Russian culture in the eighteenth century
LINDSEY HUGHES
Russia and the West: 'catching up'
Two edicts issued within a few weeks of each other offer a foretaste of the trajectory of Russian culture in the eighteenth century. At the end of December 1699 Peter I replaced the Byzantine practice of counting years from the creation of mankind with numbering from the birth of Christ, 'in the manner of European Christian nations'. Henceforth the year would begin in January, not September.[1] On 4 January 1700 townsmen were ordered to adopt Western dress, a decree that was extended later in the year to women.[2] In both cases, Peter's potentially recalcitrant subjects were provided with visual aids: examples of New Year festive greenery and mannequins wearing 'French and Hungarian' dress were displayed in public places to prevent anyone 'feigning ignorance' about what was required. Both these measures presupposed 'Christian Europe' as Russia's model. Both offended Orthodox sensibilities. Traditionalists protested that Peter was tampering with Divine time and that the 'German' dress and the clean-shaven faces imposed on men a few years earlier were ungodly. Elite Russians in Western fashions entered a Western time scale, while the mass of the traditionally clad population, who had little need to know what year it was, continued to live by the cyclical calendar of feasts and saint's days. Historians agree that these and subsequent reforms widened the gap between high and low culture: the elite 'caught up' with the West, while the lower classes 'lagged behind'.
With this in mind and with a focus on high culture, we shall examine developments in architecture, the figurative arts, theatre, music and literature from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Exploring these topics within the framework of individual reigns reflects the fact that Russian high culture was overwhelmingly dependent on initiative and funding from the sovereigns and their circle. From the 1690s to the 1790s the dominant trend was the assimilation of the devices of classicism in its various guises - baroque, rococo, neoclassicism. The sources of inspiration shifted over time, as Polish- Ukrainian influences were replaced by German and French, with a phase of 'Anglophilia' in Catherine Il's reign, but the basic process remained one of imitation and apprenticeship. Often Russia's eighteenth century has been presented as a means to an end, the end being the internationally recognised achievements ofRussian literature, music and, eventually, the visual arts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The century justified its existence by producing the poet Alexander Pushkin (born 1799). Even Soviet nationalist historians, who eulogised several key figures of the Russian Enlightenment, were uncomfortable with the 'century of apprenticeship' and the debt that Russian culture owed to foreign models. In this chapter I hope to put these issues into perspective.
The reign of Peter I (1682-1725)
Elite Russian culture at the beginning of the eighteenth century developed in a peculiar hot-house environment, show-cased in St Petersburg. The new capital's creator, Peter I, summoned foreign architects to construct palaces, and foreign artists to fill them with pictures. He instructed agents abroad to purchase what could not be produced at home.3 Once seen as revolutionary, Peter's cultural programme is best regarded as an intensification and acceleration of innovations that occurred less ostentatiously in the seventeenth century. Peter's father Alexis (1629-76) is the first Russian ruler of whom we have more or less authentic painted likenesses and the first to maintain a court theatre and a court poet. Alexis's daughter Sophia (1657-1704) was the first Russian woman to be the subject of secular portraiture. Poets praised her wisdom in syllabic verse. 4
Such developments derived from two main cultural strands that continued into Peter's reign and beyond. Firstly, there was Latinate Orthodox culture
3 See N. V Kaliazina and G. N. Komelova, Russkoe iskusstvo Petrovskoi epokhi (Leningrad: Khudozhnik, 1990); M. V Piotrovskii (ed.), Osnovateliu Peterburga. Katalog vystavki (St Petersburg: Ermitazh, 2003).
4 See L. Hughes, Sophia, Regent of Russia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990) and my chapter in volume I of The Cambridge History of Russia..
filtered through Ukraine and Belarus and propagated by the Slavonic-Greek- Latin (Moscow) Academy, established in 1687 on the model of the Kiev Academy.[3] Its teachers, pupils and artists produced syllabic verses, allegorical engravings, school drama and programmes for parades and firework displays, employing the devices of the Polish Renaissance and baroque. Secondly, Western craftsmen entered the tsars' service, many employed in the Kremlin Armoury workshops. The Moscow Academy and the Armoury catered to many of Peter's cultural needs both before and after his first visit to the West (1697-8). In the 1690s, for example, Armoury artists painted pictures of'troops going by sea' copied from German engravings and decorated the ships that Peter built at Voronezh.[4] In 1696 the Academy organised a programme of classical architectural devices, allegorical paintings and sculptures on triumphal gates for a victory parade to celebrate the capture of Azov from the Turks.[5]Such parades, inspired by Imperial Rome, continued to be held in Moscow and later St Petersburg to celebrate Russia's successes against the Swedes in the Great Northern War (1700-21).
Only after his major victories in 1709-10 could Peter devote attention to the construction of St Petersburg. The city was to be designed according to a regular plan (never fully implemented), in contrast to Moscow's haphazard maze of streets. Unlike in Moscow, where the tsars' court mainly operated within the constricted, walled space of the Kremlin, with men and women segregated, in St Petersburg a number of riverbank sites accommodated Peter's mixed-sex parties and masquerades, parades and regattas. Key landmarks were constructed ofbrick, stuccoed and paintedinbright colours and decorated with bands of flat white pilasters and window surrounds. Characteristic touches in interiors were the use of blue and white Delft tiles, carved wooden panelling and allegorical frescoes. Some historians apply the all-purpose term 'Petrine Baroque' to the architecture of early St Petersburg, although in fact there was no attempt to impose a uniform style beyond achieving a generally Western look.
The supervisor of many projects was the Swiss-Italian Domenico Trezzini (1670-1734), whom Peter hired to build the Peter and Paul fortress.[6] In 1710 Trezzini designed Peter's modest Summer Palace, with relief sculpture by the German Andreas Schluter (1665-1714) and Dutch formal gardens. Across the river the boldest point on the skyline was Trezzini's cathedral of saints Peter and Paul (1712-33), with its tall golden spire. The basilical structure departed radically from the centralised Greek cross of Russo-Byzantine church architecture, while the gilded iconostasis resembled a triumphal arch. The churches in Trezzini's St Alexander Nevsky monastery were more traditional in style. Significantly, this was to be the only monastery in early St Petersburg, located well away from the centre of the growing city.
For a while the French architect Jean Baptiste Le Blond (1679-1719) looked like eclipsing Trezzini, but he died after spending only three years in Russia. His activity was centred at the grand palaces at Peterhof and Strel'na on the Gulf of Finland, Peter's versions of Versailles, with extensive formal gardens, terraces, fountains and sculptures. Peterhof also owed a great deal to Johann Friedrich Braunstein, in Russia 1714-28. Among his several pavilions in the grounds was Peter's favourite retreat, the small Mon Plaisir palace, which housed what was probably Russia's first art gallery. Gottfried Johann Schadel (1680-1752) from Hamburg worked mainly for Peter's favourite, Aleksandr Menshikov (1673-1729), building the prince's impressive Italianate residences at Oranienbaum (1713-25) and on Vasilevskii island (1713-27). The only extant building by Georg Johann Mattarnovy (died 1719) is the Kunstkamera, which housed Peter's notorious collection of 'monsters' and other curiosities.
Among the Russian architects who received their initial training from these foreigners were Mikhail Zemtsov, Peter Eropkin and Ivan Korobov, who only began to take on major commissions in the late 1720s. Peter's painters were nearly all foreigners, too, as was the case at most European courts.[7] The most prolific court painters were Louis Caravaque (1684-1754) and Gottfried
Dannhauer (Tannhauer, 1680-1733/7). In addition to painting portraits and battle scenes (both produced versions of Peter at Poltava), their prime task was to record and celebrate the newly Westernised men and women of the court. Caravaque also introduced feminine-erotic elements into Russian art, as in his double portrait of Peter's daughters, Anna and Elizabeth (1717), which depicts the two girls as personifications of youth, beauty and fruitfulness. Such portraits often hung in rooms decorated with half-naked Dianas and Aphrodites. The allegorical female nude was a daring novelty in Russia, where classical conventions were still poorly understood and even 'seemly' portraits of women were a recent innovation.[8] Peter's taste was more for marine and battle scenes, but he also purchased the work of Old Masters.
Foreign artists taught their craft to Russian pupils, nearly all of whom started out as icon-painters. One such apprentice was Ivan Nikitin (c. I680 till after I742), whom Peter later sent to study in Italy. Nikitin's reputation was to some extent a Soviet invention. His biographers claimed that the Russian approached painting not as a 'pupil', but boldly and creatively, outstripping all the foreign artists working in Russia, whose works seemed 'inept and naive' in comparison.[9] A deathbed portrait of Peter I attributed to Nikitin was said to display a 'patriotic, purely Russian understanding of the image, a grief of loss which could be conveyed only by a Russian artist', whereas a canvas on the same theme by the German Dannhauer was dismissed as 'devoid of feeling'.[10] Nikitin's most recent biographer takes a more balanced approach.[11]Some paintings once attributed to Nikitin, who left only two signed canvases, are the subject of further investigation, for example the splendid portrait once erroneously entitled The Field Hetman. Russian art historians are now at liberty to acknowledge and research the foreign originals on which many Petrine images were based.[12] The work of foreign artists in Russia awaits thorough investigation, however.
The making of prints and engraving was supervised by foreign masters such as Adriaan Schoenebeck and Peter Picart, who superimposed Russian subjects on Western templates, for example siege and battle scenes from the Northern
War. To them and to the Russian engravers Ivan (1677-1743) and Aleksei Zubov (1682-1751) we owe a good part of our visual impression of the Petrine era.[13] A major subject was St Petersburg itself, as, for example, in Aleksei Zubov's city panorama (1716). Much-reproduced prints depict the dwarfs' wedding staged by Peter in 1710 and the wedding feast of Peter and his second wife Catherine in 1712.[14]
Unlike engraving, which was used in Muscovy for religious subjects, stone and metal sculpture in the round was completely new to most Russians, having long been stigmatised by the Orthodox Church as the art of graven images. Peter's chief sculptor was the Italian Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli (1675^-1744), whose bronze bust of Peter (1723-30), with its dynamic metal draperies, remains one of the key images of the tsar. Rastrelli failed to establish a school of Russian sculptors, however. Russian artists were more comfortable working with wooden relief carving, little of which has survived. The bulk of the statues for St Petersburg's gardens and residences had to be imported, mainly from Italy, where agents purchased both antique and contemporary pieces.[15]
Another Western novelty was instrumental music. Peter probably heard his first Western-style music in Moscow's Foreign Quarter and experienced opera and ballet on his first trip abroad. He preferred choral singing and drumming, both of which he practised vigorously, but he acknowledged the importance of courtly musical entertainments. In St Petersburg, guests at court functions were invariably entertained by musicians, who, like painters and foreign chefs, became an elite fashion accessory, especially after the Law on Assemblies of 1718 encouraged home entertainments. Foreign dance masters were in demand to teach Russians the latest steps.[16] The Dutch painter Cornelius de Bruyn thought the orchestra he heard in Menshikov's Moscow residence sounded 'just like in our countries: violins, basses, trumpets, oboes, flutes'.[17]
The use of musical instruments, including the organ, was still banned in church, but sacred music for the human voice was adapted for the new era. Parades celebrating military victories featured not only fanfares, but also choirs singing panegyric verses and cants. The seventeenth-century choral tradition was harnessed to the needs of the state and the rich expansiveness of the Russian unaccompanied choral music in church lived on into the new age, under the influence of both Russian native composers and foreigners, as did folksong. Menshikov, for example, kept a choir of Russian and Ukrainian singers alongside his foreign instrumentalists. All three strands were to continue into the great age of Russian music more than a century later, although Soviet musical historians were obliged to stress the importance of secular music and to underplay sacred works.[18]
It is unlikely that Peter had any memory of his father's court theatre, which closed in 1676. His own adult experience of the theatre probably began in the Dutch Republic in August 1697, where he saw a 'play about Cupid'.[19] Peter was probably indifferent to serious theatre, but he understood that theatre, like music, was an integral part of the Western cultural scene that he sought to emulate. In 1702 a troupe led by the German Johann-Christian Kunst duly arrived in Moscow to perform in a playhouse built in the Kremlin. The first plays were all in German, but Kunst and his successor Otto Fiirst took on Russian pupils and from 1705 plays in Russian (all translations) were staged. The repertoire consisted mainly of comic low-brow material from German and Dutch originals and bowdlerised versions of such plays as Moliere's Le Medecin malgre lui. Despite its impressive scenery and costumes, the theatre was poorly attended and soon ceased functioning altogether.[20] Peter's ill-fated public theatre was only part of the story. The Moscow Academy staged school dramas featuring characters personifying virtues and vices, while plays such as Russia's Glory celebrated current events. Plays were also staged at the Moscow Medical School.[21] In Rostov, Bishop Dmitrii established a theatre and staged his own plays, including The Nativity Play, with thrilling scenes of the slaughter of the innocents and Herod in hell.[22] Peter's sister Natalia and his sister-in-law
Tsaritsa Praskovia organised amateur dramatics, the Bible and lives of saints providing material for Play about the Holy Martyr Evdokia and Comedy of the Prophet Daniel.[23]
Historians often speak of a virtual absence of Petrine 'literature', on the grounds that scarcely any fiction, poetry or drama appeared in print.[24] Generally this shortage is explained by the practical priorities of government- sponsored publishing (no Russian presses were in private hands until the 1780s) and by a lack of leisure for private reading among Russia's small, literate (but still not very cultured) elite. Modern anthologies tend to highlight publicistic writings by churchmen such as Feofan Prokopovich (1681-1736), who praised Russia's progress through the literary forms of panegyric verse and sermons. Prokopovich's oration at Peter's funeral remains one of the best-known works of the era still in print.[25] If, however, we consider texts available in manuscript, including popular religious works, a livelier picture of literary culture emerges. Readers continued to enjoy the lives of saints, tales of roguery, picaresque stories and romances inherited from the previous century.[26] The two best-known examples of manuscript fiction assigned to the Petrine era, the tales of the Russian sailor Vasilii Koriotskii and the valiant Russian cavalier Alexander, continue this tradition, although neither of these texts can be reliably dated. Both fuse travellers' tales, love interest and exotic detail with contemporary elements. Alexander, for example, longs 'to enjoy foreign states with his own eyes' and to study their 'polite manners'.[27]
With regard to non-fiction, historians have identified a 'print revolution' in Peter's reign. Between 1700 and 1725 one hundred times more printed material was produced in Russia than in the whole of the previous century. Instructions issued in February 1700 to an Amsterdam publisher set the tone: 'to print European, Asian and American land and sea maps and charts and all manner of prints and portraits and books in the Slavonic and Dutch languages . . . for the glory of the great sovereign and his tsardom [and] for the general usefulness and profit of the nation and instruction in various crafts'.[28] From 1703 Russia's first newspaper, Vedomosti (Gazette), carried information about military and diplomatic affairs. Analysis of the subject matter of 1,312 titles published in Russia in 1700-25 indicates that laws and regulations accounted for 44%, official notices - 14.6%, religion - 23.5%, military affairs - 7.9%, calendars - 1.8%, Vedomosti - 1.8%, primers and language - 1.7%, history and geography - 1.5%, technology and science - 1.1%, secular philosophy - 0.5% and belles-lettres - 0.2%.[29] The demand for new books was uneven and many remained unsold. There are no reliable statistics for literacy rates in Peter's reign, but estimates for 1797 of 6.9% in the population as a whole suggest low figures indeed for the early 1700s.[30] Even so, state- and church-sponsored projects, such as the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation, educated new readers and the reading primer First Lesson to Youths (1720) by Prokopovich was a bestseller.[31]
A publishing landmark was the introduction of a new typeface, the so- called civil script (grazhdanskii shrift). After several revisions through 1708-10, thirty-eight Cyrillic letters based on modern designs for Latin characters were approved, with redundant letters from church script (kirillitsa) excluded.[32] The first schedule of new books (1710) included works on letter-writing, geometry, artillery, the capture of Troy and descriptions of triumphal gates. The first books actually to be printed in the revised typeface were translations from Ernst-Friedrich Borgsdorf's works on siege warfare and fortification. Despite such evidence of secular trends, one should treat with caution the notion of the secularisation of publishing in Peter's reign. Civil script did not replace church script. Religious literature published in the latter still accounted for over 40 per cent of volumes (as opposed to titles) published, in fact, more religious books were published in Peter's reign than in the seventeenth century. At the same time, a third of the titles printed in church script were secular in content, for example laws and manifestos.[33] It is hard to agree that the two 'opposing' typefaces were 'linked with the opposition of two cultures, Petrine and anti-Petrine' in an entirely consistent way.[34] It is also misleading to make a sharp distinction between the secular ('progressive') and the sacred ('unprogressive') printed word. Religious literature and writers also served the state. Sermons, prayers of thanksgiving, allegorical prints combining biblical and mythological motifs provided the essential theological underpinnings of autocracy. Prokopovich's play Vladimir (1705), about the christianisation of Rus in the tenth century, features a group of ignorant pagan priests, whose resistance to the new religion mimics that of Peter's unenlightened opponents. Even an apparently 'secular' work like the behaviour book The Honourable Mirror of Youth (1717) emphasised faith, piety and obedience.[35] The Church retained considerable control over the printed word. In February 1721 most presses were placed under the direction of the Holy Synod.[36]
The new culture was very unevenly distributed. Concentration of the cultural experiment in St Petersburg reduced the availability of craftsmen and materials for the rest of Russia, where there was little attempt to impose foreign styles. For important buildings outside the capital the 'Moscow Baroque' style remained popular for several decades, while for routine construction, even in the back streets of St Petersburg, wood remained the standard material. The spectacular wooden church of the Transfiguration at Kizhi was completed in 1714 as Trezzini's thoroughly Western Peter and Paul cathedral got under way. Everywhere icons, in both traditional and 'Italianate' styles, were in far greater demand than portraits, as were lubok wood prints, sold on the streets by vendors. Several lubki have themselves become 'icons' of the Petrine era, notably the print of a scissors-wielding barber attacking an Old Believer's beard, and 'The Mice Bury the Cat', a seventeenth-century subject that became associated with opponents' jubilation at Peter's death. Popular icon subjects also appeared on lubki.[37]
Private initiatives in high art remained weak. Local artists and architects fully trained in the Western manner were slow to appear, as was a whole range of subject matter in art, including free-standing landscapes, still life, history painting and domestic genre. These anomalies have been explained by the dearth of independent patrons with a taste for secular art, the limited opportunities for Russian artists to assimilate new subject matter, clients' preference for prestigious foreign originals, even by the theory that certain genres were too 'frivolous' for war-focused Russia.40 There was as yet no academy or school for the arts, although the Academy of Sciences, whose charter Peter issued shortly before his death, sponsored artistic activities. Even nobles, harnessed to state service andabsent from their homes for longperiods, had few opportunities for collecting and connoisseurship.41 The typical country manor house was a glorified wooden cabin, perhaps topped with a rustic pediment and with a couple of family portraits in 'parsuna' style inside.42
Resistance or indifference undoubtedly slowed the reception of certain arts, for example sculpture and theatre. The men and women of Peter's circle had little choice about Westernising, but further afield things were different. Grassroots protesters, both urban and rural, were liable to identify portraits ofPeter with the goddess Minerva as the 'icons of Antichrist' and the tsar's German boots as the Devil's hooves. In 1713 the vice-governor of Archangel complained that local people were still wearing old-style clothes and refusing to shave. 'Truly, lord', he wrote to Peter, 'such boorishness must be stopped and these heathen customs of dress rooted out.'43 Some observers predicted that once Peter's iron hand was removed, there would be a general return to Muscovite beards and even to Moscow itself. That this proved not to be the case testifies to the foundations that Westernised culture had laid among Russia's upper classes and to the dedication of Peter's successors to his cultural programme.
From Catherine I to Peter III: 1725-1762
Historians once neglected the period between Peter I's death and the accession to the throne of his self-styled 'spiritual daughter' Catherine II. Catherine I
40 See O. S. Evangulova, 'Portret petrovskogo vremeni i problemy skhodstva', Vestnik MGU. Seriia 8. Istoriia, no. 5 (1979): 69-82, and 'Kprobleme stilia v iskusstve petrovskogo vremeni', ibid., no. 4 (1974): 67-84.
41 On a rare exception, see N. V Kaliazina, and I. V Saverkina, 'Zhivopisnoe sobranie A. D. Menshikova', in Russkaia kul'tura pervoi chetverti XVlll veka. Dvorets Menshikova (St Petersburg: Ermitazh, 1992).
42 On parsuna portraits, see my chapter in volume I of the Cambridge History of Russia..
43 Pis'mai bumagi imperatora petra velikogo, vol. XIII (i) (repr. St Petersburg: Nauka, 1992),
p. 374.
(1725-7) and Peter III (1761-2) reigned too briefly and Peter II (1727-30) and Ivan VI (I740-I) died too young to make much personal impression on the cultural scene. At the same time, standard historiography castigated Anna (1730-40) for her over-reliance on German favourites and Elizabeth (1741-61) for her extravagance. Only recently has it beenpossible for Russian historians to acknowledge that German influence under Anna was not overwhelming and that Elizabeth's extravagance served its purpose in the positive presentation of monarchy.[38]
While the nobles were still tied to obligatory state service (to 1762), the elite culture of the imperial court in St Petersburg remained disproportionately influential. For a time Peter II's aristocratic entourage threatened to restore Moscow to pre-eminence, but his successor Anna preferred to consolidate her power in the setting of her uncle, Peter I's, capital. In her reign a more or less regular royal household was established, where the luxury and outward display were said to emulate the court of France. Little of Anna's architectural programme survives today, however. Indeed, visitors to St Petersburg during her reign spoke of a mixture of magnificence and squalor, with many buildings left unfinished.[39]
The 1730s saw the launch of the career of mid-eighteenth-century Russia's most successful architect, Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli (1700-71). In 1732-5 Rastrelli constructed the wooden Winter Palace, the third on the site. He owed his lasting fame to his projects for Elizabeth, however, whose court required ever more generous architectural spaces, linked series of rooms for promenading and grand halls with high ceilings for balls and banquets. Her pageants, parades and festivals celebrated a monarch who served the good of her fortunate subjects. In particular, Elizabeth, who owned thousands of costly outfits, loved transvestite masquerades. To cater to such tastes, in the I740s-50s Rastrelli built the grand Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, an amazing confection of vast length, its turquoise blue walls set off by white stone and gilded ornamentation and ornate plasterwork. Inside, guests progressed through a series of gilt-embellished rooms, full of rare furniture and porcelain, mirrors and chandeliers. The Winter Palace in St Petersburg, completed in 1762, was, in Rastrelli's words, created 'solely for the glory of Russia'. Its facade was formed of seemingly endlessly repeated units of white columns framing ornate window-surrounds, all with gilded details. The whole effect was like a grand theatrical backdrop. Rastrelli's blue and white five-domed cathedral for Smolnii convent reflected Elizabeth's preference for Orthodox conventions in church architecture, embellished with Italianate decoration.[40]As palaces proliferated, pictures were required by the square metre. Foreign artists were aided, then succeeded by their Russian pupils, such as Ivan Vishni- akov (1699-1761) and Aleksei Antropov (1716-95). Andrei Matveev (1701/4-39), who trained in Italy and the Netherlands, is credited with the first Russian easel painting on an allegorical subject, Allegory of Painting (1725). Another of Matveev's works, generally identified as a self-portrait of the artist and his wife (1729), is the first known double portrait by a Russian artist. The assimilation of new subject matter was aided by the founding in 1757 of the St Petersburg Academy of the Three Fine Arts on the initiative of Elizabeth's favourite, Ivan Shuvalov. Initially reliant on foreign teachers (the Frenchmen N. F. Gillet and J. L. De Velly were the first professors of sculpture and painting), it admitted Russians of any social class, occasionally even serfs. Few nobles, however, contemplated a career in architecture, painting or sculpture, which continued to be regarded as high-grade trades. Students followed a course that included the study of history and mythology and copying from engravings, classical sculpture and life models. Successful graduates were sent abroad for further training.
Music, singing and dancing were important at both Anna's and Elizabeth's courts. In the late 1730s the French ballet master Jean-Baptiste Lande opened the first ballet school in St Petersburg. The first opera performance in Russia (Ristori's Calandro) was staged in Moscow in 1731. Five years later audiences in St Petersburg saw La Forza del'amor e del'odio by Francesco Araja (1700-67/70), who served as maestro di capella at the court from 1735 to 1759. He and his successor Hermann Raupach were the first in a long line of foreign maestri in the imperial household. Foreign masters wrote new works for the court orchestra, composed mainly of Italian and French musicians, and directed operatic and ballet spectacles involving lavish costumes and intricate scenery, sound and lighting effects.[41] Theatricals and the staged life of the court intermingled.
In literature the i730s-40s witnessed some of the first fruits of Westernisation, even though belles-lettres still occupied an insignificant place in publishing schedules.48 Writers subsequently included in the literary canon were unpublished in their lifetime. This was true of Antiokh Kantemir (170844), whose satires in verse, written between 1729 and 1731, heaped scorn upon detractors of Peter's reforms and opponents of science and learning. All his works were self-confessed exercises in classical and Western genres, the satires, for example, drawing on Horace, Juvenal and Nicholas Boileau. The writings of Vasilii Trediakovskii (1703-69), who studied for a time in The Hague and Paris, likewise consciously imitated and sometimes translated French and German writers. Both he and Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-65), who was famed as a scientist and co-founder of Moscow University (1755), wrote panegyric verses and speeches to celebrate imperial achievements.
It was individuals like Trediakovskii and Lomonosov who laid the groundwork for professional literary culture by absorbing and experimenting with Western literary genres and acquiring foreign languages. They were pioneers of literary theory and poetic metre, advocating and demonstrating the use of syllabo-tonic versification, which ousted syllabic verse.49 Trediakovskii's A Method for Composing Russian Verse (1752) summarised the achievements of the reform. Lomonosov's influential work On the Usefulness of the Church Books (1757) promoted the use of three styles or registers of literary language: the higher the style, the more Church Slavonic included, the lower, the more vernacular. Even so, a Russian literary language easily comprehensible to today's readers took several more decades to evolve. The readership for new works expanded with the growth of educational institutions, such as the St Petersburg Cadet Corps for noblemen, founded in 1731. Literary circles developed along with literary journals, for example, Lomonosov's Monthly Compositions (1755).
In the i740s-50s Russians began to write seriously for the theatre, which was revived after the failures of earlier experiments. In 1747 'Russia's Racine', Alek- sandr Sumarokov (i7i7-77), wrote Khorev, the first Russian classical tragedy, which warned against tyranny, excessive favouritism and succumbing to passions. It played alongside an adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1748) in Sumarokov's translation, which was followed by three more neoclassical tragedies based on Racine and Corneille. In 1750 the court repertoire featured eighteen French comedies, fourteen Russian tragedies and comedies, four Italian and German interludes. In i756 Elizabeth appointed Sumarokov as the first director of the Imperial Theatre, which was based in a professional company of Russian actors under the direction of the actor-manager Fedor Volkov (1729-63).
48 See note 26 above.
49 Jones, 'Literature', p. 28.
The developments reviewed so far were overwhelmingly for the court and the nobility. Beyond these circles literacy rates remained low, opportunities for schooling few. And as long as nobles continued to be bound to the crown by service, even their scope for independent cultural activity were limited. The most notable act of the last ruler of this period, Peter III, who himself played the violin and enjoyed the theatre, was to free the nobility from compulsory service. In so doing, he unwittingly released time and energies that allowed hundreds of Russian nobles to travel abroad and also promoted the blossoming of noble culture in the Russian provinces, creating a so-called 'golden age' that continued into the first decades of the nineteenth century.
Catherine the Great: i762-i796
To quote from Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom she once sent an expensive snuffbox, Catherine II was 'a sovereign to whom all the Poets, Philosophes and Artists of the time have done homage'.[42] Catherine had a passion for architecture and landscape gardening; she was an indefatigable author, of plays as well as legislation, and an insatiable collector.[43] Among her tally of acquisitions were approximately 4,000 Old Masters, which included 225 paintings offered to Catherine after Frederick the Great could not afford to buy them and the eight Rembrandts, six Van Dycks, three Rubens and one Raphael in the Pierre Crozat collection. Catherine also bought coins and medals, objets de vertu, applied art and porcelain, of which one of the most spectacular examples was the 944-piece Green Frog Service, 1773-4 by Josiah Wedgwood, featuring British scenes.
Like most European monarchs of her time, Catherine embraced neoclas- sicism in architecture. Space and proportion, not ornament, were the watchwords and Rastrelli's baroque did not outlive Elizabeth. A fine example of Russian neoclassical architecture is the Tauride palace, built in 1783-9 by the architect Ivan Starov (1745-1808) for Catherine's favourite, Grigorii Potemkin, himself a lavish patron of the arts.[44] The interior was sumptuously decorated, but the exterior was modestly plain, redolent of'antique elegance'. One of Catherine's favourite architects and designers, the Scot Charles Cameron (1746-1812), built her a gallery addition to the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo in the shape of a Greek temple for the display of her collection of antique busts. Nearby Pavlovsk, a summer residence built by Cameron in 1782-6 for Grand Duke Paul and his wife, was set in a picturesquely landscaped park dotted with Greek temples and rotundas. The main palace reflected the popularity in Russia of the Palladian style.[45] Another of Catherine's favourite architects was Giacomo Quarenghi (1744-1817), who surmounted his Academy of Sciences (1783-9) with the plainest of porticoes. Inspired by British examples, Catherine's tastes also extended to neo-Gothic details applied to classical proportions, as, for example, in the church and palace at Chesme (by G.-F. Velden [Felten], 1770s). However, the Gothic palace at Tsaritsyno designed by Vasilii Bazhenov (1737-99) was not completed.
Neoclassical principles were not only applied to Catherine's personal projects. Restructuring the built environment was part of her plan to inculcate civic pride in her subjects, and classical St Petersburg stamped a more or less uniform blueprint over the empire, giving visual expression to notions of antique harmony and order. A planning model devised in 1763 by the Commission of Masonry Construction for the reconstruction of Tver was adapted for other towns. It incorporated columned trading arcades around a central square with a radiating street plan. Subsequently, each town designated as a 'capital' in the Provincial Statute of 1775 was supposed to build a governor's or chief official's house and other civic buildings. In Moscow the new premises for the university (1782-93) and the Noble Assembly (1793-1801) by Matvei Kazakov (1738-1813) underlined the city's role as a centre of learning and the nobility's participation in the empress's projects.
Nobles began to transform pockets of the Russian landscape on the basis of these new ideals. Gracious private dwellings sprang up, still often built of wood, but of a regular classical design.[46] Landscaped gardens in the 'natural' English style were popular, with artificial water features and temples to Friendship and the Muses. Such landscapes suggested historical, allegorical and philosophical themes for strollers to enjoy and contemplate. On the grander country estates serfs contributed to the upsurge of cultural life outside the capital. Some performed collectively in choirs, theatrical and dance troupes or horn bands, while individuals who showed promise were trained as actors, master craftsmen, painters and architects. The estates at Kuskovo and Ostank- ino outside Moscow, for example, both owned by members of the wealthy Sheremetev clan, were built and furnished by serfs, including several generations of Argunovs.
The Academy of Arts would remain the virtually unchallenged centre and arbiter of the figurative arts in Russia until the middle of the nineteenth century. In i764 a charter placed the academy directly under the sovereign's patronage and in the same year its grand new neoclassical building, the first in St Petersburg, was begun. Foreign artists continued to play a prominent role in court portraiture - the Danish artist Vigilius Eriksen and the Swede Alexander Roslin, for example, left striking portraits of Empress Catherine - but local artists competed with them. The first Russian professor of history painting was Anton Losenko (1737-73). His Vladimir and Rogneda (1770) was the first Russian history painting on a national theme, while Hector Taking Leave of Andromache (1773) treats a classical subject, emphasising the virtues of civic duty and moral heroism.[47]
The most accomplished artist of the period was the Ukrainian Dmitrii Levitskii (1735-1822), who painted most of the leading figures of his time. His best-known works are the several versions of Catherine in the Temple of Justice, in which a sculpture of Justice and a plaque of a Roman lawgiver underpin the central image of the empress sacrificing her youth and strength on an altar in the service of Russia. In Levitskii's seven canvases (i770s) depicting students of the Smolnii Institute for Noble Girls, the subjects sing, dance, act in a school play and, in one case, operate a scientific instrument.[48] Many of the paintings of Vladimir Borovikovskii (1735-1825) feature young women clad in fashionable empire-line garments and set against outdoor greenery in the manner of the English portraitists. His 1794 painting of Catherine walking her dog in the gardens at Tsarskoe Selo contrasts the empress's informal appearance with a reminder of her military victories in the monument in the background.
All the leading artists of the period made their names with portraits and history painting. 'Domestic' landscapes and genre subjects from everyday life evidently were not popular with buyers, who preferred Italian and classical vistas to scenes of the humble Russian rural landscape.[49] No Russian artist produced images of appealing peasant children to evoke pleasurable feelings of compassion among well-off audiences in the manner of, for example, Thomas Gainsborough in England. In Russia, perhaps even more than elsewhere in Europe and North America, the style and content of elite art and architecture were filtered through the prism of neoclassicism, which privileged the beautiful and the idealised over the ugly and everyday. Even serfs trained in a Western idiom were expected to discard vestiges of 'rustic' aesthetics. In Portrait of an Unknown Woman in Russian Dress (1784) by the serf artist Ivan Argunov (i729-i802), it is unclear whether the attractive subject is a peasant in her Sunday outfit (perhaps a wet nurse) or a noblewoman in fancy dress. Only a few academic paintings of real peasants have survived. These include studies of a peasant wedding and a peasant meal by the serf Mikhail Shibanov (?- after 1789), both of which have an ethnographic emphasis.
Among the peasantry, meanwhile, traditional crafts such as woodwork, brassware, embroidery and lace-making flourished. Everyday objects like distaffs and boxes were elaborately carved and painted. Lubki with lurid illustrations and minimal texts could be shared by readers and non-readers alike and were a part of both the rural and the urban scenes. Popular subjects included exotic, foreign ones, such as 'The Cat-Man of Barcelona' and 'The Mighty Elephant Beast'. The images were often crude and bawdy, with depictions of and/or textual references to defecation and urination, sex and nudity, all, of course, highly stylised. Cheap paper prints of such images were sold alongside religious subjects. Icons were always in demand.
Towards the end of the century, under the influence of Western trends some members of the elite began to appreciate selected elements of folk culture. For example, there was an interest in folklore, that developed further in the nineteenth century.[50] The folk-songs collected by Nikolai L'vov (1751-1803), himself a notable poet and architect, and Ivan Prach became popular at musical evenings. Naturally classical music predominated at Catherine's court, despite the fact that the empress claimed to be tone deaf. As before, foreign composers and musicians set the tone, but native composers such as D. S. Bortnianskii (1751-1825) and the violinist Ivan Khandoshkin (1747-1804) laid the foundations of the great Russian classical music traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Catherine sponsored music and the performing arts through the Imperial Theatre Administration, run until i779 by Ivan Elagin (i725-94) and then by a series of successors.[51] The budget, frequently overspent, maintained theatrical troupes, orchestras and a ballet and opera company, which put on performances in St Petersburg and suburban palaces. During certain seasons of the year performances alternated with masquerades. On stage a repertoire of foreign and Russian plays was developed, including Catherine's own works, such as O These Times! (1772), and Mrs Grumbler's Nameday, satires about meanness, gossip and superstition, and her lavish historical pageant The Beginning of Oleg's Reign (1790). She was the author of some twenty-five plays, all of them adaptations of foreign authors, including Shakespeare.[52] In 1783-6 the Hermitage theatre (by Quarenghi) was built next to the Winter Palace and in i785 the public Bolshoi Theatre opened in St Petersburg. Ballet reached a wider public through the work of the Italian dancer Filippo Baccari, who in the i770s-80s trained dancers to perform in the Znamenskii and Petrovskii theatres in Moscow. The latter, built by the English impresario Michael Maddox, held two thousand spectators. The Bolshoi Ballet Company dates its origins from these enterprises.
It has been argued that theatre made a substantial contribution to the 'civilising' mission of the Russian Enlightenment. Theatre for paying audiences helped to create 'a sphere of civic activity' and sociability, which was largely lacking outside the court.[53] The major trend in drama was didactic and moralising, laced with comedy, with virtuous Dobronravs and Pravdins confronting villainous Chuzhekhvats and Krivosudovs. Denis Fonvizin (i745-92) created a gallery of such characters in his comedies of manners The Brigadier (first performed in 1769) and The Minor (1783). The latter work poked fun at such trends as excessive adulation ofFrench fashions and rude rustic manners. Plays could satirise foibles and abuses of the system, but not the system itself. Iakov Kniazhnin's Misfortune over a Carriage (1779), for example, lampoons cruel and thoughtless serf owners who subvert the marriage plans of their serfs for their own selfish interests in a plot where all ends well. Rustic plots were popular with noble audiences. One of the best-loved comic operas, Aleksandr Ablesi- mov's The Miller who was Wizard, Cheat and Matchmaker (1779), hinges on a quarrel between peasant parents over whether their daughter should marry a peasant or a nobleman. Some classical tragedies were also Russified, for example Kniazhnin's Vadim of Novgorod (1789).
In poetry and prose fiction we see the appearance of Russia's first more or less independent talents. It must be borne in mind, however, that in Russia, as elsewhere, talent was still measured largely by the skill with which authors handled set genres, rather than by innovative genius. Practically all the literature in Russian at the disposal of educated readers, a mere handful of the population, was borrowed from foreign models, with translations from the French accounting for one in four of all books published in the second half of the eighteenth century. Translations of novels by British and French writers were popular, providing models for the first Russian novelists, such as F. A. Emin (1735-70), who wrote about twenty-five books, and M. D. Chulkov (174392), whose Comely Cook (1770) was a particularly successful example of the tales of sexual adventures that readers enjoyed.[54] Eighteenth-century Russian erotic and pornographic literature of a stronger sort, especially the works of Ivan Barkov, fell victim to the much more draconian censorship of later tsarist and Soviet regimes.[55] For much of Catherine's reign there was a remarkably free press, without a central censorship authority, with prohibitions confined to heresy, blasphemy and pornography. In 1783 private individuals were given permission to run printing presses.
An important vehicle for literature and literary-philosophical debate were journals, of which 500 or so existed in the 1780s, subscribed to overwhelmingly by nobles. In i769 the first issue of About This and That appeared, containing anonymous articles by Catherine herself. It sparked a debate about the nature of satire, whether it should be aimed at human vices in general, as the empress believed, or against named persons. One of the participants was Nikolai Novikov (1743-1820), whose own journals such as The Painter and The Drone took the debate further. In the 1790s Novikov's Freemasonry activities and writings earned him Catherine's disfavour and a spell of imprisonment.[56]
Eighteenth-century Russia's finest poet was Gavrila Derzhavin (i743-i8i6), who first won favour with 'Felitsa' (1782), a mock ode in praise of Catherine. Derzhavin took a flexible approach to genre, injecting a strong personal element into his work. His philosophical poems 'The Waterfall' and 'God' and lighter subjects such as 'Life at Zvanki' are among the most original works of eighteenth-century Russian literature. Derzhavin was at the heart of an extended literary circle frequented by most of the leading figures of his day, including Anna Bunina (i774-i829), Russia's first professional woman writer. A number of women wrote and even published poetry, albeit usually with the support of male mentors.[57] The popularity of 'light' genres at the end of the century and the vogue for Sentimentalism, for example the work of M. N. Murav'ev (1757-1807), have been associated with the increase in female readership. Russia's most successful man of letters, Nikolai Karamzin (17661826), was a leading voice in Russian Sentimentalism and one of the creators of the modern Russian literary language. His story 'Poor Liza' (1792), about a peasant girl who drowns herself after being abandoned by her noble suitor, remains one of the best-known works of all eighteenth-century Russian literature. Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveller (1791-7) and History of the Russian State, written in the i8i0s-20s after he became official historiographer, also enjoyed great success.[58]
In the Soviet canon it was not Derzhavin or Karamzin, but Aleksandr Radishchev (1749-1802) who earned the loudest accolades. His novel in letters A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, published privately in about six hundred copies in 1790, became notorious for its advocation of emancipation and revolution.[59] 'The purpose of this book is clear on every page: its author, infected with . . . the French madness, is trying in every possible way to break down respect for authority, to stir up the people's indignation against their superiors and against the government,' wrote Catherine. As she famously jotted in the margin of her copy: 'He is a rebel worse than Pugachev.' Only thirty copies of the Journey reached readers before the print run was confiscated. Radishchev was sentenced to death, commuted to ten years of exile to Siberia. Later he was hailed as the forerunner of the Russian intelligentsia, but it is misleading to speak of an eighteenth-century 'intelligentsia' in the nineteenth-century sense of a body of privileged, radical opponents of the system. By and large, the small, literate, largely noble public shared the empress's belief in a combination of autocracy 'without despotism' and serfdom 'without cruelty', adorned with Westernisation. It had no time for alternative systems or values, still less for revolution. Rather, in the spirit of German Enlightenment, it favoured rational improvement of the status quo. Opposition, when it occurred, tended to come from conservatives, who believed that Westernisation had gone too far. For example, in an unpublished work Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov (1733-90) lamented the corruption of morals among the Russian nobility, when 'man's natural voluptuousness and luxury' (encouraged by the bad example of the imperial court) led to dissipation and the ruination of families.[60]
Conclusion
The 'dilemma' of eighteenth-century Russian culture was succinctly expressed by Karamzin. A fervent admirer of Peter I in his youth, later in life Karamzin was influenced by new thinking about national identity and spirit. In his view, without Peter, Russia would have needed 600 years to catch up with Western Europe, but accelerated 'progress', he believed, had been bought at a high price: 'We became citizens of the world, but ceased in certain respects to be citizens of Russia.'[61] In this, of course, Russia was not as an aberration, but only a late-comer, its cultural development conforming with the general pattern throughout eighteenth-century Europe and North America, where a small educated elite 'kept up' with international trends, and technical brilliance was more prized than brilliant originality. All the same, eighteenth-century Russian culture was more a follower than a leader and languished in the shadow of later national achievements. Almost the only eighteenth-century Russian play to remain in the repertoire is Fonvizin's The Minor. Hardly any eighteenth- century Russian novels are still read today. No eighteenth-century Russian painters, writers or composers are much known outside Russia.
The international character of eighteenth-century culture and Russia's 'junior' status in the cultural pecking order created a particular headache for Soviet scholars obliged to emphasise national originality (samobytnost'). Some took comfort in the discourse that Russians 'selected only the best' from Western culture, discarding anything alien to indigenous tastes. Foreign prototypes were ignored or glossed over.[62] The lack of comparative perspectives was caused not only by ideological constraints, but also by restricted access to Western scholarship and texts, so that sometimes simple ignorance lay behind the exaggeration of Russian 'originality'. Western histories of European culture, on the other hand, were apt to omit Russia from the picture altogether.
The limited social range of the eighteenth-century Russian public and the overarching influence of the court also seemed to distinguish Russia from more developed Western societies. Some writers observed that true culture was incompatible with despotic government and that the arts could never flourish if 'enforced by the knout'.[63] In the realm of high culture there were few opportunities for independent literary or cultural activity outside the provisions made by the state. If you were a writer, the only place you could publish was with state presses, apart from a brief period in the i780s-90s. And the potential readership was tiny. For aspiring architects, painters and sculptors the only institution that offered rigorous training, including study trips abroad, was the Imperial Academy of Arts, which also oversaw commissions. This is not to say that the imperial establishment deliberately set out to restrict, censor and repress, rather that a significant private commercially oriented sector failed to develop much beyond the nobility. As has often been observed, the bourgeoisie was missing. And there were few dissenting voices. By and large, when Russian writers praised monarchs, painters and sculptors flattered them and architects provided grandiose backdrops for their ceremonies, it was because of a genuine commitment to the values they represented. From the 1760s the doctrines of Enlightened Absolutism provided a theoretical and philosophical underpinning to such support.
Such alarming events as the Pugachev revolt periodically reminded the consumers of high culture that their alien ways could provoke popular wrath, but such instances of the violent polarisation of the 'two Russias' were the exception rather than the rule. The binary models developed by the Tartu school of semioticians has proved exceptionally fruitful for exploring the tension between 'old' and 'new', 'west' and 'east' in Russian culture,[64] but the distinctness of elite and popular, urban and rural culture should not be exaggerated. Peasants as a social group were not confined to the countryside, as Peter I recognised when he imposed a fine of half a kopeck on bearded peasants entering towns, while Russian nobles raised by peasant servants and resident on their country estates in summer could hardly avoid contact with the 'other Russia'.[65] In towns, puppet theatres, peep-shows and fairgrounds attracted diverse audiences. Russian traditions of church singing provided common ground for all classes, while the scores of Russian comic operas were based on folk songs orchestrated in a classical idiom. All social classes had access to handwritten literature, often on topics or genres on which Westernisation had made little impact, such as lives of saints, popular tales, riddles, songs and devotional works. Noblewomen and merchants' wives alike enjoyed books on fortune-telling and the interpretation of dreams.[66] Although Western fashions remained de rigueur for everyday wear for the elite, Catherine II introduced a style of female court dress based on loose-fitting traditional Russian robes. Conversely, popular art absorbed motifs from high art. Ladies and gentlemen, even peasants in Western dress appear in popular wood prints; neoclassical ornaments mingle with traditional ones on carved and painted wooden objects.
As regards the impact ofWesternisation, for every Karamzin who mourned his country's loss of national identity, there were several foreigners ready with an Orientalist discourse. Many travellers perceived (or were programmed to expect) something non-European about Russia, even in St Petersburg. The Reverend William Coxe wrote in the 1780s: 'The richness and splendour of the Russian court surpasses description. It retains many traces of its ancient Asiatic pomp, blended with European refinement.'[67] Armies of serf retainers, people from the Russian East, the sheer lavishness of clothes and jewellery helped to create this impression, as did the continuing high profile of Orthodox art and ritual. Religious culture was one of the 'blind spots' of both Soviet and Western scholars, who generally underestimated the role of the Church and religious belief in eighteenth-century Russia, favouring 'the story of the progressive emancipation of culture from the stiffening control of established religion', beginning with Peter's alleged 'secularisation' of Russian culture.[68]But Russia's eighteenth-century rulers and their supporters could not do without Orthodox ritual, churches and icons. Nearly all the leading artists started their careers painting icons and frescoes and continued to do so simultaneously with undertaking secular commissions. There was far more demand for icons than for portraits. Orthodox scruples about 'graven images' hampered the development of Russian sculpture. The equestrian statue to Peter I in St Petersburg (1782, Etienne Falconet and Marie Collot) was, amazingly, the first public monument to be erected in Russia.[69] The interdependence of religious and secular art awaits a full investigation.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century the cultural history of eighteenth-century Russia is still being written. Russian scholars have seized new opportunities to explore foreign influences and religious culture. The Marxist-Leninist ideological framework that prioritised the search for motifs of dissent and a 'serf intelligentsia' has largely been abandoned, while topics once off-limits or subject to ideological disapproval, such as imperial court ceremonial and noble estate culture, are being studied.[70] Work has been published in both East and West on once taboo figures, such as Potemkin, and the first studies of Catherine II's life for over a hundred years have appeared in Russian, giving due credit to her massive contribution to Russian culture. Even the once despised empresses Anna and Elizabeth are beginning to be acknowledged as patrons of the arts. Eighteenth-century Russian culture may never appeal to Western audiences as much as what preceded it and came after, but there is at least the prospect that we shall understand it better.
Russian culture: 1801-1917
ROSAMUND BARTLETT
Russian culture comes of age
To gain a sense of the achievements of Russian culture during this period, it is instructive to compare the comments made on the subject by Petr Chaadaev in a 'Philosophical Letter' he published in 1836 with the sentiments expressed by a critic reviewing an exhibition in 1909. Chaadaev felt that Russia under Nicholas I simply had no cultural achievements it could be proud of. In his opinion, Russia was neither part of the continuum of European or Asian civilisation, nor did it have any civilisation of its own - and he did not mince his words about his nation's many defects, which, significantly, were written in French rather than Russian:
At first brutal barbarism, then crude superstition, then cruel and degrading foreign domination, the spirit of which was inherited by our national rulers - such is the sad history of our youth . . . Now I ask you, where are our sages, our thinkers? Who has ever done the thinking for us? Who thinks for us today? And yet, situated between the two great divisions ofthe world, between East and West, with one elbow resting on China and the other on Germany, we ought to have united in us the two principles of intellectual life, imagination and reason, and brought together in our civilization the history of the entire globe. But this was not the part Providence assigned to us. Far from it; she seems to have taken no interest in our destiny . . . You would think, looking at us, that the general law of humanity has been revoked in our case. Alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, taught the world nothing; we have not added a single idea to the fund of human ideas; we have contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit, and we have disfigured everything we have taken ofthat progress . . . We have never taken the trouble to invent anything ourselves, while from the inventions ofothers we have adopted only the deceptive appearances and useless luxuries.[71]
The critic reviewing the Russian section of an architecture and design exhibition in Vienna in 1909, by contrast, felt quite differently. If anything, Russia's very backwardness, in his view, had made a crucial contribution to its new position of cultural pre-eminence:
A very short while ago it was a saying that if one scratched a Russian, one discovered a barbarian ... A few years ago Western art had to acknowledge the invasion of the Japanese. Last spring at our architectural exhibition the Russians spoke, and everyone's attention was attracted. We were made to envy them for the remains of barbarism which they have managed to preserve. The West has become a common meeting ground, invaded by distant and foreign peoples as in the last days of the Roman Empire, and while they wish to learn from us, it turns out that they are our teachers.[72]
Indeed, Russian artists were now increasingly assuming positions at the forefront of the European avant-garde, their achievements equal to anything produced by their counterparts in Western Europe. This was spectacularly demonstrated when Sergei Diaghilev began his triumphant export of Russian culture to Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century: the legendary Saisons russes showcased the brightest talents of Russian ballet, art and music, culminating in the epochal premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in 1913. Back in Moscow, Stanislavsky had founded an innovatory acting technique and a world-class repertory theatre which championed the plays of Chekhov, soon to be recognised as one of the greatest of modern dramatists. And once the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky had begun to reach international audiences via translations, it was not long before writers like Virginia Woolf were proclaiming Russian literature to be the best in the world.[73] By the time of the 1917 Revolution, it was no longer possible to claim that Russia had merely borrowed from other cultures, and contributed nothing original of its own. In the space of a hundred years, the country's artistic life had been transformed beyond recognition, as the feelings of inferiority which were the residue of Russia's brusque Europeanisation in the eighteenth century gave way to a pride in national achievements. The subsequent discovery of Russian culture, combined with the constraints imposed by the constant threat of censorship, had ultimately galvanised Russian artists, writers and musicians into forging a cultural identity that was distinctive precisely for its strong national character. As soon as
Russian creativity was given the conditions to flourish in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a profusion of novels, symphonies, paintings and operas poured forth which were of a calibre never encountered either before or after.
Russian culture under Alexander I (1801-1825) and Nicholas I (1825-1855)
Exactly how accurate was the pessimistic diagnosis of Russian culture set forth in Chaadaev's 'Philosophical Letters'? Born in 1794, Chaadaev had come of age during the Napoleonic campaigns, in which he served as an officer. He had then resigned his commission and spent three years in Western Europe, which probably saved him from the brutal punishments meted out to his friends and fellow liberals who had taken part in the Decembrist uprising in 1825. Nicholas I's chief of police, Count Benckendorff, proclaimed triumphantly: 'Russia's past is admirable; her present situation is more than wonderful; as for her future, this exceeds even the boldest expectations',[74] but Chaadaev had grounds for possessing a jaundiced view of Russia. Like the Decembrists, who had been profoundly shocked when they returned home after observing Western liberty in action when they occupied Paris at the end of the war with Napoleon, Chaadaev had come to the conclusion that the source of Russia's 'unhealthy atmosphere and paralysis' was the iniquitous institution of serfdom.[75] This challenged the nationalist feelings inspired by 1812. But modernisation was out of the question under a tsar terrified of further rebellion, and in 1833 his minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, formulated an official state ideology based on 'Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality' which was to set the course for cultural policy throughout Nicholas's reign.[76] Accordingly, the teachers and students at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts were uniformed civil servants who were enjoined to uphold the techniques and artistic ideals of classical antiquity. In music, there simply was no institution yet for the professional training of native composers and performers, and the already low prestige of Russian music was soonto be further undermined when an Italian opera company was installed in St Petersburg's main opera house
in 1843.7 The Russian literary canon, meanwhile, was still so small that in Pushkin's story The Queen of Spades (Pikovaia dama), set in 1833, the old countess could express surprise that there are any novels written in Russian.8
But it was in the 1820s and 1830s that Peter the Great's secularising reforms began to bring forth fruit in terms of native works of art of outstanding originality. Pushkin published the first great Russian novel (in verse), Eugene Onegin, in 1823-31. The following year Russia's first professional critic, Vissarion Belin- sky, made his debut with an article which the literary historian D. S. Mirsky memorably called the 'manifesto of a new era in the history of Russian civiliza- tion'.9 In 1833 too Karl Briullov completed his mammoth canvas The Last Day of Pompeii, described by Gogol as a 'complete universal creation' and celebrated by Sir Walter Scott, Bulwer Lytton and countless Italian academicians.10 Two other cultural landmarks were to follow in 1836, the year in which Chaadaev's 'First Philosophical Letter' was published: Gogol's play The Government Inspector (Revizor) and Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar. This was also the year in which Pushkin launched The Contemporary (Sovremennik), which was destined to become Russia's most famous literary journal in the nineteenth century and in which Orest Kiprensky, one of Russia's finest Romantic painters, died. Other important artists of the first half of the nineteenth century who were not products of the Imperial Academy, and who treated Russian themes, include Aleksei Venetsianov, who received no formal training, and Vasili Tropinin, a gifted serf given his freedom only at the age of forty-seven. Both excelled in depicting scenes from daily life.
The central figure of what is now referred to as the 'Golden Age' of Russian poetry was Pushkin of whose work David Bethea has written: 'It engages prominent foreign and domestic precursors (Derzhavin, Karamzin, Byron, Shakespeare, Scott) as confident equal, defines issues of history and national destiny (Time of Troubles, legacy of Peter, Pugachev Rebellion) without taking sides, provides a gallery of character types for later writers... and expands the boundaries of genre . . . in an intoxicating variety that earned him the name of Proteus.'11 Pushkin's work alone undermines Chaadaev's theory of Russian cultural stagnation.
7 See Richard Taruskin, 'Ital'yanshchina', in Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 186-236.
8 A. S. Pushkin, Complete Prose Fiction, trans., intro. and notes Paul Debreczeny (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 215.
9 D. S. Mirsky A History of Russian Literature from its Beginnings to 1900, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (New York: Vintage, 1958), p. 75.
10 A. Bird, A History of Russian Painting (Oxford: Phaidon, 1987), pp. 78-9.
11 D. Bethea, 'Literature', in N. Rzhevsky (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to ModernRussian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 177.
Pushkin was one of the first Russian writers to earn his living through his literary works, and the last to have to suffer the dubious privilege of having them personally scrutinised by the tsar, who appointed himself as the poet's personal censor when graciously allowing his subject to return from exile in the south. Pushkin's career exemplifies the growing rift that was opening up between artists and the state in Russia, as the nascent intelligentsia increasingly came to define itself by its opposition to the Government. The fate of Chaadaev's 'Philosophical Letter', meanwhile, exemplifies the cultural atmosphere under Nicholas I as a whole: its author was pronounced insane and placed under house arrest, the man who failed to censor the article was sacked, the journal in which it was published was shut down, and its editor exiled. It is not surprising, under these circumstances, that culture, and in particular literature, became so politically charged during the reign of Nicholas I. The headstrong young poet and hussar Mikhail Lermontov was courtmartialled for writing an outspoken poem condemning the society which allowed a genius like Pushkin to be killed in a duel.[77] Lermontov's career was also cut short: he died in a duel in the Caucasus in 1841 at the age of twenty-seven, leaving behind a corpus of remarkable lyrical poetry (representing the apex of Russian literary Romanticism) and a justly celebrated novel, A Hero of our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni), whose 'superfluous' hero is clearly the successor to Pushkin's Onegin.
Not all Russian artists wished to antagonise the regime in the 1830s and 1840s. Glinka's patriotic opera A Life for the Tsar, the first full-length Russian opera, is also a celebration of the official ideology of nationality propagated by Sergei Uvarov. For that reason it was enthusiastically endorsed by Nicholas I, but then became a problematic work for the nationalist composers who came to prominence in the 1870s. Gogol too was an ardent monarchist, whose political outlook grew more rather than less conservative as he grew older. Epitomising the new breed of non-noble raznochinets, Belinsky, by contrast, forged his career by championing new literary talent in Russia and promoting a radical social agenda. In his preoccupation with civic content, he was largely immune to Gogol's stylistic brilliance in works such as the first part ofhis novel Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi, 1842). His dismay with the writer's preoccupation with moral rather than social values culminated in a vituperative 'Letter to N. V Gogol' following the publication of the latter's reactionary Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847). Gogol's defence of serfdom provoked Belinsky to furious rhetoric. Russia did not need sermons and prayers or an encouragement in the shameless trafficking of human beings, he thundered, but 'rights and laws compatible with good sense and justice'. Fresh forces were 'seething and trying to break through' in Russian society, he continued; 'but crushed by the weight of oppression they can find no release and produce only despondency, anguish and apathy. Only in literature is there life and forward movement, despite the Tatar censorship.'[78]
Such an incendiary document could not be published in Russia but it circulated widely in manuscript. A reading of Belinsky's letter to Gogol at a meeting ofthe Petrashevsky Circle in St Petersburg in 1849 brought about Dostoevsky's exile to Siberia. The young Turgenev, who also began his literary career in the 1840s, was exiled to his estate for over a year in 1852 for praising Gogol in an obituary. Belinsky himself did not live long enough to witness the publication that year of Turgenev's A Huntsman's Sketches (Zapiski okhotnika), in which peasants were sympathetically depicted for the first time in Russian literature as human beings and individuals. Turgenev shared Belinsky's Westernising sympathies, and so A Huntsman's Sketches was welcomed by progressive circles who seized upon its veiled attack on serfdom, but the stories were also praised by the Slavophile community for the dignified way in which the peasant characters were depicted.
Of the three great Russian novelists who began their literary careers in the latter part of Nicholas I's reign, Tolstoy was the last to make his debut. By this time, the era of poetry had long given way to one of prose, and Tolstoy's essentially autobiographical novella Childhood (Detstvo, 1852) is written in the realist style which would dominate Russian literature for the ensuing decades. This trend is also evident in the genre paintings of Pavel Fedotov (e.g. 'The Major's Marriage Proposal', 1848), often seen as one ofthe best satirists of contemporary Russian life. At the same time, however, artists representative of the 'second wave' of Romanticism were tackling large-scale, monumental themes (e.g. Aleksandr Ivanov's Appearance of Christ to the People', 1857).
Russian culture under Alexander II (1855-1881)
During Alexander II's reign Russian culture flourished. The spirit of optimism encouraged by the 'Great Reforms', together with the relaxation of censorship and other restrictions unleashed an unprecedented creative energy among artists, musicians and writers. The dramatic change of mood can be seen by comparing the two generations depicted in Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (Ottsy i deti, 1861). There is a stark contrast between the urbane and unashamedly romantic older gentlemen of the 1840s with the brash young 'men of the 1860s', a new breed typified by the hero Bazarov, who rejects art and religion in favour of science and practical activity. Compare also the static first part of Goncharov's Oblomov, written in the 1840s, with the rest of his novel, completed later and published in 1859, in which an impoverished nobleman attempts to abandon his supremely indolent lifestyle and enter the real world. The rich legacy of symbolism inherited from the Russian Orthodox Church and deeply embedded in the writings of all the great nineteenth-century novelists, is nowhere more apparent than in the character of Oblomov, whose rejection of modern Western ideas and slow decline back into his former state of inertia is prophetic of Russia's path in the 1860s and 1870s as the programme of reform faltered, and censorship was once again tightened.
What is also remarkable about Russian culture under Alexander II is the way in which all the arts were now dominated by nationalist concerns. Peter the Great's Europeanisation of Russia had engendered ambivalence towards native culture amongst the Russian aristocracy which persisted until the middle of the nineteenth century. It had been responsible, for example, for the derision which greeted Pushkin's attempts to write folktales in the early 1830s. Pushkin had recognised the enormous potential of fairytales for the creation of a truly national culture (he was so adept at imparting a Russian spirit to his verse imitations of Western legends that works such as The Tale of Tsar Saltan and The Golden Cockerel[79] soon became part of Russian folklore), but his snobbish critics had considered the oral folk tradition fit only for peasant consumption. That situation changed with the publication of Alexander Afanasiev's pioneering collection of Russian folktales, the first volume ofwhich appeared in 1855, the year of Alexander II's accession. Afanasiev's 640 tales represent the Russian equivalent of the famous anthology published by the Brothers Grimm at the beginning of the nineteenth century,[80] and were to have a huge influence on composers, writers and painters alike, stimulating further interest in Russian native culture.
The new sense of national pride felt by Russian artists was not always inspired by identical motivations. The transformation of Russian musical life brought about by the virtuoso pianist Anton Rubinstein, for example, was occasioned by his consternation at the lack of respect Russian musicians were paid in their own country (this was another legacy of the Europeanisation of the elites in the eighteenth century). Rubinstein had studied and frequently performed in Germany, and could not but be struck by how revered musicians were there. In Russia, a country where one's position in society was still determined by the Table of Ranks, musicians had no professional status, nor could they benefit from any institutionalised training. Rubinstein determined to raise the prestige of Russian musicians first by setting up the Russian Musical Society in 1859, with the help of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna's patronage. It was the first organisation in Russia to hold orchestral concerts throughout the winter season. Next Rubinstein succeeded in founding the St Petersburg Conservatoire in 1862. Tchaikovsky was one of its first graduates three years later, and he went on to teach at the Moscow Conservatoire founded in 1866 by Anton Rubinstein's brother Nikolai. Because Rubinstein had based the Conservatoire curriculum on the German model he revered, and because he was of Jewish extraction, charges of lack of patriotism were often levelled at him by other musicians who were sometimes jealous of his success. 'The time has come to stop transplanting foreign institutions to our country and to give some thought to what would really be beneficial and suitable to our soil and our national character', wrote the critic Vladimir Stasov in 1861, for example.[81] It was Stasov, a full-time employee of the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg, and an ardent Slavophile, who played a leading role in promoting a group of five nationalist composers which formed at this time led by Mily Bal- akirev (another piano virtuoso), and who coined their nickname 'the mighty handful'. Neither Balakirev, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky nor Cui had received professional training, and all combined writing music with other careers (in Borodin's case, teaching chemistry at St Petersburg University). In defiant opposition to the Conservatoire and its 'academic' methods, Bal- akirev founded a Free Music School in 1862 aimed at educating the general public.
Stasov also waged a vigorous campaign on behalf of the nationalist and 'anti-academic' cause in the Russian art world at this time. His criticism of the conservatism of the Academy of Arts, which continued to adhere rigidly to its classical ideals, spurred on some of its students to action. In 1863, fourteen of them finally rebelled against the academy's failure to engage with the pressing problems of the day when they were set 'The Entry of Wotan into Valhalla' as the assignment for the Gold Medal; after the jury refused to change the assignment, the students simply walked out. Stasov retained a close association with the Free Artists' Co-operative set up that year by the leader of the protest, Ivan Kramskoi. Another key figure during this period was the radical critic and novelist Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who assumed Belinsky's mantle when the latter died in 1848 in championing the cause of literature as a weapon for social reform, and came, like him, from a lowly provincial background. Chernyshevsky's pivotal essay The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, published in 1855, set a strongly pro-realist agenda for all of Russian art in the late 1850s and 1860s, and ensured that debates were always highly charged. Proclaiming art to be inferior to science, and declaring that 'beauty is life',[82] it was the first of many assaults on the old idealist aesthetics. Chernyshevsky's active involvement in subversive politics resulted in his arrest in 1862, but his subsequent imprisonment enabled him to sketch out his socialist vision for the future in his influential novel What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat'?, 1863) before being exiled to Siberia.
Chernyshevsky's utilitarian view of art, his theories of rational self-interest and his atheism in turn came under attack from Dostoevsky when he returned from exile in 1859. Indeed, beginning with Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol'ia, 1864), Dostoevsky's mature work may be seen as a sustained polemic against the ideology of Chernyshevsky and his followers. Tolstoy retained an Olympian distance from the ideological battles in the capital, both intellectually and physically, having retired to his country estate following his marriage in 1862. His first great novel, War and Peace (Voina i mir), written between 1863 and 1869, was unusual for fiction written at this time in not having a contemporary theme (as Anna Karenina, by contrast, would) but was typical in its Russocentrism, and in its generic challenge to Western convention. As Tolstoy himself put it in one of his draft prefaces, 'in the modern period of Russian literature there is not one work of art in prose even slightly better than average that could fully fit into the form of a novel, epic or story'.[83]
Against the background of Russian Populism, the lengthy realist novel of ideas remained the dominant literary form during the turbulent years of Alexander II's reign. The realist mood also pervaded music written in the 1860s and 1870s, as in Mussorgsky's song cycle The Nursery (1870), in which the composer imitates the speech of a child and his nurse, and Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin (1878), based on Pushkin's novel in verse set in the
Russian provinces. Despite major differences in their artistic sensibilities, both Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky considered themselves to be 'realists' (an anomaly that is matched by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, who also saw themselves in the same light, despite the wide gulf which separates each of their writing styles). Both composers also sought to establish their careers as opera composers, which became more feasible after the opening in 1860 of the St Petersburg Mariinsky Theatre, the new home for the beleaguered Russian Opera. The world premiere in 1862 of Verdi's Laforza del destino, commissioned at great cost by the Imperial Theatres, marked the apogee of the Italian Opera's prestige in Russia and partly explains the ambivalent response to Mussorgsky's unconventional operatic writing when he first presented the score of Boris Godunov for performance in 1869 (the premiere tookplace in 1874 after substantial revisions). Khovanshchina, begun in 1872 and incomplete at his death in 1881, was another innovative large-scale historical opera, focusing this time on events prior to the accession of Peter the Great. Its subject was suggested by the indefatigable Stasov, who also inspired Borodin in 1869 to start work on Prince Igor, a re-working of a classic of medieval Russian literature. The intense interest in the forces of Russian history seen in these operas is partnered by a similar trend in painting of the time, particularly in the work of Vasily Surikov, which includes his Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy (1881).
As in the other arts, narrative content also tended to prevail over purely formal qualities in painting at this time. By 1870, the young rebels who had broken away from the Academy of Arts had founded a Society of Wandering Exhibitions in order to engage more directly with contemporary life and exhibit work outside Moscow and St Petersburg.[84] The so-called Wanderers were influential on the early career of the prolific Ilya Repin, best known for his socially tendentious canvas entitled The Volga Barge-Haulers (1873). Stasov continued to champion the cause of the Wanderers in St Petersburg, but the group had also acquired a powerful new ally in Moscow: a merchant called Pavel Tretiakov. One result of the Great Reforms was Russia's belated modernisation, and it was Moscow's merchant entrepreneurs who became its chief beneficiaries. Moscow had always been the country's commercial capital, but could never compete with the sophistication of St Petersburg. As its industrialists began to make immense fortunes from the building of railways and factories in the 1870s, however, the city began to lose its image as a provincial backwater, and soon became the centre of the National movement in Russian art. Tretiakov, who came from a family of textile magnates, was one of the first Moscow merchants to become a patron of the arts, and one of the first to purchase paintings by the Wanderers, before their work became fashionable. As a passionate Slavophile, Tretiakov's aim was also to exhibit his increasingly large collection of Russian art, and work was begun in 1872 to build a new gallery to house it. With national identity the burning issue of the day, it is not surprising that Russian landscape painting, which first emerged as a distinct genre at this time, featured strongly in Tretiakov's collection. Under the inspiration of works of literature such as Lermontov's poem 'Motherland' 'Rodina', 1841) and the famous passage in chapter 11 of the first part of Gogol's Dead Souls, which were among the first to celebrate the humble features of the Russian landscape, painters began also to see their intrinsic beauty. They now became a powerful national symbol, to be revered precisely for their lack of similarity to the more immediately appealing vistas of Western Europe (as in Polenov's Moscow Courtyard, 1878). Ivan Shishkin executed countless detailed paintings of Russian trees (such as In the Depths of the Forest, 1872), for example, not because he lacked inspiration to paint anything else, but because he took pride in the grandeur of his country's natural state and felt that Russia was primarily a country of landscape. A pivotal and symbolic canvas was Aleksei Savrasov's 'The Rooks Have Arrived', exhibited at the first Wanderers' exhibition in 1871.[85]
The unveiling of the Pushkin statue in Moscow in 1880 was a public event of great significance. Since this was the first monument to a literary figure to be put up in a prominent location in Russia, the festivities lasted three days, with speeches from Dostoevsky and Turgenev. Embarrassed by the circumstances of Pushkin's death, the government had been reluctant to commission a statue in the capital, despite the writer's now iconic status as the undisputed national poet, and the statue had been funded by public subscription over two decades.[86]A year later the mood of celebration abruptly ended: not only was Alexander II assassinated, but Dostoevsky and Mussorgsky died, thus symbolically bringing to a close a remarkable era. Tolstoy, meanwhile, decided (temporarily, at least) to place fiction-writing second to the fighting of moral causes - such as vainly appealing for clemency to be granted to Alexander II's assassins.
Russian culture under Alexander III (1881-1894)
Alexander III reacted to the violent circumstances of his father's death by introducing repressive measures which actually attempted to undo some of the 1860s reforms, and by increasing censorship: it should not be forgotten that Russian writers after 1804 had to endure the humiliation of submitting their work to the censor, and then complying with whatever demands were made. Russian culture had already begun to undergo significant change by the time of Alexander II's death, as non-conformists and former radicals amongst the artistic community gradually began to become part of the establishment: Rimsky-Korsakov was appointed to teach at the St Petersburg Conservatoire in 1871, and members of the Wanderers group had begun to take up professorships at the Academy ofArts. Under Alexander III, nationalist Russian culture was for the first time supported by the state and thus could no longer be seen as 'progressive'. Alexander's reactionary policies caused widespread despondency amongst the liberal educated population, who came to see this period as a sterile era of'small deeds'. The government's closure of the country's leading literary journal in 1884, due to its allegiance to 'dangerous' (i.e. Populist) political ideas, was a further blow to morale; Notes of the Fatherland had been a mouthpiece of liberal thought for forty-five years. This was the year in which the Holy Synod assumed control of Russian primary schools, and universities lost their autonomy. It was also the year in which Alexander presented his wife with the first exquisitely crafted Easter egg commissioned from the court jeweller Carl Faberge, and so began an annual tradition which was continued by his heir Nicholas II.
Konstantin Pobedonostsev, appointed procurator ofthe Holy Synod in 1880, was as much responsible as Alexander III for the atmosphere of gloom and paranoia during his reign. The lay head of the Russian Orthodox Church (this was a civil appointment, made by the emperor), he was a staunch defender of autocracy and an implacable opponent of reform. Pobedonostsev had licence to intervene in questions of censorship as well as in matters of national education and religious freedom, and his edicts were so unpopular in educated circles that they won him the nickname of 'The Grand Inquisitor' after a character in The Brothers Karamazov (Brat'ia Karamazovy; Dostoevsky, who had consulted him during the writing of his last novel, published in 1880, had been one of this dour man's few close friends). It is thus no coincidence that the voluminous, soul-searching novels of the 1860s and 1870s now gave way to short stories. The apathy and disillusionment of the period is captured well in the short stories of Chekhov, whose unambitious, melancholy characters indicate the diminution of the intelligentsia's hopes and dreams following the era of the great reforms.
Chekhov, now renowned as the master ofthe genre, stands out as almost the only writer of international calibre to emerge from Russia's literary doldrums of the 1880s and early 1890s, and the manner in which he established his reputation says a great deal about how much the Russian literary world had changed since the times when the great novelists had begun their careers. The son of a bankrupted shopkeeper, Chekhov came from an impoverished provincial background and wrote comic stories to supplement the family income while studying medicine at Moscow University. The lightweight comic journals which published his work flourished due to the burgeoning and increasingly literate lower classes in Russian cities and soon brought him the attention of newspaper editors. Finally, in 1887, when he was twenty-seven, Chekhov was invited to submit a story to one of Russia's prestigious literary journals. After the publication of The Steppe early the following year in The Northern Messenger, Chekhov's career was meteoric; it was quite unprecedented for a writer to begin a literary career in such an unpretentious way. The absence of any didacticism in his writing was a reaction to the preaching of moral ideas in the work of his elder contemporaries, and was severely criticised by those who saw his lack of ideological engagement as a flaw. In its gentle lyricism, Chekhov's work looks towards the modernist period, as do the landscape paintings of his friend Isaak Levitan, Russia's greatest landscape painter - a good example is his Quiet Haven (1890).
There was one aspect to Alexander III's notorious Russification policies which had positive consequences, namely his active promotion of native culture, including the 'revivalist' neo-Muscovite architecture which now became popular. The first major public building project of Alexander's reign was the onion-domed Church of the Resurrection, begun in 1882. Built on the spot where his father was assassinated, its pastiche of medieval Russian styles provides a stark contrast with the neoclassical architecture which surrounds it, and which had been specifically designed to emulate the European style and make a deliberate break with Muscovite tradition. This sort of retrogressive orientation was closely allied to Alexander III's reactionary and Slavophile political beliefs. Of far greater value was his decision to found the first state museum of Russian art, to which end he became an assiduous collector. The Russian Museum opened in 1898, six years after Tretiakov handed over his collection to the city of Moscow. But perhaps of even greater value were Alexander III's services to Russian performing arts. Alexander's decision to end the monopoly on theatrical production held by the Imperial Theatres in 1882, and to close down the Italian Opera in 1885 were to have far-reaching consequences for the further development of Russian culture.
The new freedom enabled entrepreneurs to found privately run theatres, which had hitherto been outlawed. Not surprisingly, Moscow took the lead here, and one of the first such ventures was the theatre founded by the lawyer Fyodor Korsh, who commissioned Chekhov's Ivanov, the play with which he made his stage debut in 1887. Another was the Private Opera founded in 1885 by the railway tycoon Savva Mamontov. It was a venture which brought together all his activities in the artistic sphere. Like Tretiakov, Mamontov was a passionate advocate of Russian art, a cause which he took up actively after purchasing Abramtsevo, a country estate outside Moscow, in 1870 and founding an artists' colony there. The survival of traditional peasant crafts was now under threat as a result of industrialisation, and Mamontov and his wife set up workshops to revive and study them, partly under the influence of the European Arts and Crafts movement. At the same time, Abramtsevo was hospitable to new trends, and it is for this reason that it has come to be known as the 'cradle of the modern movement in Russian art'.[87] Many of Russia's best-known artists working in the late nineteenth century spent time at Abramtsevo, including Repin, Antokolskii, the Vasnetsov brothers, Polenov, Vrubel, Serov, Nesterov and Korovin. These artists worked on a variety of subjects and in various media, including landscape, Russian history and legend, portraits, icons and frescoes, architecture and applied art. When Mamontov started producing and directing plays and operas, many of these artists designed sets and costumes, which was an unprecedented theatrical innovation in a theatrical culture still dominated by the ossified traditions of the state-run Imperial Theatres, whose scenery and props were perfunctory and unimaginative. But staging operas was a costly exercise even for a tycoon like Mamontov, and in 1892 he decided to call a temporary halt to productions.
The Imperial Theatres were well-funded. As the main opera company in St Petersburg, the Russian Opera at last started to prosper now that funds were no longer being wasted on the Italian troupe, and the Mariinsky became the nation's premier stage (with the old Bolshoi Theatre, former home to the Italian Opera, demolished to make way for the new building of the St Petersburg Conservatoire). Tchaikovsky was one of the first composers to benefit: his penultimate opera The Queen of Spades was commissioned and lavishly produced by the Imperial Theatres in December 1890, the same month in which Borodin's posthumously completed Prince Igor was premiered there.
Unlike most of his peers, Tchaikovsky was a loyal and patriotic subject of Alexander III (he was the composer of a Coronation Cantata, performed in the Kremlin in 1883), but as a professional artist, he saw himself as a European as much as he saw himself as a Russian, and his music expresses his embrace of both traditions. He was also unashamed about pursuing beauty in an age which scorned too much emphasis on aesthetic considerations. In 1876 Tchaikovsky had acquired the patronage of Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a wealthy railway builder, which released him from his onerous teaching responsibilities, and in 1884 he received an imperial decoration, and an annual pension from the tsar. Once he had more time to compose, his career began to take off, and it was during this time that some of his best-known works were written and first performed, including the Rococo Variations (1877), the Violin Concerto (1881), the Piano Trio (1882), and the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies (1878,1888 and 1893). Tchaikovsky was the first Russian composer to achieve fame abroad (he undertook several concert tours in Europe and also visited America), but it was only after his death in 1893 that the significance of his legacy was properly understood, particularly in the sphere of ballet music, which he transformed from being a mere accompaniment into a serious genre in its own right. The Russian aristocracy's love of ballet had led to Tchaikovsky's first commission to write the music for Swan Lake, first performed in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1877. Tchaikovsky willingly conformed to the dictates of the Imperial Theatres and enjoyed in particular a fruitful relationship with Ivan Vsevolozhsky, who was appointed director in 1881 and commissioned Tchaikovsky to collaborate with the distinguished choreographer Marius Petipa to write a score for Sleeping Beauty in 1889. The Nutcracker followed in 1892.
Tchaikovsky also made a serious contribution to the renewal of Russian church music, which had stagnated ever since Dmitry Bortnianskii had acquired a monopoly on its composition and performance for the Imperial Court Chapel while serving as its director in the late eighteenth century. Tchaikovsky had won the right to publish his Liturgy of St John Chrysostom (1878) from the church censor, but the ecclesiastical authorities later banned it from being performed in a church after it was sung at a public concert. Undeterred, Tchaikovsky wrote an All-Night Vigil (1881-2) after serious study of Slavonic chant, and in 1884 was commissioned by Alexander III to write nine sacred pieces.23 Other composers soon followed Tchaikovsky's example and helped to revive the sacred musical tradition in Russia.
23 See Francis Maes, A History of Russian Music From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 142-4.
Russian concert life was also in need of renewal by the time of Alexander III's accession. The main symphony concert series, which had been inaugurated by the Russian Musical Society in 1859, had become increasingly reliant on the classical repertoire by the 1880s and was beginning to lack freshness. The wealthy merchant patron Mitrofan Beliaev promoted contemporary composers at the concert series he founded in St Petersburg in 1885, but the repertoire was exclusively Russian and conservative stylistically. The 'Russian Symphony Concerts' were of inestimable value in consolidating a national musical tradition which was now well and truly established, but they did not explore new territory: composers like Arensky, Liadov and Glazunov hardly belonged to the avant- garde. The Russian school had hitherto prided itself on its anti-establishment stance, but the Beliaev concerts ironically succeeded in truly institutionalising it.[88] As a bastion of the musical establishment, and now the eminence grise of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, where he had been professor since 1882, Rimsky- Korsakov certainly did not use his position as Beliaev's main advisor to change its orientation. Several of his own works were written for the 'Russian Symphony Concerts', including his celebrated symphonic suite Sheherazade (1888), whose 'oriental' theme is a feature of many Russian musical compositions of the nineteenth century. In his 1882 overview 'Twenty-Five Years of Russian Art', indeed, Stasov defined it as one of the distinguishing features of music of the 'new Russian school', that is to say, the composers who originally made up the 'mighty handful'. Nowhere in his article does he draw a link, however, between the 'orientalism' of Russian music and Russian imperial expansion into Asia, which lies behind the aggressive nationalism of Borodin's Prince Igor,
for example.[89]
Russian Culture Under Nicholas II (1894-1917)
Alexander's successor Nicholas II, was hardly less reactionary than his father, but it was during his reign that an explosion of creative talent took place across all the arts which produced what is now rightly regarded as a kind of Russian 'Renaissance'. For the first time Russian culture also became an international commodity as the great novels began to be translated into other languages, and performers, composers and artists began to acquire reputations abroad. By the end of the nineteenth century, St Petersburg could match any other European capital for elegance and refinement. Its cultural life was greatly enriched by contact with Paris, Vienna and Berlin, cities to which there were fast train connections, and Russian society was to open up still further following the 1905 Revolution, which led to an easing in censorship. The ascendancy at this time of the Mariinsky Theatre, which could now be counted amongst the world's leading opera houses, with appearances by singers and conductors from abroad and a superb native company, is emblematic. Moscow, meanwhile, could boast Russia's most distinguished new theatre company, and a Conservatoire which could now more than hold its own with its sister institution in St Petersburg (Rachmaninov and Scriabin both graduated with Gold Medals as pianists in 1892). From 1910 onwards the city became a centre for the avant-garde - a dynamic, bustling metropolis where the most daring art exhibitions were held.
The cultural revival that was instigated at the beginning of the twentieth century was prompted to a certain extent by a desire to escape from a depressing political reality which was clearly going to worsen, but also partly by the simple and inevitable need to strike out in a new direction. Signs of the dawning of a new age in the arts had come with the production of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, which simultaneously represents the apotheosis of the Russian 'imperial style', and is also a work whose hallucinatory subject matter, nostalgic mood and stylistic pastiche align it with the preoccupations of the new generation of artists who emerged in the closing years of the nineteenth century. The rebellion against old forms and championing of the new saw Russian artists for the first time becoming leaders of the European avant- garde in the early years of the twentieth century, and, in the case of Stravinsky, Kandinsky and Malevich, changing the very language of art. Music was the last art form to be affected by the winds of change which now began to sweep through Russian cultural life, but it was ironically music which - through the agency of Stravinsky - was to make perhaps Russia's most significant contribution to the modernist movement in Europe.
The Russian avant-garde's rejection of rationality and concrete reality in favour of the world of the imagination can only partly be seen as a reaction to the superannuated realist movement. At a more fundamental level it was a reaction to the disintegration of moral and ethical values, religious beliefs and existing social structures which took place under the impact of Darwin's theories of evolution, the effects of capitalism and industrialisation and the ideas of such crucial figures as Nietzsche and Freud. The feelings of alienation, anxiety and loss of control which we associate with modern culture were particularly acute in fin de siecle Russia, where chaos and revolution loomed, but they nevertheless provided the stimulus for a cultural era of unprecedented richness and creativity, which came to a peak on the eve of the First World War.
In 1896 Mamontov relaunched his Private Opera company in Moscow. From the beginning, he had championed Russian opera, and he now began to focus on the works of Rimsky-Korsakov, many of which (beginning with Sadko, in 1898) received their premiere at his theatre. Like Mussorgsky and Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov believed that the quickest path to creating a native musical tradition was through opera, and also chose to write on almost exclusively Russian subjects: twelve of his fifteen operas are based on Russian themes. Whereas Mussorgsky and Borodin concentrated largely on historical topics, Rimsky-Korsakov was attracted to the more exotic world of Russian fairy tales, and his operas now began to occupy a firm foothold in the repertoire. Mamontov's other major contribution in the field of Russian opera during this second phase was to launch the career of the legendary bass Fedor Chaliapin, who made his debut at the Private Opera in 1896, singing the role of Susanin in Glinka's A Life for the Tsar. In 1898 the company undertook a triumphant tour to St Petersburg, with Chaliapin performing the title role in Boris Godunov, which helped to reverse that opera's fortunes following neglect by the Imperial Theatres.
Two new ventures which were to have a lasting impact on Russian cultural life were launched in 1898, one in Moscow and the other in St Petersburg. The Moscow Art Theatre, founded by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, was to revolutionise Russian theatre and achieved its greatest renown through its productions of Chekhov's four last plays. The amateur actor and director Stanislavsky, scion of one of the great merchant families in Moscow, made a good team with the drama teacher and playwright Nemirovich-Danchenko. Picking up on the new approach to the stage that had first started with Wagner, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko elevated drama to high art, investing it with the capacity not only to uplift but to transform and enlighten its audiences. Initially the educational aspect oftheir activities was emphasised in the word 'accessible' being part of the company's original title, but was later dropped. The word 'artistic' (typically contracted in English to 'art') remained, however, serving as a reminder of the idealistic goals nurtured by the theatre's founders. Going to the theatre suddenly became a serious business; lights were no longer kept burning during performances so that audience members could inspect each other; they were dimmed, forcing spectators to concentrate on what was unfolding on stage in pitch blackness. The decor ofthe auditorium was similarly austere - a marked change to the gilt and velvet of traditional theatres. Productions were properly rehearsed, and a production method pioneered which placed the emphasis on ensemble work. For the first time in the Russian theatre, stagings were conceptual, their style and atmosphere determined by a director. Chekhov's The Seagull (Chaika), first performed on I7 December I898, was the Moscow Art Theatre's sixth production, and its success saved the theatre from plummeting to financial disaster in its first season. After a scandalous first production of the play by the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg in I896, Chekhov had been reluctant for it to be turned into a travesty a second time round, but in the end had no cause to regret giving his agreement after Nemirovich-Danchenko had pleaded with him on two occasions. Uncle Vanya, completed in 1895, was performed by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899, and Chekhov's last two plays, The Three Sisters (Tri sestry, 1901) and The Cherry Orchard (Vishnevy sad, 1904), were written specifically for the Moscow Art Theatre. Another dramatist who enjoyed success at the Moscow Art Theatre was Maxim Gorky, whose Lower Depths (Ha dne) was staged in 1902. Gorky's gritty indictment of contemporary society was better suited to the hyper-realist style that was Stanislavsky's trademark, and which was ironically inappropriate for Chekhov's subtle theatre of mood. Thanks to Savva Morozov, the merchant millionaire who was its chief patron, in 1902 the Moscow Art Theatre was able to move into a new building designed for the company by Russia's finest avant-garde architect Fedor Shekhtel, who also built opulent Art Nouveau mansions for Mamontov in 1897, and for Stepan Ryabushinskii, another wealthy industrialist, in I900-2.
Just as the Moscow Art Theatre could not survive without the patronage of Morozov, the arts journal founded in St Petersburg in 1898 also depended on substantial financial backing. The World of Art was edited by a group of cosmopolitan and eclectic young aesthetes led by the flamboyant figure of Sergei Diaghilev, a key figure in the history of Russian Modernism, who was also expert at raising money. This came principally from Princess Maria Tenisheva, who had founded another important artists' colony at her estate in Talashkino in the 1890s (Mamontov had offered support, but his arrest in 1899 led to his bankruptcy). No Russian magazine had even been so beautifully or so carefully produced, and the World of Art's physical appearance, together with its all-encompassing title, say much about the priority of purely aesthetic categories. Indeed, the members of the highly eclectic World of Art group whose members included Aleksandr Benois, Leon Bakst, Konstantin Somov and Ivan Bilibin were torchbearers for the artistic movement which had begun to liberate Russian culture from the earnest utilitarianism that had dominated all the arts in the preceding period. In particular, they provided one of the first platforms for the poets who called themselves Symbolists. Led initially by Valerii
Briusov and Konstantin Balmont, who drew their inspiration from French writers such as Baudelaire and Verlaine, the Symbolists were quickly condemned as decadents. Their detractors deplored the fact that the Symbolists jettisoned a concern with ideology in favour of individual emotional experience and a quest for beauty, which was expressed at first in small, lyrical forms rather than the grand canvases of the Realist period. And they condemned the Symbolists' cultivation of amorality and the occult, which was an expression of the escape from the stifling Victorian mores of the 1880s in the aftermath of Nietzsche and the 'death' of God. In St Petersburg the leader of the new movement was the writer Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, who had published an influential article in 1893 which pinned the blame for the general decline in literary quality at the time on the didacticism of the Populist age and called for culture to be revived through a concern with metaphysical idealism and spiritual experience. The World of Art embraced music as well as literature and art, and here too Diaghilev and his colleagues had eclectic tastes. They were the first to create a Tchaikovsky cult, but they were also the first non-musicians in Russia to champion Wagner on the pages of their journal, regarding him as a founder of the Modernist movement in Russia as he had been elsewhere. The World of Art group played a key role in revitalising Russian culture, exchanging the narrow domestic focus of so much of what was produced earlier for a new cosmopolitan outlook which was consonant with the spirit of the modern city in which they lived.
Diaghilev had initially hoped to pursue a career as a musician but soon turned his energies to art: his cultural activities had begun with an exhibition of English and German watercolours in 1897. Convinced that the quality of modern Russian art was now equal to that of Western Europe, Diaghilev next decided to organise a series of international exhibitions beginning in 1898, which the aging Stasov predictably condemned as decadent. Diaghilev had anticipated this reaction. When soliciting work for his first exhibition, he had addressed the problem directly: 'Russian art at the moment is in a state of transition', he wrote to prospective exhibitors; 'History places any emerging trend in this position when the principles of the older generation clash and struggle with the newly developing demands of youth.'[90] After several more successful exhibitions, and a spell as editor of the Imperial Theatres annual, into which he breathed new life (even impressing Nicholas II), Diaghilev then began triumphantly to export Russia's cultural legacy to the West. He started with music. If Russian composers had fought a hard battle for recognition in their own country, conquering Europe presented an even greater challenge, since their music was still largely unknown. The five concerts of the first Saisons russes, which took place in Paris in 1907, were a great success, however. Chaliapin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov were amongst the musicians who travelled to Paris to help showcase some of the masterpieces of their native repertoire. In 1908, Diaghilev exported opera to Paris. The triumphant production of Boris Godunov now launched Chaliapin's career as an international soloist. In 1909, it was the turn of ballet. With stars like Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky, and revolutionary choreography by Michel Fokine, the legendary Ballets Russes company which Diaghilev formed in 1910 was to transform Western attitudes to ballet as an art form. In 1910 Diaghilev also commissioned the unknown Igor Stravinsky to write a score for a new ballet called The Firebird. It was followed in 1911 by Petrushka, and in 1913 by The Rite of Spring. All three scores drew from and transformed the Russian background Stravinsky had been brought up in. Benois, Goncharova and Bakst were amongst the many gifted artists whose vibrant sets and costumes contributed significantly to the success and originality of the Ballets Russes.
It was Diaghilev's genius to perceive that native style was an essential ingredient if Russia was to come into its own and contribute something new to world culture, if made part of a modernist aesthetics. Native style was a vital factor in the creation of the Ballets Russes, in whose success Stravinsky was to become such a lynchpin, and, after his first commission to write the score to The Firebird, it inspired the development of a neo-nationalist orientation in his music which would later explode with The Rite of Spring. In that work Stravinsky presented Russian folk life with a greater authenticity than any other composer before him. It was the apotheosis of the neo-nationalist style cultivated by the artists and aesthetes of the World of Art group and it captivated Western audiences. The neo-nationalism of the Russian avant-garde may have begun in the 1870s as a desire to preserve native crafts in the face of encroaching capitalism and urbanisation. Soon, however, particularly at Princess Tenisheva's artists' colony in Talashkino, folklore came to be seen more as a stylistic resource with which to regenerate art, and infuse it with a vigour and energy that was commonly felt to have been lost. Both Stravinsky and the artist Nikolai Rerikh (who designed The Rite of Spring) spent time at Talashkino. Ethnographic colour as artistic content had been the cornerstone of nationalist aesthetics of the 1870s but had come by this point to be regarded as distinctly outmoded. Stravinsky was the first Russian composer to turn to folklore as a source for stylistic renewal and experimentation. In so doing he moved abruptly away from the 'academic' and 'de-nationalised' style of composition that characterised so much Russian music written at that time.[91]
Stravinsky's first commission for the Ballets Russes was not the only significant event in Russian culture in I9I0. It was the year in which Tolstoy died at the age of eighty-two, and in which Symbolism lost coherence as a literary movement (although its three greatest second-generation representatives Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Bely and Viacheslav Ivanov had some of their most important work still ahead of them). The year 1910 was also a watershed for the Russian avant-garde. An exhibition provocatively entitled 'The Jack of Diamonds' opened in Moscow, and the bright colours and unconventional subject matter of the paintings provoked furious debates. Amongst the artists represented were painters like Nataliia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Vasili Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, all of whom shared Stravinsky's interest in drawing inspiration from native traditions for their own work. Goncharova, for example, who along with Larionov headed the Neo-Primitivist movement which emerged at this time, was inspired by peasant woodcuts and icons. In 1910 she painted four imposing Evangelists, which were condemned as blasphemous and removed by the police when exhibited at the equally controversial 'Donkey's Tail' exhibition in 1912. 'We can no longer be satisfied with a simple organic copy of nature', wrote Aleksandr Shevchenko about Neo-Primitivism in 1913; 'We are strivingto seeknew paths for our art... Forthe point of departure in our art we take the lubok and the icon, since we find in them the most acute, the most direct perception of life.'[92] The appreciation of Russian icons as works of art rather than as exclusively religious artefacts was a relatively recent phenomenon and had come about as a result of painstaking conservation work. The removal of layers of accumulated soot and over-painting in the early years of the twentieth century had made people in Russia aware for the first time that they too had a precious artistic legacy which went back hundreds of years.
It was also in 1910 that Scriabin and Kandinsky began to forge new artistic languages in their respective fields: the first abstract paintings for Kandinsky, the first abandonment of traditional tonality for Scriabin in his last orchestral work Prometheus. The dissatisfaction with 'mere' representation which the Russian avant-garde experienced at the beginning of the twentieth century inspired a relentless experimentation with new forms which would eventually change the face of twentieth-century culture. When in the early 1900s Andrei Bely, for example, found conventional imagery inadequate to the task of giving expression to the deeper realities which he believed underlay everyday life, and which he was interested in exploring in his fiction, he began pushing the very boundaries of language to create new theories of semantic structure in literature, as in his novel Petersburg (1916). Scriabin's artistic imagination, meanwhile, led him to contemplate the very disappearance of the physical plane of consciousness as the inevitable consequence of the world cataclysm which would accompany the performance of the Mysterium, a planned synaesthetic musical work combining religion and philosophy, designed to transport all participants into a state of supreme final ecstasy. Scriabin's new harmonic system with its mystical chord of superimposed fourths led to the dissolution of a sense of time. At the same time, Kandinsky was turning to signs, colours and shapes for symbolising abstract ideas and intangible states in his paintings as he searched to free art from its ties to material reality. Kandinsky had always been interested in spirituality, in the unconscious and in the subjective world like other Russian Modernists. He now dissolved conventional form by rejecting traditional subject matter to explore instead abstract ideas, thereby releasing what he thought was the inner sound of colour, seeking to make visible an otherwise inaccessible world through the liberation ofcolours and harmonies from their traditional structures. For him moving away from representational depictions in his canvases was the first step towards the complete dissolution of matter.
IfScriabin and Kandinsky turned their gaze inwards (as Kandinsky wrote in his seminal work On the Spiritual in Art, 1912), another section of the Russian avant-garde did the opposite by taking their art into the streets. There was a strong link between Neo-Primitivism and Futurism, the movement which arose in Russia in 1912, and which blurred the boundaries between literature and painting. Like the Neo-Primitivists, the Futurists wanted art to be revolutionary, and both their work and their behaviour was deliberately shocking (the exuberant Vladimir Mayakovsky wore a yellow waistcoat and painted his face). Following the publication of their manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste in 1912, the Futurists sought to dispense with all of past culture and create a new world. In December 1913, the year in which the Romanov dynasty celebrated its three hundredth annniversary, the world's first Futurist opera, Victory Over the Sun, was first performed in St Petersburg. Its two brief acts are set in an indefinite time and place, the cast is all male, none of the characters have proper names or developed personalities, their speech and actions seem completely absurd, and there is no recognisable plot beyond the capture of the sun by strong men of the future. The production was designed by Malevich, whose abstract Cubo-Futurist sets and costumes were the most radical ever seen on the stage at that time anywhere in the world. Firmly convinced that the external world was exhausted as a source of inspiration, in 1915 Malevich went on to form his own movement, Suprematism, which he saw as a natural development of Cubism and Futurism. With its exclusive exploration of non- objective geometric forms and pure aesthetic feeling, it is regarded as the first systematic school of abstract painting. When Malevich's most famous canvas, Black Square was first exhibited in 1915, it was hung in a way that deliberately alluded to the so-called 'red corner' where icons were traditionally to be found in people's homes.
Malevich's iconic Black Square symbolised both an end and a beginning, and was the extreme point of the Russian artistic avant-garde's relentless journey into new territories (as Stravinsky's scores were in music and Bely's novels in literature). But to gain an accurate picture of Russia's remarkably vibrant cultural life on the eve of the 1917 Revolution (given that the country was then at war), Malevich's, Stravinsky's and Bely's works must be considered alongside Boris Kustodiev's colourful and nostalgic paintings of Moscow merchant life such as Shrovetide (1916), Ivan Bunin's elegant but traditional prose (as in 'The Gentleman from San Francisco', 1915), Gorky's trenchant autobiographical masterpieces Childhood (Detstvo), In the World (V liudiakh) and My Universities (Moi universitety, 1913-15), the radical stage director Vsevelod Meyerhold's stylised theatre productions (his Studio made its official public debut in 1915) and Rachmaninov's All-Night Vigil (1915), the work which marked the apex of the revival of Russian sacred music initiated by Tchaikovsky. Together they make up a richly patterned and intricate mosaic ofa quality and intensity which Russian artists have never been able to match since.
Russian political thought, 1700-1917
GARY M. HAMBURG
From Muscovy to the Early Enlightenment: the problem of resistance to ungodly rulers
Muscovites almost universally regarded the grand prince as anointed by God and thus as deserving obedience, or even reverence, but the obligation to obey him was contingent on his adherence to moral law and on his respect for an unwritten compact that was felt to constitute the foundation of government. Political actors and churchmen had the duty to render sound advice to the grand prince and to reprove him when his conduct departed from well-established Christian norms; the grand prince's reciprocal obligations were to seek wise counsel and heed justified reproofs. When the grand prince stubbornly turned against godly ways, Christians were conscience-bound to disobey his spiritually inimical decrees. On this point there was strong consensus. Iosif Volotskii (1439-1515), usually classified as a supporter of princely absolutism, warned Christians not to obey an unrighteous ruler. The archpriest Avvakum (1620-82), who had once enjoyed a cordial personal relationship with Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich, instructed his flock, on becoming convinced of Alexis's support for 'heretical' church reforms: 'Place not your hope in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no help.'[93] As a rule, Muscovite thinkers stopped short of calling for active resistance to the government. The customary recourse for morally outraged Christians was to flee from Muscovy or at least from areas under an evil grand prince's immediate control. In the correspondence attributed to Prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbskii (d. 1583) and Tsar Ivan IV the Kurbskii letters justified not only flight from Muscovy but service to the rival Lithuanian commonwealth. However, during the seventeenth-century controversy over new religious rituals, Old Believer monks at Solovetskii Monastery moved beyond flight, taking up arms in self-defence against the government. They justified their act on the grounds that Tsar Alexis had supported 'diabolical' liturgical innovations. Avvakum apparently approved the armed resistance at Solovki. Thus, if Muscovite political literature generally lacked a formal doctrine of active resistance to an unrighteous ruler, Muscovites had the functional equivalent.
Under Peter the political opposition often justified itselfin traditional Christian terms. Vasilii Sokovnin, arrested in 1697 on charges of conspiracy to kill the tsar, told interrogators that Peter 'has ruined everyone, and for that reason it is permissible to kill him, and it will not be sinful'.[94] In March 1712 Stefan Iavorskii (1658-1722), criticised Peter's comportment from the pulpit, the sermon being an archetypal vehicle for conveyance of 'good advice' to an errant sovereign. Iavorskii's sermon later helped inspire Crown Prince Alexis to resist Peter's policies. The tsarevich's conduct in 1716-18 - flight from Russia, passive resistance to an ungodly tsar, then tacit support for active resistance - followed to the letter the Muscovite script for legitimate opposition.
Peter's allies deployed religious and secular arguments to counter this traditionalist Christian opposition. In his 1716 historical essay on the rebellions against Peter 'Opisanie v sovremennom ispytaniem i podlinnym izvestiem o smutnom vremeni' (A True Account of the Time of Troubles), Andrei Arta- monovich Matveev (1666-1728) attributed the resistance to 'fratricidal and ineradicable hatred rooted in human nature'.[95] Rejecting the notion that opposition might be justified in Christian terms, Matveev suggested that Peter's opponents had learned the art of rebellion from the Ottoman janissaries, whose 'insidious designs and actions' were based on the 'lawless Quran'. The issue of opposition to Peter was also raised in Petr Pavlovich Shafirov's Ras- suzhdenie (Discourse) of 1716 on the Swedish war, a book to which the tsar contributed several pages. Shafirov (1669-1739) accused the Swedes of 'stirring up His Majesty's subjects to rebellion', and he implied that Crown Prince Alexis had treasonously undermined the Russian campaign against Sweden. Shafirov's Discourse explained Russia's conduct in the war as consistent with contemporary European thinking on international law and sovereignty, citing texts from Grotius and Pufendorf. Yet Shafirov also quoted biblical texts in support of Peter's conduct, and called the Swedes 'infidels' for violating 'the custom of all civilized and Christian nations' by spreading of sedition in Russia.[96]
Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich (1618-1736) categorically attacked Peter's opponents for disobeying anointed authority In Slovo o vlasti i chesti tsarskoi (Sermon on Royal Power and Honor, 1718), written during the affair of Tsarevich Alexis, Prokopovich warned Christians that to disobey sovereign authority 'is a sin against God warranting not only temporal but eternal punishment'.[97] He rejected interpretations of the Bible purporting to justify resistance to ungodly magistrates on the ground that the Scriptures order obedience not only to righteous authorities, but to perverse and faithless ones. Later, Prokopovich propounded a secular defence of undivided sovereignty and royal absolutism in the tract Pravda o voli monarshei (Truth Concerning the Monarch's Will, 1722). Here he added historical and philosophical justification for hereditary monarchy from Grotius, Pufendorf and Hobbes.
Peter's death in 1725 and the absence of able successors shook the stability of the system he had fostered and led to further debate over the legitimacy of resistance to the crown. In Proizvol'noe i soglasnoe razsuzhdenie i mnenie sobravshagosia shliakhtsva russkago o pravlenii gosudarstvennom (Personal and Collective Discourse and Opinion of the Russian Landed Nobility on Royal Government, 1730), Vasilii Nikitich Tatishchev (1686-1750) defended legally unrestricted monarchy. Accepting Aristotle's prejudice that monarchy is the best form of government, he argued that Russia had flourished under undivided monarchical rule. In his horror of divided sovereignty, Tatishchev showed the influence of Pufendorf, Hobbes and Prokopovich. Although Tatishchev has most often been read as a secularist thinker, he demanded that the tsar pay attention to close advisors lest dismissing their wisdom provoke divine punishment. In his dialogue Razgovor dvukh priiatelei o pol'ze nauk i uchilishch (Conversation of Two Friends on the Utility of the Sciences and of Schools, 1733), he portrayed religion as a shaper of human will and statutory law. In Istoriia rossiiskaia (Russian History, I768-84) Tatishchev predicted all peoples in the empire would embrace the Russian language and Russian Orthodoxy.
From the late 1730s to 1762 Russian thinkers redefined the ideal of the virtuous tsar. The polymath Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov (1711-65) asserted that an ideal ruler should protect Russia from foreign aggression and expand its borders at its neighbours' expense. Domestically, an ideal ruler should promote useful enterprises and should display moral discernment and 'self-restraint'. Lomonosov's portrait of the ideal ruler resembled Prokopovich's image of Peter as the energetic warrior tsar and simultaneously recalled the Muscovite image of the pious sovereign.
The playwright Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov (1717-77) looked forward to a society of patriotic, dutiful, virtuous nobles governed by an equally patriotic, dutiful and virtuous legislator tsar. His play Sinav i Truvor (Sinav and Truvor, 1750) suggested that a morally irreproachable private life is a precondition of just rulership. That private virtue was not a sufficient condition for social justice was demonstrated by his drama Pustynnik (The Hermit, 1769), which observed that service to God can sometimes harm one's family and society as a whole.
Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment: civic virtue, absolutism and liberty
The most consequential thinker of the Russian Enlightenment was Catherine the Great (1727-96), whose Nakaz (Instruction, 1767) treated liberty as a crucial ingredient of just rule. The Instruction was not without a substantial conservative component. The first article cited the Christian imperative 'to do mutual good to one another as much as we possibly can'.[98] The section on education called on parents to inculcate into children 'all those duties which God demands of us in the Ten Commandments and our Orthodox Eastern Greek religion'.[99] Furthermore, the Instruction insisted that Russia's sovereign power 'must rest in the hands of an absolute ruler', for there 'is no other authority . . . that can act with a vigour proportionate to the extent of such a vast domain'.[100] Meanwhile, Catherine defended 'natural liberty', by which she meant the innate human desire to improve social conditions. She also defended political liberty, defined as 'the right of doing what the laws allow'. Catherine seemed not to notice that, by equating political liberty with specific legal obligations, she contradicted her subjects' natural liberty to the degree that their own impulses for social improvement ran in different directions from her own. For subsequent thinkers Catherine's Instruction legitimated concepts such as the legislator monarch, civic virtue, and liberty under law.
Among the leaders of the Russian Enlightenment were Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin (1744-92), Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov (1744-1818) and Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802).
Fonvizin and Novikov were supporters of Catherine who became disillusioned by her policies. Fonvizin's satirical plays Brigadir (The Brigadier, I769) and Nedorosl' (The Adolescent, 1781) pilloried the equation of high service rank with virtue and attacked the adoption by Russian noblemen of foppish French fashions - both by-products of Catherine's service system. In his Rassuzhdenie o nepremennykh gosudarstvennykh zakonakh (Discourse on Indispensable State Laws, 1784) Fonvizin argued for the adoption in Russia of fundamental laws. The Discourse depicted the monarch as 'the soul of society'. 'If the monarch is proud, arrogant, crafty, greedy, a sensualist, shameless or lazy, then ... all these vices will spread to the court, the capital and finally to the nation at large.'[101] Clearly preferable was a monarch who was 'righteous' and 'gentle', who understood that 'between sovereign and subjects exist mutual obligations'. In Fonvizin's opinion, subjects owed the crown obedience when policy was based on legal principle (pravo), but, in turn, the crown owed respect to the nation's political liberty, defined as the right of each subject 'to do what he/she wishes, and not to be forced to do what he/she may not desire to do'. Fonvizin departed from Catherine's Instruction by criticising serfdom as an illegitimate property system wherein 'each person is either a tyrant or victim'.
Novikov's satirical journals - Truten' (The Drone, 1769), Pustomel' (The Tattler, 1770), Zhivopisets (The Painter, 1772) andKoshelek (The Bag, i774)-were inspired by Addison and Steele's Spectator but also by Catherine's own Vsiakaia vsiachina (All Sorts, I769), with which Novikov conducted cautious polemics. In these journals he praised the empress's person but pointed to the moral flaws of her court and of the nobility. Yet in 'Otryvokputeshestviia v*** i***j*** ' (Excerpt of a Journey to N by i***t***, 1772), he blamed village poverty on a 'cruel tyrant who robs the peasants of daily bread and their last measure of tranquility'.[102] Inthejournal Utrennyisvet (Morning Light, 1777-80), he preached Masonic ideals of ethical perfection and philanthropy. Although Novikov saw no contradiction between Masonry and Orthodoxy, Catherine ordered his publications investigated on suspicion of their undermining Christian values. In I79I she had him arrested for sedition.
Radishchev was the most radical figure of the Russian Enlightenment. His book Puteshestvie iz S. Peterburga v Moskvu (Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, 1790) alerted Russians to the ways in which discharging conventional social roles perpetrates injustice, in particular, toward the peasantry. Among serfdom's costs he numbered: the destruction of natural equality under God, the 'crime' of destroying natural liberty, the diminution of economic growth and of the peasant population, the destruction of peasants' individual dignity, and the spread of arrogance among serf owners. In Radishchev's opinion, serfdom, being a departure from the natural human order, was bound to end badly, probably in a terrible uprising.
Radishchev argued that a just political system must be based on individual and collective virtue. The keys to such virtue were productive physical labour, the labour of the heart (exercising compassion) and mental labour (using reason to achieve self control). Not every society manages to construct a just political order, because custom, law and virtue often contradict one another. In his view, a virtuous citizen should respect custom in so far as custom is consistent with law, 'the lynchpin of society'. He saw law as universal in application, so that, if a monarch violated it, a citizen would be justified in disobeying the sovereign. In his 'Ode to Liberty' in Journey, Radishchev called freedom 'the source of all great deeds'. He bitterly attacked censorship, accusing the censors of keeping knowledge from the poor to the detriment of society as a whole. He saw no justifiable religious ground for maintaining censorship, and labelled the Church's role in its maintenance as 'shameful'. Although Radishchev was inspired by Masonry and by Voltairean Deism, his rhetoric was often biblical in inspiration. Indeed, his moral vocabulary owed as much to Orthodoxy as to secular sources.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Shcherbatov (1733-90) has sometimes been classified as eighteenth-century Russia's only Counter-Enlightenment thinker. In part, his reputation as a reactionary derived from his outspokenness at the 1767 Legislative Commission where he warned the government not to tamper with serf owners' privileges. The principal reason for his reputation has been the misreading of two extraordinary texts: Puteshestvie v zemliu Ofirskuiu (Journey to the Land of Ophir, written 1777-84) and O povrezhdenii nravov v Rossii (On Corruption of Morals in Russia, written 1786-7). Journey to the Land of Ophir described an ideal society strictly divided into classes or estates (sosloviia) - nobles serving the state, merchants dedicated to commerce, artisans pursuing crafts and peasants ploughing the land. Each estate enjoyed a system of schools delivering basic literacy, numeracy and the virtues appropriate to all subjects of the realm: self-discipline, compassion for others and respect for the law. At the heart of the ideal social order Shcherbatov placed the nobility, whom he imagined as officer-soldiers and state officials but also as elected representatives from each province. He projected legislative 'general meetings' of these representatives at the national level. The head of state was an emperor 'bound by the laws' and chastened by fear that, should he commit crimes in office, posterity would remember him ill. In On Corruption of Morals in Russia Shcherbatov used Muscovy as a yardstick for measuring contemporary Russia's moral dissolution. According to his account, the Muscovite grand prince had set the tone for society by personifying contempt for sensual pleasure (slastoliubie) - so that Muscovite court life was admirably austere. Peter the Great and his successors had abandoned virtue in favour ofsensualism, so that by Catherine's time high society had been corrupted. Shcherbatov feared that 'corruption of the heart' would lead to 'corruption of reason' - to disastrous wars and ill-considered domestic policies. Although Shcherbatov referred repeatedly to the laws of God in his plea for virtue, he was less a Christian than a classical moralist, attracted to an impersonal code of virtues. An advocate of abstract virtue, he was closer in spirit to Fonvizin and Novikov than to later-day conservatives.
In the French Revolution's shadow: conservatism, constitutionalism and republicanism
Between 1789 and the early 1830s a distinctively Russian variant of conservatism began to emerge. A pivotal figure in its formation was the belletrist and historian Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766-1826), a man called not only Russia's first conservative but its first political scientist as well. His most important political tract was Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii (Memorandum on Ancient and Modern Russia, 1811), a document intended to dissuade Alexander I from instituting a Russian version of the Code de Napoleon and from abolishing serfdom. In it Karamzin contended that 'Russia was founded by military victories and by unitary government; it perished from division of authority and was saved by wise autocracy.'[103] He claimed that autocracy had long ago earned popular support, that the people 'felt no regrets for the ancient veche or for the dignitaries who tried to restrain the sovereign's authority'. During Ivan IV's tyranny, he asserted, 'neither the boiars nor the people had presumed to plot against him', proof that 'Russian virtue did not even hesitate in choosingbetween death and resistance.'[104] In identifying obedience and virtue,
Karamzin attempted to delegitimise resistance to ungodly magistrates - a position that ignored the Muscovite moral consensus he purported to admire. In current circumstances, Karamzin advised Alexander to reject foreign-inspired reforms, particularly any division of sovereign authority between the tsar and State Council. He rejected serf emancipation on the ground that 'it is safer to enslave men than to give them freedom prematurely'.
Three other Aleksandrine conservatives were Aleksandr Semenovich Shishkov (1754-1841), Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka (1776-1847) and Aleksandr Skarlatovich Sturdza (I79I-I854).
Shishkov's Razsuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge rossiiskago iazyka (Comments on the Ancient and Modern Style of the Russian Language, 1803) contended that Russian peasant dialects were rooted in ancient Church Slavonic and that the proximity to the old liturgical language tended to preserve among the common people Orthodox customs. He decried the modern Russian language spoken by the nobility, for it had been corrupted by foreign, irreligious influences that fostered vice among the social elites. In his Razsuzhdenie o liubvi otechestva (Treatise on Love of Fatherland, 1811-12), he rooted Russian national pride in Orthodoxy, in love of Russia's language and literature, and in civic education conducted not by foreigners but by Russians. Shishkov's conservatism, therefore, rested on linguistic nationalism, Orthodoxy and xenophobia.
Glinka's journal Russkoi vestnik (Russian Messenger) saluted pre-Petrine Russia for honouring 'its ancestral customs, its fatherland, its tsar and God', and it called on contemporary Russians to do the same. His Zerkalo novago Parizha (Mirror of Modern Paris, 1809) attributed the French Revolution to declining morals in the French court and among the provincial noblesse. It ascribed French decadence to an absence of Christian self-discipline and to a consequent fatal indulgence in worldly passions. By reminding educated Russians of Russia's glorious past and of the dangers of irreligion, Glinka encouraged them to abandon foreign vices for Orthodox virtues.
Sturdza was an adherent of Orthodoxy who attributed Europe's two great ills, despotism and liberalism, to Catholicism and Protestantism, respectively, but who called for a consortium of Christian confessions led by the Orthodox to prevent the spread of revolution across Europe. His ideal state was a Christian polity in which a strong monarch received wise advice from an advisory body of vigilant officials - something like the harmonious balance that had allegedly existed between Orthodox sovereign and his Muscovite subjects, with the key difference that Sturdza opposed resistance, passive or active, to an ungodly magistrate.
The task of generalising conservative ideas into a single political platform fell to Sergei Semenovich Uvarov (1786-1855), whose 1832 memorandum on Moscow University contained the formula: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality. Uvarov was a paradoxical figure who accepted the Enlightenment notions of historical progress and representative government, but who also understood liberty, equality and brotherhood as gifts from God that would appear gradually through organic evolution rather than through revolutionary change. He considered government's purpose to be provision of a secure environment for educating the people in religious virtue and the fruits of civilisation. To spread the wisdom of the ages, he thought, was to collaborate with Providence; to embrace false philosophy was to rebel against God, to shake the foundations of society and temporarily to reverse the ordained direction of history.
Aside from provoking a conservative reaction in Russia, the French Revolution engendered plans for reform from above. In 1809, Mikhail Mikhailovich Speranskii (1772-1839) prepared a series of memoranda on political reform, the most important of which was a draft introduction to a projected Russian law code. Although he carefully avoided describing the draft introduction as a constitution, that was its unmistakable purpose. In it Speranskii argued for a division of government into three branches: executive, judicial and legislative. He called for a multi-level, elective system of representation in which volosts, districts, provinces and the empire as a whole would select delegates to exercise oversight over the administrators of their respective jurisdictions. At the imperial level a State Duma (elected assembly) would be empowered to discuss laws proposed by the State Council. In discussing the prerogatives of citizens, Speranskii limited political rights to property owners, but made civil rights common to all Russian subjects. He called serfdom a violation of human nature and asked for its gradual abolition.
In 1818 Alexander ordered Nikolai Nikolaevich Novosil'tsev (1761-1836) to prepare a constitutional charter for Russia to be based partly on the Polish experience. Novosil'tsev's proposal, which underwent three redactions by the tsar, was entitled 'La Charte constitutionelle de l'Empire russe' (1820). Like Speranskii's plan, it divided the functions of government among three branches, and it also projected a legislature incorporating elected delegates from the various regions of Russia. Novosil'tsev proclaimed that all citizens would receive equal protection under the law, and his plan forbade arbitrary arrests and administrative punishments. His plan neither extended civil rights to the peasantry nor raised the prospect of abolishing serfdom. Novosil'tsev's plan differed from Speranskii's in two other respects. First, it contemplated a federal arrangement dividing the empire into vice regencies (namestnichestva) each with its own viceroy and vice-regal council. Second, it declared Orthodoxy the 'dominant faith of the empire' but promised not to oppress members of other creeds except for the Jews. The federalist element, nod toward religious toleration and the Jewish exclusion clause were part of Novosil'tsev's effort to contend with the empire's diversity.
Between Napoleon's defeat and Nicholas I's accession to the throne in December 1825 there developed a movement among patriotic army officers and nobles seeking to create in Russia a new active citizenry and a representative political order. In its first stages the movement focused on the inculcation of civic virtue through education and philanthropy; in its later stages it concentrated on political revolution. In the so-called Northern Society the most interesting thinker was Nikita Mikhailovich Murav'ev (1796-1843), the author of a Proekt konstitutsii (Draft Constitution, 1821-22) envisaging Russia as a federal republic. Murav'ev claimed that 'autocratic government is ruinous', and that 'it is incompatible with our holy religion's commandments and with common sense'.[105] He called for a division of Russia into thirteen states (derzhavy), each of which would elect state governments by ballot of property holders. At the national level there would be three branches of government, including a bicameral assembly with the right to pass laws over the emperor's veto. Murav'ev's constitution was influenced by the American constitution but also by his admiration for the Old Russian veche (popular assembly). In a short essay he handed to Karamzin himself, Murav'ev accused the conservative historian of preaching political quietism in the face of political evil. Murav'ev's answer to autocracy's imperfections was 'eternal struggle' against errors and vice.
In the Southern Society the dominant figure was Colonel Pavel Ivanovich Pestel' (1793-1826), whose constitutional plan Russkaia Pravda (Russian Law, 1824) was the most radical platform to appear in Russia before 1861. A fervent republican and great admirer of the French Jacobins, Pestel' was also an exclu- sivist Christian who treated the New Testament as the natural law foundation of a just society. In Russian Law, he proposed the elimination of social privileges based on property, abolition of serfdom, destruction of the monarchy, and institution of a 'provisional' dictatorship that would prepare the country for a republic. He also demanded the prohibition of any acts by non-Christian faiths 'contrary to the spirit of Christian law'. Although he declared himself willing to tolerate Islam and Judaism under certain conditions, he exhorted the revolutionary regime to proselytise Muslims to convert to Christianity.
He also warned Jews that, if they did not surrender their 'privileged' status, the government would 'assist' them to establish their own state 'somewhere in Asia Minor'.[106] Pestel' has often been called a forerunner of later-day egalitarian republicans, but it could be said with equal justice that he anticipated twentieth-century ethnic cleansers.
The Westerniser-Slavophile Debate
After the turn of the century but especially between I826 and I855 Russian intellectuals focused on the historical, religious and philosophical problem of Russian national identity. The reasons behind this shift offocus are complicated: on the one hand, strict censorship made it more difficult openly to debate contemporary policy, for even a hint of opposition to the government could result in unpleasant consequences for its critics; on the other hand, the parlous condition ofthe Holy Alliance in the wake ofthe Greek war for independence in the 1820s lent urgency to the process of redefining Russia's place in the universal political order. Aside from these external factors, Russian thinkers struggled to assimilate recent trends in Western European scholarship, especially the renascence of religious traditionalism and the ascendancy of philosophical idealism. Yet the most crucial immediate stimulus for rethinking the Russian question was the challenge to Russia's pride by Petr Iakovlevich Chaadaev (1794-1856) in his eight Lettres philosophiques (written 1828-31).
Stripped to its essentials, Chaadaev's view was that Russia had never been a historically significant community. In the 'First Philosophical Letter' he famously described Russians as rootless 'orphans with one foot in the air'. He attributed this anomie partly to Kievan barbarism, to Tatar cruelty, to Muscovite severity. In the 'Second Philosophical Letter' he criticised the Orthodox Church for permitting the perpetuation of serfdom, an institution that fatally divided Russians into masters and bondsmen. His main point, however, was that Russia had cut itself off from the Roman Catholic Church, which, in his opinion, had constructed in the West a genuine multinational community based on a deeply traditional, but also rational value system. In Chaadaev's opinion, the Catholic Church could be credited with eliminating serfdom in the West and with developing law codes recognising human dignity, but its largest achievement was the construction of a vital civilisation from which individuals and nations derived a shared identity.
The most forceful response to Chaadaev came from the Slavophiles Alek- sei Stepanovich Khomiakov (1804-60), Ivan Vasil'evich Kireevskii (1806-56) and Konstantin Sergeevich Aksakov (1817-60). Khomiakov's initial reaction to Chaadaev in the article, 'O starom i novom' (On the Old and the New, 1838), was to acknowledge the dark spots of early Russian history but also to note that Old Russian life 'had not been alien to human truth'. He claimed: 'the laws of justice and mutual love had served as the foundation of its almost patriarchal social order'.[107] In his remarkable short book, Tserkov' odna (The Church Is One, written 1844-5), Khomiakov depicted the Eastern Church as the community of all Christians - past, present and future - joined by divine grace and immune from doctrinal error. Aside from right teaching, the Eastern Church was sustained by an inner spirit, 'the living spirit of Christ', which did not inhabit the 'schismatic' confessions of the West. He held the Roman Church guilty of the 'pride of reason and of illegitimate power', and he ridiculed Protestants for their rationalism andliberalism. Thus, Khomiakovblunted Chaadaev's charges against Russia by arguing that the real, historically significant community had been constituted not in the West but in the East.
Kireevskii's clearest response to Chaadaev was his article,'O kharaktere prosveshcheniia Evropy i o ego otnoshenii k prosveshcheniiu Rossii' (On the Character of Europe's Enlightenment and Its Relationship to Russia's Enlightenment, 1852). In it he asserted that European thought's main consequence was 'virtually universal dissatisfaction and dashed hope'.[108] Western rationalism had fostered selfish individualism, the desire for conquest, a society divided into political factions, classes at war with one another and revolutionary destruction. Meanwhile, Russian life had been guided by the Eastern Church's harmonious outlook, by a search for 'inner rectitude', by a sense of 'natural proportion, dignity and humility testifying to spiritual balance and to depth and integrity of moral conscience'. Kireevskii believed Russian society, based on selflessness, mutual aid and Christian justice, to be immune from social revolution.
Aksakov's two essays titled 'Osnovnye nachala russkoi istorii' (Fundamental Principles of Russian History, i860) argued that Russia was superior to the West. Whereas Western polities had been created by violent conquest, the Slavs had invited the Varangians to 'come and rule over us'; ever after the Russians had rightly regarded government as no better than a 'necessary evil'.
When Russia's rulers had behaved tyrannically, the Russian people had never rebelled against them, choosing instead to adhere silently to the inner truth of Christian humility. At times, Russia's rulers had received sage advice from the people gathered in assemblies of the land (zemskie sobory). Aksakov called on contemporary Russians to abandon inferior Western ways, to embrace again principles of Christian harmony that had animated Old Russia.
The Slavophiles' chief adversaries were the so-called Westernisers, a loose- knit network of intellectuals usually thought to include the literary critic Vissarion Grigor'evich Belinsky (1811-48), the historians Timofei Nikolaevich Granovskii (1813-55) and Sergei Mikhailovich Solov'ev (1820-79), the jurist Konstantin Dmitrievich Kavelin (1818-85), and the radical writers Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812-70) and Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1814-76). Although the Westernisers recognised the distinctiveness ofRussia's past, they still regarded Russia as a member of the European commonwealth, and therefore they insisted that its fate was bound to Europe.
Belinsky's article,'Rossiia do Petra Velikogo' (Russia before Peter the Great, 1842), argued that, among all existing cultures, only Europe had grown beyond the primitive stage of 'natural immediacy' into a fully conscious, 'world- historical civilisation'. The key to this startling development was the productive tension stemming from collisions among its various peoples and from its disparate cultural elements: for example, the clash between classical philosophy and Christianity had led to significant intellectual advances. Elsewhere the absence of dialectical tension had favoured stagnation rather than progress. Russia itself had escaped stasis only through the intervention of Peter the Great, 'a god who breathed a living soul into the colossal, sleeping body of ancient Russia'.[109] By so doing, Peter had bound Russia to European civilisation but had also made it possible for a distinctively Russian national identity (natsional'nost') to emerge. Although the article stopped short of making political demands, Belinsky's criticism of Muscovy as a site of enforced slavery, segregation of women, violence, legal corruption and popular ignorance made clear his hopes for Europeanised Russia. Later, in his famous 'Pis'mo k Gogoliu' ('Letter to Gogol', 1847), he decried religious obscurantism and seigneurial oppression of serfs. By depicting Jesus as a rebel against social injustice, he strongly implied that serfs had the moral right to throw off their oppressors.
Granovskii, Kavelin and Solov'ev followed Belinsky in admiring Peter the Great and in regarding the Petrine reforms as a moment of convergence between Russia and Europe. All predicted that, in the future, the enlightenment of the heretofore-benighted Russian people would enable individuals to join the educated classes and to enjoy the prospect of intellectual self- determination. Granovskii called this process ofeducation the 'decomposition of the masses' into free, conscious individuals. Kavelin's long essay, 'Vzgliad na iuridicheskii byt drevnei Rossii' (Analysis of Juridical Life in Ancient Russia, I847) argued that Russia had moved from a society based on varying degrees of blood ties (the tribe, clan or family) into a society organised on abstract legal principles (duty to the state, citizenship, status defined by law). The end of the process, in Russia as in Europe, would be the complete development of individuality (lichnost'). Kavelin implied that the abolition of serfdom and the establishment of representative government in Russia were inevitable. In his multi-volume Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen (History of Russia from Ancient Times, 1851-79) Solov'ev argued that Russia had evolved from a loose association of tribes into a modern state, based on shared religious and civic values and ruled by an enlightened government. Since Peter's reign, he contended, Russia had moved rapidly toward the same historical goals as Western Europeans. He did not subscribe to Belinskii's opinion that violence in the name of social progress was morally justified, rather he treated Russia's transformation as a case study in gradual evolution.
Herzen and Bakunin constituted the radical wing of the Westerniser movement. Herzen's essays, 'Diletantizm v nauke' (Dilettantism in Scholarship, 1843) and 'Pis'ma ob izuchenii prirody' (Letters on the Study of Nature, 1845) made the case that modern society stood on the verge of a new epoch in which the tyranny of abstractions that had characterised the Christian era would be displaced by a new philosophical synthesis between philosophical idealism and materialism: idealism would protect human beings against the demoralising impact of soulless science, and materialism would save individuals from slavery to monstrous dogmas. In his Pis'ma iz Frantsii i Italii (Letters from France and Italy, 1847-52) Herzen asserted that the new era could not begin until all Europe had been plunged into revolutionary destruction. He wrote: 'the contemporary political order along with its civilisation will perish; they will be liquidated'.[110] In the book O razvitii revoliutsionnykh idei v Rossii (On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia, 1851) he noted that Europeans, being wealthy, feared revolution, whereas Russians were 'freer of the past, because our own past is empty, poor and limited. Things like Muscovite tsarism or the Petersburg emperorship it is impossible to love.'[111] He argued that Russians, with their love for bold experiments, might well lead the world toward socialism.
Bakunin's article, 'Die Reaktion in Deutschland' (The Reaction in Germany, 1842), claimed that the age of unfreedom would soon come to an end when the 'eternal spirit' of history finally destroyed the old European order. He rejected traditional Christianity in the name of a new 'religion of humanity', which, by expressing justice and love through liberty, would fulfill the highest commandment of Christ. Bakunin's pamphlet, Vozzvanie k slavianam (Appeal to the Slavs, 1848) demanded the Central European Slavs seek their independence from the Austrian empire. To liberate themselves from the German yoke, the Slavs would have either to wring concessions from the erstwhile masters or annihilate them as oppressors. In 1848-9 he began to suggest that the Russian people themselves lived under a 'German' yoke in the form of the Romanov dynasty. He forecast in Russia a popular revolution patterned on the Pugachev rebellion that would sweep away the 'German monarchy'. In Ispoved' (Confession, 1851), written in prison to Tsar Nicholas I, Bakunin admitted that he hoped to provoke 'A Slav war, a war of free, united Slavs against the Russian Emperor.'[112] The simultaneous emancipation of Slavs everywhere in Europe would make possible a Slavic confederation consisting of Russia, Poland, South Slavs and West Slavs.
In retrospect, the Westernisers shared love of liberty, but they did not define it in the same way. The moderates associated liberty with representative government and with virtually unfettered self-determination in the private sphere, while the radicals thought it the absence of all oppression - a definition that logically entailed the disappearance of government itself.
National identity, representative government and the market
The Great Reforms so altered Russian social and civil life as to radically affect subsequent political debates. As the long-standing discussion over ancient and modern Russia soon lost much of its salience, other questions quickly became urgent: whether the edifice of the Great Reforms would be 'crowned' by the addition of a European-style representative government at the imperial level; whether Russia's economic transformation from serfdom to a market economy should be hastened by the abolition of the peasant commune and the creation of an urban working class on the English model; and whether in the political and economic realms the Russian ethnos should be privileged over non-Russian elements or whether the empire should be rebuilt on an egalitarian, multinational footing.
In the reform period Russian thinkers developed a range of political ideas that, at least superficially, resembled the right-to-left spectrum existing in continental Western European countries. Conservative thought built on Uvarov's formula - Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality - but, under the threat of social instability, became more aggressive in its attitude toward non-Russian nationalities. Russian liberalism was, generally speaking, closer in spirit to European social liberalism than to classical liberalism, so most Russian liberals identified with the left rather than the centre or right. On the left populists, anarchists and social democrats vied for ascendancy.
The leading conservative thinkers of the post-reform period were the jurist Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev (1827-1907), the journalist Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov (1818-87), the Pan-Slav theoretician Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii (1822-85), the diplomat Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont'ev (1831-91) and the novelist Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-81).
Among Russian officials the most assertive conservative was Pobedonostsev, who tutored the last two Romanov tsars and served as procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1905. He was a critic of Western representative government and the Enlightenment whose antidote to those evils was strong central government and an assertive established Church. In an anthology entitled Moskovskii sbornik (Moscow Anthology) (1896), he described Rousseau's notion ofpopular sovereignty as 'the falsest of political principles'.[113] In practice, he contended, parliamentary institutions constituted the 'triumph of egoism': they were bodies that promised to represent the will of the people but which actually did the bidding of a handful of wilful leaders and served as pliant instruments of political factions. Western public opinion was ruled not by reason but by lying journalists who manipulated an idle public characterised 'by base and despicable hankering for idle amusement'.[114]
Outside the government the dominant conservative of the early reform era was Katkov whose journals Russkii vestnik (Russian Courier), Sovremmennaia letopis' (Contemporary Chronicle) andMoskovskievedomosti (Moscow Courier) strongly influenced state policy. Katkov made his reputation as patriot during the Polish uprising of 1863-4, when he demanded the military suppression of the Poles on the ground that 'any retreat . . . would be a death certificate for the Russian people'.[115] He described the political monopoly of Russians within the empire 'not as coercion . . . but a law of life and logic'.[116] In 1867, he called for the introduction of Russian language into schools in Estonia and for the elimination of traditional Baltic German privileges in the area - a harbinger of the Russification policies pursued by Alexander III after 1881. In foreign policy Katkov was a Realpolitiker, who sometimes raised the banner of Pan-Slavism against Germany and Austria, but who always made it clear that Russian interests took priority over those of other Slavic peoples.
In Rossiia i Evropa (Russia and Europe, 1869) Danilevskii elaborated a theory ofhistorical types claiming that ten distinctive civilisations had appeared in the past. He considered the European or 'Germano-Romanic' civilisation as the latest to reach world dominance, but he regarded the industrial stage into which that civilisation had evolved as proof of its decline. He predicted that Slavdom would constitute the eleventh great civilisation in world history. The Slavic peoples would be brought together by Russia, through the conquest of Istanbul and the destruction of Austro-German power in Europe. To achieve these objectives, Russians would have to subordinate themselves to the centralised state, for only by the merciless execution of the state's divine mission would the past bloodshed of Russian history be redeemed.
In a remarkable book, Vizantizm i slavianstvo (Byzantinism and Slavdom, 1873), Leont'ev defined the earmarks of Byzantinism as: autocracy, Orthodoxy, a disinclination to overvalue the individual, an inclination to disparage the ideal of earthly happiness, rejection of the notion that human beings can achieve moral perfection on earth, and rejection of the hope that the universal welfare of all peoples can be attained. He argued that the historic vitality of Russia was directly related to Russians' loyalty to autocracy, faith in Orthodoxy, and acceptance of earthly inequality - all 'Byzantine' traits. He celebrated Peter the Great and Catherine the Great precisely because their reforms increased social inequality, thereby making possible the flowering of a creative, 'aristocratic' culture among the nobility. He warned that modern-day Russians faced a crucial choice: either to maintain their distinctive, hierarchically based national culture; or to 'subordinate themselves to Europe in the pursuit of [material] progress'. To follow the second option would be disastrous, for it would risk Russia's survival for the false religion of human felicity on earth. Although Leont'ev recognised the tribal connections between Russians and other Slavs, he did not think common blood or similarity of languages to be adequate foundations for Slavic political unity. In view of his scepticism toward the other Slavs, Leont'ev cannot be regarded as a Pan-Slav of the Danilevskii type.
Dostoevsky's conservatism was predicated on opposition to Western liberalism and socialism, on hostility to individualism and capitalism, on rejection of Catholicism and religious authoritarianism in any form, on opposition to movements inimical to Russia - nihilism, Polish nationalism, Jewish separatism and feminist radicalism. In his fiction he balanced his many antipathies by applauding the religiosity of common Russian people, the wisdom of saintly monastic elders and the fabled capacity of Russians from every social stratum to embrace suffering. Although Dostoevsky the novelist was self-evidently an anti-nihilist, a conservative nationalist, a partisan of Orthodoxy and the Great Russian ethnos, his fictional politics were less programmatic than the positions taken by his publishers, Katkov and the gentry reactionary Prince Vladimir Petrovich Meshcherskii (1839-1914). However, Dostoevsky's journalistic writing, particularly his Dnevnik pisatelia (Diary of a Writer, 1873-81), was lamentably clear. In March 1877, for example, he predicted: 'Sooner or later Constantinople will be ours.'[117] That same month, in a series of articles on the Jewish question, he accused the Jews of material greed, of hostility toward Russians, of constituting themselves a 'state within a state'. Later, in his June 1880 speech at the Pushkin monument in Moscow, he issued a call for 'universal human brotherhood' based on Russians' disposition to 'bring about universal unity with all tribes of the great Aryan race'.[118] Although his auditors received the speech well, sober readers found his messianic nationalism and religious exclusivism disturbing.
Among Russian liberals the four most interesting thinkers were the classical liberal Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin (1828-1904), the philosopher Vladimir Sergeevich Solov'ev (1853-1900), the social liberal Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov (i859-i943) and the right liberal Petr Berngardovich Struve (i870-i944).
Chicherin began his intellectual career as a moderate Westerniser. In his earliest political writing, the article 'Sovremmennye zadachi russkoi zhizni' (Contemporary Tasks of Russian Life, 1856), he championed the abolition of serfdom and the introduction of civil liberties (freedoms of conscience, of speech andpress, academic freedom, publicjudicialproceedings, publicity of all governmental activities) in Russia. In his book, O narodnompredstavitel'stve (On Popular Representation, 1866), however, he explained why he thought Russia was yet unprepared for constitutional government. Pointing to the practical flaws of representative institutions and the falsity of Rousseau's theory of popular sovereignty, he argued that representative governments are workable only in 'healthy' societies with some experience of civil liberties, and only when the voting franchise is limited to educated property owners. This sharp distinction between civil and political liberties was a hallmark of Chicherin's thinking.
In the late 1870s Chicherin undertook a systematic study of German socialism. His trenchant critique of Marx's Das Kapital was a cardinal contribution to Russian social thought, a rare defence of free markets against their increasingly vociferous enemies. His book, Sobstvennost' i gosudarstvo (Property and the State, 1882-3), was nineteenth-century Russia's most erudite attempt to identify entrepreneurial freedom as an essential civil liberty. In the book Chicherin pointed to the incommensurability of individual liberty with social equality. He warned contemporaries against the danger of 'a new monster', - namely, intrusive society, which threatened to 'swallow both the state and the private sphere'.[119] His book, Filosofiia prava (Philosophy of Law, 1900), criticised legal theories that, in the name of morality or utility, would take away individual rights for some appealing social end. Chicherin's philosophical legacy was his conception of individual freedom from constraint by others, in so far as that liberty is compatible with others' freedom, as the sole and original right that belongs to every human being by virtue of his or her humanity. His political legacy can be found in the anonymous pamphlet, Rossiia nakanune dvadtsatogo stoletiia (Russia on the Eve of the Twentieth Century, 1900), in which he predicted the imminent end of Russian absolutism and demanded the addition of elected delegates to the imperial State Council. Miliukov called Chicherin's proposal 'the minimum demand of Russian liberalism'.
Solov'evbegan his intellectual life as a religious philosopher in the Slavophile tradition, yet he made two signal contributions to liberalism. First, in his remarkable Natsional'nyi vopros v Rossii (National Question in Russia, 188391), he made the case for setting nationality policy on a genuinely Christian foundation. He demanded that state officials take seriously the moral duties of Russia toward non-Russian groups by making a voluntary act of 'national self-denial' -that is, by renouncing the dangerous principle of Russian exclusivity and dominance over others. This self-renunciation would require Russians not only to tolerate non-Orthodox peoples, but to build a community in which they were equal members. His irenic interpretation of Christianity provided a theoretical basis for pluralism and equality among the empire's peoples. Second, he insisted that Christianity requires recognition of the individual's right to a dignified material existence. In his system of ethics, Opravdanie dobra (Justification of the Good, 1897), he argued against classical liberalism that private property must never be assigned an absolute ethical value, that the exploitation of nature must be limited by 'love of nature for its own sake', and that the freedom ofeconomic consumption must be subordinated to ethically defensible principles.
A distinguished historian and thoroughgoing positivist who accepted Auguste Comte's three-stage theory of human social development, Miliukov anticipated that the spread of science in Russia would mean the liberation of its people from religious prejudice and exclusive nationalism. His three-volume Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul'tury (Essays on the History of Russian Culture, 1896-1900) argued that critical social consciousness was gradually displacing national consciousness as the dominant force in Russia. The book implied that this historical evolution was creating the basis for popular representative government in the empire. Miliukov's political ideal was progressive social legislation and constitutional monarchy, wherein the monarch's authority would be balanced by an elected legislature. Under Russian conditions, he argued, that ideal might be attained through the practical co-operation of socialists and liberals. Repeatedly during the revolutionary crisis from 1904-7 he countenanced from the left 'direct action', including terrorism, for the sake of undermining the government. To counter Great Russian nationalism, he recommended the redrawing of internal administrative jurisdictions along ethnic borders, but he stopped short of advocating a federal solution to ethnic disputes. As his Istoriia vtoroi russkoi revoliutsii (History of the Second Russian Revolution, 1918-21) made clear, Miliukov lived to regret his alliance with the revolutionary left and also his attempts to encourage nationalist consciousness among minority peoples.
Not all Russian liberals in the duma period followed Miliukov's 'new liberalism' or his policy of'no enemies to the left'. In the anti-revolutionary polemic Vekhi (Signposts, 1909), Struve posited that the revolutionary gospel had led in practice to 'licentiousness and demoralisation'. Once a social democrat, Struve joined the right wing of the Constitutional Democratic party, declaring himself a partisan of Chicherin's theory of individual rights. In internal politics he defended the equitable treatment of national minorities but under the proviso that Great Russians remain the empire's dominant ethnos. In foreign policy he supported expansion of Russian influence in the Balkans, for the empire's destiny as a great power was in the south. The irony of a Russian liberal assuming a 'Pan-Slav' perspective on nationality and foreign policy could not be more striking. Struve's grand design was to reconcile Russian liberalism to a strong centralised state and to an assertive international policy - that is, to pursue a policy of national liberalism not unlike that adopted by the German national liberals in the Bismarck period.
Among Russian socialists there were three main currents of political thinking: populism, built on hostility toward capitalism, on the idealisation of the urban guild (artel') and of the peasant land commune (obshchina or mir); anarchism, focused on the abolition of state power; and social democracy, oriented toward the destruction of market relations and the eventual elimination of bourgeois democracy.
Among the populists the leading figures were the 'enlightener' (prosveti- tel') or 'nihilist' Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828-89), and the 'classical populists' Petr Lavrovich Lavrov (1823-1900), Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovsii (1842-1904) and Petr Nikitich Tkachev (1844-86).
Chernyshevsky rejected traditional Christianity in the name of the new 'religion of humanity' that would establish earthly justice based on material equality and gender equity. His ethical system of 'rational egoism' judged the virtue of human actions according to the benefits they would bring not to the individual but to the majority of society. His novel, Chto delat'? (What Is to Be Done?, 1863), described the heroism of young people who, being rational egoists, emancipate themselves from slavery to social conventions. Superficially, the story was a narrative of consciousness-raising and women's liberation, but its meta-narrative posited a mysterious revolutionary elite whose sudden disappearances, commitments to outrageous actions (faked suicides, approval of euthanasia, vigilante justice) and deliberately obscure leadership hierarchy were meant to teach readers the ethics and modus operandi of revolutionary conspiracy. This elitism captured the imaginations of progressive readers, including the young Lenin, who confessed that the book 'ploughed a deep furrow' in him.
Lavrov's essay 'Ocherki teorii lichnosti' (Outlines of a Theory of Personality, 1859), contended that the most important aspect of human consciousness is free will, that critically thinking individuals express free will in society by seeking justice for all, and that social justice requires the abolition of property as an affront to human dignity. This ethical perspective constituted the skeleton of Lavrov's book, Istoricheskie pis'ma (Historical Letters, 1868-9), which identified the goal of history as 'the physical, intellectual, and moral development of the individual, and the incorporation of truth and justice in social institutions'.[120] Lavrov regretted that no existing society had fulfilled this formula, for everywhere critically thinking individuals were in a small minority, able to effect social change only on the margins. Even the existence of these few justice seekers had cost humanity dearly: 'Progress for a small minority was purchased at the price of enslaving the majority, depriving it of the chance to acquire the same bodily and mental skills which constituted the dignity of the representatives of civilization.'[121] Lavrov's argument that, in Russia, critically thinking individuals had a moral responsibility to the suffering masses helped mobilise 'repentant nobles' of the 1870s to join the socialist movement.
Mikhailovskii attacked Western industry for its dependence on specialised labour, which inhibited workers from developing all sides of their personality. In contrast, he noted, Russian communal peasants performed a variety of agricultural tasks, from sowing and reaping to constructing houses, in the process exercising their minds as well as bodies. Building on that simple juxtaposition, his article 'Chto takoe progress?' (What Is Progress?, 1869), elaborated his famous definition: 'Progress is the gradual approach to the integral individual, the fullest possible and most diversified division of labour among an individual's organs and the least possible division of labour among individuals.'[122] The article rejected Herbert Spencer's view that there is a positive correlation between modern technological sophistication and individual happiness, and it sided with Marx's moral critique of industrial specialisation and worker alienation.
The goal of annihilating individualism was at the centre of Tkachev's political agenda. His article 'Chto takoe partiia progressa?' (What Is the Party of Progress?, 1870), defined progress as 'the fullest possible equality of individuals' - that is, 'organic physiological equality stemming from the same education and from identical conditions of life'.[123] Because individual needs will vary and most societies are too impoverished to satisfy those needs, Tkachev advocated strict limitation ofindividual demands on material resources. In his socialist collective, there would be no adjustments in distribution of goods to accommodate differences in age, gender, personality or occupation. In his journal Nabat (The Tocsin, 1875) Tkachev demanded that Russian radicals band together to launch an immediate revolution. Peasants would be led by determined conspirators, who would destroy 'the immediate enemies of the revolution', seize state power, then 'lay the basis for a new rational social life'. After the revolution Tkachev imagined a generation-long dictatorship that would construct anew 'all our economic, juridical, social, private, family relations, all our viewpoints and understandings, our ideals and our morality'.[124]
The populists hoped to avoid or curtail capitalist development in Russia. In 1859 Chernyshevsky raised the prospect that Russia, by studying the experience of more advanced Western societies, might be able to skip 'intermediate phases of development' between the communal order and socialism. He pleaded with Russians: 'Let us not dare attack the common use ofthe land.'[125]Tkachev's outlook on the question derived from reading Marx's Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, from which he concluded that a socialist revolution could be made to occur in Russia either after capitalism had fully developed or before it had developed at all. In 1874, in his 'Otkrytoe pis'mo F. Engel'su' (Open Letter to F. Engels), he argued that the Russian bourgeoisie and capitalist relations were so weak that they could be easily eradicated. In 1877 Mikhailovskii rejected Marxist determinism on the grounds that it would compel Russians to accept 'the maiming of women and children' entailed by capitalism; it was morally preferable, he thought, to resist 'inevitable' capitalism in the hope that socialism could be built on the foundation of the commune.
The three principal anarchist thinkers were Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, Petr Kropotkin (1842-1921) and Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1911).
Bakunin's major anarchist writings were Federalisme, socialisme et anti- theologisme (1868), L'Empire knouto-germanique et la revolution sociale (1870-1) and Etatisme et anarchie (1873). In the first text Bakunin attacked religion as a prop ofthe existing political order, rejected centralised government as inimical to liberty and defended a 'bottom-up' federalist organisation of society. Soon after writing it, he fell into rivalry with Marx over the control of the International Working Men's Association. In September 1868 Bakunin pronounced communism 'the negation of liberty . . . because communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the state all the forces in society'.[126]
In his view, the Marxian principle 'from each according to his work, to each according to his need' would require an external mechanism of surveillance and distribution - a state apparatus - that would destroy liberty. In the name of liberating human beings from material want and establishing scientific socialism, Marx would set up a government that 'cannot fail to be impotent, ridiculous, inhuman, cruel, oppressive, exploiting, maleficent'.
In The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution Bakunin adopted Feuerbach's theory of God as a psychic projection of human virtues whose 'existence' impoverishes and enslaves human beings. According to Bakunin, the courage to dissent from God, to embrace materialism and therefore liberty, comes to human beings from our two highest faculties: the ability to think and the desire to rebel. He took the original rebel, Satan, as his literary inspiration. How did Bakunin expect 'Satanic' materialists to provoke a revolution in Christian Russia? Following Belinsky, he contended that the religiosity of Russian peasants was superficial, and he thought it could give way at any moment to the peasants' instinctive rebelliousness. The anarchists' task was to arouse within the peasantry the slumbering spirit of outlawry. He insisted that anarchists not impose revolution on the masses but provoke it, seeing in this policy a major difference with Marx.
Kropotkin sought a theoretical foundation for 'scientific anarchism'. In the revolutionary manifesto, Dolzhny-li my zaniatsia rassmotreniem ideala budushchego stroia? (Should We Devote Ourselves To Analysing the Ideal of the Future Order?, 1873), and in his major books La Conquete du pain (1892) and Mutual Aid (1904), he elaborated that theory. In the manifesto Kropotkin argued that social equality cannot be achieved if the means of production remain in private hands, nor can equality be reached if property falls under state control, for that would mean the tyranny of some self-appointed body over workers. The state apparatus would have to be destroyed and the power decentralised in local federations, each based on a network of communes and guilds. In The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin argued against Marx that a just society must not be based on the principle, 'from each according to his work, to each according to his needs'. Taking the product of workers' labour would require the establishment of a supervisory body to monitor labour and confiscate the goods produced by it, to the detriment of liberty. In place of such a bureaucratic approach, Kropotkin projected a voluntary arrangement whereby workers would contribute five hours per day to satisfy collective needs, but would retain the right to do additional labour to produce luxury goods for themselves. Thus, his mature social philosophy entailed social ownership of the means of production, but not the elimination of all private property.
In Mutual Aid Kropotkin criticised those followers of Charles Darwin who saw competition as the motor of evolution. According to Kropotkin, animal species, including human beings, are less likely to survive through pitiless competition than through mutual aid. Early societies had been based on cooperation in the clan, commune, guild and free city, but unfortunately the rise of the state had destroyed those free institutions. Kropotkin now expected the peoples of Europe to overthrow centralised government, thus liberating the submerged principle of mutual aid.
The immediate cause of Tolstoy's conversion to anarchism was the decision, following his spiritual crisis from 1876 to 1878, to rethink his religious principles. In Ispoved' (Confession, 1879) he described his painful realisation that the simple Christian faith of the peasantry constituted a more viable world-view than the selfish rationalism to which he and his privileged peers had adhered. In Vchem moia vera? (What I Believe), Tolstoy set out his own interpretation of Christianity, based on reading the evangelist Matthew's account ofthe Sermon on the Mount. He reduced Jesus's message to five commands: 'Do not be angry, do not commit adultery, do not swear oaths or judge your neighbors, do not resist evil by evil, and do not have enemies.' He interpreted the injunction against oaths as a justification for refusing to pledge loyalty to the tsar and state. He saw in the command to 'resist not evil' an ethical prohibition against state violence of any kind. The order not to have enemies he understood as a directive not to divide peoples into states. His book Tsarstvo Bozhie vnutri vas (The Kingdom of God Is Within You, 1893) rejected the term 'Christian state' as a contradiction, classified universal history as a 'pagan epoch' and spoke of human progress as 'the conscious assimilation of the Christian theory [of nonviolence]'.[127] He described the modern conscript army as a barbarous institution, and he held up modern patriotism as a vicious lie. His anarchism started with the ethical individual refusing to acknowledge the right to shed blood or use force.
Among social democrats the key political thinkers were the classical Marxist and MenshevikGeorgii Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918), the Legal Marxist Petr Berngardovich Struve (1870-1944), the internationalist Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (Trotsky) (1879-1940), the Bolshevik theoretician Vladimir Il'ich Ulianov (Lenin) (1870-1924) and the futurologist Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinovskii (Bogdanov) (1873-1928).
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