The Icon and the Axe

gospel: the word which was in the beginning, was revealed perfectly in

Christ, and was to be praised and magnified until His Second Coming.

There was no need to speculate about this unmerited gift, but only to pre-

serve InTa^Tlrie'Trmeritg^"There was no

reasorTto write discursively about the impeflect world of here arid now when one could see-however~darkly-through the beauty of sights and sounds a transfigured workLbeypnd.

The importance of bells in lending color and solemnity to church pro

ceedings was heightened by the gerjejaljjrphibjtiojnjmjhe jjse of musical

instrumentsinOrthodox services. Only the Jnjrnan voice and b^Us were

permitted (withia!Treic!£imM4isel)Ftra^the^

furmici~iiiiaajQ^^absence from early MuSeovy

of polyphony oreven a systematic scale~made tne~rough~ but many-shaded harrnanigssouride^n!pon"ffie~Deirs seem like ffie~uitimate in earthly music. Just as Muscovy resisteTthT^nteinporary Western tendency to introduce

perspective and naturalism into religious painting, so it resisted the concurrent Western tendency to use bells to provide orderly musical intervals or to accompany (with fixed tonal values and often in conjunction with an organ) the singing of sacred offices.89

The bell played an important part in material as well as spiritual culture through its technological tie-in with the manufacture of cannon. Already by the late fourteenth century-only a few years after the first appearance of cannon in theWesf-Russians had begun to manufacture cannon along with bells; arid, by the sixteenth century, they had produced the largest of each item to be found^njwhexeJnJhe^wpild.So important were these twjnjoeta]jpro^cts_to^uscoyy that Jhe largest example of each was giventhejMs."T^tZL^.-b^-"^M^E0lokol,'',y/si^ixig nearly half a million^punds^the cannan›_lTsar Pushka," with abarrel nearly a yard wide.

They represent the first example of "overtaking and surpassing" a superiorTedhnology. ButTfTey illustrate" as weii the artificiality of the accom-plishrnent. For the bell was too large to hang, the cannon too broad to fire. \ Technological accomplishments in both fields were, moreover, in good measure the work of foreigners from the time in the early fourteenth century whenXcertim~"Boris the Roman" first came to cast bells for Moscow and Novgorod.^0

If the bell predated the cannon as an object of technological interest, die cannon soon replaced it as the main object of state concern. Many bells in jffovincial skies and monasteries~were^Systematically melted down to provide cannon for the swellingRussian armies of"tEelate seventeenth and" the eighteenth century; but irmbrnHrable'b^rrelmamed in Moscow, the skyline of which was dominated by the soaring 270-foot Bell Tower of Ivan the Great, which Boris Godunov had erected on a hill inside the Kremlin at the Very beginning of this period. This tower was intended (like another massive bell tower built by Patriarch Nikon just outside Moscow in the latter part ofjhe century) to be the/crowning glory of a IN^wJerusalem" on \ Russtansoil: q. center of civilization built in partial imitation of the ?? ^erusalernTand with enough embellishment to suggest the New. The tower in the Kremlin provided the shelter from which the fundamentalist Old Believers lateTTm^a^sToneTat official church plo^slioTrs^These defenders of the oTdlardeTfesisted the cannon fire of government troopsjfor_eight~ years in their northern monastic redoubt at Solovetsk. After this last, storied bastion fell, they spread out to "the provinces to watch for the approach of the Tsar's "legions of Antichrist" from the bell towers of wooden churches, whence they sounded the signal to set fire to the church and the true believers within.82

The later Romanov tsars revealed both uneasy consciences and bad

taste by filling the ancient monasteries with votive baroc[ue_bell towers. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the older bell towers had been largely displaced, restrictions placed onThe excessive ringing of bells, and theh^special positionTn worship services challenged_by_the intrusion of ans and other instruments into Russian liturgical music. Yet the echo of bells lingered on. They ring again majestically at the end of the coronation scene in Musorgsky's Boris Godunov; and the theological hint of redemption offered by their "ringing through" (perezvon) on the eve of festive days is recaptured by the little barking dog of that name that leads Alyosha's youthful comrades to reconciliation at the end of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov.

In the world of politics, too, the bell called up memories. Bells had been used in some ot the proud, Westward-looking cities of medieval Russia to summonthe popular assembly (veche). Ihe final silencing of the asselribTy"" bell of Novgorod ? 1478 ended the tradition of relative freedom from