The Icon and the Hatchet. The Motif of Aggression Against Icons in Russian Literature before the Revolution

Abstract

The present work focuses on the motif of aggression against icons introduced in the works by many Russian writers before the Revolution. Analysed material includes the works of Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Leskov, Lev Tolstoy, Dmitri Merezhkovsky and Vsevolod Krestovsky. The main aim of the article is to define how the authors imagined an act of imagebreaking and to determine who played the role of an iconoclast and what the presented motivation of such actions were. It attempts to answer the question of why so many authors felt the need to incorporate the motif of aggression against icons in their works, what literary and propagandistic aims this motif served, what feelings it was meant to evoke in the readers and what image of the world it strove to create.