A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

13 The Golden Age of Russian Culture

The development of Russian society in the reform era profoundly affected Russian culture, both by changing the institutional environment of culture and by calling forth new intellectual and artistic impulses. For almost all spheres of thought and creation, the period was the first great age of Russian culture, and the first one to bring that culture an audience beyond its boundaries. By the 1880s Russia had become part of the world, not just as a major political power but as a major contributor to the arts and even to science.

SCIENCE IN THE AGE OF REFORM

Science had not flourished in the years of Nicholas I. While the universities did provide high-level instruction, the professors were often foreigners and facilities were small and inadequate. Lobachevskii’s new geometry was the work of an isolated provincial professor whose calculations needed only his own genius and a pencil and paper. After the Crimean War, the government realized that the scientific level of the country needed to be raised, and the Ministry of Education provided for the expansion of science departments in the universities as part of a general upgrading of higher education. Equally or more important were the initiatives of the Ministry of Finance, especially its reorganization of the Technological Institute in St. Petersburg. A modern engineering school was crucial to the industrialization program, but the reformed curriculum had one unexpected result of worldwide significance. The young Dmitrii Mendeleev set out to provide a new, up-to-date chemistry course, and in the process found the existing textbooks unsatisfactory. He started to create his own, and in the process of looking for a way to explain the relationships among the various elements in nature, realized that they fit a certain pattern. The idea of a regularity was not absolutely new, but Mendeleev went further: he saw that there were gaps in the pattern and in 1869 he predicted that new elements would be found to exist that filled in these gaps. Soon scientists abroad found his prediction to be correct, and Mendeleev became Russia’s foremost scientist. His fame endured on the walls of science classrooms ever after in the form of charts of the periodic table of the elements that came from Mendeleev’s discovery.

The very process of educational reform and the new role of the natural sciences in Russia had sparked a major discovery. Mendeleev went on to work extensively to promote not just chemistry but scientific education and Russian economic development, working closely with the government on these tasks. Another case of the intersection of social changes and science was the work of Vasilii Dokuchaev, the creator of modern soil science. Dokuchaev’s insight was simply that soil could not be treated as just the top layer of rock mixed with decaying organic matter but as a distinct stratum of its own. Trained in geology and mineralogy, he came to this conclusion while working to survey the black earth districts of southern Russia for the Free Economic Society, a project explicitly designed to help Russian agriculture. The Ministry of Finance also helped sponsor other scientific and technological societies, in an effort to spark more public interest and channel it into directions that would contribute to industrialization.

In these years Russian science came into its own, not only because of the fame of Mendeleev but because dozens of lesser lights acquired solid if modest places in many new and old specialized fields of chemistry, physics, and biology. The other reason for the advances in science was its immense popularity with the intelligentsia of the reform era. For educated people the natural sciences seemed to be a model of rationality and progressive thought. They debated whether the experiments on the nervous system of frogs conducted by the physiologist Ivan Sechenov proved that the soul existed or not, a topic which Sechenov thought went way beyond the possible consequences of his modest work. Darwin was tremendously popular in Russia, though “social Darwinism” never caught on. Part of the popularity of Darwin came from the lack of interest on the part of the church in debating the details of biology or the biblical account of creation. Concerned about the spread of “materialism,” the church nevertheless avoided direct polemics with scientists. In Russia, Darwin’s works were approved by the Ministry of Education as soon as they appeared, even before Russian translations were available. The atmosphere of the time as well as government policy combined to rapidly raise the level of scientific activity in the country.

If government policy was crucial to the emergence of world-class natural sciences in Russia, its relationship to the arts was more complicated. For the writers, the relaxation of censorship was crucial, but an equally great change came from the end of court patronage and the rise of a market for books and journals. The painters also benefited from the new social environment, as the new millionaire businessmen became crucial patrons for the artists. Music was more complicated still, since the main opera and ballet theaters fell under the Ministry of the Court, while philharmonic societies and the conservatories worked with a combination of state and private funding and control.

The social and institutional environment of the arts was only one side of the story of Russia’s Golden Age. Central to the period was also the attempt to grapple with Russia’s history, its current politics and problems, and its place in the world of culture and ideas. Liberal intellectuals and later Soviet historians regularly portrayed almost all of the cultural figures of the era as either “democratic” or “critical,” but this description fits only some of them. Tchaikovsky was an admirer of the autocracy, as was Dostoyevsky, and both of them had only amused contempt for liberal democracy. Perhaps the only internationally famous figure to fully fit the liberal model was Turgenev, but it is perhaps futile to explore the views of most of the great artists, as many of them were too idiosyncratic to classify. Tolstoy is perhaps the most striking example, and not only in his later Christian anarchist phase. What they all did was to create works that were permanent parts of Russian culture, and in the case of the writers and composers, of the whole of Western culture of the modern age.

MUSIC

The musicians had the weakest base to work from and yet produced in only a few decades an enormous amount of new music, much of it part of the international repertory to this day. Before the Crimean War Glinka had been virtually the only important composer, an amateur from the nobility who made his name with the help of the Wielhorski salon and Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. She was also to play a crucial role in taking Russia into the world of professional music education, for she was the patron of Anton Rubinstein. Rubinstein was the son of a Jewish businessman from the Ukraine who converted to Christianity and moved to Moscow in the 1830s. There his children’s music teacher quickly noted Anton’s immense talent at the piano and took the boy and his parents to Berlin, where he soon found fame as a child prodigy and acquired a solid musical education and the favor of Mendelson and Liszt. On the father’s death young Anton had few resources and returned to St. Petersburg. There the Wielhorskis introduced him to Elena Pavlovna, and he became her personal pianist, an invented position designed to provide him with an income. By the late 1850s Rubinstein, now world famous, persuaded his patroness that Russia needed a real music school, and in 1861 the St. Petersburg Conservatory opened its doors, across the street from the Mariinskii Theater, where it still stands. Elena Pavlovna’s support ensured state financing to the new institution. From the very beginning Rubinstein ruled it with an iron hand, demanding deep study and long hours, and during his tenure as director the Conservatory produced many prominent musicians. The most important would be Peter Tchaikovsky, one of Rubinstein’s first students. Four years later, a similar conservatory came into existence in Moscow under the directorship of Anton’s younger brother Nikolai, also a talented pianist and composer, though not in his brother’s league. While Anton was in Berlin, Nikolai had stayed behind in Moscow, forming lifelong friendships with his neighbors, the future leaders of the Moscow industrialists, the Tretyakov brothers, and Nikolai Alekseev. The Moscow conservatory had no significant state financing and the businessmen had to periodically help it through crises, a new source of patronage for Russian art. The Moscow Conservatory was on a sound enough footing to hire Tchaikovsky as one of its professors (1867–1877) during the years of his maturation as a composer.

The Rubinstein brothers and Tchaikovsky constituted one of two musical circles active in Russia from the 1860s to the 1880s. The other major group, also centered in St. Petersburg, consisted of the five composers of the Balakirev circle: Milii Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin. These were a curious group – Balakirev was a gentleman amateur like Glinka, while Cui and Mussorgsky were military officers. Mussorgsky soon abandoned the army for music (but had to take positions in the civilian bureaucracy to support himself), while Cui continued in the army as a fortress engineer, rising to the rank of general before his death. Borodin was the illegitimate son of a Georgian prince and by profession a chemist, teaching at the Medical Academy and achieving some small discoveries in chemistry. Rimskii-Korsakov was a former naval officer and had even participated in the visit of the Russian fleet to New York in 1864, Tsar Alexander’s gesture of support for the Union cause in the American Civil War.

None of the circle had formal musical training, and not surprisingly their relationship with Rubinstein and the Conservatory was hostile. The hostility was stoked by their foremost defender among the music critics of the time, Vladimir Stasov (1824–1906). Stasov was a librarian at the St. Petersburg Public Library, but quickly acquired a name for himself as a writer both on music and the visual arts. The son of a well-known architect, he had traveled in Europe and was extremely erudite in the music and painting of the time. In both cases his esthetic was simple. He hated any remnant of classicism, and thus condemned all painting since 1500 and most of the music of the eighteenth century. He despised Italian opera, even Verdi, for its adherence to the conventions of aria, duet, and chorus, as well as for the insubstantiality of the plots. Another mark against it was its immense popularity with the aristocratic public in Russia, from the 1830s onward – in Stasov’s view a mark of the elite’s ignorance and love for showmanship. He was for free forms, forms that would adequately express the true nature of human beings, their inner world and their place in society, and thus he believed that art had to be realistic and national. In music that meant a certain preference for program music, and his European heroes were Berlioz, Liszt, Chopin, and Schumann. He advanced his views with wit, rudeness, savage personal attacks, and name-calling when he could, but his intelligence could not be denied. His great enemies in music were Wagner, the European classic tradition that he identified with the heritage of Mendelson, Anton Rubinstein, and the Conservatory. The Conservatory was his particular bugbear, for he thought that it would conserve traditional classic form in music and establish the dominance of German music in Russia – not “true” German music like that of Beethoven or Schumann, but a German-based cosmopolitanism.

Fortunately the Balakirev circle, soon to be christened the “mighty handful” or “mighty five,” originally a derisive epithet, was not as combative or as rigid as Stasov. They had their own views, developed under the leadership of Balakirev, the group’s main mentor at first, and later in the writings of Cui and the other composers. They were not as exclusively enamored of Russian themes as was Stasov: Balakirev and Mussorgsky from the first wrote program music and songs to non-Russian themes. Cui in particular made a very odd “nationalist.” The son of a Polish noblewoman and a French officer who stayed in Russia after 1812, he was born in Wilno and what training he had in music came from the Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko. Among all of them, however, the atmosphere of the 1860s, as much as Stasov’s hectoring, encouraged an interest in Russian folk music and operas and instrumental music on Russian themes.

The Russian themes they chose reflected in a general way the concerns of the 1860s. The use of folk music went along with the intense interest in the peasantry that was the hallmark of the emancipation era. In Russian history they turned to the pivotal moments and the eternal questions of the role of the tsars, their aims, and their effect on Russia. Even in opera, where the portrayal of figures from the Romanov dynasty was prohibited, they presented the Russian past in all its complexity. Rimskii-Korsakov’s first successful opera, “The Maid of Pskov” (1873), addressed the paradoxes of the reign of Ivan the Terrible, while the greatest achievement of any of the five, Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” of 1868–1874, followed Pushkin’s play to portray a tsar whose ambition and greed for power destroyed him and his country in the process. He took the events of the Musketeer revolt of 1682 to portray the end of the old Russia and the dawning of the new in his second opera “Khovanshchina.” These were not political tracts, and Mussorgsky was no radical, but they did offer a reflection on the painful issues of the time, earning them later fame as “critical.” Mussorgsky’s innovations in harmony and other areas would also bring him great fame in the twentieth century, but in his lifetime the operas were only limited successes, and he died of alcoholism before he could finish “Khovanshchina.”

Of the rest of the five the most successful was undoubtedly Rimskii-Korsakov, who eventually joined the Conservatory and taught himself counterpoint and orchestration, becoming one of its most distinguished professors. His series of operas based on stories from Russian history and folklore became a mainstay of the Russian operatic repertory. Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor” and his music on Central Asian themes won him a permanent place in world repertory, and his symphonies and other music continue to be popular in Russia. Balakirev, a contentious if charismatic personality, went through a religious crisis in the 1870s and stopped writing, only to take up music again in the 1880s. His religious and conservative views earned him the patronage of Alexander III’s court, and Balakirev received a position as director of the Imperial Chapel choir.

Cui, in contrast, wrote a great deal, including many articles on Russian music in French, but his extensive musical work has not retained an audience. As the move of Rimskii-Korsakov to the Conservatory shows, the five gradually moderated their hostility to the “cosmopolitans” over the decades, and musical life gradually became less contentious. Nikolai Rubinstein helped in this process, and even Stasov had to pull in his horns a bit, though he remained hostile to Tchaikovsky to the end.

Figure 13. Peter Tchaikovsky as a young man.

The Balakirev circle made a great deal of noise as well as music in Russian musical life, but Tchaikovsky overshadowed them in popularity, especially outside of Russia. He whole-heartedly adopted Rubinstein’s point of view that Russian composers needed to be trained properly and that meant in the Western manner, and he utterly lacked the hostility of Stasov and his followers to the formal conventions of Western music. Indeed Tchaikovsky’s idol was Mozart, and he believed that much of his inspiration for a musical career came from an early acquaintance with Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Tchaikovsky’s father was a well-educated official and mining engineer of noble origin but without estates or independent means to leave to his son. After the Conservatory, Tchaikovsky was unwilling to take non-musical employment, and thus his appointment to the Moscow Conservatory was crucial to his survival. There in the relatively relaxed atmosphere of Moscow he produced his first major works, the second, third, and fourth symphonies and the first and most famous piano concerto. He also began the work on the ballet “Swan Lake” and the opera “Evgenii Onegin,” both of which brought him enduring fame.

Tchaikovsky moved to St. Petersburg in 1877, abandoning his position at the Moscow Conservatory. He then was in contact with the center of the Russian opera and ballet world, and the results were soon seen. He added “Sleeping Beauty” and “Nutcracker” to his ballets, and “Mazeppa” and the “Queen of Spades” to his list of operas, as well as a violin concerto and two more symphonies, the fifth and the sixth (“Pathetique”) before his death in 1893.

Tchaikovsky’s operas were not in the Italian tradition so despised by Stasov and others. He himself called “Evgenii Onegin” “lyric scenes” rather than an opera as it was a series of scenes strung together by the story, something Stasov should have liked but characteristically found reason to fault anyway. His operas used libretti based on Russian literature rather than folklore, and thus were “national” as well, but again in ways quite different from what Stasov advocated. They had none of the reflections on Russian history that prompted Mussorgsky and Rimskii-Korsakov to write, and by the late 1870s Tchaikovsky was politically quite conservative. In his correspondence he made fun of the idea of government without a strong tsar.

In some respects Tchaikovsky’s ballets were even more important, for they were not only great pieces of music, but the first native compositions of importance for the St. Petersburg ballet under Marius Petipa (1818–1910). Petipa came to Russia in 1847 as a dancer and by 1862 had become the principal choreographer at the Imperial Theater, the Mariinskii. Himself a product of the French ballet of the first half of the nineteenth century, he was the creator of ballet in Russia as we know it. From Petipa come not only a whole series of ballets now still in repertory but many of the now standard Russian practices, including the strong male roles that were unusual in the mid-nineteenth century. The ballet, even more than the opera, retained its ties to the court and had a predominantly aristocratic audience: a number of the ballerinas were also mistresses of the Grand Dukes and great aristocrats. As the ballet was directly subordinate to the Ministry of the Court, it was provided with lavish subsidies for the productions and support for Petipa until nearly the end of his life. As George Balanchine later put it, “St. Petersburg was now the ballet capital of the world.”

Russian music came to maturity in a relatively short period of time, the result of both state and private patronage. The continuation of the state theater system was a great boon to ballet, less so to opera, but by the 1890s operas could be staged by private companies subsidized by the Moscow industrialists. Rubinstein founded the Imperial Russian Music Society with court patronage to provide symphony concerts as early as the 1860s. Stasov and the Balakirev circle were particularly concerned to bring music to a larger public, founding a Free (not for payment) Music School and giving many semi-amateur concerts of choral music. At first the audiences were sparse, but by the 1890s St. Petersburg and Moscow boasted a number of concert series and private theaters and orchestras with growing and enthusiastic audiences. In the provinces small, mostly private music schools sprang up, creating music far from the capitals and producing many great musicians. The institutional basis of Russian music reflected the changing society of the time, combining as it did state subsidy and control, private patronage from the new class of industrialists, and intelligentsia activism. On this basis the composers and musicians were able to create and perform some of the world’s greatest music.

THE VISUAL ARTS

For Russia’s painters the most important event was the resignation of thirteen students from the Academy of Art in 1863. The students, led by the most talented of the group, Ivan Kramskoi, objected to the traditional conditions of the annual Gold Medal competition at the Academy. For these competitions the students were assigned a historical, mythological, or biblical subject for their painting, and the specific theme that year was “Odin in the Hall of Valhalla.” The winner received not just a medal but also a trip to Europe and the right to sell the painting from the Academy but Kramskoi and his colleagues would not accept the assigned subject. Instead they chose to resign from the Academy, thus forfeiting their chances to win, and formed a “Free Association of Artists.”

The Academy rebels were not alone in wanting to reject the academic models. Both the artistic conventions and the subject matter seemed to most younger artists to be old-fashioned and foreign, having nothing to do with the Russian reality changing so swiftly around them in the 1860s. Insofar as any of them had European models, they were Courbet and some of the German realist painters, but mostly the Russian painting that emerged in the decade had native roots in the genre painting of the 1850s and to some extent in Alexander Ivanov. The new painting was to be realist, and it was to depict the life of the Russian people in its fullest extent. Not surprisingly, the self-appointed spokesman of the new trend was once again Vladimir Stasov.

The association of the Academy rebels soon fell apart from internal squabbles, but in 1870 Kramskoi came up with the idea of the “Itinerant Association of Russian Artists,” designed to put on exhibits of their work not just in the capitals but in a variety of Russian cities. The idea was an immediate success, and many artists joined. The new association came to encompass virtually all Russian artists other than the privileged academicians. It found a new public beyond the St. Petersburg elites, bringing the work of its members to provincial audiences, to the intelligentsia and also to the emerging middle class. The exhibitions also brought the artists in contact with wealthy businessmen, the most important being the Moscow textile millionaires. Pavel Tretyakov had been collecting since 1856 and made his private collection available to the public from early on. He thus was able to support the artists by buying their work and also making it better known. In 1881 he opened the collection to the general public. Petersburg had no equivalent, though Tsar Alexander III did purchase many paintings, including the work of the Itinerants. Supposedly it was one of Repin’s religious paintings which Alexander bought at the Itinerant exhibition in 1889 that gave him the idea for establishing a museum of Russian art in St. Petersburg. It opened only in 1895, after Alexander’s death, in the Michael palace, the old residence of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna.

The Itinerants chose as their subject matter Russian landscape, genre scenes of life in the countryside, and portraits of the writers and artists of the day, as well as of the businessmen who served as their patrons. The most important was Ilya Repin, who made a sensation in 1873 with a simple depiction of workmen hauling a barge on the Volga. Though Repin’s sympathies were with the Itinerants, he was an Academy student and made use of its stipend to spend several years in Paris. Though he intensely admired the French painters of the time including Manet, and improved his technical skills, he remained true to the ideals of his Russian mentors and colleagues. His most famous paintings were the work of the 1880s, monumental canvasses depicting a religious procession in Kursk province, the return of a political prisoner to his family, and other subjects that implied mild criticism of the existing order. Repin also tried historical subjects, the most powerful being his painting of Ivan the Terrible in the moment after killing his son. Repin saw this work not as an unambiguous condemnation of despotism but as a tragedy of crime and repentance, though many among the public took it in a more political sense.

Repin was only the best known of many painters of the time. Vasilii Vereshchagin’s horrifying pictures of the wars in Turkestan and the Balkans were a sensation for their realistic depictions of the aftermath of battle. The Siberian Vasilii Surikov’s huge historical paintings, showing Peter the Great’s execution of the musketeers, the imprisonment of the Old Believer martyr Morozova, and the conquest of Siberia, formed Russia’s visual conception of its past for decades. The landscape painters, Ivan Shishkin with his forests and Isaak Levitan with his many elegiac rivers and fields with their churches conveyed the vastness and humble beauty of the Russian countryside. Most of these painters were pupils or friends of Repin, for St. Petersburg’s artistic life changed rapidly. The Academy was less of a threat as salons and studios appeared, as did new patrons. Tsar Alexander III was deeply impressed by Repin, bought more and more of the Itinerant paintings, and eventually the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg provided the city with its first museum devoted exclusively to Russian art. The rebels had found a supporter where they least expected it.

Russian painting never acquired the fame abroad of Russian literature or music. Some of the painters (Vereshchagin, for example) had a brief vogue in Europe at the time, but were largely forgotten in the twentieth century. Russian art of the nineteenth century was too far in its esthetic from the dominant French school to have any impact. Indeed Russian painters other than Repin and a few others did not travel in the West and knew little of French art. Their work did not even resemble the European realist art that was dominant outside of France, though they were aware of the Germans to some extent. Impressionism left the Russian painters cold until the very end of the century. What the painters of the period – the Itinerants and others – did produce was a portrait of Russia, its people, its history, and its land, that still resonates with virtually every educated Russian.

LITERATURE

The glory of Russian culture in the decades after the Crimean War was in its literature, which not only was central to Russian society and culture but for the first time breached the barrier of language to enter into the common culture of the West. Within a few years, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy all acquired enormous fame and popularity in Russia. The vehicle of this new popularity was the press, particularly the half dozen or so “thick journals” that published almost all of the new work. The public for Russian literature, as opposed to Western Europe, was not concentrated in the big cities. Even Petersburg was not yet a huge metropolis like Paris or London, and much of its population was barely literate. No large educated middle class yet existed to provide readers for the new novels, whose place in Russia was taken by the gentry and the intelligentsia. They were spread all over the country as landowners on their estates, provincial doctors and gymnasium teachers, and minor officials throughout the empire. There were often no bookstores in the provinces, and the monthly arrival by post of the “thick journal” was the main focus of cultural life.

Ivan Turgenev had already made a name for himself with the Sportsman’s Sketches and several novels when he achieved real notoriety with Fathers and Sons in 1862. In his later novels Turgenev’s heroes and his very strong heroines, mostly from the gentry, spent their time trying to puzzle out the meaning of the changes in Russia and the world and their role in them. Turgenev presented various possibilities, and in the process satisfied no political camp, but earned for himself a large and appreciative public. His nearly full-time residence abroad kept him aloof from much of the details of ever-changing Russian life, but it also made him a link to European literature. His friendship with the leading lights of French literature, Emile Zola, the Goncourt brothers, and others, eased the way for translations and thus earned Russian literature a place in wider European culture for the first time.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky had made his literary debut, like Turgenev, in the 1840s. His involvement in the Petrashevskii circle had brought him four years in prison in Siberia, followed by another five years in the army in remote fortresses bordering the Kazakh steppe. In prison Dostoevsky’s view of the world began to change, for he abandoned utopian socialism as too far away from the people and began to turn to Orthodoxy, in his mind the “people’s” religion. In the army he was able to at least read and write, and finally returned to European Russia in 1859 with a bundle of manuscripts in his trunk. One of them was his Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–61), which brought him instant fame. Its harrowing account of prison life was in harmony with the public mood of the emancipation era, and many readers seemed to have missed the note of redemption by faith in the work. Unlike most of the Russian writers of his time, Dostoevsky did not come from the hereditary gentry. His father was a doctor who had acquired noble rank through service but little means of subexistence. Dostoevsky had to live by his pen, and that was not easy. In 1861–1865 he tried his hand at journalism, together with his brother putting out two journals that sold only moderately and quickly collapsed. In the journals he espoused a variant of Slavophilism, calling for the return to the soil and traditions of the Russian people. In his mind, this return meant Orthodoxy and respect for the tsar. A trip to Western Europe broadened his experience, but also confirmed in him an increasingly negative view of modern society as individualistic, irreligious, and mainly devoted to greed. The trip also introduced him to the casino, and added an addiction to gambling to his medical problems (epilepsy) and his chronic indebtedness.

Dostoevsky had already made a contribution to the literary debate of the time in his 1864 Notes from the Underground, a savage attack on the utopianism of Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done?, but this was not a work calculated to win popular acclaim, indeed its fame came only in the twentieth century. The collapse of his journals impelled him to furious work just to survive, and the results were spectacular in the literary sense, if not the financial. His first major success was Crime and Punishment, published in Katkov’s conservative “thick journal” Russian Messenger in 1866. Eventually it would win him worldwide fame, but right from the start it was his greatest Russian success. The story of the student Raskol’nikov who murdered an elderly woman pawnbroker because he needed money and felt that he was above normal moral rules caught the imagination of his contemporaries, and has never ceased to fascinate. Over the next decade and a half he would produce more great novels as well as a host of shorter works. In them he showed himself a master of human psychology, though he disliked the term: he thought he was simply portraying the human soul as it was.

Crime and Punishment brought him enduring fame, but it did not solve his monetary problems. The Russian book market was developed enough to circulate new novels widely, but not enough to provide a living even for a now famous author. The second of the great novels, The Idiot, was an attempt to portray a positive character in Prince Myshkin, the main character, but it is perhaps for the mysterious Nastasia Fillipovna that it is best remembered. Soon after came Demons (1871–72), among other things an attack on the liberals and radicals of his time, whom he portrayed as ineffective dreamers playing with fire in the elder Verkhovenskii or amoral and power-hungry fanatics in the younger Verkhovenskii, a combined portrait of the revolutionary Nechaev and Dostoevsky’s erstwhile leader Petrashevskii.

Demons cemented his reputation as a conservative spokesman and once again in financial straits, Dostoevsky turned back to journalism, but this time in different circumstances. In 1872 Dostoevsky began to visit the political salon of Prince V. P. Meshcherskii, the close friend of the heir to the throne, Alexander Alexandrovich. The heir was the center of the conservative opposition to his father’s reforms, reinforced in his views by the conservative lawyer Konstantin Pobedonostev, who had served as one of his tutors. All of them espoused a monarch-centered statist conservatism, nationalist and Orthodox, but lacking the specific Slavophile doctrines about the village community and the spiritual unity of the nation. Meshcherskii had just founded a newspaper called The Citizen and convinced Dostoevsky to become the editor. As an encouragement, Alexander Alexandrovich also paid Dostoevsky’s debts, a fact not known until the 1990s. Part of Dostoevsky’s contribution was the regular feature, The Diary of a Writer, which contained some of his most famous as well as his most notorious contributions. In the Diary and its later continuations he used the opportunity it provided to criticize the new reformed Russia. The new court system in particular aroused his wrath, as the idea of trial by jury seemed to him pernicious. In any case, he saw crime in a religious light, as an issue of sin and repentance, and mocked legal formulas and trial procedure. His journalism was intensely nationalistic, glorying in Russia’s military achievements in the Russo-Turkish war and indeed in warfare itself. The Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews came in for his wrath, the latter in his mind the incarnation of the grasping, individualistic spirit of modern society. None of these ideological positions and national prejudices endeared Dostoevsky to the intelligentsia outside its small conservative contingent.

The last of Dostoevsky’s novels, The Brothers Karamazov, again brought him success, with its family intrigue and philosophical ruminations, and finally established his position among Russian writers. His last important public appearance took place in 1880, as a speaker for the celebrations surrounding the erection of a statue of Pushkin in Moscow. Here he surprised his audience by praising Pushkin not as just a Russian writer, but one who embraced all of humanity. The speech went a long way to repairing his reputation with the intelligentsia, but did him little good with his conservative friends like Pobedonostsev. Pobedonostsev was by now the head of the Holy Synod, and as guardian of Orthodoxy he had begun to think Dostoevsky’s view of Christ much too vague and not sufficiently in accord with church teaching. Dostoevsky’s Christ had indeed come to resemble his Pushkin, a figure for humanity, not just for Russia. This was to be Dostoevsky’s ultimate fate as well.

The religious theme that was central to Dostoevsky’s work and thought also came to preoccupy the other of Russia’s greatest writers, Tolstoy. Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 into a family of well-off landowners with lands in the rich provinces south of Moscow. Tolstoy was born in Iasnaia Poliana, the primary family estate, and it remained his principal home until his death. The family was not part of the great aristocracy that frequented the court and Petersburg salons, but was certainly of ancient date and with a distinguished record of service in the army and the civil service of the Russian empire. He grew up on the family estate under the guidance of various tutors and then spent some time as a student in the University of Kazan,’ all described in unforgettable detail in his autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. At the university he also participated in the normal life of the young nobleman, drinking, playing cards, and pursuing women far removed from polite society. He never took a degree at the university and so, restless at home, he took off for the Caucasus where he enlisted as a volunteer in an artillery unit. The outbreak of the Crimean War brought him a commission, and he saw serious fighting, not least at the siege of Sevastopol. His stories of that siege were published while it was still continuing and brought him instant fame as a writer. At war’s end he spent several years in Petersburg and Moscow, quarrelling with nearly all the important and unimportant literary figures of the time. Fundamentally he was not in sympathy with their ideas, neither with the progressivism and fascination with science and progress of the liberals nor the subservience to autocracy of the conservatives. The Slavophiles seemed to him nice people but hopelessly doctrinaire. Personally he remained a nobleman and country gentleman (not a courtier) and found most of the literati crude or self-serving or both.

In these years he made his first trip to Western Europe. Europe as a whole left him with much the same critical view as that of Dostoevsky, that Europe’s vaunted progress was just materialism, greed, and spiritual emptiness. The difference was that Tolstoy lacked Dostoevsky’s chauvinism, and had no great respect for Russian autocracy or Orthodoxy. He did not see any “Russian” answers to Europe’s dilemmas. His next project was a school for the peasant children on his estate, which he determined to run on lines derived from Rousseau’s pedagogical theories. That meant no compulsion, no punishments, work projects, and a determined attempt to engage the pupils in the subject matter. The school was eventually successful, though perhaps more due to Tolstoy’s charisma than to the efficacy of his theories. Tolstoy founded a magazine to propagate his views, in the process annoying most of the educational establishment. The school gave him considerable notoriety, and also inspired a second trip to Europe to meet famous pedagogues and inspect schools. He found European schools, especially the famous Prussian schools, to be depressing, regimented, and heavily dependent on memorization, all of which merely substantiated his prejudices. Returning from abroad early in 1861, just after the emancipation of the serfs, he found himself with a new occupation: Intermediary of the Peace for one of the districts of his home province of Tula. These were the men the assembled gentry were supposed to elect to deal with disputes between peasants and landlords over the implementation of the emancipation. The Tula gentry rejected Tolstoy as too sympathetic to the peasants, but the provincial governor, a general, overruled them and appointed Tolstoy. He served for nearly a year, most of the time in battles with his fellow intermediaries. The rumors of his unusual views caused him even more trouble, for the spreading revolutionary movement in the spring of 1862 led to a police raid on the estate. The police were looking for underground printing presses and revolutionary manifestoes, and found nothing of the sort. Tolstoy wrote to the tsar to complain of the insult to his honor and reputation, and received assurances from the ministers that there would be no consequences. Neither his neighbors in the gentry nor the government knew quite what to make of him.

The same year he married Sofya Bers, the daughter of one of his neighbors, and for the next twenty years devoted himself to his family, his school, his duties as Intermediary of the Peace, and to writing. The fruit of those years would be War and Peace, which appeared in 1865–1869, like many of Dostoevsky’s works, in Katkov’s Russian Messenger.

Tolstoy’s immense epic was devoted to Russia’s wars with Napoleon, and mainly to the French invasion of 1812. Though certainly patriotic in a general sense, Tolstoy was no nationalist. He hated Napoleon, not the French, and his view of Russia was far from rosy. He portrayed the tsar, the court, and the government as inept and removed from the realities of life and warfare. The many Germans in Russian service came in for contemptuous treatment, and only his hero Kutuzov stands above the crowd of cold and formalistic commanders. Though the book concluded with long reflections on the meaning of history (Tolstoy was particularly incensed by notions that “great men” determine the course of history), the book is not really about the events of 1812, it is about man and his fate, as Tolstoy understood it.

Figure 14. Lev Tolstoy Plowing a Field, drawing by Ilya Repin. Tretyakov Museum.

For Tolstoy the real issues of life were not political, they were moral. Pierre Bezukhov and his spiritual pilgrimage in particular incarnated the desire to act in a moral manner and to find what meaning might be hidden behind the rush of everyday life and the mindless acceptance of inherited values and institutions. Prince Andrei Bolkonskii is his opposite, the rational analyst of warfare, events, and human beings. Ultimately it is Pierre who finds happiness, first learning from the peasant Platon Karataev and his humility and faith in God, and then in family life with Natasha Rostova. Much of Tolstoy was in Pierre, not only his experiments with schemes to benefit the peasants on his estate but also in his spiritual search.

After the success of War and Peace Tolstoy turned again to pedagogy and several schemes for new novels. The outcome was Anna Karenina in 1875–1877. This was the story of the aristocratic Anna, her lover Vronskii and her bureaucrat husband, contrasted with Levin and his wife Kitty, again a portrait of Tolstoy, a happy family life contrasted with Anna’s disastrous affair. While he was writing the book, however, Tolstoy went through the final and deepest spiritual crisis of his life.

Tolstoy’s was a religious crisis. Haunted by death and the problem of the meaning of life, he turned to philosophy and religion, but could not make out which religion he should follow. He first turned to Orthodoxy, the religion in which he had been brought up, mainly on the grounds that it was the religion of the peasantry and he wanted to remain close to them and their wisdom. Orthodoxy, however, did not satisfy him. The liturgy left him cold, and he disliked the enthusiastic support of the church for the state and all its doings – warfare, oppression, and capital punishment – all already unacceptable in his mind.

Finally in 1879–80 he began to read the Bible intensively, particularly the Gospels, and came to the conclusion that the core of the teaching of Christ was non-resistance to evil. (“I say unto you, That ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Matt. 5:39) In Tolstoy’s mind, everything flowed from that principle. It meant that the state, in fighting crime or foreign enemies, was basically un-Christian, and that the only proper stance was radical pacifism and a sort of Christian anarchism. He developed these ideas in a series of long tracts, the Confession that recounted his inner development toward these views as well as accounts of what he saw as true Christianity. Needless to say, none of these works could be published in Russia though they circulated widely underground and attracted to him a small but devoted following.

Tolstoy did not abandon literature, in 1899 he published his last major novel, Resurrection, about a prostitute wrongly convicted of a murder and her spiritual rebirth (this book was banned in Russia) and he wrote Khadji Murat, a novella of the Caucasian Wars. Shorter works like The Kreutzer Sonata and The Death of Ivan Ilich as well as innumerable articles on public issues gradually made him the most famous person in the country, and the most famous Russian in the world.

Tolstoy’s views and his stubborn defense of them created problems with the church and the state and with his family as well. His wife thought that he was neglecting their welfare, though by the 1890s the changing book market in Russia meant that he, like other authors, began to realize more substantial returns on his many works. The Revolution of 1905 was a hard time for him as well, since he was opposed to the autocracy but did not believe in the violence used against it, much less the violence of the state against strikers, revolutionaries, and peasant rebels. Finally in 1910, at the age of eighty-two, he decided to leave everything and lead the life of a religious recluse. His trip on an unheated third class carriage in winter proved too much for him. He died in the house of the railroad stationmaster in a small town only a few hundred miles south of Iasnaia Poliana.

By the time of Tolstoy’s death Russian literature and culture had passed into new phases, with which he had little sympathy. He was the last survivor of the greatest age of Russian literature, and perhaps of Russian culture in general. The arts as well as the sciences had put Russia on the map of world culture. For the first time the vast Russian empire was known for something other than size and military power.