The Icon and the Axe

The outbreak of revolution seemed to Bely and many others to be the beginning of the last great earthly struggle that would deliver men from the reign of Antichrist to that of the returned Messiah. "Christ is Risen," Bely wrote in a famous hymn to the Revolution just a few months after Blok's Twelve.116 At almost the same moment Russia was called the "new Nazareth" by the most authentically earthy and rural of all the great poets of the age, Serge Esenin.117 Another peasant poet, Nicholas Kliuev, hailed the Revolution as a sign of messianic deliverance, in his remarkable works of the early twenties: "Song of a Bearer of the Sun," "The Fourth Rome," and "Lenin," in which he compared the Bolshevik leader to Avvakum.118 It was not long before the new revolutionary regime became equated with Antichrist rather than Christ. The identification of the Revolutionary leader with the returning Christ in Blok's "Twelve" had been only tentative and symbolic, and Blok died disillusioned in 1921. Berdiaev, Merezhkovsky, Kandinsky, Remizov, and many others had emigrated abroad permanently by 1922, and begun writing about the new order in tones of Spenglerian gloom.119 Even Gorky, a man of lower-class origin, who was close to Lenin, went abroad late in 1922 for a long stay. His departure was but one sign of the revulsion that passed through precisely those writers who were closest to the simple people and to the great hopes they had originally had for the Revolution.

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The city joined the railroad train as the symbol of apocalypse. An apocalyptical poem of 1903 by Briusov, "The Pale Horse," inspired Blok to write in 1904 "The Last Day," the first in a gloomy series called The City.120 The modern city was "a curse of the beast," to cite the title of Andreev's famous story of 1908: "the final curse of man," a labyrinth with "many doors and no exits," populated by people with "small compressed, cubic souls."121 Bolshevism was only the last and most extreme product of the "steel fever" of the cities, of an "electrical uprising"122 which was leading men to Armageddon and the final straggle between "iron and the land."123 People were only minor actors in this Manichean battle between factory chimneys and the cupolas of churches. Chimneys became "red fingers" of the beast threatening to rip out of the soil the onion domes of the faithful, or trumpets reaching above the city to announce the Last Judgment.124

Within the accursed cities "earth no longer resembles earth. . . . Satan has beaten and trampled it down with iron hoofs . . . riding over it like a foaming horse across a meadow."125 The image of an apocalyptical horseman is blended into that of an armored train carrying the curse of the city out into the countryside and provinces by means of "dragon trains," "the iron serpent in the clean field," "the forty-mouthed creature":

Did you see

Racing over the steppe,

On cast-iron paws

Knifing through lakes of mist

Snorting with iron nostrils

– the train?

And after him

Across the great lawn

As in some festival of desperate races

Pitching his thin legs forward

The galloping red-maned foal?126

The train symbol was given new suggestiveness by the Bolshevik use of brightly ornamented propaganda trains and Trotsky's repeated forays to the front in an armored command train during the Civil War. Among the most powerful early prose accounts of this period are Vsevelod Ivanov's Armoured Train No. 14-??, the chapter "Train No. 58" in Pil'niak's panoramic Naked Year, and Nikitin's memorable story "Night," in which the Civil War is portrayed as a nocturnal collision between two armored trains, red and white, moving from East and West to a fated collision in the heart of Russia.127

Almost alone among the visionary writers of the silver age, Bely returned permanently to the USSR in 1923, professing to see signs of deliverance rather than apocalypse in the new order. Yet the second part of his trilogy, Petersburg, written between 1913 and 1916, had already presented an apocalyptical picture of men and women in a half-mad city paralyzed by a box containing a bomb, which no one can either disarm or discard. His literary efforts of the twenties-such as the Baptized Chinamen and Moscow-are less successful; and his attempt to invest older religious symbols with new Bolshevik content are even more inept than in his "Christ is Risen." His most successful work after Petersburg was Kotik Letaev, depicting the coming into awareness of a small child by journeying imaginatively back into the child's infant and even pre-natal experience. This world had already been discovered by the greatest of all literary apocalypticists of the period-Vasily Rozanov, who had variously fancied himself as a fetus longing to remain in the womb and as "the baby Rozanov lost somewhere on the breast of the earth."128