and protected the heavy horizontal log structures beneath, which were often raised to permit entrance atop snowdrifts. Fire and frost have destroyed all but a few of these older churches in the relatively unsettled regions of Karelia and further north and east from Archangel, where Soviet expeditions have recently discovered wooden churches and chapels dating back as far as the fourteenth century. The wild proliferation of onion-shaped gables and domes during the century that followed the building of this church represented an increasing preoccupation with external silhouette; and a rustic, Muscovite defiance of both the neo-Byzantine style introduced by Patriarch Nikon and the purely Western architecture of Peter the Great. At the very time when Peter was building the totally Westernized city of St. Petersburg on the spot where the Neva River flows into the Baltic Sea, defenders of the old order were raising up the magnificent Church of the Transfiguration (Plate XII) on one of the Karelian lakes from which the Neva ultimately drew its water. The silhouette of this church at Kizhi on Lake Onega has been likened to the jagged fir tree from which its wooden substance was largely hewn.

The Evolution

of Old Russian

Architecture

PLATES XI-XII

262

IV. THE CENTURY OF ARISTOCRATIC CULTURE

1. The Troubled Enlightenment

263

heightening the position of the state servant than most of the independently wealthy aristocracy. As the husband of an Englishwoman and an admirer of Bentham, he was particularly interested in the English tradition of public service.125

Thus, while Speransky edited Radishchev's last contribution to Russian thought, the "Charter of the Russian People," he had little sympathy with the latter's abstract, rhetorical approach.126 He spent his early years in practical administrative activity: reforming Russia's chaotic financial system and attempting to establish clear responsibility and delineation of authority within the newly created ministries. Recognizing the need for a better-educated civil service, he helped organize two new schools for training them: the polytechnical institute and the lycee at Tsarskoe Selo. The latter in particular became a major channel through which reformist ideas were to penetrate the Russian aristocracy.127

After Alexander's rapprochement with Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807, the idea of a thoroughgoing …reform., of the Russian government on French models gained favor. Asked to prepare a secret plan for the reform, Speransky proposed a constitutional monarchy with a separation of powers, transformation of the senate into a supreme judiciary, and a system of regional representative bodies under a central legislature. The executive was to be responsible to the central legislature; but ultimate control remained with the tsar and an imperial council responsible solely to him.128

This ingenious, somewhat eclectic proposal of 1809 was never taken any further than the creation of the imperial council with Speransky himself as secretary. Speransky's determination to tax the aristocracy more effectively and to require systematic examinations for the civil service was resented by the aristocracy. As a man of humble origins popularly identified with the French alliance, Speransky was vulnerable to attack when Napoleon invaded Russia. Thus, although Alexander had assured La Harpe only the year before that "liberal ideas are moving ahead"129 in Russia, he dismissed Speransky and exiled him to the East in 1812. With him went the most serious plan for the introduction of representative and constitutional forms into the Russian monarchy that was to appear for nearly a century.

Nicholas Karamzin, the spokesman for autocratic conservatism, entered the political arena dramatically with his Note on Old and New Russia: a frontal attack on Speransky written at the request of the Tsar's sister in 1811. The Tsar was delighted by the piece and invited Karamzin to take up residence at the Anichkov palace, where he secured his position as the new court favorite by writing his famous multi-volume History of the Russian State.

Karamzin was a widely traveled aristocrat whose journalistic and liter-