A Haymarket Khozhdenie na osliati: Raskolnikov’s Donkey Walk and the Failures of Iconic Performativity

In sixteenthand seventeenth-century Moscow, Orthodox priests and celebrants reenacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday in a ritual known as the Donkey Walk (Khozhdenie na osliati). Art historian Alexei Lidov has interpreted this reenactment as a “spatial icon,” in which city and inhabitants co-create a dynamic, living “Entry into Jerusalem” icon. This paper reexamines the final chapters of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment within the context of this ritual, arguing that Raskolnikov’s attempted act of penitence at the Haymarket represents a failed Donkey Walk, in which the city and its inhabitants resist the anticipated transformation, suggesting the impossibility of iconic performativity in Peter’s profane city.


Introduction: The Performing Icon, Past and Present
The question of an icon's performativity-its ability to effect change or transformation within a reverent beholder or community-has remained a topic of theological and theoretical debate for over one and a half millennia, from antiquity through the Iconoclastic crisis and beyond, into the postmodern age. Through the ancient and medieval eras, theologians developed various subtle explanations for the divine image's capacity to mediate between God and believer, including essentialist models that implied the presence of the divine prototype within the image and nonessentialist models that carefully distinguished a saint's outer likeness from his divine essence. By the ninth century, Orthodox thinkers had landed on a solution to the iconoclasts' challenge that carefully excised any hint of spirit from matter; but while their doctrines successfully shielded the devout from charges of idolatry, they failed to account for the icon's miraculous properties. As a result, an uneasy fault line opened up between the dictates of iconoclast-era theology and the draw of popular belief, where legends of icons' miraculous intercessory, protective, or healing performances blurred the fine lines these theologians had so carefully drawn to keep earthly image distinct from heavenly model. 1 Over the past several decades, as visual culture has taken shape as an academic field, the Orthodox icon has reemerged as the site of spirited debate, and an interdisciplinary assortment of scholars-historians, religious and literary specialists, political theorists, and art historians, among others-has sought to reassess Byzantine image theory in light of contemporary intellectual developments. Their reconsideration of the divine image takes place at a particularly lively scholarly crossroads, where the performative turn in the arts of the late twentieth century intersects with the recent material turn in religious studies.
The so-called performative turn of the late twentieth century occurred across multiple disciplines, as scholars sought to reexamine cultural phenomena as diverse as language, gender, and religious ritual through the central metaphor of performance. Artistic works were reconceived not as stable artifacts-independent texts, detached from their creators, ready to be consumed and interpreted by discrete spectators-but rather as ephemeral events, co-constructed and experienced by actors and spectators within a shared physical environment. The dynamic interaction among these participants has the potential to effect transformation in all three: in a work of performance art, for instance, the actor transforms her body, becoming both subject and object of performance; the spectator's embodied response to this performance transforms him into actor and co-creator; and the physical performance space itself is transformed into an unstable and transient communal environment, charged with meanings and possibilities. Such performances routinely disrupt, and ultimately dissolve, traditional boundaries between actor and spectator, being and doing, art and life. 2 More recently, a material turn in the humanities and social sciences has invigorated a shift within the study of religion from the realm of the intellect-reversing a general Western tendency to prioritize ideas, doctrine, and theology as religion's defining elements-to that of the body, reestablishing the primacy of matter-physical objects, sensory perceptions, enacted and emplaced ritual practices-in constituting, accessing, and experiencing the spiritual. 3 Both performative and materialist approaches emphasize corporeality, sensuous experience, and spatial context, establishing perception as a vital and meaning-making encounter between lived, phenomenal bodies and the physical environment. Cultural phenomena, including religious rites or artistic works, are understood to be experienced through the bodily senses-they are touched, smelled, heard, seen, and felt-rather than simply analyzed by a disembodied intellect. These new frameworks thus encourage a refocusing of the critical gaze, from the text or object itself to "its function as a performative and communicative act in a particular cultural situation"; 4 indeed, the very notion of a stable, fixed text is replaced by that of a fluid and ever-changing performance, generated through the dynamic interactions among participants within a shared space. Such artistic events generate meaning within the bodies and senses of the spectator, initiating the possibility of transformation in all participants and destabilizing conventional binaries, such that matter leads to spirit, spectator becomes performer, and performance constitutes reality. 5 It is within this corporeally charged critical context that contemporary scholars such as art historians Alexei Lidov, Bissera Pentcheva, and Nicoletta Isar have undertaken a critical reevaluation of the Orthodox icon. 6 As the debate has left the church and entered the academy, theological questions have largely been consigned to the Orthodox clergy, allowing scholarly attention to shift from the metaphysical nexus of divinity/icon/beholder, so essential to Byzantine thought, to the more material postmodern nexus of image/spectator/environment. This new generation of icon theorists has clearly kept up with the recent material and performative tendencies in cultural studies, traces of which mark their own studies of the divine image. Collectively, their approaches redirect attention from the icon as discrete object to its active role in iconic rituals, from flat surface to spatial emanation; emphasize the environmental context and spatio-material qualities of the divine image; and recognize the critical role of the beholder's sensory response. In contrast to medieval theology, these more recent approaches stress the contextualized nature of iconic performance: the relationship between icon and venerator does not take place in isolation, but within a rich liturgical or ceremonial environment. These readings dramatize the interdependence of spirit, matter, and space: the charged spiritual atmosphere heightens the embodied perceptions of the beholder which, coupled with phenomenal changes in the environment-reverberations of music and chanted liturgy; hazy wafts of intoxicating incense; flickering candlelight, stirred by the breath of prayer-all animate the surface of the image which, in turn, sacralizes the environment and effects a transformation in the observer by facilitating an experience of the divine. 7 According to these recent reassessments, then, the performativity of the icon is determined not through the presence of the divine essence, but through the image's material apprehension by living, sensing bodies within a sacrally charged environment.
The most influential of the recent frameworks to emerge from this new era of icon scholarship is undoubtedly Lidov's theory of hierotopy, devoted to the creation of sacred spaces. An interdisciplinary field of study spanning anthropology, religion, and art history, hierotopy accounts for the material and performative means (including imagery, light, song, and rite) by which humans produce spatial or architectural links to the sacred; where hierophany refers to the breakthrough of the spiritual into everyday life, hierotopy involves human intention-not a spontaneous breakthrough, then, but an active, purposeful creation of sacred space. 8 Like other performative approaches to the divine image, Lidov's hierotopic schema ties the icon's "performance"-the active transformation of its surroundings and spiritual transport of its beholder-to the dynamic interaction between image, viewer, and ritual space. Introduced in 2001 and developed in a significant body of research over nearly two decades, Lidov's hierotopic approach has sparked spirited intellectual debate and inspired innovative interdisciplinary methodologies, particularly among art historians, medievalists, and scholars of religious studies. Having made a considerable splash in these diverse fields, the rich possibilities of this young research discipline have now begun to reach the shores of literary studies. 9 By now, the artistic strategies by which Orthodox authors like Dostoevsky and Bulgakov weave narrative icons into their texts are well documented, the critical literature replete with analyses demonstrating how literary works might be read "iconically" in order to illuminate new layers of spiritual meaning. As approaches like Lidov's have broadened the concept of the icon from wooden object to energetic participant in the performance of the sacred, critical studies of such textual icons must likewise widen their analytical lens to encompass extra-pictorial elements of the icon such as ritual, devotional, and otherwise sacralized spaces. While previous scholars have located and identified verbal icons in Crime and Punishment, most prominently in the epilogue, the present study will focus on a different, previously unremarked icon in the novel's final pages: the reenactment of a medieval iconic ritual. It is intended as a case study, illustrating how Lidov's hierotopy can open sacred possibilities within narrative spaces, allowing literary expressions of performative icons to reveal new spiritual meanings in even the best-known works.

The Gospel according to Dostoevsky, and the Missing Entry into Jerusalem
A century and a half of readers-scholars and students alike-have discerned a familiar narrative pattern underlying Raskolnikov's redemption plotline in the final chapters of Crime and Punishment: the passion and resurrection of Christ. George Gibian notes that the murderer's taking up the cross and going on his "sorrowful way" to confess his crime are reminiscent of Christ's path to Golgotha. 10 Jostein Bortnes argues that the Gospel modeling of Raskolnikov's spiritual regeneration is initiated by Sonia's reading of Lazarus, and continues through the epilogue, with his "descent into the hell of the Siberian prison," symbolic victory over death, and eventual resurrection. 11 Susan McReynolds detects Raskolnikov's self-association with Christ much earlier, noting his own conception of the crime as "taking sin and suffering on oneself in order to save others." 12 Priscilla Meyer has even suggested that the entire novel represents a modern-day revision of Dostoevsky's beloved Johannine Gospel, in which the hero experiences a series of events that "parody" those recounted by John, including the Passover feast, cleansing of the temple, interrogation, and resurrection. 13 Notebooks for the novel preserve various possible outcomes for Dostoevsky's criminal-hero, including the seeds that would eventually mature into the more fully incarnated evangelical design of the final version: within a few pages at the end of the draft, Sonia calls for Lazarus to arise, follows Raskolnikov to Golgotha at forty paces, and hangs a cypress cross around his neck. 14 Clearly, as Gibian points out, the Gospel references-at least those everyone agrees upon, most prominently the raising of Lazarus, Raskolnikov taking up the cross and bowing down at the crossroads, and his Siberian resurrection-are both intentional and intended to be read as a connected whole. 15 Most biblical readings construe Raskolnikov's scene at the Haymarket as part of his Via Dolorosa: the "sorrowful path" he follows through the streets of Petersburg toward confession, trial, and eventual redemption (in fact, this is how he himself conceptualizes it, noting that Sonia had "accompanied him all along his walk of sorrows [skorbnoe shestvie]"). 16 Perhaps, however, it is worth reconsidering this scene in light of a different episode: Jesus's triumphant entrance to Jerusalem, the city in which he was to be condemned to death, recorded in all four Gospels as the link between Christ's raising of Lazarus and the events leading to his own crucifixion and resurrection.
In Christian Orthodoxy, the celebration of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday completes the Week of Palms, commemorating the death and raising of Lazarus, and marks the beginning of Passion Week, which culminates on Easter Sunday. Situated between the penitence of Lent and the mourning of the Passion, the Feast of the Entry into Jerusalem provides a celebratory transition between Christ's ministry on earth and his acceptance of death; it points backward to the Lazarus miracle and forward to the resurrection of Jesus, thus signifying the Christian triumph of eternal life. While details vary slightly across Gospel accounts, all four chronicle reverent crowds welcoming Jesus as he enters the Holy City on the back of a donkey.
In Crime and Punishment, the Haymarket scene is likewise situated between two resurrections-Sonia's Lazarus reading and Raskolnikov's ascent to the police station to confess, leading to his own spiritual rebirth in the Siberian prison. Remembering Sonia's command, he kneels down in the middle of the marketplace, bows to the earth, and kisses it "with delight and happiness" (s naslazhdeniem i schastiem) (405), a sudden moment of jubilance heralding his ultimate embrace of redemption through suffering. 17 He performs his act of penance and near-confession in a public square, before a crowd of onlookers, one of whom remarks aloud, "He's going to Jerusalem" (Eto on v Ierusalim idet) (405). Although the Haymarket scene does not take place on Palm Sunday, Dostoevsky signals their association both structurally and thematically: within the final chapters' established Gospel framework, Raskolnikov's bow falls between two resurrections: one rehearsal, and one real. The joy with which he enacts his public repentance indicates that he has freely chosen Sonia's difficult spiritual path, rather than Svidrigailov's unrepentant fleshly shortcut; he understands and welcomes the suffering he will endure in hopes of spiritual redemption, just as Christ's triumphal entrance into the Holy City traditionally marks his acceptance of physical torment/death in return for mankind's salvation. Ironically, Raskolnikov's confession is interrupted by the bystander's explicit allusion to Christ's entry into Jerusalem-his spiritual renewal will have to wait.
It seems likely that the biblical Entry into Jerusalem would have been on Dostoevsky's mind at this time. He was already consumed by the composition of The Idiot as he completed work on Crime and Punishment and, as Michael Finke has observed, Prince Myshkin's arrival in Switzerland was accompanied by the braying of a donkey in a marketplace, while his later entry into Petersburg society is accompanied by the story of that braying donkey. 18 In his reading of the novel's Christological plane, the donkey-with its strong Gospel associations-heralds Myshkin's physical and spiritual transformation. Of course, it might also plausibly be argued that, if the braying ass accompanying Myshkin's arrival in Switzerland signifies Christ's entry to Jeru-salem, then his return to Petersburg represents a reversal of that entry, ironically prefiguring that novel's series of failed transformations and redemptions. 19 In Crime and Punishment, at least, the Jerusalem reference seems to signal, fairly straightforwardly, Raskolnikov's readiness (after four hundred pages of self-justifying theory) for suffering and, eventually, resurrection. But as a closer reading of the passage suggests, Dostoevsky's evocation of this Gospel episode served another, more political purpose, as well.
In early-modern Russia, the Feast day was celebrated in an annual ritual in which tsar and patriarch reenacted Christ's donkey ride into Jerusalem, in the process transforming Moscow into an icon of the Holy City. 20 The Palm Sunday Donkey Walk, considered one of the most important ceremonies of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Muscovy, functioned as a public display of the accord between political and ecclesiastical authorities. The ritual was abolished by Peter the Great in the late seventeenth century as part of his comprehensive subjugation of church to state. As this paper will argue, rereading the Haymarket scene in light of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem not only fills out the Gospel schema symbolically underlying Raskolnikov's path to regeneration, but also reveals a previously overlooked artistic strategy by which Dostoevsky introduced into the final pages of his novel a critique of Russia's post-Petrine schism from the Orthodox Church.

The Icon and the Iconic in Dostoevsky
Over the past half century, Dostoevsky scholarship has expanded its rigorous focus on the word to encompass the image, and particularly the Orthodox icon. While a full discussion of the theory and theology of the icon lies beyond the scope of this paper, at the most fundamental level it provides a link between material and spiritual worlds, uniting visible and invisible; it reveals the presence of an invisible prototype, drawing the believer into a sacred "iconic space," and thus offering access to the divine. 21 In his 1966 Dostoevsky's Quest for Form, R.L. Jackson argues that for Dostoevsky, art's transformative possibilities-its potential to effect moral or spiritual transformation in its beholder-are tied to beauty, and particularly to the icon, "the visible symbol of the beauty of God" toward which man strives. 22 In a superb analysis of Jackson's work, Caryl Emerson remarks that the image reveals such beauty-the ideal type of beauty that Dostoevsky believed might save the world-more clearly and immediately than does the word. 23 Since Jackson's pioneering study, an enormous body of scholarship has developed on the topic of icons in literature, and particularly in Dostoevsky's narrative fiction; the following summary will attempt only to outline its rough form.
The recent explosion of articles and panels-even one full-length book-devoted to the aesthetic dimension of Dostoevsky's verbal art attests to the high level of scholarly interest in the function and interpretation of the visual, and particularly of Orthodox iconography, in his fiction. 24 Over the past several decades, literary scholars have scoured various levels of Dostoevsky's fictional universe for suggestions of Orthodox imagery, ranging from references to individual icons on the page to the "iconic" structure of the works themselves. But whether such verbal icons are repre-sented at the micro-or macro-level of text, they still possess what Valery Lepakhin calls "iconicity" (ikonichnost'), or iconic function-that is, they still provide a link between physical and spiritual worlds, allowing both characters and readers access to the unseen divine. 25 In other words, Dostoevsky's verbally rendered "icons"-whether in the form of spiritually pure characters like Prince Myshkin and Alesha Karamazov or iconographically organized spaces like Sonia's roompossess the same redemptive potential as a physical icon. 26 Carol Apollonio has noted that in Dostoevsky's works, icons "work most effectively when masked." 27 In that spirit, several scholars have demonstrated how Dostoevsky uses physical space (including city streets, interiors, etc.) to create a substructure of religious imagery, both cruciform and iconic, beneath the surface of his texts. In these readings, the St. Petersburg of Crime and Punishment occupies two planes at once: on a physical level, it remains a gritty urban center, while on the symbolic it becomes, in Janet Tucker's words, a "giant icon." 28 Others have mined the work for specific icons embodied in major characters: Amanda Murphy recognizes the famous Vladimir Mother of God as Lizaveta backs away from the murderer Raskolnikov, and again as Sonia listens to his confession; Tatiana Kasatkina discerns a composite Mother of God with Christ Child in the novel's final pages, as Sonia and Raskolnikov silently clasp hands on the bank of the Siberian river. 29 The spiritual dimension of Raskolnikov's regeneration is thus expressed not only verbally (as in Sonia's reading of Lazarus), but visually, as crowded streets come together in crossroads, filthy rooms reveal the "inverse perspective" of the icon, and characters strike iconic poses, providing a hidden scaffolding of Orthodox imagery for the novel's Gospel structure. 30 Jefferson Gatrall has catalogued the physical icons in the novel, demonstrating how they appear at the most crucial points along Raskolnikov's moral trajectorypremeditation, crime, and confession. 31 It seems clear from the evidence above that the "embodied" or concealed icons, too, emerge at Raskolnikov's most spiritually critical moments-his crime, confession to Sonia, and final reconciliation with her. It would make intuitive sense for such a narrative icon to appear at his moment of confession at the Haymarket. Indeed, several critics have already searched for one: Bruce Foltz reads Raskolnikov's bow as an act of veneration toward the iconic earth, and Tucker argues that, in kissing the soil, Raskolnikov kisses an "icon of the mother of God." 32 In fact, I believe that the scene refers to a particular icon: Christ's "Entry into Jerusalem," one of the most popular icon subjects in Byzantine and Russian Medieval art ( fig. 1). The reference is not to the physical icon, however, but to its associated ritual.
Over the past two decades, fertile new ground has opened up within the broader field of icon studies, stemming from Lidov's hierotopy, which theorizes the creation of sacred spaces through the dynamic interaction between icons and their physical environment, as well as the heightened performative possibilities within those created spaces. Certain rituals have the power to temporarily transform a corner of the physical world (such as a city street or marketplace) into what Lidov terms a "spatial icon": the energetic reenactment of an icon in the real world, possessing the same miraculous, transporting qualities as a material icon. For example, in the Byzantine "Tuesday rite," a venerated Hodegetria icon was carried through the streets of Constantinople every Tuesday morning in a liturgical reenactment of the Siege of Constantinople of 626 and the miraculous appearance of the Mother of God, whose intercession had famously saved the city. At a crucial moment in the Tuesday rite, as the procession circled the marketplace, the icon appeared to fly on its own, carrying along its own bearer. Through the performance, according to Lidov, the miraculous power of the icon would emanate through the city, transforming profane urban space into an enormous living icon of the Holy City, an "earthly embodiment of […] Jerusalem." 33 Medieval Muscovites adopted this and other similar rituals from Byzantium, in order to transfer the sacred space to Moscow-in the words of Marie Gasper-Hulvat, to "fashion the Russian city upon the prototype of [ Jerusalem]-as if cities could model a prototype in the same way as icons." 34 In other words, just as an icon provides access to its unseen prototype, the "living pictures" generated through such rituals had the power to transport worshippers to the Holy City. 35 Lidov has written that Dostoevsky's "iconic consciousness" (ikonicheskoe soznanie) enabled him to perceive the visible world as an image of another, invisible one; indeed, in recent years, literary scholars have begun to apply his hierotopical approach to the study of sacred textual spaces, specifically those found in the works of Dostoevsky. 36 Ksana Blank notes that the boundaries of the sacred can be extended "beyond the temple" in the literary text; she is particularly concerned with those Dostoevskian confessions, sermons, or revelations that occur in "underground" or profane spaces, such as taverns or brothels. 37 She holds up Raskolnikov's Haymarket repentance as a central example of hierotopy in Crime and Punishment, noting the astonishment of the bystanders and the resemblance between Raskolnikov's ritual actions in the Haymarket and Lidov's description of the Tuesday rite in the marketplace of Constantinople: in both instances, she argues, the market is transformed into a place of worship. 38 While I agree with Blank's general assessment of the scene's hierotopic potential, I would argue that it more closely resembles a different spatial icon described by Lidov.

The Donkey Walk: The History, Politics, and Art of a Ritual
In early-modern Russia, during the period between the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, the "Entry into Jerusalem" was just such an icon-its most visible iteration was not as an object of veneration on the wall of a cathedral, but as embodied in an annual ritual known as the Donkey Walk (khozhdenie or shestvie na osliati). 39 The Donkey Walk was a reenactment of Christ's entry into Jerusalem performed every Palm Sunday in Moscow between 1558 and 1693.
In it, the patriarch of the Orthodox Church, representing Jesus Christ, rode on the back of a donkey-a role actually played by a horse in long-eared donkey guise-being led by the tsar to an analogue for Jerusalem. The original procession started at the Uspensky (or Dormition) Cathedral in the Kremlin and ended at Pokrovsky, or St. Basil's Cathedral (formerly known as Trinity), on Red Square ( fig. 2). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Trinity Cathedral was popularly known as "Jerusalem" due to its role in the ceremony, and its western entrance was called the "Entry into Jerusalem." The procession reversed direction in 1656 under Patriarch Nikon: now, on the return trip from Pokrovsky, the patriarch mounted a horse at Lobnoe Mesto, a platform in front of the Cathedral on Red Square, and was led from there back to Uspensky (fig. 3).
While historians and semioticians have debated the intricacies and interpretations of the ceremony, this study will limit description to the following details, each of which will be relevant to the discussion of Crime and Punishment. At Lobnoe Mesto, where the procession began, an icon stand draped in a green shroud displayed the Gospels and various icons, including the Kazan Mother; the horse stood there as well, awaiting the patriarch and tsar. When the tsar arrived at Lobnoe Mesto, he ascended the dais, crossed himself, bowed down to kiss the Gospel, and abased himself by removing his crown. The patriarch mounted the horse, holding a cross in his right hand and the Gospels in his left. The tsar then led the horse to "Jerusalem" while a crowd of believers spread cloth and branches along their route. When the procession arrived at the Cathedral, tsar and patriarch blessed and kissed one another, publicly staging a show of harmony between Russian secular and sacred authority. As one of only two public events in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Muscovy involving both tsar and patriarch, the Palm Sunday ritual was viewed as a performance of the complex power relationship between earthly and ecclesiastical authorities, spotlighting the delicate and shifting balance between the two institutions. 40 The choreography of the event, in particular the tsar's performed deference, has traditionally been interpreted as an expression of his submission before the head of the church. 41 Like the Tuesday Hodegetria rite discussed earlier, the Donkey Walk represents a "liturgical performance" adopted from Byzantium and interpreted by Lidov as an attempt to reproduce Jerusalem in central Moscow, generating a "huge spatial icon" and reaffirming the spiritual status of the Russian capital as embodiment of the Heavenly City. 42 Adopting such rituals was an attempt to "transfer the sacred space" of Constantinople-and, by extension, Jerusalem-to Russian soil, such that Moscow actually became these holy cities in an iconic sense, thus entrenching Muscovy's capital as "the appropriate geographical location for Christ's arrival at the End of Days." 43 The mid-sixteenth century, when the Donkey Walk ritual was adopted, was a transformative period for the Russian state and monarchy. With the rise of Muscovy, the Russian state expanded south into the Caucasus and east into the Urals, and princedom swelled into tsardom. The newly anointed Ivan IV, first tsar of all Rus, skillfully employed ecclesiastical art, architecture, and ritual to build a new Russian political culture, project state power, and inspire national unity. 44 As manifestations of the Orthodox faith, icons-their creation, veneration, and ritual displays-played a fundamental role in the formation and defense of the burgeoning Empire. 45 In an era of political turmoil and anxiety over the establishment of a new state and national identity, icons and their associated rituals, including the Donkey Walk, served to stabilize and legitimize the expanding Russian empire by solidifying the Muscovite connection to the Holy City. Indeed, Flier writes, the ritual was so popular because it "successfully [allowed] medieval Moscow to come into contact with ancient Jerusalem, as well as with the New Jerusalem." 46 Within the semiotics of Muscovite culture under Ivan IV, he elaborates, Moscow was equated, not only with the Third Rome on earth, but with the New Jerusalem on the eschatological plane. 47 At the end of the seventeenth century, eschatological anxieties peaked once again as a young tsar undertook a sweeping program of reforms; recent historians have argued that Peter the Great drew on the era's apocalyptic apprehensions, envisioning his newborn city of Petersburg as a new New Jerusalem on the Neva. Robert Collis has reassessed popular conceptions of Peter's rational, secular city, suggesting that the tsar initially intended to legitimize his new capital by aligning it semiotically with Jerusalem, thereby usurping Moscow's spiritual status in the Russian state. 48 Despite Peter and his officials' best efforts, however, it proved impossible to map the Holy City onto the western grid of Peter's capital. Instead, popular associations with the sinful city of Babylon persisted from the city's very founding; prophesies of its eventual destruction by flood competed with official myths of its miraculous creation, portending a watery doom befitting a Russian Babylon created and ruled by an Antichrist-tsar. 49 In any case, as Uspenskij and Zhivov have detailed, by the late seventeenth century, the general perception of the Palm Sunday ritual as "emphasizing the greatness of the patriarch and […] belittling the power of the tsar" had begun to undermine Peter the Great's efforts to subordinate the church to the state. 50 As part of his broader reforms, Peter formally abolished the Donkey Walk in 1697, about a quarter-century before eliminating the Patriarchate itself. In its place, he introduced a blasphemous new ceremony that satirized the ritual: on Palm Sundays from now on, a mock patriarch and his retinue now rode through the city "on oxen and donkeys, or in sleighs drawn by pigs, bears or goats." 51 In the two centuries following Peter the Great's state-mandated overhaul of icon production and his attempts to reseed the artistic landscape with European conventions, the medieval sacred image and its associated processional and devotional expressions receded from the public life of educated, urban Russians. 52 By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the rise of realism in the verbal and visual arts coincided with a rise in nationalist sentiment, including the spread of Slavophile ideas and a promotion of native "Slavic" ideals over the Western secularism promoted by Peter's eighteenth-century reforms. This tumultuous era of political, cultural, and artistic reevaluation galvanized an impulse to develop a distinct school of visual representation that would identify and elevate national subject matter, honestly represent Russian reality, and facilitate the construction of a new national identity. 53 Toward this end, artists sought and emphasized distinctive signifiers of Russianness, drawn from Orthodox imagery, folk culture, and medieval history; the resulting return to the pre-Petrine past led to a renewed interest in religious and historical themes, including a reemergence of icons and iconography in Russian intellectual life.
Viacheslav Shvarts (1838-1869) has been identified as the first visual artist to revive this lost Russian past, producing detailed and accurate scenes from medieval Rus, skillfully reimagined in oil on canvas. 54 Shvarts's work heralded the broader late-nineteenth-century recovery of subjects drawn from Russia's historical and religious past toward the expression of an emergent national identity; his efforts to develop a mode of pictorial representation corresponding to his return to lost Orthodox traditions anticipated the aesthetic and ideological direction of the following two decades in visual art. 55 . 4). Correspondence with his father from this period depicts an anxious young artist, impatiently anticipating the upcoming exhibition and public response. Judging had ended on September 8, but the exhibition did not open for over a month after that; his nervous letter home on October 9 frets that it had not yet opened. 56 By the time he sent his next letter on October 18, however, the exhibition had already received the first of many sharply negative reviews, with a critic from Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti opining that the exhibit was "lacking in good works." 57 Shvarts complained to his father that the Vedomosti critic had "clearly not even taken the trouble to walk through the exhibition" before reviewing it. 58 Despite the disparaging reviews of the exhibit, however, the critics unanimously praised Shvarts's Palm Sunday for its "accurate," "precise," and "archeological" restoration of ancient Russian life. 59 Given Dostoevsky's activities and interests during this period, it is quite likely that he would have seen Shvarts's Palm Sunday at the Academy Exhibition. Having spent the summer of 1865 in Germany, where he had begun working on the drafts that would eventually grow into Crime and Punishment, the writer returned to St. Petersburg on October 15, just before the opening of that year's exhibition. 60 Dostoevsky's strong interest in and views on visual art are well attested: when he was still in exile, he had proposed a treatise on its Christian mission, to be titled Letters about Art. While that book was never completed, by the early 1860s Dostoevsky had begun to produce polemical assessments of the contemporary art scene, including reviews of the Annual Exhibitions of the Academy of Arts. 61 In an anonymously published review of the 1860-61 Exhibition in the journal Vremia, Dostoevsky accused gold-medal-winning painter V. I. Iakobi of "straining for photographic truth," and in so doing producing "a lie." 62 The author calls instead for a realism that goes beyond such a mechanical reproduction of surface reality: truthful art, he writes, must endeavor to discover a deeper and more essential spiritual truth; it should penetrate the surface to reveal a version of reality transformed through art, giving man an ideal toward which he might strive. His indictment of Iakobi's Halt of the Convicts, whose powerful verisimilitude was otherwise celebrated, thus amounts to an artistic statement on the purpose of realism, whether verbal or visual: his call for a transformative, revelatory art corresponds to his own contemporaneous pursuit of a narrative realism "in a higher sense." 63 A decade later, in a meditation on that year's Academy Exhibition, Dostoevsky would praise I.E. Repin's Barge Haulers on the Volga for dramatizing the essence without idealizing or aggrandizing the subject. 64 By this time, the Academy's Annual Exhibition, as the country's main venue for new Russian art, had become an indispensable event in St. Petersburg's public life; there is every reason to imagine that Dostoevsky might have viewed-or at least read about-Shvarts's image of the Palm Sunday Donkey Walk ritual upon his return to the capital in 1865, just as his emerging novel was taking a new, spiritual turn. 65 Particularly at times of upheaval in the political or spiritual landscape of Russia-whether over imperial expansion, radical reform, or millenarian fears-the Orthodox icon has been assigned a central role in the formation, protection, and projection of a unified Russian identity; in this sense it has become a political, as much as a spiritual object. Correspondingly, the history of the Donkey Walk ritual reads like a map of such flash points in the development of a Russian national culture, from the autocratic medieval monarchy through Peter's revolutionary Westernization and back to the nineteenth-century pan-Slavist movement. In the mid-sixteenth century, icons and their ritual expressions, including the Donkey Walk, played a decisive role in the process of defining the growing empire and establishing Moscow as the site of the New Jerusalem. By the early eighteenth century, Peter had abolished the procession as part of his radical reorientation of the state toward Europe. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a post-Petrine search for a Russian national identity led to innovations in the narrative and fine arts; new forms of visual expression emerged as artists reached to the Orthodox past in search of visible manifestations of the abstract ideal of Russianness, just as Slavophile writers "cobbled together a native Russian tradition through selective study of pre-Petrine history." 66 It is in the context of this 1860s return to Orthodox nationalism, and away from Petrine Westernism, that the Donkey Walk makes its artistic comeback, spotlighted at the Academy Exhibition of 1865 (and, arguably, secreted in the final pages of Dostoevsky's anti-Western redemption novel the following year). Given this political history, perhaps it should come as no surprise that the ritual has recently been resurrected in various cities across Russia. In the revitalized nationalism of the Putin era, the Kremlin has cannily embraced the Church and glorified the nation's imperial past and traditional values in an attempt to define a new, post-Soviet national identity and reassert Russia on the world stage. The nationalist drift reached its apotheosis in the spring of 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea, an act he justified by invoking Vladimir the Great, whose tenth-century baptism on the peninsula marked the conversion of the medieval Slavic state to Orthodoxy. The peninsula was invaded and annexed in late February and March of 2014; one month later, on April 13, St. Petersburg held its first-ever Palm Sunday Donkey Walk. Since then, Orthodox believers in Petersburg have participated annually in a modernized version of the Donkey Walk: a procession around St. Isaac's Cathedral, including several thousand worshippers holding icons and palm branches, all headed by a "donkey" (a role still performed by a costumed horse) pulling a cart full of young children ( fig. 5). While Moscow might have seemed a more appropriate choice of venue-especially with Putin himself playing the role of tsar-reviving the ritual in Petersburg brings the added satisfaction of reversing the ukaz (decree) of the Antichrist-tsar and his Drunken Synod.

Hierotopy in the Haymarket
It is this icon-not the painting on a wooden panel, but the living icon, brought to life in the Donkey Walk ritual-that is suggested in Raskolnikov's final Haymarket scene. As we have seen, the passage's placement in the text between Sonia's reading and Raskolnikov's arrest recalls both the correct Gospel sequence and the liturgical observance of the Orthodox Palm Sunday ritual, between Lazarus Saturday and the Passion Week, bridging Christ's miraculous ministry on earth and his resurrection. We have also heard the drunken bystander's comment that Raskolnikov is "going to Jerusalem," making the reference explicit. Beyond these details connecting the scene to its corresponding Gospel episode, there are several details in the text suggestive of the ritual: Raskolnikov's act of penance in the Haymarket occurs as he journeys from the sacred space of Sonia's apartment to the police station, just as the Donkey Walk-specifically the revised path set by Nikon, the same version of the procession commemorated by Shvarts-begins at a public place (Lobnoe Mesto) between the Cathedral and the Kremlin. The Haymarket arguably represents the most profane space in the city, a feature consistent with Lidov's description of the Byzantine Tuesday rite, in which the miraculous performance of the Hodegetria icon transformed "the most profane place of a market square […] into the most sacred." 67 Indeed, on a symbolic level, Dostoevsky endows the debased space of the Haymarket with spiritual potential: Raskolnikov reaches the crossroads (perekrestok) soon after Sonia has crossed them both and hung a cross around his neck. Another vital feature of Lidov's hierotopy is the active involvement of the beholder, who "finds himself within the image [and] participates in creating the spatial imagery"; it is such communal participation that brings spatial icons to life in the city's most public spaces. 68 Accordingly, Raskolnikov performs his ritualistic bowing and kissing in a crowded marketplace, amidst the loud interjections of bystanders. As he bows down, he notices Sonia standing off to the side; in her green shawl, she recalls the green cloth-draped iconostasis on Lobnoe Mesto-a connection that also evokes her spiritual function in the text: to bear the Gospel and cross, and to embody the Mother of God icon. Raskolnikov's bow to kiss the earth recalls the ceremonial actions of the tsar, who removes his crown to bow and kiss the Gospel. And even Lobnoe Mesto-the "place of the skull," whose name is associated with the foreheadis conjured: the same tipsy passerby who mentions Jerusalem goes on to explain, in marked religious terms, that Raskolnikov is kissing the soil farewell: "on […] stolichnyi gorod Sankt-Peter-burg i ego grunt lobyzaet" (405, my emphasis).
In the end, what are we to make of this subtextual spatial icon? Is Raskolnikov the tsar in this reenacted ritual, abasing himself to signal his submission to spiritual authority? The patriarch, the "living icon of Christ" who enters Jerusalem in preparation for spiritual resurrection, with Sonia bearing him there? Is he somehow both at once? And what of the donkey in this proposed Donkey Walk? First, readers should not seek a one-to-one analogy between the two events: like the rest of the novel's Gospel design, the Donkey Walk is invoked symbolically, rather than literally. And second: there is no hidden donkey, no osël cunningly encoded in Dostoevsky's text. 69 There is, however, a horse; and while she is long dead by the time of Raskolnikov's marketplace repentance, she is present in this scene on a spiritual level. As many scholars have pointed out, the novel is full of doubles-not only of characters, but of scenes: the murder is rehearsed, as is the confession; the Lazarus reading prefigures the epilogue. 70 Similarly, Raskolnikov's public penance on the Haymarket can be read as a repetition of his horse dream: where he once fell to his knees in his town's public square and kissed the brutalized nag, he now falls to his knees in the Petersburg marketplace and kisses the earth he has defiled. The dream had prompted a brief renunciation of his plan-a renunciation he quickly abandoned after a detour through the Haymarket, where he overheard the information he needed to carry out the murder. The confession in part VI offers a sort of reversal of his Haymarket detour in part I: a public renunciation of the plan he has attempted to rationalize since the novel's opening pages. The city's geography highlights the thematic parallels between the two scenes: although Raskolnikov approaches his destination from different directions, in both cases he enters the Haymarket by way of the same street, Pereulok Grivtsova, known in Dostoevsky's time as Konnyi pereulok, or "Horse Lane." In short, Raskolnikov takes up the cross and follows the path of the horse to the public square, where he bows down and kisses the earth, metaphorically entering Jerusalem, on his way to accepting his sentence: suffering, repentance, and-ultimately-resurrection; in other words, in both form and function his path evokes the Donkey Walk.
Why would Dostoevsky refer to the Palm Sunday ritual, rather than the Gospel story itself ? Perhaps because, in Dostoevsky's "iconic consciousness," the ceremony was powerful enough to transform the profane space of the Russian capital into a performative icon of Jerusalem. In his quest for spiritual absolution in the grimy soil of Peter's city, Raskolnikov, too, is seeking access to the Holy Land. Indeed, as Gibian has detailed, Raskolnikov is abandoning the Socialists' "false" notion of the New Jerusalem (a rationalist utopia), and seeking the true, Christian ideal of the New Jerusalem. 71 Given the icon's intrinsic performativity-its potential to spiritually transform its space and transport its beholder-Raskolnikov's reenactment of this medieval iconic rite should grant him access to the New Jerusalem. But of course, this icon does not come to life: the bystanders mock, the horse has been slain, the market is not transformed into a sacred space, and the sinner is not granted the spiritual transport he seeks. Instead, the hero will have to leave the city (physically, that is, not iconically) in order to continue the process initiated in the Haymarket.
A close comparison of this passage and the text's subsequent "living icon" tableau, set on the bank of the Siberian river, reveals marked lexical and physical correspondences; it seems likely that Dostoevsky intended these two scenes-Raskolnikov's unrealized Entry into Jerusalem, followed by the Mother of God with Christ icon he and Sonia enact in the novel's final pages-to be interpreted together. 72 The failed Haymarket icon opens with a mother and child, as well-as Raskolnikov walks from Sonia's to the police station, he takes a sudden detour toward the Haymarket where he offers a coin to a beggar woman, who blesses him in return. It is there, in the middle of the square, that a sudden sensation took hold of him, gripping him (zakhvatilo ego), body and mind. Remembering Sonia's instructions, he began to shake all over (zadrozhal) and threw himself into the possibility of feeling whole and new (rinulsia v vozmozhnost' etogo tsel'nogo, novogo, polnogo oshchushcheniia). The feeling consumed everything (okhvatilo) like fire, softening him until tears poured out (khlynuli slezy) and he fell (upal) to the ground where he stood. He kneeled, bowed to the earth, and kissed the dirty earth with joy and happiness, then did it once again. He turned and saw Sonia in her green shawl, but the comments of the crowd held him back, and the words of confession froze (zamerli) within him. Sixteen pages later, in Siberia, Sonia approached Raskolnikov in her familiar green shawl and offered her hand; suddenly, something swept him up (podkhvatilo) and hurled him (brosilo) to her feet where he wept (plakal), embracing her knees. In shock, Sonia shook all over (zadrozhav), her face frozen (pomertvelo) in terror, then her eyes lit up with eternal happiness (schast'e) as she grasped his conversion. Tears (slezy) stood in both their eyes, and in their faces glowed "the dawn of a renewed future, of full resurrection into new life" (zaria obnovlennogo budushchego, polnogo voskreseniia v novuiu zhizn'). In the Haymarket, his desire for spiritual renewal makes him shake, weep, and fall to the ground, where he kisses the earth with happiness. In Siberia, he is thrown to Sonia's feet, where he weeps and embraces her; it is she who shakes and radiates happiness. He is finally truly ready for the redemption he sought for so long, and their faces-pale and thin, with luminous eyes-now shine like sacred images. While both scenes begin with some force seizing and physically overwhelming Raskolnikov, the shift from active to passive constructions to describe his response ("he threw himself," "he fell," vs. "he was thrown") indicates a change in agency: while he might have performed the Donkey Walk in an unconscious attempt to access the divine, the Siberian Mother of God icon will perform itself upon him when he is spiritually ready to apprehend it. He left the Haymarket untransformed, but the riverbank scene will exert a powerful, transformative effect on him, finally resuming the process initiated and arrested in Petersburg.
Dostoevsky's novels are replete with such potential transformations, only some of which are successfully fulfilled (if not always convincingly represented). 73 Why do some of his sinners attain salvation, while others fail? 74 While some readers remain unconvinced by Raskolnikov's ultimate redemption, Dostoevsky clearly intended to portray his hero's salvation into a new life; but why does his spiritual transformation progress in Siberia, where it had faltered in the Haymarket? Many readers have attributed the failure of his Petersburg confession to his lack of remorse: his bow in the Haymarket reads as a ritualized act of repentance, devoid of true penitence. 75 While it is undoubtedly true that Raskolnikov does not yet truly repent, either on the square (where his words are inhibited) or at the station (where he confesses without contrition), there is another element impeding Raskolnikov's spiritual regeneration: his physical surroundings. As Lidov has argued, an icon's "performance"-its power to spiritually revitalize beholder and environment alike-depends upon the active cooperation of image, viewer, and space. On both Haymarket and riverbank, each of the necessary participants-an icon or iconic ritual, a willing body in a defined material environment-is textually present. One primary distinction between the novel's unfulfilled Donkey Walk and its final, fully embodied icon of Mother and Child, however, involves the space within which characters enact each icon: the profane crossroads of Peter's Western capital versus the Siberian district (okrestnost', literally the area around the cross), geographically remote from Europe and symbolically associated with the biblical age of Abraham (421). While all the elements of the medieval ritual would appear to be present in the Haymarket, then-from the symbolic donkey to the hero's public abasement-the city's stone walls and Western origins prove inimical to the spirit. 76 In short, Raskolnikov's incipient spiritual conversion is inhibited by Petersburg's stubborn non-participation in the iconic act he is attempting to stage, suggesting the fundamental impossibility of iconic performativity within the space of this secular Western capital. Perhaps this should come as no surprise in a Russian city where the Window on the West has replaced the iconic Window to Heaven-as though to open this new window to Europe, Peter had first sealed the older one shut.
Ultimately, the reference to the Entry into Jerusalem-and specifically to the Palm Sunday ritual-serves two purposes: it elaborates the invisible Gospel scaffolding supporting Raskolnikov's spiritual journey, and at the same time allows Dostoevsky to offer commentary on the political dimension of the novel. Peter abolished the Donkey Walk ritual in his violent Western turn, and the resulting schism-a hacked-out window to Europe replacing the iconic window to heaven, a Socialist New Jerusalem on earth in place of the eternal New Jerusalem of Revelation-is etched like a scar in the very soil of Petersburg. Bruce Foltz has read the Dostoevskian act of kissing the earth (in Crime and Punishment as well as The Devils and Dream of a Ridiculous Man) as the ultimate rejection of Western materialism-an act of veneration toward the iconic earth, inviting the possibility of spiritual redemption. 77 This insight illuminates Raskolnikov's act in the Haymarket, with its allusion to the "living icon" abolished by Peter himself, as an attempt to reconnect with the Orthodox past: to heal the schism preserved within himself, as well as the urban landscape, in order to return to the pre-Petrine soil and access the true Jerusalem. The city's failure to respond to his iconic performance, however, suggests that it is not only the novel's hero whose Western ideals delay any possibility of redemption, but the environment that facilitated Russia's contamination in the first place.

Conclusion: Icons, Art, and the Possibility of Resurrection
As we have seen, visual and verbal artists of the late nineteenth century, in their quest for a new style rooted in medieval and folk art forms, shared a vision of a Russian society reborn and spiritually regenerated through art, which might serve as a "source of spiritual renewal even for West-ern Europe." 78 This declaration of Russian artists' urgent spiritual mission reflects what Dostoevsky sought to do on a narrative level: teach his readers to see-or at least intuit-something that could not be spoken in words; a world transformed by art which, once perceived, would lead to the reader's-and eventually the world's-own spiritual regeneration. In Dostoevsky's fiction, the divine is generally expressed in gesture or image, rather than words; the reader's challenge is to discern and interpret the silent icons he has embedded in his texts. 79 Although Dostoevsky wrote remarkably little about icons outside of his novels, it is clear that they stood at the center of his aesthetic, philosophical, and religious principles during this period. 80 A December 1868 letter to the poet A. N. Maikov-the same letter in which he articulated his famous doctrine of a "fantastic realism" that reaches beyond the surface of reality to grasp a hidden ideal-expresses admiration for the poem "At the Chapel," in which a poet stands before an illuminated icon, gazing from darkness into a bright eternity. Dostoevsky takes issue with the poet's hesitation to proclaim his faith ("You seem to apologize for the icon, to justify it"), but then struggles to express his own deep, almost inarticulable reverence for the icon; perhaps, in fact, he conceals his narrative icons precisely because the essential truths they convey cannot, or should not, be spoken. 81 In an iconic reading of The Idiot, which Dostoevsky was finishing around the same time as this important letter, Amy Adams identifies two Mother of God icons in the novel's final pages, the recognition of which shifts the ending's primary association from death to resurrection. She argues convincingly that Dostoevsky's unseen verbal icons teach his readers "how to look": 82 that is, how to read iconically by looking beneath the verbal surface of a text to perceive its essence, just as an icon's beholder must look through the material image to meet the divine. Recent scholars-drawing on both ancient image theory and performance studies-have much to say about vision and its transformative power: the embodied vision of the beholder animates the icon which, in turn, liberates the beholder's vision from its earthly, flesh-bound limitations, enabling a heavenly, transcendent, multidimensional perspective. 83 Dostoevsky's narrative art offers the same possibilities if one learns how to perceive the divine visual order lying just beneath the messy verbal surface of his fiction.
The icon acts as a link between earthly and heavenly-more than an inert, discrete object of veneration, it is a performer, actively facilitating such transformations of vision and space, spirit and beholder. For several decades, scholars of literary icons have surveyed the eruption of the sacred into literary spaces: iconic moments with the potential to transform literary spaces and characters, as well as readers. Following the performative turn in the arts, as our understanding of icons has expanded to encompass the hierotopic phenomena identified by Lidov-spatial images, whether architectural or ritual, that mediate between the earthly and the heavenly in the same way as the paradigmatic flat image-scholars must in turn learn to discern and analyze literary reenactments of such iconic spaces and rituals. 84 Raskolnikov's confession at the Haymarket, with its hidden allusion to iconic ritual, offers an exemplary case for the hierotopic approach: the self-abasement of a repentant sinner in the crowded marketplace evokes an old Palm Sunday rite whose purpose was the transformation of the Russian capital into an icon of the Holy City, offering its participants access to the divine. An iconic reading of the scene demonstrates how the perception of such narrative spatial icons-textual expressions of the dynamic interaction between man, image, and space-can illuminate works of literary art. Lidov's hierotopy enables us to perceive two linked icons in the final pages of Crime and Punishment, as in The Idiot: one unrealized iconic ritual that fails to transport either hero or reader from Petersburg to the New Jerusalem, and a second of the Bogoroditsa and Christ clasping hands, fully realized on the bank of a Siberian river. The juxtaposition of the two icons suggests that an icon's textual "performance"-its transformation of space, its transportation of character or reader-depends, as it would in the physical world, upon the cooperation of image, beholder, and environment. Where the anti-iconic space of Petersburg proves unreceptive, resulting in a failed transformation, the final iconic image offers a triumphant response: renewal is possible, though the rational West is not yet spiritually prepared for such profound transformation. While the bulk of the novel takes place in Petersburg-with only a childhood dream and Siberian epilogue offering relief from the oppressive city-the final lines suggest that Raskolnikov's Petersburg years will ultimately account for only a fraction of his lifespan: a brief, disastrous detour between provincial Orthodox upbringing and Siberian regeneration. The progression at novel's end from failed iconic ritual in the Haymarket to triumphant Siberian icon implies that Russia's own path to regeneration lies similarly in its Orthodox past; closing its window to the West will curtail its own disastrous Petrine period, reopening the window to heaven. The revelation of these icons affirms Dostoevsky's first post-Siberian novel, often considered his "simplest," as a sophisticated work of art whose objective, in part, is to teach his audience exactly how to approach his fiction: like an icon, the novel retrains our readerly vision, guiding us through complex verbal thickets before, at last, revealing a divine world beyond the text-and, in so doing, enabling the spiritual transformation of reader and Russia alike.