ABSTRACT
The scale of nineteenth-century Russian God-seeking was defined by Nikolai Berdyaev as early as 1907. The God-seekers reflected our spirit, rebellious and hostile to every philistinism. Almost the whole of Russian literature, the Russian great literature, is a living document, witnessing to this God-seeking, to an unquenchable spiritual thirst. Literature gave the profoundly secular Russian society a means to project Christ's image onto its intellectual life and its moral and social values. The artists of Tchaikovsky's generation set up the vast new wave of paintings on New Testament themes. Canonic icon painting had been the best known, iconic', Russian way of depicting Christ since the Middle Ages. The basic belief in dissent held by educated Russian society, first manifested in a mass participation at Pushkin's funeral in 1837, is its traditional prerogative. The polyphonic chorus of Russian writers eagerly discussed these issues in the press.
