Large-scale cleaning and restoration in the early twentieth century helped Russians rediscover at long last the purely artistic glories of the older icons. Just as the hymns and chants of the church had provided new themes and inspiration for early Russian iconographers, so their rediscovered paintings gave fresh inspirationbackJo.j)oets and musicians as well as painters in late imperial Russia. Undj»jheJioj7riex_sejmnarian Stalinjjjowiver, the icon lived on not as the inspiration for creative art but as a model for mass indoctrinatiorTTTiFolrler icons, like the newerjjxrjejrhnental paintings, were for ffleTnosr-part lockecTup in the reserve collections of museums. Pictures of ????~1????-^??~^??????01????1??1?8 and public ~pTaces~replaced icons of Christ and the Virgin. Photographs of Lenin's successors deployed in a prescribed order on either side of Stalin replaced the old "prayer row," in which saints were deployed in fixed order on either side of Christ enthroned. Just as the iconostasis of a cathedral was generally built directly over the grave of a local saint and specially reverenced with processions on a religious festival, so these new Soviet saints appeared in ritual form over the
mausoleum of the mummified Lenin on the feast days of Bolshevism to review endless processions through Red Square.
In the context of Russian culture thisjitempt to capitalize politically on
the popular_reverence for icons rgpjresents only an extension of an estab-
HshjdJiadTtiraroTrle^Polish pretender JDmitry, the Swedish
warrior Gustavus Adolphus, most of the Romanovs, and many of their generals had themselves painted in semi-iconographic style for the Russian populace.81 An emigre Old Believer-for whom all modern history repre-sentFaloredoomed divergence from the true ways of Old Russia-looked with indifference and even joy upon the transfer of the icon of Our Lady of Kazan from a cathedral to a museum early in the Soviet era:
The Queen of Heaven, divesting herself of her regal robes, issued forth from her Church to preach Christianity in the streets.82
Stalin added an element of the grotesque to the tradition of politically dpbnsin^£m^aOnTn^sTjJ^introducedjiew icons and relics in thejiame_ of science, then proceeded tojetouch and^esecrateftem,JtEfoje_his own
?? lesser figures on the
image and remains were posthumously defiled. Soviet iconostasis had removed the central icon of Stalin enthroned, and largely destroyed the new myth of salvation. But in the uncertain age that followed, lithographs of Lenin and giant cranes continued to hover over prefabricated concrete huts piled on one another much as the icon and the axe had over the wooden huts of a more primitive era
Bell and Cannon
If the icon and the axe in the peasant hut became abiding symbols for Russian culture, so too did the bell and cannon of the walled city. These were-ihe-fitsLlarge metal ?^????^???'? manufactured indigenously in the wooden world of Muscovy: objects that distinguished the city from the surroundingcountryside and fortified it against alien invaders.
Just aTtnellam'^nrr'tne axe were closely linked with one another, so were ??~??~???~^????7^?1?~??? had fashioned and coulu destroythe
wooden board orTwhich the painting was ??? foundry which forged the first cannon also made-the
being ttielted back into metal for artillery in time of war. The beJLJili£jb£JconJ_was taken from Byzantium to provide aesthetic eiaboratian for th£_"right^praising" of ?^fand"bT5tK media came to be
the "primitive*; first 6ells;nffi3these, werealwjrysinjjerii ?\
used ^witti_ey£n_greater intensity and imagination than in Constantinople. The development of the elaborate and many-tiered Russian bell tower- with its profusion of bells and onion-shaped gables-parallels in many ways that^of the iconostas^JThejich "mauvP^finging"oFbeTIs~so that "people cannot hear one another in conversation"83 became the inevitable accompaniment of icon-bearing processions on special feast days. There were almosl-as-???? bejjs_agd ways to~nri~g ftl^ asTconTlmd ways to di^glay them. By the early. fKteenf^jSitury^Russia??? evolveadistinctive models that differed from the bells of Byzantium, Western Europe, or the Orient. The Russian emphasis on massive7immovable*~cStalD31s sounded by metal gongs and clappers led to a greater sonority and resonance than the generally smaller, frequently swinging, and often wooden bells of the contemporary West". Although Russia never produced carillons comparable to those of the Low Countries, it did develop its own methods and traditions of ringing different-sized bells in series. By the sixteenth century, it has been estimated that there were morejhan five thousand bdk_ in the four huntod^hjKche^of^loiiCjPjv^one^'
Just asjhe icon wasiautone element in a pictorial culture that included the fresco, the illuminated holy te^anJjEilillustrated chronicle, so the beU^^^^rt^TJTorrej^of soun^^o^id^^y^iate^niinable chanted church services, ppuTartyinnsmtcTballajIs, and the^ secular improvisations of wandering folk singers armed with a variety of stringed instruments. Sights and sounds pointecTthe wayTo God, not philosophic speculation or literary subtlety. Servjcgs~were committed to memory without benefit of missal or prayer book;, and the "obedient listeners" in monasteries were subjected to oral instruction. Not only were the saints said to be "very like" the holy forms on the icons, but the very word for education suggested "becoming like the forms" {obrazovanie).
The interaction between sight and sound is also remarkable. If the iconography of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Russia drew special inspiration from holy singing, and the Russian icon came to be a kind of "abstract musical arabesque . . . purified, like music, of all but its direct appeals to the spirit,"85 so the new method of musical notation thafwas" simultaneously coming into being in Muscovy had a kind of hieroglyphic quality. The authority of the classical Byzantine chant appears to have waned after the fourteenth century-without giving way to any other method of clearly defining the intervals and correlations of tones. In its place appeared the "signed chant": a new tradition of vocal ornamentation in which "melody not only flowed out of words, but served as the mold on which words were set in bold relief."86 When written down, the embellished red and black hooked notes offered only a shorthand guide to the direction
of melody rather than a precise indication of pitch; but the vivid pictorial impression created by the signs gave rise to descriptive names such as "the great spider," "the thunderbolt," "two in a boat," and so on.87
Though even.less is known about secular than sacred music in this early period, there ware apparently patterns* of beauty in it, based on repetition with variation by different voices. The exalted "rejoicing" (blagovestie) of the bells used an overlapping series of sounds similar to that which was used in the "many-voiced" church chant-producing an effect"that:w^'anhe^aniSTime~clSo]Dh6nous and hypnotic.