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

1. The Blueprint: Dmitrii Merezhkovskii’s Christ and Antichrist

1 The Blueprint Dmitrii Merezhkovskii’s Christ and Antichrist Oh, will we not find the kind of faith that could once again Unite on earth all tribes and peoples? Where are you, unknown God, where are you, O future Rome? Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, “The Future Rome,” 1891 Dmitrii Merezhkovskii’s trilogy Khristos i Antikhrist (Christ and Antichrist ), comprising the novels Smert’ bogov: Iulian otstupnik (The Death of the Gods: Julian the Apostate, 1895); Voskresshie bogi: Leonardo da Vinchi (The Resurrected Gods: Leonardo da Vinci, 1900); and Antikhrist: Petr i Aleksei (The Antichrist: Peter and Alexis, 1904–5), represents a milestone in Russian letters.1 As the philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev would later write, Merezhkovskii had “introduced, and was himself expressive of, a whole unknown or forgotten world of cultural values, of Greek and Roman antiquity, of the Italian Renaissance.”2 The critic D. S. Mirsky would use almost identical terms when describing the signi ficance of Merezhkovskii’s prose: it had “introduced to the Russian reader a whole unknown world of cultural values; it made familiar and significant to him figures and epochs that had only been names in textbooks .”3 Contemporary readers compared Julian the Apostate to works by Henryk Sienkiewicz, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and Anatole France.4 Upon the appearance of Leonardo da Vinci, an enthusiastic subscriber to the newspaper Novoe vremia (New Times) wrote to its literary critic Viktor Burenin that he had just returned from Italy, where as a 34 result of this second novel Merezhkovskii was being mentioned along with Lev Tolstoi and Maksim Gor’kii as a leading Russian writer.5 Sigmund Freud would later draw upon Leonardo da Vinci in his own research on the Renaissance painter.6 Meanwhile, Merezhkovskii’s depiction in Peter and Alexis of the relationship between the Westernized Russian intelligentsia and the religious narod (folk) would find echoes in the writings of Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi, Osip Mandel’shtam, and Aleksei N. Tolstoi. The trilogy as a whole marked the beginning of a tradition of Symbolist novels in Russia.7 Merezhkovskii brought the cultural heritage commonly associated with Europe to life in Russia, making it relevant to Russian readers, and, with Peter and Alexis, inserted Russian history and letters into that European narrative. Christ and Antichrist would contribute to Merezhkovskii ’s being nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1933.8 In their chronological and cultural sweep and in their focus on Russia’s place in world history and culture, the novels of Christ and Antichrist form a complex, allegorical epic of Russia’s national identity and destiny at the turn of the twentieth century, with Merezhkovskii as author-prophet defining both. Goals and Influences I say that one must be a visionary—that one must make oneself a VISIONARY. Arthur Rimbaud, letter of 1887 (Cited in Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle) To undertake this lofty task, Merezhkovskii turned to Rome, with its longstanding East-West markers and messianic associations, and created a Symbolist Rome reflective of the concerns of Silver Age Russia . He set the first novel in the fourth-century Roman Empire and the third novel in Petrine Russia, and then rendered explicit the implication of Russia’s Third Rome status with references throughout the third novel both to Rome and to the Third Rome. In addition, in the second novel of the trilogy, set in the Italian Renaissance, he featured an artist, a Russian icon-painter, who foretold in exalted terms the glory of “Russia , the Third Rome.” Because of the novels’ popularity, Merezhkovskii ’s trilogy functioned for Russian readers as an acknowledged thesaurus of Rome’s myriad associated themes (imperial power and its decline, differing varieties of Christianity, the relationship between East and West, the role of the artist in society, the ancient, Renaissance, and The Blueprint 35 modern periods), as the author laid out the resonances and parallels of these concepts in a Russian context. Through Merezhkovskii’s texts, Rome became a powerful mythmaking tool in the Symbolist construction of Russia’s history and future. Merezhkovskii’s impassioned literary musings on a Third Rome mission for Russia—and, as Russia’s political and social tensions worsened and Merezhkovskii’s views changed, on the vanishing feasibility and desirability of such a mission—created an influential set of terms and ideas that would inspire or have an effect upon a series of similarly Rome-focused texts by his contemporaries. Despite the...