A. F. Koni on Dostoevsky, Children, and Icons
Dostoevsky's friend and admirer A.F. Koni, a noted liberal jurist, provides perhaps one of the finest introductions to children, icons, and their relationship, in the life and thought of our author.
Was Dostoevsky a prophet of Russia’s return to her historical icons in more that one way? That is, only figuratively - his rediscovery of the deepest wells of the people’s spiritual life, and how to get there? Or literally, as well, of the actual return from Western paintings to the Orthodox people’s icons?
Now, a good part of Dostoevsky’s generation, it is said, was characterized by a romantic enthusiasm for the Sistine Madonna (the Dresden “icon of Russian Romanticism”, in the apt words of James Billington, whose classic The Icon and the Axe, 1966, has the details1). Such enthusiasm, it is well known, sometimes seemed to overcome our author. Given the fashionable eclecticism of his day2 and ours, then, it is perhaps understandable that few accounts seem to challenge this impression. Yet, there is more to the story…3
Today we read an almost forgotten gem, one that seems to us to suggest that Dostoevsky’s co-suffering love for the youngest among the insulted and injured didn’t quite fit well with the naturalistic sentimentalism of Italian religious painting, after all. The Dostoevskian ethos was actually seeking its way towards the spiritual sobriety of genuine Russian icons, at a time when it was still difficult to do so.4
The setting is around Christmas 1875. Dostoevsky was visiting a colony for juvenile delinquents in Okhta, at his request, accompanied by a friend and admirer, the prominent jurist Anatoly Feodorovich Koni, who had been able to arrange the visit. That Koni was a liberal seems not inconsequential, here: he can hardly be suspected of the partialities towards olden Russian Icons, that he saw in Dostoevsky.
Writes Koni:
***
Dostoyevsky attentively looked at and listened to everything, asking questions and inquiring about the smallest details of the pupils' everyday life. He gathered all the young people around him in one of the large rooms and began asking them about everything and conversing with them. He answered both their inquisitive and their naive questions, but little by little this conversation turned into a lecture on his part, profound and at the same time quite understandable in its content, permeated with real love for the children, which openly shines from all the pages of his writings that talk of the “little ones”... They sometimes interrupted him and engaged him in an argument, but they listened to him with intense attention, not even suspecting who he was, and once or twice clipped one of the more impish and impatient listeners round the ear. He made a very strong impression upon all those gathered around him, – the faces of many who had already imbibed the poison of a large city became serious and lost their assumed expression of mockery and devil-may-care swaggering; the eyes of some of them became teary.
When we went out to go and look at the church, the whole crowd went with us, closely surrounding Dostoyevsky and vying with each other to tell him about their everyday adventures and about their mates' capers and views of the colony's rules. One could feel that a heartfelt connection had been established between the author of sorrowful stories about life and its young unconscious victims, and that they sensed in him not only a curious visitor, but also a sorrowing friend.
The fairly spacious church, with plain unvarnished wooden walls inside, was copiously adorned with icons. Kovalevsky had obtained for it the icons stolen or for some reason taken away from the Old Believers, and which had been kept for many years without use or return, as factual evidence, in the storerooms of abolished olden courts of judicature. Brown faces and thin abstract figures of the old school of painting, in bluish-green vestments and with beards “to the loins,” surrounded by surreal mountains, among which nestled no less strange cities and dwellings, gazed down from the icons. But the iconostasis was new, painted with beautiful traditional images in the manner of the Italian school.
When we drove back to town, Fedor Mikhaylovich was fixedly silent for a long time, and then softly said to me: “I don't like this church. It's like a museum! Why such an abundance of icons? Only several images are needed to act upon the souls of those who enter, but images that are strict and even severe, as faith should be strict and a Christian's duty should be severe. And they should also remind any boy who finds himself in the maelstrom of a big city and has had time to become befouled in it, his faraway village, where he used to be pure. And the icons in the iconostasis there are usually painted in a manner that is unskilled but true to tradition. But here everything is like some kind of gaudy Italianism. No, I don't like this church... And what I also don't like, – he added, – is this artificial and incomprehensible manner of using the polite form of address in speaking to children who come from the people. Maybe for us, for seigneurs, it is more polite, but it is colder, much colder. I used the intimate form in talking to all of them, and they saw us off very warmly and sincerely. Why should they pretend? For the time being they are still unfeigned, both in good and in bad...” And, in truth, the “colonists” did see him off noisily and trustingly, surrounding the carriage into which we were seating ourselves and shouting to Dostoyevsky: “Come again! Come without fail! We will definitely be waiting for you...”
Translation courtesy of Matushka Natalia Sheniloff, after the Russian original, that we highly recommend in its entirety, to all the enthusiasts of the Dostoevsky for children project.
Billington also adumbrates the following interesting development, although without really connecting it with Dostoevsky (or with its deeper theological meaning, on which see Ouspensky, referenced below, and esp. St. John Maximovitch, here or here): ‘They [the Russian romantics] seemed almost to be feeling their way back to the dimly perceived, half-remembered world of Muscovy where belief was unquestioning and where truth was pronounced by the original prophetic historian and artist: the monastic chronicler and iconographer. The missing Madonna was perhaps not that of Raphael, which they had never really known, but rather the Orthodox icon of the Mother of God… When a trickle of intellectuals began to return to the Church in the late imperial period, one of the converts likened the process to an exchange of the Sistine Madonna for the icon of Our Lady of Vladimir.’ (Billington, pp. 350-51; also cf. Bulgakov, hyperlink below.)
Cf. L. Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992), esp. ch. 17: “Art in the Russian Church During the Synodal Period”, for a possibly dated, but useful overview of the background against which Dostoevsky’s position can be grasped. The larger context was perhaps akin to what Fr. George Florovsky called pseudomorphosis, in particular as occurring in Church art during the Petrine Synodal period (something that can become ‘a kind of schism in the soul, in cases where an alien language or symbolism, for some imperative reason, is adopted as a means of self-expression’, according to Florovsky.)
Thus, Rosamund Bartlett seems to suggest that - notwithstanding possible impressions, or suggestions to the contrary - Dostoevsky’s characters don’t actually pray to Western paintings! Connecting the dots since decades ago, the unduly neglected Sergei Fudel, in his time, was prefacing the Koni episode (above) as follows (Наследство Достоевского [The Legacy of Dostoevsky], 1963):
[W]ithout internally separating art from Christianity, at the same time he (Dostoevsky) never intermingled them. In 1879 Vladimir Solovyev brought him a large photograph of the Sistine Madonna, as a gift from the widow of the poet A. Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky so loved this work of art that his wife often found him standing before the photograph in a state of deep emotion, not even hearing her enter the room. Yet, speaking about a visit to the Orthodox Church in Dresden, the same Anna Grigoryevna noted [in her 1867 notebook, on Apr.30/Mar.12]: "The image of the Mother of God on the right side of the iconostasis was copied from Raphael's Madonna (something which Fedya strongly disapproves)." "They sang, - she adds, - an extremely strange melody that I've never heard before, as though singing romances." (accompanying text to nn. 411-13, emphasis added.)
On the other hand, in a remarkably close and useful reading, Sophie Ollivier (followed to various extents by Katya Jordan [pdf], and J.J. Gatrall) probably goes to an extreme, in declaring that "only women pray before the icons in Dostoevsky's works". After all, this seems to leave out Dostoevsky’s Elder Zossima, perhaps the foremost man of prayer in universal literature ("I fell on my knees before the icon and wept for him before the Holy Mother of God, our swift defender and helper.")
For, the correlated restoration and rediscovery of the historical Russian icons, that was to be greeted by E. Trubetskoi, among others, as the visual epiphany of Dostoevsky’s “beauty that will save the world”, and set the background to Bulgakov’s moving adieux to the Sistine Madonna, that had shaped his religious youth, was yet in the future, as previously noted.