The Icon and the Axe

Whereas Muscovy had thought of Russia as a "vineyard planted by God" for ultimate harvest in the life to come, Alexis seemed now to think of it as a place in which man could create his own "many-flowered garden." These were the titles respectively of the most famous Old Believer protest against the reforms and the most famous collection of poems by the new court poet Simeon Polotsky. Just as Simeon's "garden" of verse was full of tributes to such non-Muscovite subjects as "citizenship" and "philosophy,"94 so Alexis' new Izmailovo gardens outside Moscow were full of Western innovations. Behind the baroque entrance gate there were windmills, herb and flower gardens, irrigation canals, caged animals, and small pavilions for rest and relaxation.90

An even greater symbol of secular elegance was the palace built by Alexis between 1666 and 1668 at Kolomenskoe, outside Moscow.9" There was, to be sure, the superficial traditionalism so characteristic of Alexis' reign, as onion domes and tent roofs dominated the basically wooden construction. But light streamed in as it never had before in Muscovite buildings, through three thousand mica windows, revealing a vast fresco depicting the universe as heliocentric and an equally unfamiliar world of mirrors, opulent furniture, and imported mechanical devices. Pictures of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Darius stared down from walls where icons might have been, and Alexis received visitors on a throne flanked by two giant mechanical lions whose eyes rolled and jaws opened and roared on prearranged signals. Polotsky considered Kolomenskoe the eighth wonder of the world. It would perhaps be more correct to speak of it as the first wonder of a new world in which Western technology began to dominate the monuments of a new empire. Retaining the garish and ostentatious features of native tradition, Alexis had built the first of the palatial pleasure domes that came to symbolize Romanov Russia. He had taken over the pretentious building program of Nikon and the xenophobic arrogance of Awakum; but he had left behind the religious convictions of both. The path was to be long and agonizing-but in some ways direct and inescapable-from seventeenth-century Kolomenskoe and Izmailovo to twentieth-century parks of culture and rest.

The Westernizing changes of Alexis' late years were profoundly revolutionary in the modern sense of the word. But in the seventeenth-century meaning of revolution-the restoration of a violated natural order, based on

the image of a sphere revolving back to its original position-the defeated religious reformers were the true revolutionaries.97 Both the theocrats and the fundamentalists were trying to return Russia to its presumed original Christian calling after an unnatural capitulation to foreign ways. Each put his faith in the Tsar to lead Russian Christendom back to its former purity; yet each instinctively understood that his cause was hopeless. They sorrowfully concluded that Alexis was either another Julian the Apostate who had secretly deserted the faith, or that Moscow had become the "fourth Rome," which they had previously thought would never be.98

Everywhere that the religious reformers looked in the new secularized court culture they found signs that the reign of the Antichrist had begun. Not only had the church council been summoned in a year containing the number of the beast, but the new doctrinal work Peace with God for Man presented to the Tsar in that very year by Gizel had 666 pages in it.99 The frontispiece of another Kievan work of the same year showed King David and St. Paul pointing swords toward a globe on top of which rode the tsar of Russia into battle accompanied by a citation from the Book of Revelation -one of the most frequently quoted biblical books of the period.100 The first painting done for the Tsar by his newly commissioned Dutch court painter (and presented to him on New Year's Day of 1667) further intensified the feeling of foreboding by depicting the fall of Jerusalem.101

The apocalypticism of the schismatics was the logical outgrowth of their extreme fidelity to the prophetic Muscovite ideology. But any full understanding of the schism requires not only Russian but Byzantine and Western perspectives as well. Indeed, this seemingly exotic and uniquely Russian schism can, in many ways, be described as "Byzantine in form, Western in content."