Russia's Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940

Introduction: Rome Envy

Introduction Rome Envy Roads to Rome And when I finally saw Rome for the second time, oh, how much better it seemed than the first! It felt as if I were seeing my homeland, where I hadn’t been for several years, but where my thoughts had been living. But no, it’s not that, not my own homeland, but the homeland of my soul that I saw, where my soul was living even before me, before I appeared on this earth. Nikolai Gogol’, letter to M. P. Balabina, 1838 Not far from the Coliseum, in the heart of Rome, stands the Basilica of San Clemente, named after the Roman Pope Clement, who died in approximately 100 CE. The basilica, which dates back to the twelfth century , is located on the remains of a fourth-century Christian church, which in turn rests upon a first-century Mithraeum, sacred to the pagan god Mithras. The Mithraeum is found above yet another level, consisting of pre-Christian walls dating to Rome’s Republican period, before the Roman Empire began. It is startling to observe on the fourth-century level of this architectural palimpsest of Roman history a shrine to Saints Cyril and Methodius, credited with creating the first Slavic alphabet and spreading the words of the Christian Gospels to the Slavs. Grateful plaques and murals from various Slavic peoples—Russians, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Croats, and more—abound. The Russian contribution portrays Methodius on the left, with the initial words of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the word . . .”), and Cyril on the right, holding the Cyrillic alphabet. An icon lamp hangs before this celebration of 3 Russian religion and literacy. The explanation for this geographically unexpected veneration: the bones of St. Cyril, buried by his brother Methodius in the fourth-century church “at the right-hand side of the altar of St. Clement.”1 How did the apostles to the Slavs end up in Rome, and how is this story relevant to the Rome-related writings of a group of Russian modernist authors in the final years of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth? The answer to the first question is relatively straightforward. As legend has it, during the reign of the Roman emperor Trajan (98–117 CE), Clement was exiled to the Crimea and ordered to work in the local mines. When he continued despite these hardships to preach the Christian Gospel, anti-Christian representatives of Rome attached him to an anchor and hurled him into the Black Sea; frescoes on the walls of San Clemente depict this tale. Centuries later, the brothers Cyril and Methodius were proselytizing in the Crimea. In 861 Cyril supposedly found Clement’s body, albeit in pieces, along with the famous anchor, on an island near Chersonesus. Clement’s reconstructed body was brought to San Clemente in 868 with great pomp, and when Cyril died the following year, the pope permitted Cyril’s bones to be buried near those of the saint he had returned to Rome.2 The answer to the second question is more complex and forms the subject of this book. The Russian contribution to the Basilica of San Clemente stakes a claim to the heritage represented by Rome: in short, the heritage commonly known as Western civilization. A Russian presence in a building that encompasses within itself the best-known features of Roman history and culture, from Republican freedom to the imperial age, from paganism to Christianity, asserts a Russian connection to all those stages and, more importantly perhaps, also makes clear the Russian desire to be recognized as having such a connection. (The statue of Aleksandr Pushkin erected in 2000 in Rome’s famed Borghese Gardens as a gift from the Russian government might be said to follow in the same tradition [fig. 1].) In fact, Russians have claimed Roman origins for centuries, from stories of the first Roman emperor Augustus Caesar’s mythical brother Prus, who supposedly was a forebear of Riurik,3 to the well-known doctrine of “Moscow the Third Rome.” Although in some ways these efforts to assert Roman-ness (Romanitas) echo those of other nations, the Russian case is to some degree unique. Unlike some other would-be Romes, Russia was never a part of the Roman Empire, nor did it form part of the ensuing Catholic, Latin-dominated realm that the 4 Introduction Fig. 1. Statue of the...