Among the Russians(23)
I peered inside, where groups of Russian tourists were walking. Over the walls and arches a dreamlike population of painted saints and angels kept pace with them. Some had almost flaked away; others had paled to silhouettes. Hovering on soffits or banked along the choir, they touched the air with a moribund glory. The darkness was filled with the lifting of their faded hands and crosses, the rush and flutter of their wings. Troops of avuncular and half-vaporized prophets congregated blackly on the pillars or marched along the aisles in indecipherable procession.
A whole cycle portraying the Last Judgement was painted in 1408 by the incomparable Andrei Rublev—the Duccio or Fra Angelico of Orthodoxy—but its colours were all but drunk away into the plaster. A tourist guide harangued his group beside me. ‘Look up there! See how recognizable the faces are! It shows that Andrei Rublev was a man of the people, clearly….’
Russian patriotism demands that the great pre-Soviet countrymen be enrolled as honorary Communists. And now here, even, was Rublev—pious monk and iconographer—being gathered in among the chosen people of Marxism. The group stared up at the surge of the righteous hurrying to heaven in an undemocratic richness of robes. And it was true that the frescoed faces were human and woundable, with small Slavic eyes and barbered beards. Composed during the slow recession of the Tartar onslaught—once laid on Russia like the flail of God—they belong to a time of new confidence, when men felt that the denizens of gospel, or even of heaven, might look like ordinary humans.
Of the Last Judgement the guide said nothing. The group merely gazed up with the same wizened, incurious eyes as the blessed. Under the central arch a blemished Christ swam almost faceless in a mandorla of blue. If you started up long enough his eyes emerged slowly to meet yours as in some worn-out palimpsest, but were strangely restive, the face nested sadly in a fleece of sallow hair and beard. But beneath him, on the rise of the vault, were gathered the aristocracy of heaven. Apostles and evangelists cradled open books and lifted their fingers in nervous benediction, while massed behind them, their haloes overlapping like the scales of some tarnished but gorgeous serpent, a crowd of androgynous angels turned its heads this way and that in silent converse. They seemed less a heavenly host than a clutch of courtiers gossiping together in imperial antechambers. Only far below them, at the foot of one pier, a single archangel survived to trumpet the glory of God in a clatter of half-obliterated wings.
As I gazed up at those declamatory prophets clutching their infalliable books, I was reminded inescapably of their descendants. Lenin, Kalinin, Kirov—in half the squares of the Soviet Union their Baggy-trousered figures are silently shouting. Lenin’s statues, in particular, have sprung up like weeds wherever those of Stalin were torn down. Gospel-bearers of the later faith, their iron fists are closed over scrolls and bulletins. In these men the old Russian belief in an apocalyptic history continues: history with a divine purpose, a beginning and an end. They are the initiate, the bearers of fire from heaven. The directives and warnings of Christian gospel are replaced by the insights and sociological lumberings of the Communist Manifesto. But the message is still sacrosanct. There is no middle path. At the great Internationals anathemas flew, heretics were excommunicated, orthodoxy redefined. The very language was Christian. Lenin, in a moment of high repudiation, accused a colleague (the philosopher Mach) of ‘betraying materialism with a kiss.’ Sometimes it seems as if nothing has profoundly changed at all. It was Marx who said that ‘the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’
But the greatest treasure of the Assumption Cathedral is not here. The twelfth century icon called ‘Our Lady of Vladimir’, the most revered in the land, was taken to Moscow’s Kremlin as long ago as the fourteenth century, and has come to rest in the Tretyakov Art Gallery. The ancient choice of this ‘Virgin of Tenderness’ as the pallium and figurehead of all Russia can be no accident. The Russians inherited from Byzantium two utterly different iconic conventions. In one, the Hodegetria, the Virgin and Child confront the worshipper in hieratic and unrelated glory; she is the unearthly Queen of Heaven, he a precociously adult Child enthroned on her lap. But the Russians rejected this too-intellectual formula, and instead fell in love with the less common but warmer Eleousa. Here the Holy Child—a swaddled infant—curls his arms about the Virgin’s neck and presses his lips to hers, while she is a mother of sorrowful, dark-eyed tenderness, whose head inclines to his in a gesture of stately adoration.
This image of motherhood plucks a profound chord in the Russian soul. It pervades Soviet nationalism with its mystical invocation of the Rodina, the motherland, and reaches back, it seems, to a time long before Christianity, when a primordial Great Mother ruled these pagan woods and plains. This Mother was faceless, perhaps nameless: an all-engendering womb. Through the animistic worship of her nature—trees, pools, fire, stones—she enveloped her worshippers with a passive omnipotence. At the coming of Christianity, it seems, she was tamed and christened in the Eleousa. Icons, churches, feast-days were poured into her lap. Her common and beloved name is not the ‘Holy Virgin’ (the virgin saints are almost ignored by the Russian Church) but Bogoroditsa, ‘Mother of God’, a word filled with soulful power. And her ancient pantheism is perhaps responsible for that passionate attachment to icons, relics, chalices—all the kissed and supplicated paraphernalia of the house of God—which still pervades Russian Orthodoxy. The dialectic of Byzantium and the legalism of Rome are equally far from this peasant adoration. To many Russian Christians a church is above all a treasury of objects in which divinity resides, just as divinity once dwelt in plants and stones.