ALEXANDER LAVRENTYEVITCH VITBERG
Among the grotesque and dirty, petty and loathsome scenes and figures,
affairs and cases, in this setting of official routine and red-tape, I
recall the noble and melancholy features of an artist, who was crushed
by the government with cold and callous cruelty.
The leaden hand of the Tsar did not merely strangle a work of genius in
its infancy, did not merely destroy the very creation of the artist,
entangling him in judicial snares and police traps, but tried to snatch
from him his honourable name together with his last crust of bread and
to brand him as a taker of bribes and a pilferer of government funds.
After ruining and disgracing A. L. Vitberg, Nicholas exiled him to
Vyatka. It was there that we met.
For two years and a half I lived with the great artist and saw the
strong man, who had fallen a victim to the autocracy of red-tape
officialdom and barrack-discipline, which measures everything in the
world by the footrule of the recruiting officer and the copying clerk,
breaking down under the weight of persecution and misery.
It cannot be said that he succumbed easily; he struggled desperately for
full ten years. He came into exile still hoping to confound his enemies
and justify himself, he came in fact still ready for conflict, bringing
plans and projects. But he soon discerned that all was over.
Perhaps even this discovery would not have overwhelmed him, but he had
at his side a wife and children and ahead of him years of exile,
poverty, and privation; and Vitberg was turning grey, growing old,
growing old not by days but by hours. When I left him in Vyatka at the
end of two years he was quite ten years older.
Here is the story of this long martyrdom.
The Emperor Alexander did not believe in his victory over Napoleon, he
was oppressed by the fame of it and genuinely gave the glory to God.
Always disposed to mysticism and melancholy, in which many people saw
the fretting of conscience, he gave way to it particularly after the
series of victories over Napoleon.
When ‘the last soldier of the enemy had crossed the frontier,’ Alexander
issued a proclamation in which he vowed to raise in Moscow an immense
temple to the Saviour. Plans for such a temple were invited, and an
immense competition began.
Vitberg was at that time a young artist who had just completed his
studies and gained the gold medal for painting. A Swede by origin, he
was born in Russia and at first was educated in the Engineers’ Cadet
Corps. The artist was enthusiastic, eccentric, and given to mysticism:
he read the proclamation, read the appeal for plans, and flung aside all
other pursuits. For days and nights he wandered about the streets of
Petersburg, tortured by a persistent idea; it was too strong for him, he
locked himself up in his own room, took a pencil and set to work.
To no one in the world did the artist confide his design. After some
months of work, he went to Moscow to study the city and the surrounding
country and set to work again, shutting himself up for months together
and keeping his design a secret.
The date of the competition arrived. The plans were numerous, there were
designs from Italy and from Germany and our Academicians sent in theirs.
And the unknown youth sent in his among the rest. Weeks passed before
the Emperor examined the plans. These were the forty days in the
wilderness, days of temptation, doubt, and agonising suspense.
Vitberg’s colossal design, filled with religious poetry, impressed
Alexander. He came to a stop before it, and it was the first of which he
inquired the authorship. They broke open the sealed envelope and found
the unknown name of an Academy pupil.
Alexander wanted to see Vitberg. He had a long talk with the artist. His
bold and fervent language, his genuine inspiration and the mystic tinge
of his convictions impressed the Emperor. ‘You speak in stones,’ he
observed, examining Vitberg’s design again.
That very day his design was accepted and Vitberg was chosen to be the
architect and the director of the building committee. Alexander did not
know that with the laurel wreath he was putting a crown of thorns on the
artist’s head.
There is no art more akin to mysticism than architecture; abstract,
geometrical, mutely musical, passionless, it lives in symbol, in emblem,
in suggestion. Simple lines, their harmonious combination, rhythm,
numerical relations, make up something mysterious and at the same time
incomplete. The building, the temple, is not its own object, as is a
statue or a picture, a poem, or a symphony; a building requires an
inmate; it is a place mapped and cleared for habitation, an environment,
the shield of the tortoise, the shell of the mollusc; and the whole
point of it is that the receptacle should correspond with its spirit,
its object, its inmate, as the shell does with the tortoise. The walls
of the temple, its vaults and columns, its portal and façade, its
foundations and its cupola must bear the imprint of the divinity that
dwells within it, just as the convolutions of the brain are imprinted on
the bone of the skull.
The Egyptian temples were their holy books. The obelisks were sermons on
the high-road. Solomon’s temple was the Bible turned into architecture;
just as St. Peter’s at Rome is the architectural symbol of the escape
from Catholicism, of the beginning of the lay world, of the beginning of
the secularisation of mankind.
The very building of temples was so invariably accompanied by mystic
rites, symbolical utterances, mysterious consecrations that the mediæval
builders looked upon themselves as something apart, a kind of
priesthood, the heirs of the builders of Solomon’s temple, and made up
secret guilds of stonemasons, which afterwards passed into Freemasonry.
From the time of the Renaissance architecture loses its peculiar mystic
character. The Christian faith is struggling with philosophic doubt, the
Gothic arch with the Greek pediment, spiritual holiness with worldly
beauty. What gives St. Peter’s its lofty significance is that in its
colossal proportions Christianity struggles towards life, the church
becomes pagan and on the walls of the Sistine Chapel Michael Angelo
paints Jesus Christ as a broad-shouldered athlete, a Hercules in the
flower of his age and strength.
After St. Peter’s, church architecture deteriorated completely and was
reduced at last to simple repetition, on a larger or smaller scale, of
the ancient Greek peripteras and of St. Peter’s.
One Parthenon is called St. Madeleine’s in Paris; the other is the
Exchange in New York.
Without faith and without special circumstances, it was hard to create
anything living: there is something of artificiality, of hypocrisy, of
anachronism, about all new churches, such as the five-domed cruet-stands
with onions instead of corks in them in the Indo-Byzantine manner, which
Nicholas builds, with Ton for architect, or the angular Gothic churches
offensive to the aristocratic eye, with which the English decorate their
towns.
But the circumstances under which Vitberg created his design, his
personality, and the state of mind of the Emperor were all exceptional.
The war of 1812 had caused a violent upheaval in men’s minds in Russia;
it was long after the deliverance of Moscow before the ferment of
thought and nervous irritation could subside. Events outside Russia, the
taking of Paris, the story of the Hundred Days, the suspense, the
rumours, Waterloo, Napoleon sailing over the ocean, the mourning for
fallen kinsmen, the apprehension over the living, the returning troops,
the soldiers going home, all produced a great effect even on the
coarsest natures. Imagine a youthful artist, a mystic, gifted with
creative force and at the same time a fanatic, under the influence of
all that had happened, under the influence of the Tsar’s appeal and his
own genius.
Near Moscow, between the Mozhaisk and Kaluga roads, there is a slight
eminence which rises above the whole city. These are the Sparrow Hills
of which I have spoken in my first reminiscences of childhood. The city
lies stretched at their foot, and one of the most picturesque views of
Moscow is from their top. Here Ivan the Terrible, at that time a young
profligate, stood weeping and watching his capital burn; here the priest
Sylvester appeared before him and with stern words transformed that
monster of genius for twenty years.
Napoleon with his army skirted this hill, here his strength was broken,
it was at the foot of the Sparrow Hills that his retreat began.
Could a better spot be found for a temple to commemorate the year 1812
than the furthest point which the enemy reached?
But this was not enough, the hill itself was to be turned into the lower
part of the temple; the open ground down to the river was to be
encircled by a colonnade, and on this base, built on three sides by
nature itself, a second and a third temple were to be raised, making up
a marvellous whole.
Vitberg’s temple, like the chief dogma of Christianity, was threefold
and indivisible.
The lower temple carved out of the hill had the form of a parallelogram,
a coffin, a body, it was a heavy portico supported by almost Egyptian
columns, it merged into the hill, into rough, unhewn nature. This temple
was lighted up by lamps in tall Etrurian candelabra, and the daylight
filtered sparsely into it through the second temple, passing through a
transparent picture of the Nativity. In this crypt all the heroes who
had fallen in 1812 were to be laid at rest. An eternal requiem was to be
sung for those slain on the field of battle, the names of all of them
from the generals to the private soldiers were to be carved upon the
walls.
Upon this tomb, upon this graveyard, the second temple—the temple of
outstretched hands, of life, of suffering, of labour, was laid out in
the form of a Greek cross with the four ends equal. The colonnade
leading to it was decorated with statues from figures of the Old
Testament. At the entrance stood the prophets, they stood outside the
temple pointing the way which they were not destined to tread. The whole
story of the Gospels and of the Acts of the Apostles was depicted within
this temple.
Above it, crowning it and completing it, was a third temple in the form
of a dome. This temple, brightly lighted, was the temple of the spirit
of untroubled peace, of eternity, expressed in its circular plan. Here
there were neither pictures nor sculpture, only on the outside it was
encircled by a ring of archangels and was covered by a colossal cupola.
I am now giving from memory Vitberg’s leading idea. He had it worked out
to the minutest detail and everywhere perfectly in harmony with
Christian theology and architectural beauty.
The marvellous man spent his whole life over his design. During the ten
years that he was on his trial he was occupied with nothing else and,
though harassed by poverty and privation in exile, he devoted several
hours every day to his temple. He lived in it, he did not believe that
it would never be built; memories, consolations, glory, all were in the
artist’s portfolio.
Perhaps one day some other artist, after the martyr’s death, will shake
the dust off those sheets and with reverence publish that record of
martyrdom, in which was spent and wasted a life full of strength, for a
moment gladdened by the radiance of glory, then worn out and crushed
between a drill-sergeant Tsar, serf-senators, and pettifogging
ministers.
The design was a work of genius, terrifying, staggering; that was why
Alexander chose it, that was why it ought to have been carried out. It
was said that the hill could not have borne the weight of the temple. I
find that incredible in face of all the new resources of the American
and English engineers, the tunnels which a train takes eight minutes to
pass through, the hanging bridges, and so on.
Miloradovitch advised Vitberg to make the thick columns of the lower
temple of single blocks of granite. On this some one observed that it
would be very expensive to bring the granite blocks from Finland. ‘That
is just why we ought to get them,’ answered Miloradovitch, ‘if there
were a quarry in the river Moskva there would be nothing wonderful in
having them.’
Miloradovitch was a warrior poet and he understood poetry in general.
Grand things are done by grand means.
Only nature does great things for nothing.
Even those who have no doubt of Vitberg’s honesty find great fault with
him for having undertaken the duty of directing operations, though he
was an inexperienced young artist who knew nothing of official business.
He ought to have confined himself to the part of architect. That is
true.
But it is easy to make such criticisms sitting at home in one’s study.
He undertook it just because he was young, inexperienced, and an artist;
he undertook it because after his design had been accepted, everything
seemed easy to him; he undertook it because the Tsar himself had
proposed it to him, encouraged him, supported him. Is there any man
whose head would not have been turned?... Are there any so prudent, so
sober, so self-restrained? Well, if there are, they do not design
colossal temples nor do they make ‘stones speak’!
It need hardly be said that Vitberg was surrounded by a crowd of rogues,
men who look on Russia as a field for plunder, on the service as a
profitable line of business, on a public post as a lucky chance to make
a fortune. It was easy to understand that they would dig a pit under
Vitberg’s feet. But that, after falling into it, he should be unable to
get out again, was due also to the envy of some and the wounded vanity
of others.
Vitberg’s colleagues on the committee were the metropolitan Filaret, the
Governor-General of Moscow, and the Senator Kushnikov; they were all
offended to begin with by being associated with a young upstart,
especially as he gave his opinion boldly and objected if he did not
agree.
They helped to get him into trouble, they helped to slander him and with
cold-blooded indifference completed his ruin afterwards.
They were helped in this by the fall of the mystically-minded minister
Prince A. N. Golitsyn, and afterwards by the death of Alexander.
Together with the fall of Golitsyn came the collapse of Freemasonry, of
the Bible societies, of Lutheran pietism, which in the persons of
Magnitsky at Kazan and of Runitch in Petersburg ran to grotesque
extremes, to savage persecutions, to hysterical antics, to complete
dementia and goodness knows what strange doings.
Savage, coarse, ignorant orthodoxy was supreme. It was preached by Fotiy
the archimandrite of Novgorod, who lived on intimate (not physically, of
course) terms with Countess Orlov. The daughter of the celebrated Alexey
Grigoryevitch who strangled Peter III., she hoped to win the redemption
of her father’s soul by devoting herself to frenzied fanaticism, by
giving up to Fotiy and his monks the greater part of her enormous
estates, which had been forcibly snatched from the monasteries by
Catherine.
But the one thing in which the Petersburg government is persistent, the
one thing in which it does not change, however its principles and
religions may change, is its unjust oppression and persecution. The
violence of the Runitches and the Magnitskys was turned against the
Runitches and the Magnitskys. The Bible Society, only yesterday
patronised and approved—the prop of morality and religion, was to-day
closed and sealed, and its members put almost on the level with
counterfeit coiners; the _Messenger of Zion_, only yesterday recommended
to all fathers of families, was more severely prohibited than Voltaire
and Diderot, and its editor, Labzin, was exiled to Vologda.
Prince A. N. Golitsyn’s fall involved Vitberg; everyone fell upon him,
the committee complained of him, the metropolitan was offended and the
governor-general was displeased. His answers were ‘insolent’
(‘insolence’ is one of the principal charges in the indictment of him);
his subordinates were thieves—as though there were any one in the
government service who was not a thief. Though indeed it is likely that
there was more thieving among Vitberg’s subordinates than among others;
he had had no practice in superintending houses of correction and
official thieves.
Alexander commanded Araktcheyev to investigate the case. He was sorry
for Vitberg; he let him know through one of his attendants that he
believed in his rectitude.
But Alexander died and Araktcheyev fell. Under Nicholas, Vitberg’s case
at once took a turn for the worse. It was dragged on for ten years with
terrible absurdities. On the points on which he was found guilty by the
Criminal Court he was acquitted by the Senate. On those on which he was
acquitted by the Court he was found guilty by the Senate. The committee
of ministers found him guilty on all the charges. The Tsar, taking
advantage of the ‘most precious privilege of monarchs to show mercy and
remit punishment,’ added exile to Vyatka to his sentence.
And so Vitberg was sent into exile, dismissed from the service ‘for
abuse of the confidence of the Emperor Alexander and causing loss to the
treasury.’ He was fined, I believe, a million roubles, all his property
was seized and sold by public auction, and a rumour was circulated that
he had transferred countless millions to America.
I lived in the same house with Vitberg for two years and remained on
intimate terms with him up to the time I left Vyatka. He had not saved
the barest crust of bread; his family lived in the most awful poverty.
To give an idea of this case and of all similar ones in Russia, I will
quote two little details which have remained in my memory.
Vitberg bought for timber for the temple a copse from a merchant called
Lobanov; before the trees were felled Vitberg saw another wood, also
Lobanov’s, nearer to the river and asked him to exchange the one he had
sold for the second one. The merchant consented. The trees were felled
and the timber floated down the river. Later on more timber was needed,
and Vitberg bought the first wood again. This was the celebrated
accusation of having twice over bought the same copse. Poor Lobanov was
put in prison for it and died there.
The second instance came before my own eyes. Vitberg bought an estate
for the temple. His idea was that the peasants bought with the land for
the temple should be bound to furnish a certain number of workmen for
it, and by this means should obtain complete freedom for themselves and
their villages. It is amusing that our serf-owning senators found a
suggestion of slavery in this measure!
Among other things, Vitberg wanted to buy my father’s estate in the
Ruzsky district on the bank of the Moskva. Marble had been found on it,
and Vitberg asked permission to make a geological survey to discover
what amount of it there was. My father gave permission. Vitberg went off
to Petersburg.
Three months later my father learnt that quarrying was going forward on
an immense scale, that the peasants’ cornfields were heaped up with
marble. He protested; no notice was taken. A protracted lawsuit began.
At first they tried to throw all the blame on Vitberg, but unluckily it
appeared that he had given no orders, and that it all had been done by
the committee in his absence.
The case was taken before the Senate. To the general surprise the
Senate’s decision was not very far from common-sense. The marble
quarried was to remain the property of the landowner as compensation for
the ruined cornfields. The government money spent on quarrying and
labour, mounting to a hundred thousand roubles, was to be made good by
those who signed the contract for the work. Those who signed were Prince
Golitsyn, Filaret, and Kushnikov. There was of course a great clamour
and outcry. The case was taken before the Tsar. He had his system of
justice. He directed that the offenders should be excused payment
because—he wrote it with his own hand, as is printed in the minutes of
the Senate—‘The members of the committee did not know what they were
signing.’ Even if we admit that the metropolitan was professionally
bound to show a meek spirit, what are we to think of the other two grand
gentlemen who accepted the Imperial favour on grounds so courteously and
graciously explained?
But from whom was the hundred thousand to be taken? Government property,
they say, is not burnt in the fire nor drowned in the water. It is only
stolen, we might add. No need to hesitate, an adjutant-general was sent
off post-haste to Moscow to investigate the question.
Strekalov investigated everything, set everything straight, arranged and
settled it all in a few days: the marble was to be taken from the
landowner to make good the sum paid for the quarrying; if, however, the
landowner wished to retain the marble he was required to pay the hundred
thousand. The landowner needed no compensation, because the value of his
property was increased by the discovery of a new form of wealth upon it
(this was the _chef-d’œuvre_!), but for the damaged fields of the
peasants so many kopecks per dessyatin were to be allotted in accordance
with the law of flooded meadows and ruined hayfields passed by Peter I.
The person really punished in this case was my father. There is no need
to add that the quarrying of this marble was nevertheless brought up
against Vitberg in his indictment.
Two years after Vitberg’s exile the merchants of Vyatka formed a project
of building a new church.
Nicholas, desirous of killing all spirit of independence, of
individuality, of imagination, and of freedom, everywhere and in
everything, published a whole volume of designs for churches sanctioned
by the Most High. If any one wanted to build a church he was absolutely
obliged to select one of the approved plans. He is said to have
forbidden the writing of Russian operas, considering that even those
written by the adjutant Lvov, in the very office of the secret police,
were good for nothing. But that was not enough: he ought to have
published a collection of musical airs sanctioned by the Most High!
The Vyatka merchants after turning over the approved plans had the
boldness to differ from the Tsar’s taste. The design they sent in
astonished Nicholas; he sanctioned it and sent instructions to the
provincial authorities to see that the architect’s ideas were faithfully
carried out.
‘Who made this design?’ he asked the secretary.
‘Vitberg, your Majesty.’
‘What, the same Vitberg?’
‘The same, your Majesty.’
And behold, like a bolt from the blue, comes permission for Vitberg to
return to Moscow or Petersburg. The man had asked leave to clear his
character and it had been refused; he made a successful design, and the
Tsar bade him return—as though any one had ever doubted his artistic
ability....
In Petersburg, almost perishing of want, he made one last effort to
defend his honour. It was utterly unsuccessful. Vitberg asked the
assistance of A. N. Golitsyn, but the latter thought it impossible to
raise the case again, and advised Vitberg to write a very touching
letter to the Tsarevitch begging for financial assistance. He undertook
to do his best for him with the assistance of Zhukovsky,[149] and
promised to get him a thousand silver roubles.
Vitberg refused.
I was in Petersburg for the last time in the beginning of the winter of
1846 and there saw Vitberg. He was completely crushed. Even his old
wrath against his enemies which I had liked so much had begun to die
down; he had no more hope, he did nothing to escape from his position,
blank despair was bringing him to his end, his life was shattered, he
was waiting for death. If this was what Nicholas wanted he may be
satisfied.
Whether the victim is still living I do not know, but I doubt it.
‘If it were not for my family, my children,’ he said at parting, ‘I
would escape from Russia and go begging alms about the world. With the
Vladimir cross on my neck I would calmly hold out to passers-by the hand
pressed by the Emperor Alexander and tell them of my design and the fate
of an artist in Russia!’
‘They shall hear in Europe of your fate, poor martyr,’ I thought; ‘I
will answer for that.’
The society of Vitberg was a great solace to me in Vyatka. A grave
serenity and a sort of solemnity gave something priestly to his manner.
He was a man of very pure morals and in general more disposed to
asceticism than indulgence; but his severity did not detract from the
wealth and luxuriance of his artistic nature. He could give to his
mysticism so plastic a form and so artistic a colouring that criticism
died away on one’s lips; one was sorry to analyse, to dissect the
shining images and misty pictures of his imagination.
Vitberg’s mysticism was partly due to his Scandinavian blood, it was the
same coldly-thought-out dreaminess which we see in Swedenborg, and which
is like the fiery reflection of sunbeams in the icy mountains and snows
of Norway.
Vitberg’s influence made me waver, but my realistic temperament
nevertheless gained the upper hand. I was not destined to rise into the
third heaven, I was born a quite earthly creature. No tables turn at the
touch of my hands nor do rings shake at my glance. The daylight of
thought is more akin to me than the moonlight of phantasy. But I was
more disposed to mysticism at the period when I was living with Vitberg
than at any other time. Separation, exile, the religious exaltation of
the letters I received, the love which was filling my soul more and more
intensely, and at the same time the oppressive feeling of remorse, all
reinforced Vitberg’s influence.
And for two years afterwards I was under the influence of ideas of a
mystical socialist tinge, drawn from the Gospel and Jean-Jacques, after
the style of French thinkers like Pierre Leroux.[150]
Ogaryov plunged into the sea of mysticism even before I did. In 1833 he
was beginning to write the words for Gebel’s[151] oratorio, _The Lost
Paradise_. In the idea of a “Lost Paradise,” Ogaryov wrote to me, ‘there
is the whole history of humanity’; so at that time, he too mistook the
paradise of the ideal that we are seeking for a paradise we have lost.
In 1838 I wrote historical scenes in the religious socialist spirit, and
at the time took them for dramas. In some I pictured the conflict of the
pagan world with Christianity. In them Paul going to Rome raised a dead
youth to new life. In others I described the conflict of the official
Church with the Quakers and the departure of William Penn to America to
the new world.[152]
The mysticism of the gospel was soon replaced in me by the mysticism of
science; fortunately I rid myself of the second also.
But to return to our modest little town of Hlynov, the name of which
was, I don’t know why, perhaps from Finnish patriotism, changed by
Catherine II. to Vyatka.
In the desolation of my Vyatka exile, in the filthy atmosphere of
government clerks, in that gloomy remote place, separated from all who
were dear to me and put defenceless in the power of the governor, I
spent many exquisite sacred moments, and met many warm hearts and
friendly hands.
Where are you? What has happened to you, my friends of that snowy
region? It is twenty years since we met. I dare say you have grown old
as I have, you are marrying your daughters, you don’t now drink
champagne by the bottle and liqueur by the little glass. Which of you
has grown rich, which of you has come to ruin, who is high up in the
service, who is paralysed? Above all, is the memory of our old talks
still living in you, are those chords which vibrated so eagerly with
love and indignation still vibrating within you?
I have remained the same, that you know; I dare say news of me reaches
you even from the banks of the Thames. Sometimes I think of you, always
with love; I have some letters of that time, some of them are
exceedingly dear to me and I like reading them over.
‘I am not ashamed to own to you that I am passing through a very bitter
time,’ a young man wrote to me on the 26th of January 1838. ‘Help me for
the sake of that life to which you called me, help me with your advice.
I want to study, tell me of books, tell me anything you like, I will do
all I can, give me a chance; it will be too bad of you if you don’t help
me.’
‘I bless you,’ another wrote to me after I had gone away, ‘as the
husbandman blesses the rain that has made fruitful his arid soil.’
It is not from vanity that I have quoted these lines, but because they
are very precious to me. For the sake of those youthful appeals and
youthful love, for the sake of the yearnings aroused in those hearts,
one could well resign oneself to nine months’ imprisonment and three
years’ exile to Vyatka.
And then twice a week the post from Moscow came in; with what excitement
I waited by the post-office while the letters were sorted, with what a
tremor I broke the seal and looked in the letter from home for a tiny
note on thin paper written in a wonderfully fine and elegant hand.
I never read it in the post-office, but walked quietly home, deferring
the minute of reading it, happy in the mere thought that there was a
letter.
Those letters were all kept. I left them in Moscow. I long to read them
over again and dread to touch them....
Letters are more than memories, the very essence of events still lives
in them; they are the very past just as it was, preserved and unfaded.
... Should one know it, see it all again? Should one touch with wrinkled
hands one’s wedding garment?