13 - Imagination and ideology in the new religious consciousness

Summary

From the terrifying distance there sounds a voice of hope – not the hope of a single life, but a universal hope for the potential salvation of humanity from the ugliness and vulgarity of life by means of true, inspirited beauty. Then I look out the window of my monastic cell onto this noisy Petersburg, with its innumerable smoking chimneys, with its damp streets along which crowds rush, and I wonder: where is this ferment of young, still vital forces leading? What road will it find? Will victory be had by the elements that turn the life of the capital into an insufferable soulless turmoil, or will those elemental forces finally prevail which found expression in the prophetic works of the best Russian artists and which periodically glimmer in the moods of individual people who thirst for the highest truth? O, I believe that this inner force will conquer; I believe, I believe.

Akim Volynskii (1861–1926) in 1899

VOLOGDA, 1902

An unlikely debate club forms, made possible by the tsarist authorities' questionable policy of allowing internally exiled political opponents to congregate in a single provincial town, where they have little to do save carry on their partisan polemics. Among the Social Democrats gathered here are Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948), Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873–1928) and Anatolii Lunacharskii (1875–1933); the Socialist Revolutionaries include writer Aleksei Remizov (1877–1957) and budding terrorist Boris Savinkov (1879–1925).