Curiously, the maternal imagery returns in Merezhkovskii’s depiction of something that would seem to be the very opposite of defeatism, namely, rebelliousness: “We [Russians] no longer believe the testimony of Saint Hippolytus that The Antichrist will ascend into the heavens.’ Yet we sucked this in with mother’s milk; it’s in our blood, even amongst nonbelievers: treachery, sinfulness, the demonism of any kind of escape upward into flight [kainstvo, okaianstvo, liutsiferianstvo vsiakoi voobshche voli k voskhozhdeniiu, k poletu].”160 Tolstoy’s philosophy of reductive simplification, Pisarev’s nihilism, and Bakunin’s anarchistic tendencies are all examples of this upward-directed defiance, says Merezhkovskii.
Rebellious Russians did indeed “suck in” their rebelliousness “with mother’s milk”—if the psychoanalytic view is to be believed (below, 106, 119). The primal rebellion was against the controlling mother in Russian matrifocal society. But the primal submission was also submission to that mother. Defiance and masochism are the two necessary poles of life’s earliest ambivalence. Merezhkovskii senses this, even though he is not altogether explicit. The maternal imagery puts him just next door to psychoanalysis.
According to Merezhkovskii, wild, barbaric faces peep out from behind the ascetic mask of the Russian Christ. When Christ rises from the dead on Easter Sunday Russians customarily proclaim their holy joy to one another, saying: “Christ has arisen!” (Easter is a very special holiday—more important than Christmas—in Russian Christianity).161 But Merezhkovskii tells us that he has heard drunken Russians mix mother oaths with their ritualized utterances celebrating Christ’s resurrection.162 Again, maternal imagery accompanies the vertical motif.
“What if the Russian idea is Russian insanity?” asks Merezhkovskii. This is not a very precise diagnosis, clinically speaking. But Merezhkovskii clearly wants us to understand that there is something wrong, something pathological in the slavish attitude of Russian intellectuals toward authority. Russia is like a man being buried alive. He screams in protest, but the dirt just piles up on the coffin, a cross is placed there, and the great Russian thinkers do nothing but find ways to justify what is happening:
Dostoevsky writes on the cross: “Resign yourself, proud man [Smiris’, gordyi chelovek]!” L. Tolstoy writes: “non-resistance to evil [Neprotivlenie zlu].” Vl[adimir] Solovyev writes: “This is not the point [Delo ne v etom].” Viach[eslav] Ivanov writes: “Through the Holy Spirit we rise from the dead [Dukhom Sv. voskresaem].”163
A caricature, to be sure. But Merezhkovskii has understood something essential, something masochistic about the very “Russian” worldviews of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solovyev, and Ivanov.
Masochism and Antimasochism
Vasilii Rozanov (1856–1919) was a contemporary of Merezhkovskii’s who also cultivated hostile sentiments toward Russian masochism. His antimasochism is most clearly expressed in his writings about religion and sexuality. According to Rozanov, religious belief and erotic feelings should overlap with one another. There is too much asceticism and glorification of suffering in Christianity. Christ essentially castrated and made slaves out of his followers.164 Russians should have more reverence for their pagan roots. The Russian Orthodox church should recognize that human beings are sexual creatures. Withered, impotent old monks should not be held up as shining examples for young people. The sexual activity of a newly married couple should be encouraged. Indeed, it should begin right in the church where the wedding takes place, and the young couple should live on the church premises until the wife is pregnant.165
Rozanov is fond of using maternal imagery to convey his ideas: “Christianity is the sweat, pain, and joy of a mother who is giving birth, it is the cry of a newborn child.” But here Rozanov wants to emphasize the joy (“radost”’), not the pain (“muki”): “One cannot insist enough on the fact that Christianity is joy, only joy, and always joy.”166
In contrast to his antimasochistic religious stance, however, are Rozanov’s equally strong masochistic inclinations. For example, even though the Church refused him permission to marry the woman he loved (and with whom he had five children), Rozanov continued to praise the Church in his writings, for example: “The Church is the soul of society and of the people.”167 Rozanov’s servile attitude toward tsarist power is also well known, and was essential to his extreme conservatism.168 As for Russia herself, Rozanov never failed to see her in a bad light, yet he never stopped loving her either. Russia was condemned to sin and to suffer immense pain for her sins (here Rozanov is, as Lisa Crone says, a “prophet of doom”).169 Because Mother-Russia is a sinner one is obliged to love her:
It’s no great accomplishment to love a fortunate and grand motherland. It is when she is weak, small, humbled, even stupid, even depraved—that we should love her. Precisely, exactly when our “mother” is drunk, when she tells lies, when she gets all tangled up in sinfulness—that is when we are obliged not to leave her. But this is not alclass="underline" when finally she dies and is picked at by the Jews until nothing but her bones are left, then that person who weeps by her useless, spat-upon skeleton will be a real Russian.170
With this thoroughly disgusting imagery Rozanov not only idealizes Russian masochism, but reveals his own necrophilic and anti-Semitic tendencies.
Another Russian thinker who strayed into antimasochistic territory—and whose maternal imagery is equally interesting—is the religious philosopher Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1828—1903). Fedorov lived ascetically, but advocated a view profoundly opposed to the fatalistic attitudes normally met with in Russia. Fedorov believed that it would one day actually be possible to restore life to people who have died, that is, to all those previous generations that have succumbed to what Fedorov termed “the blind force of nature.” The Philosophy of the Common Task, a posthumously published treatise that Fedorov was writing for most of his life, has been called brilliant by some, half crazy by others.171 There can be no doubt, however, that the theory of human resurrection advocated in this complex work is fascinating.
Death is the source of all unhappiness. “Why does what is living die?” Fedorov repeatedly asks. Or, to personify the issue: “Why is nature not a mother to us, but a stepmother, or a nurse who refuses to feed us?”172 Nature is even an “executioner” of those who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their fellow human beings. But Fedorov resists death, he is disgusted by “altruists” who have a “passionate desire to be martyrs,” that is, who in psychoanalytic terms engage in masochistic behavior. Fedorov’s “project” for the resurrection of all humankind is a rejection of both the masochistic welcoming of death as well as the not particularly masochistic acceptance of death that all aging human beings develop. For Fedorov, death is simply not acceptable—not for one’s self, not for one’s fellow humans with whom one wants to connect (“rodstvennost”’), not for previous generations of humans to whom one is connected by the all-important bonds of kinship (“rod”). “Blind nature,” who deals in death, must be conquered, must be “regulated” by means of scientific understanding. She must be given eyes to see us with, and only we humans, the highest and most intelligent form of life, can give her those eyes. Thus, to extend Fedorov’s imagery to its logical conclusion, nature will no longer be the mere stepmother who tends to fail in looking after us orphans (cf. Russian “besprizornye”), but will be the ideal mother we all knew before we knew death, the first organism we deigned to personify, to give a face.