controversies of the seventeenth century, the fundamentalists passionately and successfully defended the rite whereby flaming candles were immersed into the waters that were blessed on Epiphany to remind men that Christ came to "baptise with the Holy Ghost and with fire."38 In 1618 the head of Russia's largest monastery was beaten by a mob and forced to perform a penance of a thousand prostrations a day for trying to do away with this uncanonical rite. One of the tracts written to denounce him, On the Enlightening Fire, accused him of trying to deny Russia "the tongue of fire that had descended upon the apostles."39 Fire was the weapon of the fundamentalists in the 1640's as they burned musical instruments, foreign-style paintings, and the buildings of the foreign community itself in Moscow. After the fundamentalists had been anathemized in 1667, many of these "Old Believers" sought self-immolation-often with all their family and friends in an oil-soaked wooden church-as a means of anticipating the purgative fires of the imminent Last Judgment.40
Apocalyptical fascination with the cleansing power of flames lived on in the traditions of primitive peasant rebellion-and indeed in the subsequent tradition of ideological aristocratic revolution. The atheistic anarchist Michael Bakunin? fascinated Europe during the revolutionary crisis of 1848-9 with his prophetic insistence that "tongues of flame" would shortly appear all over Europe to bring down the old gods. After hearing Wagner conduct a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Leipzig in 1849, Bakunin rushed forward to assure him that this work deserved to be spared the imminent world conflagration. Fascinated by this man (whom he called the "chief stoker" of revolution), Wagner was haunted by the fact that the opera house did perish in flames shortly thereafter, and may well have been influenced by Bakunin in his characterization of Siegfried, his own fire music, and his over-all conception of "The Downfall of the Gods."41 When Russia produced its own musical revolution in the early twentieth century, the symbol of fire was equally centraclass="underline" in Scriabin's "Poem of Fire" and the spectacular fusion of music with the dance in Stravinsky and Diaghilev's "Firebird."
Their firebird, like the two-headed imperial eagle, perished in the flames of the 1917 revolution, which the winds of war had fanned out of Lenin's seemingly insignificant Spark. Some poets of the old regime feTT whaFone oFTIierrrcalled "the attraction of the moth-soul to fiery death,"42 while one of the first and greatest to be killed by the new regime left behind a posthumous anthology called Pillar of Fire.4* During the terrorized silence that followed under Stalin, the stage production which evoked the greatest emotional response from its audience was probably Musorgsky's "popular music drama" Khovanshchina, which ends with the self-destruction of an
Old Believers' community-using real flame on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater. The image recurs in the work of Pasternak; but the guestjon_of what arose from the cultural ashes of the Stalin era belongs to the epilogue rather than the prologue of our story. Suffice ???????? stress that the sense of spiritual intimacy with natural forces already present in earlier times was intensified in the inflammable forest world of Great Russia, where fire contended with fertility; the masculine force of Peran withjhe damp mother earth for control of a world in which human beings seemed strangely insignificant.
WBy Russians did not sink into complete fatalism and resignation during {he dark days of the thirteemlrtndTouf teehth centuries can perhaps be explained in terms of two key pairs of artifacts that stayed with them through all the fires and fighting of the period???????? and icon in the countryside, and the bell and cannon in the monastery and city. Each element in these pairings bore an intimate relationship to the other-demonstrating the close connection between worship and war, beauty and brutality, in the militant world of Muscovy. These objects were also~"important in other societies, but they acquired and retained in Russia a special symbolic S'gRlfiSSSSfi-fiyJESJS1" 1^? complex culture of modefrTlimelF. ~
Axe and Icon
Nothing better illustrates the combination of material struggle and spiritual exultation in Old Russia than the two objects that were traditionally hung together in a place of honor on the wafr7›Te^ry"pTjTs1frit hut?" the axe and the icon. IBe'???? ffle basic inipiemeatoi;ureat Kus,sia: the_ indispensable meaFs~ot"T^
The icon, or religious picture, was the omnipresent reminder of 1?? religious faith which gave the beleaguered frontiersman a sense of ultimate security and highex.pmposejf the axe was_used with delicacy to plane and smooth
the wooden surface on which these holy pictures were painted, the icon, in_
turn, was borne~TJfflitantIy beTSre*^^
forth into the foTSsTI-wTtn" axes for the more harsh bulmesT"6r Telling-trees
or warding off assailants.
'~Th"e~axe was as important to the muzhik of the north as a machete to
the jungle dweller of the tropics. It was the "universal tool" with which a
Russian could, according to Tolstoy, "both build a house and shape a
spoon."44 "You can get through all the world with an axe" and "The axe is
the head of all business"43 were only two of many sayings. As one of the first and best students of daily life in early Russia has explained:
In the bleak wild forests and in the fields wherever the axe went, the scythe, plow, and whirl-bat of the bee-keeper followed; wherever axes cut into them, forests were destroyed and thinned, houses were built and repaired, and villages created within the forests. . . .4e
Pre-Christian tribes of the region frequently used axes for money and buried them with their owners. The axe was popularly called the "thunderbolt," and stones found near a tree felled by lightning were revered as part of the axehead used by the god of thunder.
The baptized Muscovite was no less reverential to the axe. He used it to cut up, plane, and even carve wood. Not until relatively recent times were nails-let alone saws and planes-widely used in building.47 Axes were used for close-range fighting, neutralizing the advantages that might otherwise be enjoyed by wolves, armored Teutonic swordsmen, or Mongol
cavalry.
One of the very few surviving jeweled works from the twelfth-century Russian north is, appropriately, the initialed hatchet of the prince most responsible for the transfer of power from Kiev to the north: Andrew Bogoliubsky.48
The axe played a central role in consolidating the new civilization of the upper Volga region. With it, Russians eventually cuTofflrthe zasechnaia cherta-long clearings lined by sharpened stumps and cross-felled trees- as a defense against invasion, fire, and plague.4" The axe was the standard ins^furnejF^[J^mary_execution, and became an abiding symbol of the hard and primitive life on Europe's exposed eastern frontier. There is a certain suppressed bitterness toward more sheltered peoples in the proverb "To drink tea is not to hew wood." The Russian version of "The pen is mightier than the sword" is "What is written with the pen cannot be hacked away with an axe."50
More than the rifles from the west and the daggers from the east, the axe of tte-notth~Temained--^^????-^??????"1^~19^??^?6:??^7 EverflTiougiriheir nameTiterally meant "shooters," the ,srretoy,~Russia*s first permanent infantry force of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, drilled with axes and carried thern in processions. The axejvas the principal weapon used by the tsars for putting down the urban rebellions of the seventeenth century, ~andby"tEe~ peasants for terrorizing Jhe_groyincial nobility andJJm^alrcracy during their lumsingjTLeaders of these revolts were publicly executed by a great axe in Red Square in the ritual of