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INTRODUCTION: Natasha’s Dance Chapter 1. European Russia 1.
Founding of St. Petersburg 7. Impact of
the French Revolution Chapter 2: Children of 1812
1. The Decembrists:
Birth of the Intelligentsia/ Liberal Russian Nationalism Chapter 3. Moscow! Moscow! Chapter 4. The Peasant Marriage
1. the ‘going to the people’ movement Chapter 5. Chapter 5. In Search of the Russian Soul
1. 19th c.
religious revivalism: the Old Believers Chapter 6. Descendants of Genghis Kahn Chapter 7. Russia Through a Soviet Lens 1. Akhmatova at
Fountain House Chapter 1. European Russia (full text) 1. Founding
of St. Petersburg 7. Impact of the French Revolution
Chapter 1. European Russia (notes) 1.
Founding of St. Petersburg
INTRODUCTION:
Natasha’s Dance In Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Book Seven, Chapter 7): After a day’s hunting in the woods, Natasha Rostov
and her brother Nikolai are invited by their ‘Uncle’ (as Natasha calls him)
to his simple wooden cabin where his ‘peasant bride’ Anisya keeps house. a cultural history: impressions of the national consciousness, which mingle with politics and ideology, social customs and beliefs, folklore and religion, habits and conventions, and all the other mental bric-a-brac that constitute a culture and a way of life. The search for truth:
Russia's artistic energy was almost wholly
given to the quest to grasp the idea of its national identiy. For the past two hundred years the arts in Russia
have served as an arena for political, philosophical and religious debate in
the absence of a parliament or a free press. The great Russian novels are not
novels in the European sense: instead they are huge poetic structures for
symbolic contemplation, not unlike icons, laboratories in which to test
ideas. The golden age of Russian culture from Pushkin to
Pasternak: an complex interaction between two
entirely different worlds: the European culture of the upper classes and the
Russian culture of the peasantry. The war of 1812 was the first moment when
the two moved together in a national formation. Stirred by the patriotic
spirit of the serfs, the aristocracy of Natasha’s generation began to break
free from the foreign conventions of their society and search for a sense of
nationhood based on ‘Russian’ principles'. However, Russia was too complex, too socially
divided, too politically diverse, too ill-defined geographically, and perhaps
too big, for a single culture to be passed off as the national heritage.
There was no ‘authentic’ Russian peasant dance. Peasant dances originated in
the towns and before then on the Asiatic steppe. Natasha’s shawl is Persian.
The balalaika has a Central Asian origin: Kazakh music. The Russian
peasant dance tradition was itself derived from oriental forms. It is rather my intention to rejoice in the sheer diversity of Russia’s cultural forms. Myths about Russia typify the competing
ideologies:
These myths were more than just ‘constructions’ of
a national identity. They all played a crucial role in shaping the ideas and
allegiances of Russia’s politics. In the Western imagination these cultural forms
have all too often been perceived as ‘authentically Russian’: all bast
shoes and homespun coats and beards, cabbage soup and kvas, folk-like
wooden houses and brightly coloured churches with onion domes: it is the myth
of exotic Russia. It is an image first exported by the Ballets Russes at the
dawn of the 20th c. We expect the Russians to be ‘Russian’ - their art
easily distinguished by its use of folk motifs, by onion domes, the sound of
bells, and full of ‘Russian soul’. If there is one myth which needs to be
dispelled, it is this view of Russia as exotic and elsewhere. They were
European as well. Karamzin, Pushkin, Glinka, Gogol, Tolstoy,
Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Repin, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov,
Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Chagall and Kandinsky,
Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Nabokov, Pasternak, Meyerhold and Eisenstein. Russians engage in two very different modes of
personal behaviour. In the salons and the ballrooms of St Petersburg,
at court or in the theatre, they were very ‘comme il faut’ (accepted; proper), but on
another and perhaps unconscious plane and in the less formal spheres of
private life, native Russian habits of behaviour prevailed: relaxation:
becoming ‘more oneself'. The simple recreations of the country house or dacha
- hunting in the woods, visiting the bath house or what Nabokov called the
‘very Russian sport of hodit’ po gribi (looking for mushrooms)’ - were
more than the retrieval of a rural idyll: they were an expression of one’s
Russianness. 1.
Founding of St. Petersburg 7. Impact of the French Revolution Amid the bleak and barren marshlands where the
wide and bending Neva river runs into the Baltic sea, Peter the Great
cut with his bayonet two strips of peat and arranged them in a cross on the
marshy ground. Then Peter said: ‘Here shall be a town.’ The year was
1703. The site was not a place fit for human habitation:
wolves and bears were its only
residents. The winds often caused the rivers to rise above the land. When
Peter’s soldiers dug into the ground, they found water a metre or so below. Yet, in four months of furious activity, in which
at least half the workforce died, 20,000 conscripts built the Peter and Paul
Fortress, an outpost of Russian power in the Great Northern war against the
Swedes. The estuary became an energetic building site. A quarter of a
million serfs and soldiers from as far afield as the Caucasus and Siberia
worked around the clock to clear forests, dig canals, lay down roads and
erect palaces. They used primitive hand tools: axes, simple carts with tiny
birch-log wheels. New industries sprang up to manufacture brick, glass,
mica and tarpaulin. It was a city built on
water with imported stone. (4) And so St. Petersburg emerged miraculously from
the sea: a capital without foundations in the soil: the magic city of a
Russian fairy tale, an unreal city, a supernatural realm of fantasies and
ghosts, an alien kingdom of the apocalypse. (6) When Peter declared, ‘Here shall be a town’, his
words echoed the divine command, ‘Let there be light.’ He was Titan, Neptune
and Mars rolled into one. The city was built as a work of art. (5) Peter was attracted by the broad, fast-flowing
river Neva and the open sky as a backdrop for his tableau. Amsterdam (which
he had visited) and Venice (which he only knew from books and paintings) were
early inspirations for the layout of the palace-lined canals and embankments. From his European travels in the 1690s Peter had brought
back architects and engineers, craftsmen and artists, furniture designers and
landscape gardeners. No expense was spared for Peter’s ‘paradise’.
By 1754, work had begun on the third version of the Tsar's home: The Winter Palace, and a vogue for mansion buillding among the super rich nobility was well underway. The achievement of transporting such
quantities of stone has been surpassed only by the building of the pyramids.
The huge granite rock for the pedestal of Falconet’s equestrian statue of
Peter the Great was twelve metres high and nearly thirty metres in
circumference. Weighing in at some 660,000 kilograms, it took a thousand men
over eighteen months to move it, first by a series of pulleys and then on a
specially constructed barge, the thirteen kilometres from the forest clearing
where it had been found to the capital. Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman turned
the inert monument into an emblem of Russia’s destiny. The job required an
army of several thousand men with 200-horse sleigh teams. By the nineteenth century, the view of Petersburg
as an artificial copy of the Western style had become commonplace. Even so,
the city has a unique artistic harmony. Architects in
Amsterdam and Rome were cramped for room in which to slot their buildings.
But in Petersburg they were able to expand their classical ideals: mansions
low and wide used their reflections in the rivers. The city fans out in three radials from the golden
spire of the Admiralty which thus became the
symbolic and topographical centre of the city.
Petersburg was a vast, almost Utopian, project of cultural engineering to reconstruct the Russian as a European man. It was a negation of ‘medieval’ (seventeenth-century) Muscovy. Peter wished to leave behind the ‘dark’ and ‘backward’ customs of the Russian past in Moscow and to enter, as a European Russian, the modern Western world of progress and enlightenment. Muscovy resembled the medieval culture of central Europe, it upheld the spiritual traditions of the Eastern Church which went back to Byzantium. But historically and culturally it remained isolated from Europe.
The icon was the focal point of Muscovy’s
religious way of life. It was an artefact of daily ritual as much as it was a
creative work of art. (See late seventeenth century Russian icon-painters
such as Simon Ushakov.) Visitors from Europe were invariably shocked by
the primitive condition of Russia’s visual arts. ‘Flat and ugly’, 'gilde
gingerbread’. Tsar Alexei, who reigned from 1645 to 1676, is the first
Russian ruler for whom we have anything remotely resembling a reliable
likeness. Instrumental music (as opposed to sacred singing)
was regarded as a sin although Russians had a rich folk tradition of
minstrels and musicians, or skomorokhi (featured by Stravinsky in Petrushka),
who wandered through the villages with tambourines and gusli (a
type of zither). Literature as well was held back by the
omnipresent Church.: no printed news sheets or journals, no printed plays or
poetry, but a lively industry of folk tales and verse published in the form
of illustrated prints (lubki) Peter hated Muscovy. He despised its archaic
culture and parochialism, its superstitious fear and resentment of the West.
As a young man, Peter spent a great deal of his time in the special ‘German’
suburb where, under pressure from the Church, Moscow’s foreigners were forced
to live. He wore Western clothes and shaved his beard. He ate meat during Lent.
The nineteenth-century image of the Imperial city
was defined by the notion of its regimentation. Everything in the new capital
was intended to compel the Russians to adopt a more European way of life.
Even so, the Nevsky, that most European of his avenues,
was undone by a ‘Russian’ crookedness: a distinct kink. 2. ‘Fountain
House’ and the Sheremetev family The Sheremetev palace on the Fontanka
river The poet Anna Akhmatova, who
lived there, on and off, in an annexe flat from 1926 to 1952 I don’t have
special claims The history of the palace is a
microcosm of the Petrine plan to set down Western culture on Russian soil. The Sheremetev
family was a
hugely wealthy clan with close connections to the court. Russia did not have a
gentry in the Western sense - an independent class of landowners that
could act as a counterbalance to the power of the Tsar. From the sixteenth
century the state had swept away the quasi-feudal rights of the local princes
and turned all nobles (dvoriane) into servants of the court (dvor). Muscovy was
conceived as a patrimonial state, owned by the Tsar as his personal
fiefdom, and the noble was legally defined as the Tsar’s ‘slave’. For
his services the nobleman was given land and serfs, but not as
outright or allodial property, as in the West, and only on condition that he
served the Tsar. Before the eighteenth century Russia
had no grand noble palaces. Most of the Tsar’s servitors lived
in wooden houses, not much bigger than peasant huts, few Russian
noblemen had feather beds; during winter they slept on flat-topped
stoves… [lying] with their servants… the chickens and
the pigs’. Olearius considered the Russian nobility ‘among the barbarians… [with] crude opinions about the elevated natural sciences and arts.' This backwardness was in part the result of the Mongol occupation of Russia from about 1230 to the middle of the fifteenth century. For over three hundred years, the period of the Renaissance in the West, Russia was cut off from European civilization. The majority of the nobility could not read and many of them could not even add up simple sums; the nobleman mistrusted new or foreign ways In his Western reforms, Peter laid the basis of the modern
absolutist (European) state Rank also carried considerable
material privileges.
Horses at post stations were allocated strictly according to the
status of the travellers. At banquets food Sheremetev remained in office for six
consecutive reigns. Allies: Prince Trubetskoi, Count
Nikitza Panin. When Boris Sheremetev died in 1719,
the Tsar told his widow that he would be ‘like a father’ to his children. To succeed in this court-centred
culture the nobleman required a fabulous lifestyle. They needed an opulent palace with art and
furniture, lavish balls and banquets in the European style. A peculiar
weakness of the Russian aristocracy: enormous household staffs. Foreigners
were always struck by the large number of servants in Russian palaces. Even middling gentry households in the
provinces would retain large staffs beyond their means. Entertaining was a costly business,
too: lavish entertainments, with concerts, operas, fireworks and balls for
several thousand guests. the Russian noble custom of
opening one’s doors at mealtimes. Nearly everything in the Sheremetev
household was imported from Europe. Clothes
were another source of huge extravagance. By the middle of
the nineteenth century they had amassed debts of several million roubles. The Italian architect
Bartolomeo Rastrelli created the synthesis of the Italian and Russian baroque styles
which is so characteristic of St Petersburg; distinguished from its European
counterparts by the vastness of its scale, the exuberance of its forms and
the boldness of its colours. On the upper floor was a grand reception hall,
used for balls and concerts, with a parquet floor and a high painted ceiling,
lined on one side by full-length windows that looked on to the water and, on
the other, by enormous mirrors with gold-leaf candelabras whose wondrous
effect was to flood the room with extraordinary light. The house was a
typical collection of European sculpture, bas-relief, furniture and decor,
reflecting a taste for expensive luxury. extensive gardens The Kuskovo estate,
to the south of Moscow, had an open amphitheatre and a larger inside
theatre. Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev was the first great
impresario of the Russian theatre. He took the
Sheremetev opera to its highest levels, had the theatre rebuilt at Ostankino,
on the western outskirts of Moscow, after
the auditorium at Kuskovo burnt down in 1789: it had a specially
designed contraption that could transform the theatre into a ballroom by
covering the parterre with a floor.
The Argunov family had a vital role in the development of the Russian arts.
The
position of the creative serf was complicated and ambiguous. There were
artists who were greatly valued and rewarded by their lords. Prized
chefs and singers were the highest paid in the Sheremetev world. They
lived in better housing, received better food. Yet, like any serf, they
were the property of their master and they could be punished just like
any other serf. Ivan
Argunov was responsible for supervising the frequent changes to the
palace’s interior design, for organizing masquerades and costume balls,
for painting sets for theatrical productions, for firework displays, as
well as countless menial household tasks. His own artistic projects
were constantly abandoned so that he could perform some minor duty on
his master’s summons and, if he failed in this, the count would have
him fined or even flogged. Ivan died a serf. But his children would be
freed. Praskovya was born to a family of serfs on the Sheremetev estate at Yukhotsk in Yaroslav province. At
an early age Praskovya was already noted for her beauty and her voice,
and Pyotr Sheremetev had her trained for the opera. In 1779, at the age
of eleven, she first appeared on stage as the servant girl in the
Russian premiere of Andre Gretry’s comic opera L’Amitie a l’epreuve and, within a year, she had been given her first leading role as Belinda in Antonio Sacchini’s La Colonie. From that point on she nearly always sang the leading female role. The
story of Praskovya’s romance with the count could have come straight
out of a comic opera. The eighteenth-century stage was filled with
servant girls who had fallen for young and dashing noblemen. Praskovya
herself had sung the part of the young serf girl in Anyuta, a hugely popular opera in which the humble background of the charming heroine prevents her from marrying the prince. In real life, Nikolai eventually he fell in love with her. The young count was fond of hunting and of chasing girls, and until his father died in 1788, when he took up the running of the family estates, Nikolai Petrovich spent most of his time in these sensual pursuits. The young squire often claimed his ‘rights’ over the serf girls. When he fell for Praskovya, he declared, like the hero of a comic opera, "You weren’t born for this! Today you are a peasant but tomorrow you will become a lady!" It
is not exactly clear when the count and Praskovya became de facto ‘man
and wife’. To begin with, she was only one of several divas given
special treatment by her master, part of his prized harem: ‘The
Emerald’ (Kovaleva), ‘The Garnet’ (Shlykova) and ‘The Pearl’
(Praskovya). Nikolai showered these ‘girls of my house’with
expensive gifts and bonuses. Serf
harems were extremely fashionable in the eighteenth and the early
nineteenth centuries. Among Russian noblemen the possession of a large
harem was ironically seen as a mark of European manners and
civilization. Sergei Aksakov, in his Family Chronicle
(1856), tells the story of a distant relative who established a harem
among his female serfs: anyone who tried to oppose it, including his
own wife, was physically beaten or locked up. The
most detailed and interesting such memoir was written by Maria
Neverova, a former serf from the harem of an octogenarian nobleman
called Pyotr Koshkarov. Twelve to fifteen of his prettiest young serf
girls were strictly segregated in a special female quarter of his house
and placed under the control of the main housekeeper, a sadistic woman
called Natalia Ivanovna, who was fiercely devoted to Koshkarov. Within
the harem was the master’s room....then he would begin ‘the
punishments’. By the beginning of the 1790s Praskovya had become Sheremetev’s unofficial wife. He felt that it was morally wrong not to marry Praskovya, but his aristocratic pride would not allow him to do so. The count’s dilemma was one faced by noblemen in numerous comic operas. Nikolai Petrovich was a man susceptible to the cult of sentimentalism. There was a production of Voltaire’s Nanine (1749), in which the hero, Count Olban, in love with his poor ward, is forced to choose between his own romantic feelings and the customs of his class that rule against marriage to the humble girl. In the end he chooses love. In
the theatre the public sympathized with the unequal lovers and
applauded the basic Enlightenment ideal that informed such works: that
all people are equal. But it did not take the same view in real life.
Praskovya’s secret relationship with the count placed her in an almost
impossible position. Her fellow serfs became resentful of her
privileged position and called her spiteful names. To protect Praskovya
and himself from malicious gossip, the count built a special house, a
simple wooden dacha, near the main mansion, but Praskovya's greatest roles were always those of tragic heroines. Her most celebrated performance was as Eliane in Les Manages Samnites,
put on for the visit by the newly crowned Emperor Paul to Ostankino in
April 1797. The plot of Gretry’s opera could have been the story of
Praskovya’s life. Nikolai
Petrovich had been summoned to the court by the Emperor Paul. The count
was an old friend of the Emperor. Sheremetev was one of the few
grandees to get along with Paul, whose outbursts of rage and
disciplinarian attitudes had alienated most of the nobility. Praskovya’s
confinement to the Fountain House was not just the result of her
illness. Rumours of the serf girl living in the palace had caused a
scandal in society. When this most eligible of men was found to have
wasted himself on a peasant girl, the disappointment of the aristocracy
was compounded by a sense of anger and betrayal. The Sheremetevs
disowned him and descended into squabbles about what would happen to
the legacy. The vast reception rooms of the Fountain House were devoid
of guests. The Emperor Paul , though, maintained his loyalty to his friend. Several times he arrived incognito at the back entrance of Fountain House - either to visit the count when he was sick or to hear Praskovya sing. Paul was enchanted by Praskovya and presented her with his own personal diamond ring, which she wore for her portrait by Argunov. The moral support of the Emperor must have been a factor in the count’s decision to flout social conventions and to take Praskovya as his legal wife. In 1801 the count gave Praskovya her liberty and then at last, on 6 November, he married her in a secret ceremony. One year later Praskovya gave birth to a son, Dmitry, who was christened, like his father, in the private chapel of the Fountain House. But she was weakened by the birth and, already suffering from advanced tuberculosis, she died after three weeks of painful suffering. At this moment, the most desperate time in his life, the count was abandoned by the whole of Petersburg society. He buried Praskovya next to the grave of his father. There was no one present from the court (Paul had been murdered in 1801); no one from the ancient noble families; and perhaps most shockingly of all, no one from the Sheremetev family. After
Praskovya's death Nikolai liberated dozens of his favourite domestic
serfs, spent vast sums on building village schools and hospitals, set
up trusts for the care of orphans, endowed monasteries to give the
peasants food when the harvest failed, and reduced the payments levied
from the serfs on his estates. But by far his most ambitious project
was the alms house which he founded in Praskovya’s memory on the
outskirts of Moscow - the Strannoprimnyi Dom, which at that time, in
1803, was by some way the largest public hospital in the Empire. Nikolai
died in 1809, the richest nobleman in the whole of Russia, and no doubt
the loneliest as well. On Praskovya’s death the count wrote to the new
Emperor, Alexander I, to inform him of his marriage and appealed to him
(successfully) to recognize the rights of Dmitry as his sole legitimate
heir. He claimed that his wife had only been the ward of the blacksmith
Kuznetsov and that she was really the daughter of an ancient Polish
noble family called the Kovalevskys, from the western provinces. It was
in fact the ending of Anyuta - where the servant girl in love with the nobleman is finally allowed to marry him. Praskovya
was blessed with a rare intelligence and strength of character. She was
the finest singer in the Russia of her day, literate and conversant
with several languages. Yet until a year before her death she remained
a serf. In 1863 a document was found among the papers of the recently
deceased Tatyana Shlykova, the opera singer (Sheremetev’s ‘Garnet’) and
Praskovya’s lifelong friend, who had raised Dmitry, as if her own son,
at the Fountain House after 1803. The document, in Praskovya’s own neat
hand, was written in the form of a ‘prayer’ to God, clearly in the
knowledge that she was about to die. 4. The Russian Split Personality The
musical life of eighteenth-century Russia was dominated by the court
and by small private theatres. Catherine
the Great
(at the Hermitage Theatre in the Winter Palace and the Chinese Theatre
at Tsarskoe Selo) In 1762, the Empress liberated the nobility from compulsory service to the state. This was a turning point in the cultural history of the aristocracy. Relieved of their stately duties, many noblemen retired to the country and developed their estates. The late 18th c. became the golden age of the pleasure palace, with galleries for art, exquisite parks and gardens, orchestras and theatres. The noble estate was an island of European culture on Russian peasant soil. During the Enlightenment the noble classes considered theatre to be a school of public manners and sensibilities. Anyuta (premiered at
Tsarskoe Selo in 1772.), was produced at Kuskovo in 1781; and Misfortune
from a Carriage by Vasily Pashkevich, with a libretto by
Kniazhnin (first put on at the Hermitage Theatre in 1779) The design and the decor of the palace and its park contained much theatricality. The landscaped gardens and the manor house were laid out, like the props upon a stage, to create a certain emotion or theatrical effect. Features such as sculptured ‘peasants’ or ‘cattle’ in the woods, or temples, lakes and grottoes in the English park. Green with Jealousy, or The Boatman from Kuskovo (1781) was a perfect illustration of the way in which the palace had itself become a kind of theatre for the acting out of Russian noble life. Peter
the Great began it all - reinventing himself and his aristocracy in the
European mould.
The first thing he did on his return from Europe, in 1698, was to order
all the boyars to give up their kaftans for Western codes of dress. In a
symbolic rupture with the past, he forbade them to wear beards. He distributed a The
point was not to become a European, but rather to act as one, Pushkin (this was how the poet was depicted in the famous portrait by Orest Kiprensky (1827) The
European Russian had a split identity. His mind was a state divided into two.
On one level he was conscious of acting out his life according to prescribed
European conventions; yet on another plane his inner life was swayed by
Russian customs and sensibilities. The distinction was not absolute, of
course: there could be conscious forms of ‘Russianness’, as the Slavophiles
would prove, just as it was possible for European habits to be so ingrained
that they appeared and felt ‘natural’. But generally speaking, the European
Russian was a ‘European’ on the public stage and a ‘Russian’ in those moments
of his private life when, without even thinking, he did things in a way that
only Russians did. This was the legacy from his ancestors which no European
influence could totally erase. It enabled a countess like Natasha to dance
the Russian dance. In every Russian aristocrat, however European he may have
become, there was a discreet and instinctive empathy with the customs and
beliefs, the habits and the rhythms of Russian peasant life. How, indeed,
could it not be so when the nobleman was born in the countryside, when he
spent his childhood in the company of serfs, and lived most of his life on
the estate - a tiny island of European culture in a vast Russian peasant sea? The
layout of the palace was a map of this divide in the nobleman’s emotional
geography Every estate also had a wooden banya
or bath house. The
banya was believed to have special healing powers In
the palace, the salon upstairs belonged to an entirely different, European
world Women
became educated and accomplished in the European arts. Russian
noblewomen ‘had outstripped the men in this progressive march towards
improvement: you already saw a number of elegant women and girls, remarkable
for their graces, speaking seven or eight languages with fluency, playing
several instruments, and familiar with the most celebrated romance writers
and poets of France, Italy and England’. art
of salon conversation Pushkin
said that the point of salon conversation was to flirt The
readership of literature in Pushkin’s age was by and large female. The
Queen of Spades (1834), the old countess, ‘Are
there any Russian novels?’
The
written language of the eighteenth century was a clumsy combination of
archaic Church Slavonic, a bureaucratic jargon known as Chancery, and
Latinisms imported by the Poles. There was no set grammar or
orthography, and no clear definition of many abstract words. It was a bookish
and obscure language, far removed from the spoken idiom of high society
(which was basically French) and the plain speech of the Russian peasantry. Karamzin
and his literary disciples (including the young Pushkin) aimed to ‘write as
people speak’ - meaning how the people of taste and culture spoke, and in
particular the ‘cultivated woman’ of polite society, who was, they realized,
their ‘principal reader’ In
November 1779 the Hermitage court theatre in St Petersburg staged the
premiere of Kniazhnin’s comic opera Misfortune from a Carriage. Here
was precisely the sort of Gallomania that Kniazhnin’s opera blamed for the
moral corruption of society
‘We
Russians have two fatherlands: Russia and Europe,’ Dostoevsky Mikhail
Saltykov-Shchedrin: ‘In
Russia,’ he recalled of the 1840s, ‘we existed only in a factual sense, or as
it was said then, we had a “mode of life”. We went to the office, we wrote
letters to our relatives, we dined in restaurants, we
conversed with each other and so on. But spiritually we were all inhabitants
of France.' The Russian nobility was so immersed in foreign languages that many found it challenging to speak
or write their own language. French
was the language of high society, and in high-born
families the language of all personal relationships as well. The
most refined and cultured Russians could speak only the peasant form of
Russian which they had learnt from the servants as children.121 Here was the
European culture of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In
some families children were forbidden to speak Russian except on Sundays and
religious holidays. Orthodox
religion was equally remote from the consciousness of the
Westernized elites influenced by the
secular culture of the French Enlightenment. Idyllic views of the unspoilt past were commonplace in Rousseau’s age: in Fonvizin 's satire The Minor (1782), he celebrates the Christian principles of the ‘old thinker’ Starodum, the homespun village mystic: ‘Have a heart, have a soul, and you’ll always be a man.’ . ‘Everything else is fashion.’ The sentimental cult of rural innocence finds perfect expression in Karamzin’s tearful tale of Poor Liza (1792). Nikolai Lvov, the poet, engineer, architect, folklorist believed that the main Russian trait was spontaneity. He contrasted the convention-ridden life of the European Russians with the spontaneous behaviour and creativity of the Russian peasantry. Alexander Radishchev was the first to argue that the nation’s highest virtues were contained in the culture of its humblest folk. His proof for this was teeth. In his Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (1790) The projection of Russia into Europe had always been the raison d’etre of St Petersburg. It was not simply Peter’s ‘window on to Europe’ - as Pushkin once described the capital - but an open doorway through which Europe entered Russia and the Russians made their entry to the world. Western Europe was a cultural ideal, the spiritual source of their civilization, and to travel to it was to make a pilgrimage. Peter the Great was the model of the Russian traveller to the West in search of self-improvement and enlightenment.
All the pioneers of Russia’s arts learned their crafts abroad:
The
Grand Tour was a vital rite of passage for the aristocracy. After the emancipation
of the nobles from obligatory state service in 1762, many young nobleman made the trip to the west. England was their
favourite destination. It was the homeland of a prosperous and
independent landed gentry, Travel literature played a vital role in shaping Russia’s self-perception vis-a-vis the West. Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller (1791-1801) presented a panorama of the ideal European world: a mythic realm which later travellers, whose first encounter with Europe had been through reading his work, would look for but never really find. In his letters Karamzin portrayed himself as perfectly at ease, and accepted as an equal, in Europe’s intellectual circles. Karamzin also managed to express the insecurity which all the Russians felt in their European self-identity. Everywhere he went he was constantly reminded of Russia’s backward image in the European mind. Even though Russians had adopted Western manners and conventions. But European values and sensibilities had yet to penetrate their mental world. In 1836 the philosopher Chaadaev was declared a lunatic for writing in despair that, while the Russians might be able to imitate the West, they were unable to internalize its essential moral values and ideas. The writer and civil servant Denis Fonvizin had travelled with his wife through Germany and Italy. It was not their first trip to Europe. In 1777-8 his Travel Letters were the first attempt by a Russian writer to define Russia’s spiritual traditions as different from, and indeed superior to, those of the West. Whether in Paris or St Petersburg, he nursed a contempt for the whole beau monde - a world in which he moved as a senior bureaucrat in the Foreign Ministry. He believed that ‘worthwhile people form a single nation among themselves, regardless of the country they come
from.’ Paris
was ‘a city of moral decadence’, of ‘lies and hypocrisy’, which could only
corrupt the young Russian who came to it in search of that crucial ‘comme
il faut’. It was a city of material greed, where ‘money is the God’; a
city of vanity and external appearances, where ‘superficial manners and
conventions count for everything’ and ‘friendship, honesty and spiritual
values have no significance’. ‘Corrupt’
and ‘decadent’, ‘false’ and ‘superficial’, ‘materialist’ and ‘egotistical’ The
constant repetition of these epithets signalled the emergence of an ideology
- a distinctive view of Russia in the mirror of the West. The idea
that the West was morally corrupt was echoed by virtually every Russian
writer from Pushkin to the Slavophiles. Herzen and Dostoevsky placed it at
the heart of their messianic visions of Russia’s destiny to save the fallen
West. This
imaginary ‘Europe’ had more to do with the needs of defining ‘Russia’ than
with the West itself. ‘We
needed Europe as an ideal, a reproach, an example,’ Herzen wrote. ‘If she
were not these things we would have to invent her.’ The
Russians were uncertain about their place in Europe (they still are), and
that ambivalence is a vital key to their cultural history and identity. If
Russia could not become a part of ‘Europe’, it should take more pride in
being ‘different’. In this nationalist mythology the ‘Russian soul’ was
awarded a higher moral value than the material achievements of the West. It had a
Christian mission to save the world. 7. Impact of the French Revolution Russia’s idealization of Europe was
profoundly shaken by the French Revolution of 1789. ‘The “Age of Enlightenment”! I do not
recognize you in blood and flames,’ Karamzin wrote with bitterness in 1795. Karamzin’s anguish was widely shared by the European Russians of his age. Politically the once Francophile nobility became Francophobes, as ‘the French’ became a byword for inconstancy and godlessness In Petersburg, where the aristocracy was totally immersed in French culture, the reaction against France was more gradual and complicated - there were many liberal noblemen and patriots (like Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace) who retained their pro-French and Napoleonic views even after Russia went to war with France in 1805.The Enlightenment ideal of a universal culture was finally abandoned for the national way. ‘Let us Russians be Russians, not copies of the French’, wrote Princess Dashkova; ‘let us remain patriots and retain the character of our ancestors’. Karamzin was calling on his fellow
writers to embrace the Russian language and ‘become themselves’: Man and nation may begin with
imitation but in time they must become themselves to have the right to say:
‘I exist morally’: the
rallying cry of a new nationalism that flourished in the era of 1812. Chapter 2: Children of 1812 (full text) 1. The Decembrists: Birth of the
Intelligentsia/ Liberal Russian Nationalism Chapter 2: Children of 1812 (full notes) 1. The
Decembrists: Birth of the Intelligentsia/ Liberal Russian Nationalism 1. The
Decembrists: Birth of the Intelligentsia/ Liberal Russian Nationalism August 1812, Prince
Sergei Volkonsky was delivering a report to the Emperor Alexander in
St Petersburg: ‘From the Supreme Commander to the ordinary
soldier, every man is prepared to lay down his life in the patriotic cause.’ ‘You should be proud of them. For
every single peasant is a patriot.’ ‘Your
Majesty! I am ashamed to belong to that class. There have been only words.’ There were many officers who lost
their pride in class but found their countrymen in the ranks of 1812. Sergei Volkonsky was born in
1788 into one of Russia’s oldest noble families. They were descended from a fourteenth-century prince, Mikhail Chernigovsky. Sergei’s uncle, General Paul Volkonsky, was In 1808 Volkonsky returned to the army
in the field
and, in the course of the next four years, he took part in over fifty
battles, rising by the age of twenty-four to the rank of major-general. After 1812 and the defeat of the invading French armies, Volkonsky developed a new sense of
‘the nation’ that was based upon the virtues of the common folk. The poet Fedor
Glinka,
in his Letters of a Russian Officer (1815), compared the serfs (who
were ‘ready to defend their motherland with scythes’) with the aristocracy
(who ‘ran off to their estates’ as the French approached Moscow). As noblemen they had been brought up
to regard their fathers’ serfs as little more than human beasts For some officers it was not
enough to identify themselves with the common people’s cause: they wanted to
take on the identity of common men themselves. They Russified their dress
and behaviour. During Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, Volkonsky took command
of a partisan brigade and pursued Napoleon’s troops as far as Paris. Volkonsky’s political views were deeply
influenced by his brief encounter with the West. Russia,
though, did not seem ready for their liberal message, and the young
officers were disgusted by the lavish lifestyles of the nobility.
‘We had taken part in the greatest
events of history, and it was unbearable to return to the vacuous existence
of St Petersburg, to listen to the idle chatter of old men about the
so-called virtues of the past. We had advanced a hundred years.’ The ‘men of the last century’
were defined by the service ethic of the Petrine state. They set great
store by rank and hierarchy, order and conformity. As Chatsky put it, in
Griboedov’s drama Woe from Wit, ‘I’d love to serve, but I am
sickened by servility.’ It was inconceivable for a nobleman to
be an artist or a poet, but the new generation did just that. It was axiomatic to this literary
tradition that the writer should stand up for human values against the
service ethic based on rank. They expressed their rebellion in poetry,
philosophy and drunken revelry. As Silvio remarks in Pushkin’s
Tales of Belkin (1831), wild behaviour ‘was the fashion in our
day’. Pushkin holds a
special place in that enterprise. He was too young - just thirteen in
1812 – to serve in the army. He spent between
1812 and 1817 at the lycee at Tsarskoe Selo - a school
modelled on the Napoleonic lycees that drew heavily on the curriculum
of the English public schools, stressing the humanities: classical and modern
languages, literature, philosophy and history. Like the officers of 1812, he felt
that the landowner’s obligation as the guardian of his serfs was more
important than his duty to the state. ‘To know our people’, wrote the
Decembrist poet Alexander Bestuzhev, ‘one has to live with them and talk with
them in their language, one has to eat with them and celebrate with them on
their feast days, go bear-hunting with them in the woods, or travel to the
market on a peasant cart.’ Sergei Volkonsky was deeply disillusioned by the
reactionary turn taken by the Emperor Alexander during the War of 1812. However. Alexander hesitated to implement his
minister’s proposals, and once Russia went to war with France, they were
condemned by the conservative nobility. Arakcheev's policies radicalized many of the officers who began to plot a coup. From the start the officers were
divided over how to bring this end about: some wanted to wait for the Tsar to
die, whereupon they would refuse to swear their oath of allegiance to the
next Tsar unless he put his name to their reforms (they would not break the
oath they had already sworn to the present Tsar); but Alexander was not even
forty years of age and some hotheads like Mikhail Lunin favoured the idea of
regicide.
In 1818 the society broke up, and the moderates formed the Union of Welfare
with a rather vague programme of educational and philanthropic activities. Pushkin, who had friends in the
Decembrist camp, characterized their conspiracy as no more than a game: ‘Twas
all mere idle chatter/ Twixt Chateau-Lafite and Veuve Cliquot.' The Northern Society, led by Volkonsky was given the task of
recruiting Pushkin who had been banished to his estate at
Mikhailovskoe, near Pskov, because his poetry had inspired the rebels. Rumours of an uprising were already
circulating around St Petersburg, so, in all likelihood, the Emperor
Alexander knew about the Decembrists’ plans. The insurrection had been scheduled
for the late summer of 1826. But these plans were hastily brought
forward by the Emperor’s sudden death and the succession crisis caused by
the refusal of the Grand Duke Constantine to accept the throne in December
1825. The conspirators had only the vaguest
notion of how to go about this task. They thought of the uprising as a
military putsch, carried out by order from above. In
the end, the Decembrist leaders could not convince the rank and file to
support them: only some 3,000 troops in Petersburg participated in
the uprising. On 14 December, in garrisons
throughout the capital, soldiers were assembled for the ceremony of swearing
an oath of allegiance to the new Tsar, Nicholas I. The 3,000 mutineers refused to swear
their oath and, with flags unfurled and drums beating, marched to Senate
Square, where they thronged in front of the Bronze Horseman and called
for ‘Constantine and a Constitution’. Most of the soldiers who appeared on
Senate Square had no idea what a ‘constitution’ was (some thought it was the
wife of Constantine). They displayed no inclination to capture the
Senate or the Winter Palace, as envisaged in the hasty plans of the
conspirators. Nicholas, assuming the command of his
loyal troops, ordered them to commence firing against the mutineers. Sixty soldiers were shot down; the
rest ran away. Within hours the ringleaders of the
insurrection had all been arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul
Fortress At their trial, the first show trial
in Russian history, 121 conspirators were found guilty of treason, stripped
of their noble titles and sent as convict labourers to Siberia. Pestel and Ryleev were hanged with
three others in a grotesque scene in the courtyard of the Fortress. When the victims fell through the gallows, the ropes broke on two of them: ‘What a wretched country!’ cried out
one of them. ‘They don’t even know how to hang properly.’ Of all the Decembrists, none was
closer to the court than Volkonsky. Nicholas was harsh on his old friend. He was spared the death
sentence handed down to the other leaders but sentenced to twenty years of penal labour
followed by a lifetime of compulsory settlement in Siberia. He lost control of all his lands and
serfs. His mother, Princess Alexandra, said ‘I only hope,’ she
would tell her visitors, ‘that there will be no other monsters in the
family.’ In his mother’s view, Sergei’s civil death was a literal death
as well.
Maria’s family was just as unforgiving. Sergei's wife Maria chose to share her husband’s
fate. She gave up everything and followed Sergei to Siberia. Maria acted out of her sense of duty
as a wife. It was not unusual for a
noblewoman to follow her husband to Siberia. Romantic love, though by no means uncommon, was not a high
priority in the conjugal relations of the early nineteenth-century Russian
aristocracy. Nor does it seem to have played a major role in Maria’s
decision. She may have been responding to the literary cult
of heroic sacrifice. On the eve of Maria’s departure there
was a special evening at Princess Zinaida Volkonsky’s dazzling
literary salon where Pushkin read his ‘Message to
Siberia’
(1827).
It was about 6,000 kilometres
across the snow-bound steppe by open carriage from Moscow to Irkutsk, at
that time the last outpost of Russian civilization in Asia, and from there
a hazardous adventure by cart and sledge around the icy mountain paths of
Lake Baikal. (Irkutsk Oblast) (Lake Baikal) By entering the penal zone beyond
Irkutsk, Princess Maria would herself become a prisoner. She would lose direct
control of her property, her right to keep a maid or any other serfs, and
even on the death of her husband, she would never be allowed to return to the
Russia she had left. Nerchinsk was a bleak, ramshackle
settlement of wooden huts built around the stockades of the prison camp.
Maria rented a small hut from one of the local Mongolian settlers. In Chita, where they moved in 1828,
Alexei organized an artel, a collective team of labourers which divided up
the tasks between themselves. Gone were the servants who had taken
over child care for the noble family of the eighteenth century. The Siberian
exiles brought up their own children and taught them all they knew.
In their
imaginations this new life came close to re-creating the egalitarian simplicity of the
peasant commune. Exile meant a
simpler and more ‘Russian’ way of life. In 1844 the Volkonskys were
allowed to settle in Irkutsk Volkonsky, in this sense, was the
first in a long line of Russian noblemen who found their nation, and their
salvation, in the peasantry Siberian folklore and history; village
schools; they
took up peasant crafts or worked the land themselves.; 4. The Vogue
for Russian Identity The war of 1812
was a vital watershed in the culture of the Russian aristocracy. It was a war
of national liberation from the intellectual empire of the French, but the aristocracy was still immersed in
the culture of the country against which they were at war. ‘How can we fight the French?’
asks Count Rostopchin, the Governor of Moscow, in War and Peace. ‘Can
we arm ourselves against our teachers and divinities? Look at our youths!
Look at our ladies! The French are our Gods. Paris is our Kingdom of Heaven.’ In the
patriotic climate of 1812 nobles, who had been brought up to speak and think
in French, struggled to converse in their native tongue. For lack of Russian texts, children
had learned to read Russian from the Scriptures - indeed, like Pushkin, they were often
taught to read by the church clerk or a local priest. Tolstoy
played on these differences in War and Peace. Sergei Volkonsky wrote in French but
inserted Russian phrases when he mentioned daily life on the estate; or he
wrote in Russian when he aimed to underline a vital point and emphasize his
own sincerity. In its
customs and its daily habits the aristocracy was struggling to become more
‘Russian’, too. The dacha was a place for
Russian relaxations and pursuits: picking mushrooms in the woods, making
jams, drinking tea from the samovar, fishing, hunting, visiting the
bath house, or spending the whole day, like Goncharov’s Oblomov, in an
oriental khalat. Casual Russian clothes were worn. Hunting became an aristocratic passion. Fidel Bruni’s portrait of Zinaida
Volkonsky (1810) The turn toward Nature and simplicity
was widespread throughout Europe from the final decades of the eighteenth
century. Pushkin’s
masterpiece Eugene Onegin is, among many other things, a subtle exploration of the
complex Russian-European consciousness that typified the aristocracy in the
age of 1812. I love you
(why should I dissemble?); These lines are adapted from a song
well known among the Russian folk Peasant folk tales and superstitions inspired many of Pushkin's tales. (See Chulkov’s ABC of Russian
Superstitions (1780-83) and Levshin’s Russian Tales (1788)) Pushkin also drew on Western sources for his tales:Tsar
Sultan and The Golden Cockerel (1834) drew on Western souces. More than any other Western canon,
Russian literature was rooted in the oral narrative traditions, to which it
owed much of its extraordinary strength and originality. During his childhood Gogol fell in
love with the earthy idiom of the local peasantry. He loved their
songs and dances, their terrifying tales and comic stories, from which his
own fantastic tales of Petersburg would later take their cue. Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831-2), the stories were adapted by Musorgsky for the unfinished Sorochintsy Fair (1874-) and for Night On A Bald Mountain; (1867), and by Rimsky-Korsakov for May Night (1879) More and more, common speech entered
literature, as writers like Gogol began to assimilate the spoken idiom to
their written form. Literary language thus broke free from the confines of
the salon and flew out, as it were, into the street, taking on the sounds of
colloquial Russian and ceasing in the process to depend on French loan words
for ordinary things. Lermontov’s civic poetry and his epic Song of the
Merchant Kalashnikov (1837) imitates the style of the bylina, also Borodino (1837) described the battle from the
peasant soldiers’ point of view. A Collection
of Russian Folk Songs was assembled by Nikolai Lvov
and annotated by Ivan Prach in 1790 Beethoven the ‘Razumovsky’ string quartets (opus 59) commissioned in 1805 Beethoven, Razumovsky String Quartets op. 59 (1805) Theme Russe Quartet #1 allegro The famous ‘Slava’ (‘Glory’) chorus -
later used by Musorgsky in the coronation scene of Boris Godunov - which
Beethoven used as the subject for a fugue in the scherzo of the opus 59
number 2 quartet. It was originally a sviatochnaya, a
folk song sung by Russian girls to accompany their divination games at the
New Year. Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar (1836
‘Glory’ chorus practically became a second national anthem in the nineteenth
century. A Life for the
Tsar, first Russian Opera (1836); "My
dawn will soon rise;
"Slavsya!" ("Glory!") The opera tells the story of Ivan Susanin, a peasant from the estate
of Mikhail Romanov. Susanin had saved Mikhail’s life by misdirecting the
Polish troops who had invaded Russia in its ‘Time of Troubles’ (1605-13). Glinka
said that his opera was conceived as a battle between Polish and Russian
music. He had fused the qualities of Russian peasant music with the European
form. In painting, too, there was a new
approach to the Russian peasantry.
Compared to their parents, the Russian
nobles who grew up after 1812 put a higher valuation on childhood. In the eighteenth century the
aristocracy had seen childhood as a preparation for the adult world. It was a
stage to be overcome as soon as possible, Noble parents kept their children at
arm’s length, which often meant the length of the longest corridor or down
the longest staircase to a separate basement floor in the servants’ quarters
of their house. V. A. Sollogub: ‘Our lives were
entirely separate and there was never any sign of emotion.' It was not unusual, then, for the
noble child to grow up without any direct parental discipline, and the servants were naturally afraid to
discipline their master’s children. However, in many families The high-born Russian boy spent his
childhood in the downstairs servants’ world. Venetsianov’s Morning of the Landlady (1823) The maid,
the wet nurse and the nanny were the closest to the family. They formed a
special caste. The stereotype of the old-fashioned
nanny At the age of six or seven, in a a painful rite of passage, the noble
child was transferred from the care of a nanny to the supervision of a French
or German tutor and then sent off to school. It was not at all unusual for grown
men and women to remain in frequent contact with their former nannies;
indeed, for them to provide for them in their old age. Pushkin
remained close to his old nanny, and he put her image into many of his
works. In some ways she was his muse. The nanny was an almost sacred figure
in that cult of childhood which the Russian gentry made its own. No other
culture has been so sentimental or quite so obsessed about childhood. The cultural
elites' fixation on folklore took them back to their happy
childhoods, to the days when they had listened to their nannies’ tales on
woodland walks and the nights when they had been sung off to sleep with
lullabies. Stravinsky’s Petrusbka
(1911): nostalgia for
the sounds and colours which they both recalled from the fairgrounds of their
St Petersburg childhoods.
Herzen starts his
sublime memoir My Past and Thoughts Nikolai Karamzin's masterpiece, History of the
Russian State (1818-26), was the
first truly national history - not just in the sense that it was the
first by a Russian, but also in the sense that it rendered Russia’s past as a
national narrative. The first eight volumes of Karamzin’s History
were published in 1818 and created a sensation. As Belinsky wrote in 1846, ‘we
interrogate our past for an explanation of our present and a hint of our
future.’ If Russia was no longer to pursue the
Western path of history toward a modern constitutional state, as the
Decembrists and their supporters had hoped, what then was its proper destiny? Pyotr Chaadaev, the Guards
officer and foppish friend of Pushkin, produced a cataclysmic shock on his readers in his sensational First Philosophical Letter (1826). There were many similar expressions of
this cultural pessimism after 1825. The triumph of reaction had engendered a
deep loathing of the ‘Russian way’. The Slavophiles had an opposite
response to the crisis posed by Chaadaev. Karamzin’s History
was the opening statement in a long debate on Russia’s past and future
that would run right through its culture in the nineteenth century. Karamzin’s
own work was squarely situated in the monarchist tradition, which portrayed
the Tsarist state and its noble servitors as a force for progress and
enlightenment. Pushkin shared Karamzin’s statist view
of Russian history - at least in his later years, The democratic trend of Russian
history was advanced by the Decembrists. So debate over the origins of Russia reflected the contemporary debate between the Slavophiles and the Decembrists. In Karamzin’s words, before
the establishment of princely rule, Russia had been nothing but an ‘empty
space’ with ‘wild and warring tribes, living on a level with the beasts and
birds’. Lermontov wrote a poem entitled Novgorod
(‘Brave sons of the Slavs, for what did you die?’), in which it was left
deliberately unclear whether it was the fallen heroes of medieval Novgorod or
the freedom fighters of 1825 whose loss was to be mourned. Alternately, Karamzin argued that Moscow’s
conquest of Novgorod had been a necessary step towards the creation of a unitary
state, and was recognized as such by its citizens. This submission was a sign
of the Russian people’s wisdom. In Karamzin’s view, they recognized that
freedom was worth nothing without order and security. The Novgorodians were
thus the original consenting members in the leviathan of autocracy. They
chose the protection of the Tsar in order to save themselves from their
own internal squabbles. For the Decembrists, the War of 1812
was a people’s war; for the status quo, the war symbolized the holy
triumph of the Russian autocratic principle. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (Ton, Cathedral
of Christ the Saviour (1837-83) was half
war museum and half church, intended to commemorate the miraculous
salvation of Moscow in 1812. To the opposing ideological camps there were two images of 1812 - as a national
liberation or imperial salvation. 7. Volkonsky’s
Return from Exile and Emancipation Sergei Volkonsky was a childhood hero
of Tolstoy’s (all the Decembrists were idolized by the progressive youths of
Tolstoy’s age), and in time he became the inspiration for Prince Andrei
Bolkonsky in War and Peace. In 1859 Tolstoy started a school for
peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana, the old
Volkonsky estate that had passed down to him on his mother’s side. Reverence for his ancestors was at the emotional
core of Tolstoy’s conservatism. Nikolai Volkonsky was brought back to
life as Andrei’s father Nikolai Bolkonsky in War and Peace
-
the retired general, proud and independent, who spends his final years on
the estate at Bald Hill, dedicating himself to the education of his daughter
called (like Tolstoy’s mother) Maria. Volkonsky’s release from exile was one
of the first acts of the new Tsar. Volkonsky’s notion of the Fatherland
was intimately linked with his idea of the Tsar: he saw the sovereign as a
symbol of Russia. Throughout his life he remained a
monarchist. After Defeat in the Crimean War in 1855-56, the new tsar Alexander II believed believed that
emancipation was a necessary measure to prevent a revolution from below. The
soldiers who had fought in the Crimean War had been led to expect their
freedom. The gentry were woefully unprepared for emancipation. The gentry had very little idea how to
make a profit from their estates. Most of them knew next to nothing about
agriculture or accounting. Yet they went on spending in the same old lavish
way as they had always done, mounting up enormous debts.
By 1859, one-third of the estates and two-thirds of the serfs owned by the
landed nobles had been mortgaged to the state and noble banks. Volkonsky sketched out his own
progressive plans for the emancipation, in which he envisaged a state bank to
advance loans to individual peasants to buy small plots of the gentry’s land
as private property. The peasants would repay these loans by working their
allotments of communal land. Volkonsky’s programme was not dissimilar to
the land reforms of Pyotr Stolypin, the russian Prime Minister in the years before WWI. The Law of the Emancipation was signed
by Alexander on 19 February 1861. None the less, despite its
disappointment for the peasantry, the emancipation was a crucial watershed. Chapter 3. Moscow!
Moscow! ‘Petersburg is our head, Moscow is our heart’, went a Russian proverb.
While watching Moscow burn, Napoleon cried out, ‘Are they abandoning all this? It isn’t possible! What
a people! They are Scythians! What resoluteness! The barbarians!’ In a
fit of anger Napoleon instructed that the Kremlin be mined as an act of
retribution. For Russians, the sacrifice of Moscow during the War of
1812 proved to be the most heroic moment in the country's
history. In War and Peace Tolstoy wrote that every
Russian felt Moscow to be a mother. Moscow was founded in the twelfth century when Prince Dolgoruky of Suzdal
built a rough log fortress on the site of the Kremlin To celebrate their final victory, Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) ordered the construction
of a new cathedral on Red Square: St Basil’s. (St Basil’s in Red Square completed in 1560 commemorates the capture of Kazan and Astrakhan) This moment celebrated With the building of St Petersburg, Moscow’s
fortunes had declined rapidly. As Catherine the Great saw it, though,
Moscow was ‘the seat of sloth’ whose vast size encouraged the nobility to
live in ‘idleness and luxury’. It was ‘full of symbols of fanaticism,
churches, miraculous icons, priests and convents, side by side with thieves
and brigands’, the very incarnation of the old medieval Russia. Only after 1812 was the centre of the city finally
rebuilt in the European style. Moscow was located in the centre of the Russian
lands, an economic crossroads between north and south, Europe and the Asiatic
steppe. Moscow's aristocratic homes were spacious and expansive, built for entertaining on a massive scale, with large central courtyards that functioned as farms, with pens for cows and poultry, vegetable allotments, sheds for storing produce brought in from the country for the winter months and, in some of the larger mansions, like Zinaida Volkonsky’s on the Tver Boulevard, extensive greenhouses for growing exotic winter fruits. The Empire style expressed opulence of the ornament and furnishing of private noble space. The Muscovite love of comfort met the Victorian aesthetics of the European middle class.
The neo-Byzantine style of architecture dominated
its reconstruction in the 1830s and 1840s.  Malyutin Perstsov Mansion Cathedral
of Christ the Saviour After
1812, as the romantic yearning for a more authentically national way of life
seized hold of the literary imagination, the idea of Moscow as a ‘Russian’ city and the notion of St Petersburg as a foreign civilization grew. A
thriving underground mythology of tales and rumours about Petersburg developed. Stories
abounded of the ghost of Peter walking through the streets, of weird mythic
beasts hopping over churches, or of all-destroying floods washing up the
skeletons of those who had perished in the building of the town. Writers
such as Pushkin and Odoevsky used these myths as the basis of their own ghost stories
from the capital. Pushkin’s Bronze
Horseman - subtitled a
‘Tale of Petersburg’ - was the founding text of this literary myth. The poem
was inspired by Falconet’s
equestrian statue of Peter the Great. For the Slavophiles, Peter’s city was a symbol of
the catastrophic rupture with Holy Rus’; for the Westerners, Petersburg represented a progressive
sign of Russia’s Europeanization. Gogol, Tales of Petersburg (1842):
‘Nevsky Prospekt’; "The Overcoat " (another translation)
(1842) Dostoevsky said that the whole of Russian literature ‘came out from underneath Gogol’s “Overcoat”'. In The Double (1846) Petersburg becomes a place where human feelings are perverted and destroyed by human isolation and rationality. Dostoevsky’s Petersburg is full of dreamers wandering the sleepless White Nights of the northern summer. In 1861 he recalled a ‘vision of the Neva’ which he himself had had in the early 1840s and included in the short story ‘A Weak Heart’ (1841). Dostoevsky claimed that it was the precise moment of his artistic self-discovery: 3. Moscow: A
city of gourmands and massive banquets Moscow became the centre of the ‘good life’ for the nobility. Moscow was the food capital of Russia. No other
city could boast such a range of restaurants. There were high-class dining
clubs like the Angleterre, where Levin and Oblonsky have their famous lunch
in the opening scene of Anna Karenina; business restaurants like the
Slavic Bazaar, where merchants made huge deals; fashionable late-night places
like the Strelna and the Yar (which Pushkin often mentions in his poetry);
coffee houses where women were allowed unaccompanied; ‘Bistro!’ they
would say, the Russian word for ‘fast’. Moscow was a city of gourmands. It had a rich
folklore of the fabulously fat In this society, where prestige meant promotion at
court, princes vied with one another in their hospitality. Vast sums were
paid for the best serf cooks. The food of seventeenth-century Muscovy had been
plain and simple - the entire repertory consisting of fish, boiled meats and
domestic fowl, pancakes, bread and pies, garlic, onion, cucumbers and
radishes, cabbages and beetroot. The ‘traditional specialities' included kulebeika (a
pie stuffed with several layers of fish or meat). The ‘classic zakuski’, such as
fish in aspic, were not in fact invented until the early nineteenth century as an aspect of the new taste for
old-Russian fashions after 1812. Traditional foods were associated with church rituals:
borshcbt (beetroot) and shchi (cabbage), recipes for Easter breads
and pies, and dozens of varieties of porridges and pancakes (bliny)
Deaths from drinking claimed a thousand people
every year in Russia between 1841 and 1859. In
the latter part of the eighteenth century the gentry distillers who
were licensed by the state to manufacture vodka increased their
production many times. There was little state regulation of the booming
retail business, legal or illegal, which made vodka traders very
rich. Since the state derived at least a quarter of its total
revenues from vodka sales, and the aristocracy had vested interests in
the trade, there was little pressure for reform. ‘The difference between Moscow and St Petersburg
is this. In Moscow, if you have not seen a friend for a few days, you think
there’s something wrong and send out someone to check that he’s not dead. But
in Peter, you may not be seen for a year or two and no one will miss you.’ The doors of Moscow’s mansions were always open
and the Petersburg custom of set times for visits was regarded as absurd. Moscow was famous for its lavish
entertaining. Maria Rimsky-Korsakov became famous
for her breakfast parties where Senator Arkady Bashilov, in apron and cap,
would serve all the dishes he had cooked himself. As with food and drink, the Russians
knew no limits when it came to partying. From October to the spring,
provincial families with a daughter to marry off would take a house in Moscow
for the social season. There were balls and banquets almost every night. This
Moscow lived a nocturnal way of life, its body clock reset to the social
whirl. 4. ‘Neo-Russian’
style in crafts, architecture and music In 1874 the Academy of Arts organized a show in remembrance of the artist Viktor Gartman, the painter at the centre of Musorsky's famous piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition (1874). Musorsky paid his own tribute to his artist friend by composing Pictures after visiting the show. Gartman’s ‘neo-Russian’ style grew from years of study of medieval ornament. He designed the Kiev city gate, shaped in the form of a warrior’s helmet with a kokosbnik arch.
In contrast to the rigid European
classicism of the St Petersburg Academy, the atmosphere in Moscow was rather
more relaxed and open to the exploration of Russian themes and styles. Three giants of Russian painting, Repin, Polenov and Vasnetsov, all moved to Moscow as students from St Petersburg. The old crafts of lubok painting and Palekh lacquer work were still alive in Moscow and its environs, whereas they had died out in St Petersburg.  A mid-century building boom in the neo-Russian style was made possible by the abolition
of an eighteenth-century law stipulating that buildings in the centre of
Moscow should be made from stone with facades in approved European styles.
The repeal of this law, in 1858, opened the way for a spate of wooden
buildings in the Russian peasant style.
The neo-Russian style entered its heyday in the
1870s, largely as a result of the growing wealth and status of the Moscow
merchant patrons. The city’s business region was
suddenly taken over by ancient tent roofs and kokoshnik pediments,
fancy yellow brickwork and ornate folk designs.
Moscow entered the twentieth century with its skyline in the form of the
seventeenth. Musorgsky fell in love with Moscow’s ‘Russianness’. He had spent nearly all his life in Petersburg. But as an artist he was drawn to the ‘realm of fairy tales’. Gartman’s fantastic folk forms were the equivalent of Musorgsky’s explorations in music: both were attempts to break free from the formal conventions of European art. Among the pictures at the exhibition there was a design for a clock in the form of Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken’s legs. He created a new Russian language in music. As a mentor to the young composer,
Balakirev, a Westernist and a thumping patriot of
Petersburg, was not pleased. Musorgsky began to explore a more native musical idiom in his ‘village scene’ for voice and piano, Savishna (1867), in Boris Godunov (1868-74) and then in his Pictures.
Musorgsky dedicated Pictures to
Vladimir Stasov, the critic, scholar and self-appointed champion of
the national school in all the Russian arts. Stasov wanted Russian art to liberate
itself from Europe’s hold. In his view, art
should be ‘national’ in the sense that it portrayed the people’s daily lives,
was meaningful to them, and taught them how to live. Stasov was a towering
figure in Musorgsky’s life. Balakirev and Stasov were incensed The kuchkist composers
were all young men in 1862. Balakirev was twenty-five, Cui
twenty-seven, Musorgsky twenty-three, Borodin the old man at
twenty-eight, and Rimsky-Korsakov the baby of them all at just
eighteen. This self-conscious Russian styling was
based on two elements. Kuchkist music
was filled with imitative sounds of Russian life.
Secondly the kuchkists invented
a series of harmonic devices to create a distinct ‘Russian’
style
5. The Debate
over Russian Identity in the Arts Writers, artists and composers developed an obsession with Russia’s history. History was regarded as a battlefield for competing views of Russia and its destiny, and these fifty years were seen as a crucial period in Russia’s past. One focus of the debate concerned one of the most difficult moments in Russian history: the ‘Time of Troubles’, a period of civil wars and
foreign invasion following the death of Boris Godunov in 1605. Boris, in real life was engaged in a protracted
struggle with noble boyar clans. Ivan the Terrible had made a point of promoting loyal
servicemen from humble origins like the Godunovs. Ivan's son Fedor was crowned when Ivan died, but the practical
affairs of government were taken over by Boris Godunov. In 1598 Fedor died. At
the zemskii sobor, or ‘Assembly of the Land’, the Moscow boyars voted
for Boris to become Tsar - the first elected Tsar in Russian history. At first things went well for the new tsar, but in
1601-3 they took a sharp turn for the worse. A young pretender to the
Russian throne appeared with an army from Poland. The pretender was
Grigory Otrepev, a runaway monk who had been at one time in the service
of the Romanovs, and he was probably approached by them before his
escapade. He claimed to be the Tsarevich Dmitry, Ivan’s youngest son.
Dmitry had been found with his throat cut in 1591. Godunov’s opponents
always claimed that he had killed the boy to clear his own passage to
the Russian throne. The ‘False Dmitry’. Godunov died suddenly in 1605,
as the pretender’s forces approached Moscow. Russia descended into
chaos as the central government collapsed , and during the next ten
years, nearly a third of the population died as the result of peasant
uprisings, famine and invasion. The murder story was far too good for Karamzin to
resist. The moral lesson which he drew from the Godunov story - that elected
rulers are never any good - was carefully attuned to the politics of
Alexander’s reign. For Karamzin, Boris had been a Russian Bonaparte. Musorgsky, too, who followed Pushkin’s text in his
first version of the opera (1868-9), portrayed the Russian people as a dark
and passive force, mired in the customs and beliefs of the old Russia
embodied in Moscow: the scene outside St Basil’s on Red Square. The starving
people gather there, and Boris is confronted by the Holy Fool, who by
implication condemns the Tsar’s crimes. But the crowd remains inert. However, in Musorsky's second version of Boris Gudonv (1871-2), his politics had changed. The
addition of the ‘Kromy Forest Scene’ introduced the theme of conflict between the people
and the Tsar. In the Kromy scene the people are revealed in rebellion, the
crowd mocks the Tsar, and folk song is deployed as the embodiment of the
people’s voice. The substitution of the Kromy scene for the one before St
Basil’s (which is what Musorgsky clearly intended) meant a complete switch in
the intellectual emphasis of the opera. There was
no Kromy revolt in Karamzin or Pushkin. The defenders of old Russia were represented in
the opera by the hero Prince Khovansky, a Moscow patriarch who was the main
leader of the streltsy musketeers (Khovansbchina means
‘Khovansky’s rule’) The opera presents However, the Westernists viewed Khovansbchina as a progressive work, a celebration of the passing from the old Moscow to the European spirit of St Petersburg. Stasov, for example, tried to persuade Musorgsky to devote more of Act III to the Old Believers’ association with ‘that side of ancient Russia’ that was ‘petty, wretched, dull-brained, superstitious, evil and malevolent’. Rimsky-Korsakov, who, as the editor of the
unfinished score after Musorgsky’s death in 1881, moved the prelude (‘Dawn
over the Moscow River’) to the end. To this melismatic Old Believers’ melody that Musorgsky had transcribed from the
singing of a friend, Rimsky added a brassy marching tune of the
Preobrazhensky Regiment - the very regiment Peter had established as his
personal guard to replace the streltsy musketeers. Without Rimsky’s
programmatic alterations the Old Believers would have had the fifth and final
act of the opera to themselves. The fifth act takes its subject from the mass
suicides of the Old. At the end of Musorgsky’s original version of the opera
the Old Believers marched off to their deaths, singing chants and prayers. He
felt ambivalent about Russia’s progress; he held to the conviction that the
Old Believers were the last ‘authentic Russians’. The painter Vasily Surikov's two great history
paintings, The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy.
1881
and The
Boyarynia Morozova. (1884) are the visual
counterparts of Khovanshchina. Surikov was closer to the Slavophiles
than Musorgsky, whose mentor Stasov, despite his nationalism, was a confirmed
Westernist. Surikov idealized Moscow as a ‘legendary realm of the authentic
Russian way of life.’ Surikov spent several years making ethnographic sketches
of the Old Believers in the Rogozhskoe and Preobrazhenskoe areas of the city.
history was depicted on the faces of these
types.All the faces in The Boyarina Morozova were drawn from
living people in Moscow. Tolstoy, who was among the first to see the
painting, was so full of praise for the crowd figures: ‘The artist has caught
them splendidly! It is as if they are alive! One can almost hear the words
they’re whispering. in the 1880s Surikov’s
two paintings were hailed by the democratic intelligentsia, who saw the
Streltsy revolt and the stubborn self-defence of the Old Believers as a form
of social protest against Church and state. The 1880s was a time of renewed political
repression following the assassination of Alexander II by revolutionary
terrorists in March 1881. The new Tsar, Alexander III, was a political
reactionary who soon sacked his father’s liberal ministers and passed a
series of decrees rolling back their reforms. 6.
Moscow Becomes a Metropolis: Rise of the Merchant Patron Moscow grew into a great commercial
centre in the nineteenth century. a bustling metropolis of shops and
offices, theatres and museums, with sprawling industrial suburbs that every
year drew hordes of immigrants By 1900, with 1 million people, Moscow
was, along with New York, one of the fastest growing cities in the world. The railways held the key to Moscow’s
growth. All the major lines converged on the city,
the geographic centre between east and west, the agricultural south and the
new industrial regions of the north. Financed mainly by Western companies,
the railways opened new markets for Moscow’s trade and linked its industries
with provincial sources of labour and raw materials. the metropolis of capitalist Russia Moscow’s rise was the demise of its
own provincial satellites, which spelt ruin for those
gentry farmers, like the Ranevskys in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, who They were unprepared for the
international market which the railways opened up Moscow’s emergence as an economic
giant was associated with its transition from a
noble- to a merchant-dominated town Moscow’s trade was concentrated in the
narrow winding streets of the Zamoskvoreche district, It was a world apart from the rest of
Moscow, little touched by modern or European ways, with its patriarchal
customs, its strict religious life and Old Beliefs, and its cloistered
merchant houses built with their backs to the street The appearance of the merchants, with
their long kaftans and beards, was reminiscent of the peasantry, from
which many of them had in fact emerged. The great Moscow textile dynasties -
the Riabushinskys and the Tretiakovs, the Guchkovs, Alekseevs and the
Vishniakovs - were all descended from serf forebears.
For this reason, the Slavophiles idealized the merchants as the
bearers of a purely Russian way of life The public image of the merchantry was
fixed by the plays of Alexander Ostrovsky His first drama,
A Family Affair (1849), was based on a case in the Moscow
courts. It tells the depressing tale of a merchant called Bolshov. To
escape his debts he pretends to be bankrupt by transferring all his assets to
his daughter and son-in-law, who then run off with the money, leaving Bolshov
to go to debtors’ jail. the
strange and (at that time) exotic mores of the Moscow business world. The
corrupting power of money, the misery of arranged marriages, domestic
violence and tyranny, the escape of adultery - these are the themes of
Ostrovsky’s plays The Storm (1860), In the novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy
the traders who swindled the squires of their land symbolized the menace of
the new commercial culture to the old-world values of the aristocracy.
Take the scene in Anna Karenina, for example, where Stiva
Oblonsky, the hopelessly spendthrift but endearing nobleman, agrees to sell
his forests to a local merchant at far too low a price. All over Europe it was commonplace for
the nineteenth-century cultural elites to hold trade and commerce in
contempt, and such attitudes were equally pronounced in the intelligentsia.
But nowhere else did they have such an effect as in Russia, where they
poisoned the relations of the middle classes with the cultural elites and
thereby closed off the possibility of Russia going down the
capitalist-bourgeois path - until it was too late.
Even as late as the 1890s merchants were excluded from the social circles
of Moscow’s aristocracy. the
so-called ‘native soil’ critics (pochvenniki), whose
outlet was the journal Moskvitianin (The Muscovite). The Apollon Grigoriev
was a leading member of the ‘native soil’ movement, along with the writer
Fedor Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail. Ostrovsky’s plays, they
said, had spoken a ‘new word’ on Russian nationality. As a social group that
lay somewhere between the peasantry and the educated classes, the merchants,
they believed, were uniquely qualified to lead the nation in a way that
reconciled its Muscovite and Petrine elements. They had flourished in the European
culture of the new Russia, yet had managed to retain the culture of the old;
and in this sense, Dostoevsky claimed, the merchants showed the way for
Russia to progress without social divisions.87
This interpretation was a reflection of the ‘native soil’ ideals of
national integration that followed in the wake of the emancipation of the serfs. The mixed-class origins of the ‘native
soil’ critics, most of whom were raznochintsy types (from a minor
noble background, with close connections to the world of trade), perhaps led
them to idealize the merchants as the pioneers of a new classless society. The Final Sacrifice (1878) a
new generation of merchants’ sons and daughters who are European in their
ways. fabulously wealthy merchant dynasties The Riabushinskys, for example, added
glass and paper, publishing and banking, and later motor cars, to their
textile factories in Moscow; and the
Mamontovs had an immense empire of railways and iron foundries. Their sons adopted European ways,
entered the professions and civic politics, patronized the arts, and
generally competed with the aristocracy for pre-eminence in society. they
knew that their acceptance depended on their
public service and philanthropy - above all, on their support for the
arts. a
service ethic that placed a burden on the rich to use their wealth for the
people’s benefit. Most of them belonged to the Old
Belief, whose strict moral code (not unlike that of the Quakers) combined the
principles of thrift, sobriety and private enterprise with a commitment to
the public good. Savva Mamontov,
the Moscow railway baron, became an opera impresario and a major patron of
the ‘World of Art’, out of which the Ballets Russes emerged. ‘work is not
a virtue’ but ‘a simple and immutable responsibility, the fulfilment of one’s
debt in life’.90 Konstantin Stanislavsky, the
co-founder of the Moscow Arts Theatre, was brought up with a similar attitude
by his father, a Moscow merchant of the old school. Pavel Tretiakov,
Russia’s greatest private patron of the visual arts. The self-made textile
baron came from a family of Old Believer while he adhered throughout his life
to the moral code and customs of the Old Belief, he had broken out of its
narrow cultural world at an early age Tretiakov spent in excess of 1 million
roubles on Russian art. the Tretiakov Museum in 1892 a vital boost for
the Wanderers Ilya Repin and Ivan Kramskoi
who had broken from the Academy of Arts in the early 1860s and, like the kuchkists
under Stasov’s influence, had begun to paint in a ‘Russian style’. Their down-to-earth provincial scenes
and landscape paintings appealed to the merchant’s ethnocentric taste.
Savrasov in his painting , The
Rooks Have Come (1871 The Wanderers’ name (in Russian, Peredvizhniki)
derived from the travelling exhibitions organized by their collective in
the 1870s.* Nurtured on the civic and Populist ideals of the 1860s, they
toured the provinces with their exhibitions, usually financed out of their
own pockets, to raise the public’s consciousness of art. Local merchants funded public
galleries that purchased canvases from the Wanderers and their many emulators
in provincial towns. In this way the ‘national style’ of Moscow became the
idiom of the provinces as well. 7. Moscow’s
paradox - a progressive city whose mythic self-image was in the distant past. Savva
Mamontov: Another merchant patron
who helped to define the Moscow style in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries was the railway magnate. Benois (the voice of refined St
Petersburg) described Mamontov as ‘grandiose and vulgar and dangerous’.94 He
might have been describing Moscow, too. Mamontov was not just a patron of the
arts but an artistic figure in his own right.
He studied singing in Milan, acted under Ostrovsky’s own direction in The
Storm, and wrote and directed plays himself. Populist ideas:
Art was to be for the education of the masses. he commissioned the artist Korovin to
decorate his Moscow
railway station (today the Yaroslav) with murals
showing rural scenes In 1870 the couple purchased
the
Abramtsevo estate, an artists’ colony with workshops to
revive the local peasant crafts It is ironic that these crafts were
dying out as a result of the spread of factory goods by rail. For this was
what had made the Mamontovs so rich. Abramtsevo Abramtsevo It had previously belonged
to the Aksakovs, the leading clan of the Slavophiles, and as an artists’
colony it attempted to restore the ‘authentic’ (that is, folk-based) Russian
style which the Slavophiles had prized. Korovin and the two Vasnetsovs,
Polenova, Vrubel, Serov and Repin were all active
there. Gartman Abramtsevo was, like everything in
which its merchant founder was involved, a commercial enterprise. Its
workshops catered to the vibrant market for the
neo-Russian style among Moscow’s fast expanding middle class. like the Solomenko embroidery workshop, the
Talashkino colony and the Moscow zemstvo studios folk-styled tableware and furniture,
the embroidery and objets d’art spectacular
interior designs. Elena Polenova (at Solomenko)
built a dining room with elaborate folk wood carving Sergei Maliutin
artist Vladimir Konashevich Chekhov liked to poke fun at this
‘folksy’ craze. In his story ‘The Grasshopper’
(1891) ubok woodcuts,
hung up bast shoes and sickles, placed a rake in the corner of the room, the ‘style moderne’,
where
Russian folk motifs were combined with the styling of European art nouveau
Moscow’s architecture at the turn of the twentieth century, Fedor
Shekhtel’s splendid mansion for Stepan Riabushinsky, an
Old Believer chapel designed in the ancient Moscow style. Moscow’s paradox - a progressive city
whose mythic self-image was in the distant past. silversmiths and jewellery shops that catered to
the city’s prosperous merchant class Craftsmen such as Ivan Khlebnikov and
Pavel Ovchinnikov (a former serf of Prince Sergei
Volkonsky) produced silver tableware and samovars, dishes shaped like
ancient Viking ships (kovshi), drinking vessels, ornaments and
icon covers in the ancient Russian style. Carl Faberge In St Petersburg the Faberge workshops
made gems in the classical and rococo styles. The Moscow workshops, by contrast,
turned out mainly silver objects which were within the financial reach of the
middle classes. Sergei Vashkov,
a silver craftsman Nicholas II was a major patron of
Vashkov and the Moscow workshop of Faberge.98 Vashkov designed the silver
objects for the
mock medieval church in the Fedorov village at Tsarskoe Selo,
a sort of Muscovite theme park constructed for the Romanov tercentenary in
1913. the cult of Muscovy The Romanovs were retreating to the
past, hoping it would save them from the future. Nicholas,
in particular, idealized the Tsardom of Alexei in the seventeenth century. It was in his reign that the
Church of the Spilt Blood was
completed on the Catherine Canal. the church was a piece of Moscow kitsch the
Muscovite renaissance in the arts conjured up a land of fairy tales.
The retreat to Russian wonderland painters such as Vasnetsov, Vrubel and
Bilibin turned to Russian legends as a new way to approach the national theme Viktor Vasnetsov
Vasnetsov depicted monumental figures from the epic
folk legends like Ilia Muromets, presenting them as
studies of the national character Only Moscow welcomed Vasnetsov Mikhail Vrubel
followed Vasnetsov from Petersburg, moving first to Moscow and then
Abramtsevo, where he too painted scenes
from Russian legends. Mamontov’s Private Opera Stanislavsky, who was a cousin of
Elizaveta Mamontov, recalled that during these productions ‘the house would
become a tremendous workshop’ Vasnetsov and Vrubel joined with
composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov in a conscious effort to unify the arts on
the basis of the folk-inspired ‘Russian style’. Wagner’s idea of the total work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk the
opera could not succeed on the basis of good singing and musicianship alone;
it had to unite these with its visual and dramatic elements in an organic
synthesis. Mamontov established his Private
Opera in 1885, three years after the state monopoly of the Imperial
Theatre (already an anachronism when private theatres were outlawed in 1803)
had finally been lifted Vasnetsov brought the vibrant primary
colours of the folk tradition to the stage for Rimsky’s
Snow Maiden, the inspired by the
wooden palace of Kolomenskoe the great bass Shaliapin, Rimsky’s
Maid of Pskov, the Private Opera’s main production of
the 1896-7 season Rimsky, the young kuchkist of
the 1860s, had risen to become a pillar of the Russian musical establishment
and a professor of the Petersburg Conservatory after 1871; now he too became
a convert to Moscow’s neo-nationalist school.
All his last six major operas were performed by the Private Opera in its
distinctive neo-Russian style, including Sadko and May Night
(with the 24-year-old Rachmaninov conducting) in 1897, The Tsar’s
Bride in 1899, and Kashchei the Immortal in 1902. colourfully stylized folk-like sets and
costumes by Korovin, Maliutin and Vrubel a major influence on the synthetic
ideals of the World of Art movement and the Ballets Russes 8. The Moscow Arts
Theatre and Chekhov’s Plays the
Moscow Arts Theatre, founded by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin
Stanislavsky in 1898. Here Chekhov’s last great
plays were first performed Stanislavskymerchant family which ‘had
already crossed the threshold of culture’, As a
student Stanislavsky took part in the Mamontov amateur productions. These
convinced him that, while huge efforts had been put into the music, the
costumes and the sets, very little had been done about the acting, which
remained extremely amateurish, not just in the operas but in the theatre,
too. His famous ‘method’ (from which
‘method acting’ was to come) boiled down to a sort of naturalism. It was
acting without ‘acting’ - which fitted in so well with the modern dialogue
(where the pauses are as important as the words) and the everyday realities
of Chekhov’s plays. Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote a
blistering satire of the Moscow Arts in his farcical, unfinished Black
Snow (1939- ), ridiculed these methods in a scene in which the director
tries to get an actor to feel what passion is by riding round the stage on a
bicyclethe playwright and director Vladimir
Nemirovich-Danchenko the
theatre should reach out to the masses by producing plays about contemporary
life. The Moscow Arts was originally called the Accessible Arts Theatre 1898 productions of Alexei Tolstoy’s Tsar
Fedor (1868) and Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896). Nemirovich was a great admirer of
Chekhov’s plays: “real”, not theatrical. The production relaunched Chekhov’s
career as a playwright - and he now came home to Moscow as its favourite
literary son. Born in Taganrog, in southern Russia, to a devout,
old-style merchant, Anton Chekhov
came to Moscow at the age of seventeen and two years later, in 1879,
enrolled as a student of medicine at the university. He fell in love with
the city from the start. ‘I will be a Muscovite forever’, he wrote in a
letter of 1881. a
journalist (‘Antosha Chekhonte’) for the humorous tabloids and weekly
magazines aimed at Moscow’s newly literate labourers and clerks.
He wrote sketches of street life, vaudeville satires on love and marriage,
and stories about doctors and magistrates, petty clerks and actors in
Moscow’s poor districts Vladimir Giliarovsky, author of the
1920s classic Moscow and the Muscovites But Chekhov was the first major
Russian writer to emerge from the penny press (nineteenth-century writers
such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had written for the serious or ‘thick’
periodicals that combined literature with criticism and political
commentary). His concise written style, for which he is so famed, was
fashioned by the need to write for commuters on the train. In 1892 he purchased Melikhovo, a
delightful small estate a short journey to the south of Moscow Moscow often featured as a backdrop to
his stories from this period - for example in
‘Three Years’ (1895) and ‘Lady with the Dog’ (1899). In all his greatest plays Moscow is
perceived as a distant ideal realm, a paradise beyond the provinces, where
his characters are trapped in a stagnant way of life. “Moscow! Moscow!” Three Sisters (1901)
Moscow becomes a symbol for the happiness so lacking in the sisters’
lives. Stifled by the petty routines of their
daily life, they strive for a higher form of existence, which they imagine
there to be in Moscow, yet in their hearts they know does not exist.
The sisters’ ‘Moscow’, then, is not so much a place (they never go there)
as a legendary realm - a city of dreams which gives hope and the illusion of
meaning to their lives. Chekhov’s Moscow, then, is a symbol of
the happiness and better life to come. Chekhov put his faith in science and
technology. He was a doctor by training, and
by temperament a man who looked to practical solutions rather than to
religion or ideologies. Astrov in Uncle Vanya (1896) or Vershinin
in Three Sisters are constantly speculating about the future of
Russia. They hope that one day life will become better and they talk about
the need to work towards that end. Progress is a constant theme in
Chekhov’s plays Trofimov, the eternal student in The
Cherry Orchard, is always saying ‘we must work’, yet he himself has never
done a thing. Chekhov thought that well-intentioned chatter was Russia’s
greatest curse. He believed in work as the
purpose of existence and as a form of redemption: it was at the heart of his
own religious faith a
critique of the landed gentry, which had never really known the
meaning of hard work and for this reason was destined for decline. The Cherry Orchard,
written
for the Moscow Arts in 1904 reminiscent of the ‘nest of gentry’
melodramas No one was prepared to puncture the
mystique of ‘the good old days’ on the estate - a mystique that had grown
into a national myth. Journals such as Bygone
Years (Starye gody) and Town and Country (Stolitsa i usad’ba) catered
to this cult the
last remaining outposts of a civilization that was threatened with extinction
by the social revolution of the towns. Chekhov was insistent that the play
should be performed as a comedy, not a sentimental tragedy;
and in this conception the play could not have been written later than it
was, even if Chekhov had lived for another twenty years. After the
1905 Revolution the passing of the old world was no longer a subject of
comedy. Chekhov called his play a ‘piece of
vaudeville’.118 Throughout The Cherry Orchard he is subtly ironic
and iconoclastic in his treatment of the gentry’s ‘cultivated ways’. He is sending
up the mystique of the ‘good old days’ on the estate Madame Ranevskaya Her overblown expressions of sadness
and nostalgia are belied by the speed with which she recovers and then
forgets her grief. This is not a tragedy: it is a
satire of the old-world gentry and the cult of rural Russia which grew up
around it Chekhov himself felt nothing but
contempt for such hypocrisy. He wrote The
Cherry Orchard while staying on the estate of Maria Yakunchikova near
Moscow. ‘A more disgracefully idle, absurd and tasteless life would be
hard to find’, he wrote. ‘These people live exclusively for pleasure.’119 Lopakhin Here was the first merchant hero to be
represented on the Russian stage. Like Lopakhin, Chekhov’s father was a
merchant who had risen from the enserfed peasantry. Far from lamenting the old gentry world, his last play embraces the cultural forces
that emerged in Moscow on the eve of the twentieth century. 9. Moscow: the
Centre of the Avant-garde Diaghilev
remarked that in the visual arts Moscow produced everything worth looking at.
Moscow was the centre of the avant-garde; Petersburg was ‘a city of
artistic gossiping, academic professors and Friday watercolour classes’ Moscow really was the place to be in
1900, when the Russian avant-garde first burst on
to the scene. Along with Paris, Berlin and Milan, it became a major centre in
the world of art, and its extraordinary collection of avant-garde
artists were as much influenced by trends in Europe as they were by Moscow’s
heritage. Moscow’s younger generation of merchant
patrons embraced and collected modern art. young playboys and decadents, these
rich merchants’ sons moved in the same bohemian circles, the cafes, clubs and
parties, as the young artists of the Moscow avant-garde Nikolai Riabushinsky-
‘I love beauty and I love a lot of women’ - and for his outrageous
parties at his Moscow
mansion, the Black Swan. From his
patronage stemmed the Blue Rose group of Moscow Symbolist painters
who, together with their literary confreres and composers like Alexander
Scriabin ‘Jack of Diamonds’ exhibitions
(1910-14), at which more than forty of the
city’s youngest and most brilliant artists (Kandinsky, Malevich, Goncharova,
Larionov, Lentulov, Rodchenko and Tatlin) declared war on the realist
tradition and shocked the public with their art. Meyerhold branched out from the
naturalism of the Moscow Arts to experiment with Symbolist drama,
establishing his Theatre Studio, with its highly stylized acting, in 1905.
Scriabin was the first Russian composer to experiment with what was later
known as ‘serial music’ (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were doing the same
thing). Scriabin was an inspiration to the avant-garde. The writer Boris Pasternak, a Scriabin
devotee,* blazed the Futurist trail in poetry along with Vladimir
Mayakovsky, Malevich called Maytovsky’s ‘From
Street into Street’ (1913) the finest illustration of ‘versified Cubism’.128 Marina Tsvetaeva was
equally a poet of Moscow. like Pasternak, she grew up in the
middle of the Moscow intelligentsia She herself once wrote that her early
verse was meant to ‘elevate the name of Moscow to the level of the name of
Akhmatova… I wanted to present in myself Moscow… not with the goal of
conquering Petersburg but of giving Moscow to Petersburg’: Tsvetaeva gave Moscow to fellow poet
Mandelstam as well. ‘It was a magic gift’, wrote the poet’s wife Nadezhda,
‘because with only Petersburg, without Moscow, it would have been impossible
to breathe freely, to acquire the true feeling for Russia. After 1917 Moscow superseded
Petersburg. It became the Soviet capital, the cultural centre of the state, a
city of modernity and a model of the new industrial society the Bolsheviks
wanted to build. Moscow was the workshop of the avant-garde, the left-wing
artists of the Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) and Constructivists like
Malevich and Tatlin, Rodchenko and Stepanova,
who sought to construct the new Soviet man and society through art. It
was a city of unprecedented freedom and experimentation in life as in art,
and the avant-garde believed, if only for a few years in the 1920s, that they
saw their ideal city taking shape in it Tatlin’s ‘tower’ From the old idea of Moscow as the
Third Rome to the Soviet one of it as leader of the Third International, it
was but a short step in the city’s mission to save humanity. the
huge building projects of the 1930s, the mass
manufacture of motor cars, the first metros, and the forward-upward images of
Socialist Realist ‘art’. mass
parades on May Day and Revolution Day. With their
armed march past the Kremlin, the citadel of Holy Russia, these parades were
imitations of the old religious processions they had an
imperial city - a Soviet Petersburg - and, like that unreal city, it became a
subject of apocalyptic myths. In Mikhail
Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita (1940), when
Hitler attacked it in the autumn of 1941, its people fought to defend it.
There was no question of abandoning the city, as Kutuzov had abandoned it to
Napoleon in 1812. Mother Moscow was saved.
Chapter 4. The
Peasant Marriage 1. the ‘going to the people’ movement In the summer of 1874 thousands
of students left their lecture halls in Moscow and St Petersburg and
travelled incognito to the countryside to start out on a new life with the
Russian peasantry. Renouncing their homes and families, they were ‘going
to the people’. By merging with the people and sharing
in the burdens of their lives, these young revolutionaries hoped to win their
trust and make them understand the full horror of their social condition. Writers such as Dostoevsky compared
the Decree of 1861 to the conversion of Russia to Christianity in the tenth
century. Western Commune vs. Slovophile commune Suddenly the old accursed questions
about Russia’s destiny became bound up with the peasant’s true identity. Was
he good or bad? Could he be civilized? What could he do for Russia? And where
did he come from? Everything had changed in 1852, with the
publication of Turgenev’s masterpiece, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album which presented the image of the
peasant as a rational human being, as opposed to the sentient victim depicted
in previous sentimental literature. Nikolai Nekrasov in Who Is Happy in
Russia? (1863-78) and in other works such as On the Road (1844) or The
Peddlers (1861) created poems that were practically transcriptions of peasant dialogue. Dostoevsky: not one of us loves them
as they really are but only as each of us imagines them to be. ‘A commune,’ declared
one of the movement’s founding members, Konstantin Aksakov, ‘is a
union of the people who have renounced their egoism, their individuality, and
who express their common accord; this is an act of love, a noble Christian
act. For the
Populists, the peasant was a natural socialist, the embodiment of the
collective spirit that distinguished Russia from the bourgeois West. Democrats
like Herzen saw the peasant as a champion of liberty - his wildness embodying
the spirit of the Russia that was free. The Slavophiles regarded him as a
Russian patriot, suffering and patient, a humble follower of truth and justice,
like the folk hero Ilia Muromets. Dostoevsky: the simple ‘kitchen muzhik’
was morally superior to any bourgeois European gentleman. The peasants,
he maintained, ‘will show us a new path’, and, far from having something to
teach them, ‘it is we who must bow down before the people’s truth’. Populism was the cultural product of
this synthesis. After the
assassination of Alexander II in 1881, the powers of the zemstvos were
severely curtailed by the government of the new Tsar, Alexander III, who
looked upon the zemstvos as dangerous breeding grounds for radicals.
Many of the students who had taken part in the ‘going to the people’ ended
up as zemstvo employees - teachers, doctors, statisticians and
agronomists whose democratic politics attracted the police. Even Turgenev, who saw the solution to
the peasant problem in liberal reform, could not help admiring (and perhaps
envying) the idealistic passion of these young revolutionaries. Which is just
how it turned out. Most of the students were met by a
cautious suspicion or hostility on the part of the peasants, who listened
humbly to their revolutionary sermons without really understanding anything
they said. The peasants were wary of the students’ learning and their urban
ways, and in many places they reported them to the authorities. ‘How can we live without a Tsar?’ Rounded up by the police,
forced into exile or underground, the Populists returned from their defeat in
deep despair. 2. Stasov’s
troika: Repin, Musorgsky and the sculptor Antokolsky In the summer of 1870 Ilia Repin left St Petersburg for ‘an undiscovered land’ with his friend Fedor Vasilev. The young
artist’s aim was to make a study of the peasants for a painting he had
planned of the Volga barge haulers. For three months Repin lived among the
former serfs of Shiriayevo, a village overlooking the Volga near Samara. In the final
painting of The Volga Barge Haulers (1873) (plate 11) it is this human
dignity that stands out above all. The image at the time was
extraordinary and revolutionary. Hitherto, even in the paintings of a
democratic artist such as Alexei Venetsianov, the image of the peasant had
been idealized or sentimentalized. But each of Repin’s boatmen had been drawn
from life and each face told its own story of private suffering. Stasov saw
the painting as a comment on the latent force of social protest in the Russian
people, a spirit symbolized in the gesture of one young man readjusting his
shoulder strap. Repin was a ‘man of
the sixties’- democratic circles the duty of the artist was to
focus the attention of society on the need for social justice by showing how
the common people really lived. Stasov: Russian painters, he
maintained, should give up imitating European art and look to their own
people for artistic styles and themes. Instead of classical or biblical
subjects they should depict ‘scenes from the village and the city, remote
corners of the provinces, the god-forsaken life of the lonely clerk, the
corner of a lonely cemetery, the confusion of a market place, every joy and
sorrow which grows and lives in peasant huts and opulent mansions’ Vladimir Stasov was the self-appointed
champion of civic realist art. He took up the cause of the Wanderers in art,
and the kuchkists in music. Virtually every artist and composer of
the 1860s and 1870s found himself at some point in Stasov’s tight embrace. Repin, Musorgsky and the sculptor
Antokolsky were its three horses.30 Mark Antokolsky quickly
rose to fame for a series of sculptures of daily life in the Jewish ghetto
which were hailed as the first real triumph of democratic art by all the
enemies of the Academy. Ivan Kramskoi Earlier painters such as Venetsianov
had portrayed the peasant as an agriculturalist. But Kramskoi painted him
against a plain background. cultural rediscovery of the Russian
provinces - ‘that huge forsaken territory that interests nobody’, as he wrote
to Stasov in 1876, ‘and about which people speak with derision or contempt;
and yet it is here that the simple people live, and do so more authentically
than we’.32 Musorgsky was
roughly the same age as Repin and Antokolsky but he had joined Stasov’s
stable a decade earlier, in 1858, when he was aged just nineteen The Populist conception of Boris
Godunov (in its revised version with the Kromy scene) is certainly in
line with Stasov’s influence. Musorgsky explained his Populist
approach in a letter to Repin, written in August 1873, congratulating him on
his Barge Haulers. It is the people I want to
depict: when I sleep I see them, when I eat I think of them, when I drink I
can see them rise before me in all their reality, huge, unvarnished, and
without tinsel trappings! And what an awful (in the true sense of that
word) richness there is for the composer in the people’s speech -as long as
there’s a corner of our land that hasn’t been ripped open by the railway tensions between Musorgsky and the
Populist agenda set out for him by Musorgsky’s populism was not political
or philosophical - it was artistic. He loved folk songs and incorporated many
of them in his works. The distinctive aspects of the Russian peasant song -
its choral heterophony, its tonal shifts, drawn out melismatic passages which
make it sound like a chant or a lament - became part of his
own musical language. Above all, the folk song was the
model for a new technique of choral writing which Musorgsky first developed
in Boris Godunov. building up the different
voices one by one, or in discordant groups, to create the sort of choral
heterophony which he achieved, with such brilliant success, in the Kromy
scene. Musorgsky was obsessed with the craft
of rendering human speech in musical sound. Gogol’s ‘Sorochintsy Fair’ ‘liudi’ - a word which
has the meaning of individuals Antokolsky felt the same artistic
impulse pulling him away from Stasov’s direction. He gave up working on the Inquisition,
saying he was tired of civic art, Even
Repin, the ‘lead horse’, began to pull away from Stasov’s harnesses: he would
no longer haul his Volga barge 3. Tolstoy’s
Ambivalence about the Peasants In 1855 Tolstoy lost his favourite house
in a game of cards. For two days and nights he played shtoss with his
fellow officers in the Crimea, losing all the time, until at last he
confessed to his diary ‘the loss of everything - the Yasnaya Polyana house. I
think there’s no point writing - I’m so disgusted with myself that I’d like
to forget about my existence.’43 Tolstoy moved into a smaller house, an
annexe of the old Volkonsky manor, and, as if to atone for his sordid game of
cards,
he set about the task of restoring the estate to a model farm. He had
underestimated the gap between nobleman and serf - and he
left the country-side for the high life of Moscow, then joined the army in
the Caucasus. But by the time of his return in 1856, there was a new spirit
of reform in the air. The Tsar had told the gentry to prepare for the
liberation of their serfs. With new determination Tolstoy threw himself into
the task of living with the peasants in a ‘life of truth’. In 1859
Tolstoy set up his first school for the village children in Yasnaya Polyana. siding with the
peasants in their claims for land. On his own estate Tolstoy gave
the peasants a sizeable proportion of his land - nowhere else in Russia was
the manifesto fulfilled in a spirit of such generosity. In 1862 he settled down for good with his
new wife, Sonya, at Yasnaya Polyana, dismissed all the stewards, and took
charge of the farming by himself. The experiment was a complete
failure. The fantasy, however, would not go away. ‘I am going to give up my land and my
aristocratic way of life and become a peasant. I shall build myself a hut
at the edge of the village, marry a country woman, and work the land as you
do: mowing, ploughing, and all the rest…. there’s nothing to laugh at in a
man’s working, but there is a great deal of shame and disgrace in his not
working, and yet living better than others. Tolstoy’s life was full of
contradictions and
he never could decide if he should become a peasant or remain a nobleman.
On the one hand he embraced the elite culture of the aristocracy. War
and Peace is a novel that rejoices in that world. War and Peace would depict
only ‘princes, counts, ministers, senators and their children’ he could no more understand what a
peasant might be thinking than he ‘could understand what a cow is thinking as
it is being milked or what a horse is thinking as it is pulling a barrel’.48 On the
other hand, his whole life was a struggle to renounce that elite world of
shameful privilege and live ‘by the sweat of his own brow’. Prince Levin, for example,
the peasant-loving squire in Anna Karenina that blissful
moment when Levin joins the peasant mowers in the field and loses himself in
the labour and the team? Tolstoy loved to be among the
peasants. He derived intense pleasure - emotional, erotic - from their physical
presence. The peasant women he found
irresistible - sexually attractive and available to him by his ‘squire’s
rights’. Tolstoy’s diaries are filled with details of his conquests of the
female serfs on his estate - a diary he presented, according to the custom,
to his bride Sonya (as Levin does to Kitty) on the eve of their wedding:* he had a huge
sex drive and, in addition to the thirteen children Sonya bore, there were at
least a dozen other children fathered by him in the villages of his estate. when Tolstoy
married Sonya, he tried to break relations with Aksinia; and in the first
years of their marriage, when he was working without rest on War and
Peace, it is hard to imagine his wandering off to find Aksinia in the
woods. But in the 1870s he began to see her once again there was one
peasant woman who represented more than a sexual conquest. Aksinia
Bazykina in the 1870s he began to see her once
again Aksinia was Tolstoy’s unofficial
‘wife’, and he continued to love her well into her old age. ‘Without her’, Tolstoy wrote, ‘the khorovod
was not a khorovod, the women did not sing, the children did not
play’.56
Tolstoy saw her as the personification of everything that was good and
beautiful in the Russian peasant woman ‘The Devil’, which tells
the story of his love affair with her both before and after his marriage. Tolstoy’s own life story was
unresolved as well.
In the middle of the 1870s, when the ‘going to the people’ reached its
apogee, Tolstoy experienced a moral crisis that led him, like the students,
to seek his salvation in the peasantry. A Confession (1879-80), he saw
that there was a true religion in which to place his faith - in the
suffering, labouring and communal life of the Russian peasantry. . In many ways he only played at
being a ‘peasant’. During the day he would labour in the fields at
Yasnaya Polyana - then return to his manor house for a dinner served by
waiters in white gloves. Repin was disgusted by the count’s
behaviour.
‘To descend for a day into this darkness of the peasantry’s existence and
proclaim: “I am with you” - that is just hypocrisy.’58 a publishing
venture (‘The Intermediary’) to print the classics (Pushkin, Gogol, Leskov
and Chekhov) for the growing mass of readers in the countryside. From his teaching at the village
schools, he came to the conclusion that the peasant had a higher moral wisdom
than the nobleman - an idea he explained by the peasant’s natural and
communal way of life. This is what the peasant Karataev teaches Pierre in War
and Peace: With every passing year, Tolstoy
strived to live more and more like a peasant. Sometimes in the evening he would join
the pilgrims walking on the road from Moscow to Kiev, which passed by the
estate. He would walk with them for miles, returning barefoot in the early
morning hours with a new confirmation of his faith. ‘Yes, these people know
God,’ In 1862, Tolstoy married Sofya (Sonya)
Behrs, the daughter of Dr Andrei Behrs, the house doctor of the Kremlin
Palace in Moscow, in a ceremony at the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Assumption. the splendid
wedding scene between Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina. As in many
gentry weddings of the time, the ceremony combines Orthodox and
peasant rituals; an ethnographic
document about this special aspect of the Russian way of life. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in the lovesick
Tatiana asks her nurse if she has ever been in love. The peasant woman
replies by telling the sad story of how she came to be married, at the age of
just thirteen, to an even younger boy she had never seen before: ‘Oh, come! Our world was quite
another! The scene encapsulates the contrast
between the two different cultures - the European and the folk - in Russian
society Tatiana looks at marriage through the
prism of romantic literature, her nurse regards it from the viewpoint of a
patriarchal culture Sonya was eighteen when she married
Tolstoy Eighteen was in fact the average age
of marriage for women in nineteenth-century Russia - far younger than even in
those pre-industrial parts of western Europe where women tended to marry
relatively early (around the age of twenty-five). in this respect
Russian marriage more closely fits the Asiatic pattern.)66 Serf owners liked their peasant girls
to marry young, so that they could breed more serfs Sometimes the serf owners enforced
early marriages - their bailiffs lining up the marriageable girls and boys in
two separate rows and casting lots to decide who would marry whom.67 Among
the upper classes (though not the merchantry) girls married at an older age,
although in the provinces it was not unusual for a noble bride to be barely
older than a child. Sonya Tolstoy would have sympathized with Princess
Raevskaya, who became a widow at the age The arranged marriage was the norm in
peasant Russia until the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a collective rite intended to
bind the couple and the new household to the patriarchal culture of the
village and the Church. By custom throughout Russia, the
parents of the groom would appoint a matchmaker in the autumn courting
season who would find a bride in one of the
nearby villages and arrange for her inspection at a smotrinie. If
that was successful the two families would begin negotiations over the bride
price, the cost of her trousseau, the exchange of household property and the
expenses of the wedding feast. When all this was agreed a formal
marriage contract would be sealed by the drinking of a toast which was
witnessed by the whole community and marked by the singing of a ceremonial
song and a kborovod.69 Judging from the plaintive nature
of these songs, the bride did not look forward to her wedding day. The prenuptial khorovod, The bride and groom played a largely
passive role in the peasant wedding rituals, which were enacted by the whole
community in a highly formalized dramatic performance. The night before the wedding the bride
was stripped of the customary belt that protected her maidenly purity and was
washed by village girls in the bath house. The bridal shower (devichnik) by ritual songs
to summon up the magic spirits of the bath house which were believed to
protect the bride and her children. the unplaiting of
the maiden’s single braid, which was then replaited as two braids to
symbolize her entry into married life. As in Eastern cultures, the
display of female hair was seen as a sexual enticement, and all married
Russian peasant women kept their plaited hair hidden underneath a kerchief or
head-dress. The bride’s virginity was a matter of communal importance and,
until it had been confirmed, either by the finger of the matchmaker or by the
presence of bloodstains on the sheets, the honour of her household would
remain in doubt. At the wedding feast it was not unusual for the guests to
act as witnesses to the bride’s deflowering -
sometimes even for guests to strip the couple and tie their legs together
with embroidered towels. In the aristocracy arranged marriages
remained the norm in Russia long after they had been replaced in Europe by
romantic ones Even among the most educated families,
parents nearly always had the final say over the choice of a spouse By the end of the nineteenth century a
father would rarely refuse to sanction his child’s marriage; In the
provinces, where the gentry was generally closer to the culture of the
peasants, noble families were even slower to assimilate the European notion
of romantic love The noble marriage contract The autumn balls in Moscow were a
conscious translation of the autumn courtship rituals played out by the
peasants and their matchmakers. Pushkin himself met his wife, Natalia
Goncharova,
who was then aged just sixteen, at a Moscow
autumn ball. In War and Peace Levin comes to
Moscow to court Kitty rituals of their wedding The parents of the bride and groom are
absent from the service, as demanded by custom, for the wedding was perceived
as the moment when the bridal couple leave their earthly homes and join
together in the family of the Church. Like all Russian brides, Kitty is
accompanied by her godparents, whose customary role is to help the priest
administer this rite of passage by offering the bride and groom the sacred
wedding loaf, blessing them with icons and placing on their heads the
‘wedding crowns’. ‘coronation’ (venchane), among the common people the bridal
pair were called the ‘Tsar’ and ‘Tsarina’, and proverbs said the wedding
feast was meant to be ‘po tsarskii’ - a banquet fit for kings.79 The traditional Russian marriage was a
patriarchal one. According to the 1835 Digest of Laws,
a wife’s main duty was to ‘submit to the will of her husband’ State and Church conceived the husband
as an autocrat - his absolute authority over wife and family a part of the
divine and natural order. Konstantin Pobedonostsev,
‘The husband is the head of the wife. The wife is not distinguished from her
husband. Those are the basic principles from which the provisions of our law
proceed. In fact, Russian women had the legal
right to control their property women were at a severe disadvantage
when it came to inheriting family property The peasant wife was destined for a
life of suffering The traditional peasant household was
much larger than its European counterpart, often containing more than a dozen
members, with the wives and families of two or three brothers living under
the same roof as their parents. The young bride who arrived in
this household was likely to be burdened with the meanest chores the ancient peasant custom of snokbachestvo Then there were the wife-beatings. For those who saw the peasant as a
natural Christian (that is, practically the whole of the intelligentsia) such
barbaric customs presented a problem. Yet even Dostoevsky stumbled when
it came to wife-beating: the patriarchal customs of the Domostroi,
the sixteenth-century manual of the Muscovite household ‘to obey in
all things’. the patriarchal
culture
that had produced it was pretty universal in the provinces until the
latter half of the nineteenth century. divorces were very
rare indeed - about fifty a year for the whole of Russia in the 1850s, rising
to no more than a few hundred in the final decades of the nineteenth
century87 - much fewer than in Europe at the time. Tolstoy saw the Kitty-Levin marriage
as an ideal Christian love: each lives for the other and, through that love,
they both live in God The theme runs right through his
literary work. But here too he failed to find true
union. His own selfishness was always in the way. Tolstoy came to question the romantic
basis of marriage. Here was the central theme of all his fiction from Anna
Karenina to
The Kreutzer Sonata (1891) and Resurrection (1899). an essay called ‘On Life’
happiness depends on a form of love that gives; and we can only find
ourselves through a communion with our fellow human beings. Tolstoy’s Kitty and Levin in Anna
Karenina: combining Orthodox and peasant rituals Tatiana and her nurse discuss love in Eugene
Onegin Girls marry at 18: early average age
of marriage (Asiatic) Arranged marriage and patriarchy: The matchmaker and the smotrinie the unhappy prenuptial khorovod, The bridal shower (devichnik) The wedding sheet Aristocratic arranged marriages
survived the 19thc. despite Western Romantic love The noble marriage contract ‘coronation’ (venchane), wedding
scene between Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina: Patriarchal: wife could control but
not inherit property The peasant wife was destined for a
life of suffering: snokbachestvo; wife-beatings; Dostoevsky on wife
beating the patriarchal culture: wife beating
rare among nobility but divorces were even rarer indeed Tolstoy saw the Kitty-Levin marriage
as an ideal Christian love: each lives for the other and, through that love,
they both live in God. Tolstoy’s own marriage was
patriarchal: The Kreutzer Sonata (1891); Resurrection (1899) ‘On Life’: happiness depends on
a form of love that gives; and we can only find ourselves through a communion
with our fellow human beings
The myth of the good peasant had been
punctured by the tale. The Populists denounced Chekhov for
failing to reflect the spiritual ideals of peasant life. Tolstoy called the
story ‘a sin before the people’ and said that Chekhov had not looked into the
peasant’s soul.91 Slavophiles attacked it as a slander against Russia. But
the Marxists, whose opinions were beginning to be heard, praised the story
for revealing the way the rise of the capitalist town had caused the decline
of the village. Reactionaries were pleased with the story, too, because it
proved, they said, that the peasant was his own worst enemy.92 Russia’s identity was built upon the
myth which Chekhov had destroyed. The impact of the story was all the
more disturbing for the simple factual style in which it was composed. It
seemed not so much a work of fiction as a documentary study: Chekhov’s story was the fruit of its
author’s first-hand knowledge of the peasantry. Shortly before he wrote the story
Chekhov had observed a group of drunken servants in his own kitchen. One of
them had married off his daughter, much against her will, in exchange for a
bucket of vodka. They were now drinking it.94 But Chekhov was not shocked by
such a scene. Over the years he had come to know the peasants through his
work as a doctor. Melikhovo During the cholera epidemic
that followed on the heels of the famine crisis in 1891 he had given up his
writing and worked as a doctor for the district zemstvo in Moscow. ‘The peasants are crude, unsanitary
and mistrustful’, Five years later, in 1897, Chekhov
helped to collect the statistics for the first national census in Russian
history. He was horrified just a few kilometres from Moscow there were villages
where six out of every ten infants would die in their first year: the lack of
proper aftercare , a ‘small deeds’ liberal since the rich got richer by turning
the poor peasants into drunks and whores, they should be made to meet the
costs of their health care.96 For the Slavophiles and the Populists,
who saw Russia’s unique virtues in the old peasant culture and community, the
growing subjugation of the village to the town was a national catastrophe.
But for Westernists, the liberals and the Marxists, who embraced the city as
a modernizing force, the peasantry was backward and bound to die away. Even
the government was forced to reassess its peasant policy as the influence of
the urban market began to change the countryside. The peasant commune was no
longer feeding the growing population of the countryside, let alone providing
a marketable surplus for the state to tax the agrarian crisis Since 1861 the government had left
villages in the hands of the communes -believing them to be the bulwarks of
the patriarchal order in the countryside: its own state administration
stopped at the level of the district towns after the 1905 Revolution the Under Stolypin, Prime Minister between
1906 and 1911, it attempted to break up the village commune, which had organized
the peasant war against the manors, by encouraging the stronger peasants to
set up private farms on land removed from communal control, and at the same
time helping those who were too weak to farm, or deprived of access to the
land by the new laws of private property, to move as labourers into the
towns. the slow decline
of peasant farming in the overpopulated central Russian zone. The peasantry’s
egalitarian customs gave them little incentive to produce anything other than
babies. birth rate in Russia (at about fifty
births per 1,000 people per year) was nearly twice the European average
during the second half of the nineteenth century The astronomical rise of the peasant
population (from 50 to 79 million between 1861 and 1897) resulted in a
growing shortage of land. By the turn of the century, one in ten peasant
households had no land at all; while a further one in five had a tiny plot of
little more than one hectare which could barely feed a family, given the
primitive methods of cultivation The communes kept the open three-field
system used in western Europe in medieval times in which two fields were sown
and one lay fallow every year. Each household got a certain number of arable
strips according to its size and, because the livestock were allowed to graze
on the stubble and there were no hedges, all the farmers had to follow the
same rotation of crops. In the most overcrowded regions these
strips were no more than a couple of metres wide the long-term
effect was to make the situation worse - for the soil became exhausted from
being overworked, while livestock herds (the main source of fertilizer) were
reduced because of the shortage of grazing lands. By the end of the
nineteenth century, one in three peasant households did not even own a
horse.97 Millions of peasants were driven off the land by crushing poverty.
Some managed to survive through local trades, such as weaving, pottery or
carpentry, timber-felling and carting, although many of these handicrafts
were being squeezed out by factory competition; or by working as day
labourers on the gentry’s estates, although the influx of new machines
reduced demand for them with every passing year. most were forced into the towns, where
they picked up unskilled jobs in factories or worked as domestic or service
staff New urban ways were also filtering
down to the remote villages younger and more literate peasants They looked towards the city and its
cultural values as a route to independence and self-worth. Virtually any
urban job seemed desirable compared with the hardships and dull routines of
peasant life. less than 2 per
cent held any desire to follow in the footsteps of their peasant parents. peasant boys set
themselves above the other peasants by swaggering around in raffish city
clothes. Such boys, wrote a villager, ‘would run away to Moscow and take any
job’.99 They looked back on the village as a ‘dark’ and ‘backward’ world of
superstition and crippling poverty - a world Trotsky would describe as the
Russia of ‘icons and cockroaches’ - and they idealized the city as a force of
social progress and enlightenment. Here was the basis of the cultural
revolution on which Bolshevism would be built: a science of contempt for the
peasant world the masses would destroy Russia’s
fragile European civilization Bolshevism was built on the mass
commercial culture of the towns. The urban song, the foxtrot and the tango,
the gramophone, the fairground entertainment and the cinema The village song was gradually being
supplanted by the urban ‘cruel romance’, or the chastushka, a crude
rhyming song which was usually accompanied by an accordion (another new
invention) in the tavern or streets. Unlike the folk song, whose performance
was collective and impersonal, these urban songs were personal in theme and
full of individual expression. The folk tale was also dying out, as the new
rural readership created by the recent growth of primary schooling turned
instead to the cheap urban literature of detective stories and tales of
adventure or romance. Tolstoy set up the Intermediary to
publish cheap editions of the Russian classics and simple country tales such
as ‘How a Little Devil Redeemed a Hunk of Bread’ and ‘Where There Is God
There Is Love’ which Tolstoy himself wrote for the new mass peasant
readership. Within four years of the publishing house’s foundation, in 1884,
sales had risen from 400,000 books to a staggering 12 million 100 - book
sales that could not be matched by any other country until China under Mao. the intelligentsia, The peasant had been ‘lost’ to the crass
commercial culture of the towns. The peasant who was meant to bear the
Russian soul - a natural Christian, a selfless socialist and a moral beacon
to the world - had become a victim of banality. Suddenly the old ideals were
crushed, and, as Dostoevsky had predicted, once the champions of ‘the people’
realized that the people were not as they had imagined them to be, they
renounced them without regret. The educated classes were thrown into
a moral panic about what they saw as the peasantry’s descent into barbarity. The 1905 Revolution confirmed all
their fears. In October 1905, with the Russian
empire engulfed by popular revolts, the army crippled by soldiers’ mutinies,
and his own throne threatened by a general strike, Nicholas II finally gave
in to the pressure of his liberal ministers to concede a series of political
reforms. Nicholas
II, October Manifesto (1905); Dissolution of the Duma (1907); Imperial
Manifesto (1907) The
October Manifesto, civil liberties and civil liberties
and a legislative parliament (or Duma)
elected on a broad franchise the political revolution was all the
time developing into a social one, as the workers pressed their radical
demands for industrial democracy in a growing wave of strikes and violent
protests, and the peasantry resumed their age-old struggle for the land,
confiscating property and forcing the nobility from their estates. liberals and
socialists went their separate ways after October. For the propertied elites,
the October Manifesto was the final goal of the revolution. But for the
workers and the peasantry, it was only the beginning of a social revolution
against all property and privilege The growing insubordination of the
lower classes, the fighting in the streets, the rural arson and destruction
of estates, and the mistrust and the hatred on the faces of the peasants
which continued to disturb the landed nobles long after order was bloodily
restored - all these destroyed the romance of ‘the people’ and their cause. In 1909 a group of philosophers
critical of the radical intelligentsia and its role in the Revolution of 1905
published a collection of essays called Vekhi (Landmarks) The essays caused a huge storm of
controversy a fierce attack
on the nineteenth-century cult of ‘the people’ and its tendency to
subordinate all other interests to the people’s cause. In 1909 a group of philosophers
critical of the radical intelligentsia and its role in the Revolution of 1905
published a collection of essays called Vekhi (Landmarks) the intelligensia
was pushing Russia to a second revolution, much more violent and destructive
than the first. Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg (1913-14)
is filled with images of the city being overrun by Asiatic hordes Bunin’s novella The Village (1910).
Bunin, The
Village (1910) Bunin belonged to the minor provincial
gentry He had never had any illusions about
the spiritual or noble qualities of the peasants. His diaries are filled with
horrific incidents he had seen or heard about in the villages: a woman who
was beaten by her drunken husband so that she had to be ‘bandaged up like a
mummy’; another woman raped so often by her husband that she bled to death. in the 1890s - a
decade of famine and flight from the land. Bunin’s village was a realm of natural
beauty that was being undermined and gradually destroyed by the new
industrial economy. the main agent of
its own demise. The Village is set in 1905 in a place called Durnovo
(from the word ‘durnoi’, meaning ‘bad’ or ‘rotten’). Its peasants are
portrayed as dark and ignorant, thieving and dishonest, lazy and corrupt. all of peasant
Russia is a Durnovo. the hopeless destiny of their peasant
land The most that the peasant, as depicted by Bunin, was capable of
achieving… was only the awareness of his hopeless savagery, of being
doomed.’106 Maxim Gorky came from the ‘lower
depths’ himself Gorky had known more human suffering
in his first eight years than the count would see in all his eight decades. My Childhood (1913) Gorky, My
Childhood (1913), provincial Russia - a place of poverty, cruelty
and meanness, where the men took to the bottle in a big way and the women
found solace in God. that was the real loathsome truth and
to this day it is still valid In 1888, at the age of twenty, Gorky
had ‘gone to the people’ a village on
the Volga near Kazan. The enterprise ended in disaster. The villagers burned
them out after Romas failed to heed the threats of the richer peasants Three years later, Gorky was beaten
unconscious by a group of peasant men when he tried to intervene on behalf of
a woman who had been stripped naked and horsewhipped by her husband and a
howling mob after being found guilty of adultery a bitter mistrust of the ‘noble
savage’ Some dog-like desire to please the
strong ones the violence of the revolutionary
years - a violence he put down to the ‘savage instincts’ of the Russian
peasantry Gorky wrote in 1922: Where then is that kindly,
contemplative Russian peasant, the indefatigable searcher after truth and
justice, so convincingly and beautifully presented to the world by Russian
nineteenth-century literature? In my youth I earnestly sought for such a man
throughout the Russian countryside but I did not find him.110 The controversy over Chekhov’s
‘Peasants’. Over the years Chekhov had come to
know the peasants through his work as a doctor. Gathered data for the 1st
national census in 1897 Stolypin, peasant reforms 1906 and
1911 Influence of the urban market on the
countryside: the slow decline of peasant farming in the overpopulated central
Russian zone the slow decline of peasant farming in
the overpopulated central Russian zone Peasant egalitarian customs emphasize
child birth more than production the feudal open three-field system
lapses as land becomes scarce, soil depleted and strips narrower; peasants
driven off the land by poverty and try to make living in crafts squeezed by
factory competition and new machines drive even more labourers from the field New urban ways were also filtering
down to the remote villages: new generation looks to growing middle class for
livelihood and condemn tradition Bolshevism: the urban song, the
foxtrot and the tango, the gramophone, the fairground entertainment and the
cinema the urban ‘cruel romance’, or the chastushka cheap urban literature of detective
stories and tales of adventure or romance 1880’s Tolstoy sets up the Intermediary
to publish cheap editions of the Russian classics and simple country tales
such as ‘How a Little Devil Redeemed a Hunk of Bread’ and ‘Where There Is God
There Is Love’ for the new mass peasant readership. The intelligentsia gives up on the
peasants during years leading to 1917 1905 Revolution: liberals and
socialists went their separate ways after October over spectre of social
revolution 1909 Vekhi (Landmarks) essays
criticize populists for paving the way for social revolution and savagery Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg (1913-14)
Bunin’s novella The Village (1910). Gorky, My Childhood (1913) 6. the World
of Art movement and the Ballet Russes In fact the Ballets Russes was a
direct descendant of the ‘going to the people’ in the 1870s. Abramtsevo: the arts
and crafts movement. The aim was to revive the peasant
handicrafts that were fast disappearing as the railways brought in cheaper
factory products from the towns. Artists like Gartman and Elena
Polenova Polenova and her artists would go
around the villages copying the designs on the window frames and doors,
household utensils and furniture, which they would then adapt for the
stylized designs of the craft goods manufactured in the colony’s workshops. Polenova
collected several thousand peasant artefacts which can still be seen
in the Craft Museum at Abramtsevo. She saw these artefacts as the remnants of
an ancient Russian style Urban fans of this ‘neo-national’
style took it as a pure and authentic Russian art was a fantasy.
By the early 1890s, when the door was carved, Polenova had moved on from
copying folk designs to assimilating them to the art nouveau style, which
made her work even more appealing to the urban middle class. Other artists trod the same path from
ethnographic to commercial art. At the Solomenko embroidery
workshops in Tambov province, Instead of the gaudy colours favoured
by the peasants in their own designs (orange, red and yellow), they used the
subdued colours (dark green, cream and brown) that appealed to urban tastes The folk-like crafted goods of
Sergei Maliutin, the principal artist at Talashkino, were pure invention.
Maliutin was the creator of the first matriosbka, or Russian
nesting doll, in 1891 a Russian
version of the Japanese nesting doll. Maliutin created a red-cheeked
peasant girl in the shape of a barrel with a chicken underneath her arm. Each The myth was then established that the
matriosbka was an ancient Russian toy Diaghilev to the neo-nationalists of
Abramtsevo and Talashkino - a marriage that gave birth to the folklore
fantasies of the Ballets Russes. By artistic temperament the impresario
was aristocratic and cosmopolitan, even if he came from the provincial town
of Perm. with young
aesthetes such as Alexander Benois, Dmitry Filosofov (Diaghilev’s cousin) and
Walter (‘Valechka’) Nouvel. There a general mood of Populism in these
circles, especially at the Bogdanovskoe estate near Pskov The four students would spend their summers
at Bogdanovskoe; and it was then that they first conceived the idea
of a magazine to educate the public in the great art of the past. co-founders of the World of Art They identified themselves with the
aristocracy, and saw that class as a great repository of Russia’s cultural
heritage. Benois underlined
this point when he reminisced about the Filosofovs, one of Russia’s
ancient noble families: From this class came the heroes and
heroines in the novels of Pushkin and Lermontov, Turgenev and Tolstoy. This
was the class that achieved all that is peaceful, worthy, durable and meant
to last for ever. They set the tempo of Russian life… They saw
art as a spiritual expression of the individual’s creative genius, not as a
vehicle for social programmes or political ideas, as they believed the
Russian arts had become under Stasov’s leadership. Their veneration
of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky stemmed from this philosophy - not ‘art for art’s
sake’, as they frequently insisted, but the belief that ideas should be
integrated in the work of art. Reacting against the nineteenth-century
realist tradition, the World of Art group sought to restore an earlier ideal
of beauty as the artistic principle of what they envisaged (and successfully
promoted) as Russia’s cultural renaissance a cult of eighteenth-century
Petersburg. It Benois and his nephew Eugene Lanceray each produced a
series of prints and lithographs depicting city scenes in the reigns
of Peter and Catherine the Great. Benois lamented that the classical
ideal of eighteenth-century Petersburg peasant art could also be regarded as
a form of ‘classicism’ - at least in the stylized forms in which it was
presented by the neo-nationalists Here was an
ancient, a different ‘world of art’, whose principles of beauty could be used
to overturn the deadening influence of nineteenth-century bourgeois and
romantic art. For Diaghilev, money
played a part. Always keen to spot a new market opportunity, the
impresario was impressed by the growing popularity of the neo-nationalists’
folk-like art. Fin-de-siecle Europe had an endless fascination for
‘the primitive’ and ‘exotic’. The savage of the East was regarded as a force
of spiritual renewal for the tired bourgeois cultures of the West. in 1900 when
Russia’s arts and crafts made a huge splash at the Paris Exhibition. The
centre of attention was Korovin’s ‘Russian Village’ an ancient teremok The Parisians were enchanted by these
‘savage carpenters’, with their ‘unkempt hair and beards, their broad,
child-like smiles and primitive methods’, a steady flow of peasant-crafted goods
from Russia to the West Diaghilev was particularly attracted
to the paintings of Viktor Vasnetsov, a general sense
of peasant colouring. Vasnetsov palette from the
study of folk art (the lubok woodcuts and icons) and peasant
artefacts, which he collected on his tours of Viatka province in the 1870s. Their fairytale-like quality was
clearly to be seen in later stage designs for the Ballets Russes by Alexander
Golovine (Boris Godunov: 1908; The Firebird: 1910) and
Konstantin Korovin (Ruslan and Liudmila: 1909). Even more influential,
in the longer term, was Vasnetsov’s use of colour, motifs, space and style to
evoke the essence of folk art, which would inspire primitivist painters such
as Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall. The ballet needn’t be three-tiered.
The libretto is ready. Fokine has it. It was dreamed up by us all
collectively. It’s The Firebird - a ballet in one act and perhaps two
scenes.126 In 1899 he was employed by Prince
Sergei Volkonsky, the grandson of the famous Decembrist, who had just been
appointed by the Tsar as Director of the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg. it was opera,
not ballet, that made up his exotic saisons russes. It was only the
comparative expense of staging operas that made him look to ballet for a
cheap alternative. The importance of the ballet as a
source of artistic innovation in the twentieth century is something that no
one would have predicted before its rediscovery by Diaghilev At the Marinsky Theatre, where Stravinsky
spent much of his childhood, there were regular Wednesday and Sunday ballet
matinees - ‘the half-empty auditorium’ being made up, in the words of Prince
Lieven, of ‘a mixture of children accompanied by their mothers or
governesses, and old men with binoculars’.127 Among serious intellectuals
the ballet was considered ‘an entertainment for snobs and tired
businessmen’, the ballet was ‘not really an art
form’.129 The ballets of Tchaikovsky they were an
inspiration to the founders of the Ballets Russes. Tchaikovsky was the last
of the great European court composers (he lived in the last of the great
European eighteenth-century states). Staunchly monarchist, he was among the
intimates of Tsar Alexander III. His music, which embodied the ‘Imperial
style’, The Imperial style was virtually
defined by the polonaise. Tatiana at the ball in Petersburg.
Tolstoy used the polonaise at the climax of the ball in War and Peace, where
the Emperor makes his entrance and Natasha dances with Andrei. In The
Sleeping Beauty (1889) and in his opera The Queen of Spades (1890)
Tchaikovsky reconstructed the imperial grandeur of the eighteenth-century
world. The Sleeping Beauty was a
nostalgic tribute to the French influence on eighteenth-century Russian music
and culture.
The Queen of Spades, based on the story by Pushkin, evoked the
bygone Petersburg of Catherine the Great, an era when the capital was fully
integrated, and played a major role, in the culture of Europe. rococo elements ( Benois, Filosofov and Diaghilev, the
co-founders of the World of Art. From that moment on, according to Benois,
the group was united by their love of Tchaikovsky In 1907 Benois staged a production of
Nikolai Cherepnin’s ballet Le Pavilion d’Armide (based on Gauthier’s Omphale)
at the Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Like The
Sleeping Beauty, it was set in the period of Louis XIV and was
classical in style. enois’ own sumptuous designs, Fokine’s
modern choreography, the dazzling virtuosity of Nijinsky’s dancing – Le Pavilion became the
curtain-raiser to the 1909 season in Paris, alongside the Polovtsian dances
from Borodin’s Prince Igor (also choreographed by Fokine), in a mixed
programme of Russian classical and nationalist works. Diaghilev could see that there was
money to be made from the export of more Russian ballets in this vein. And so
it was, as he wrote to tell Lyadov, that they cooked up the libretto of The
Firebird. Diaghilev and Benois and Fokine, with the fabulist Remizov, the
painter Golovine, the poet Potemkin and the composer Cherepnin (of Le
Pavilion fame) dreamt up the whole thing around the kitchen table in the
true collective spirit of the Russian tradition. But in the end Lyadov did
not want to write the score. It was offered to Glazunov, and then Cherepnin,
who turned it down, and then, in a state of utter desperation, Diaghilev
resorted to
the young, and at that time still little known composer, Igor Stravinsky. Benois called the ballet a ‘fairy
tale for grown-ups’. Patched together from various folk tales, its aim
was to create what Benois called a ‘mysterium of Russia’ for ‘export to the
West’.134 The real export was the myth of peasant innocence and
youthful energy. Each ingredient of the ballet was a
stylized abstraction of folklore. Stravinsky’s score was littered with
borrowings from folk music, especially the peasant wedding songs (devichniki
and khorovody) in the Ronde des princesses and the finale. a patchwork compilation of two
entirely separate peasant tales the tale of Ivan Tsarevich and the
Firebird, and the tale of Kashchei the Immortal the Firebird
herself was made to carry far more than she had done in the Russian fairy
tales. She was transformed into the symbol of a phoenix-like resurgent
peasant Russia,
the embodiment of an elemental freedom and beauty, in the pseudo-Slavic
mythology of the Symbolists which came to dominate the ballet’s conception
(as immortalized by Blok’s ‘mythic bird’, which adorned the cover of the Mir
iskusstva journal in the form of a woodcut by Leon Bakst). Stravinsky’s use of folk music the heterophonic
harmonies of Russian folk music were ugly and barbaric, and not really
‘music’ in the proper sense at all, so that it would be highly inappropriate
to adopt them as a part of their art form. Stravinsky was the first
composer to assimilate folk music as an element of style - using not just its
melodies but its harmonies and rhythms as the basis of his own distinctive
‘modern’ style.* The Firebird was the great
breakthrough.
But it was only made possible by the pioneering work of two ethnographers Yury Melgunov, Evgenia Linyova
Peasant Songs of Great Russia as They Are in the Folk’s Harmonization, published
in St Petersburg in 1904-9,136 which directly influenced the music of
Stravinsky in The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. It was precisely this ‘classical’
quality that became so central, not just to the music of Stravinsky, but to
the whole theory of primitivist art. In Petrushka (1911) Here was
another Russian revolution - a musical uprising by the lowlife of St
Petersburg. the vanished
fairground world of the Shrovetide carnival of his beloved childhood in St
Petersburg. The Rite of Spring (1913). the painter Nikolai Roerich, in the rituals
of neolithic Russia, which he idealized as a pantheistic realm of spiritual
beauty where life and art were one, and man and nature lived in harmony. ‘The Great Sacrifice’, It was meant to be that rite -
not to tell the story of the ritual but (short of actual murder) to re-create
that ritual on the stage and thus communicate in the most immediate way the
ecstasy and terror of the human sacrifice. The evidence of human sacrifice in
prehistoric Russia is by no means clear. especially the khorovod,
with its ritualistic circular movements that played such a key role in The
Rite of Spring. folklorists such as Alexander
Afanasiev The Slavs’ Poetic View of
Nature (1866-9), a sort of Slavic Golden Bough, of burning effigies, as symbols of
fertility, in ritualistic dances marking the commencement of the spring
sowing in parts of
Russia this custom had been replaced by a ritual that involved a beautiful
maiden: the peasants would strip the young girl naked, dress her up in
garlands (as Yarilo was pictured in the folk imagination), put her on a
horse, and lead her through the fields as the village elders watched.
Sometimes a dummy of the girl was burned.141 Roerich’s costumes were drawn from peasant
clothes in Tenisheva’s collection at Talashkino primitivist sets were based on
archaeology Nijinsky’s shocking choreography This rhythmic violence was the vital
innovation of Stravinsky’s score. Like most of the ballet’s themes, it was
taken from the music of the peasantry. In these explosive rhythms it is
possible to hear the terrifying beat of the Great War and the Revolution of
1917. the Ballets
Russes was a direct descendant of the ‘going to the people’ in the 1870s. Elizabeth Mamontov at Abramtsevo, the
arts and crafts movement: revive the peasant handicrafts that were fast
disappearing as the railways brought in cheaper factory products Gartman and Elena Polenova: peasant
artefacts: remnants of an ancient Russian style: Polenova: ‘Cat and Owl’
carved door: a 19th fantasy about ancient Rus’ : path for
artist from ethnographic to commercial art folk-like crafted goods of Sergei
Maliutin, the principal artist at Talashkino, were pure invention the first matriosbka,
or Russian nesting doll, in 1891. Hailed by Diaghelev as organic Russian
art; gaped at by peasants Diaghilev and the neo-nationalists of
Abramtsevo and Talashkino: the folklore fantasies of the Ballets Russes the World of
Art movement: identified themselves with the aristocracy, and saw that
class as a great repository of Russia’s cultural heritage: art as a spiritual
expression of the individual’s creative genius, not as a vehicle for social
programmes or political ideas; Reacting against the nineteenth-century
realist tradition: deadening influence of nineteenth-century bourgeois and
romantic art. The savage of the East was regarded as a force of spiritual
renewal for the tired bourgeois cultures of the West. Korovin’s ‘Russian Village’ at the
Paris Exhibition of 1900 Viktor Vasnetsov: ‘peasant art’ in the
stylized forms of modernism: Mamontov’s production of The Snow Maiden The Ballet Russes and Richard Wagner’s
Gesamtkunstwerk Prince Sergei Volkonsky, the grandson
of the famous Decembrist, who had just been appointed by the Tsar as Director
of the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg. St. Petersburg Marinsky Theatre
ballet: ‘an entertainment for snobs and tired businessmen’ The ballets of Tchaikovsky were an
inspiration to the founders of the Ballets Russes. Tchaikovsky was the last
of the great European court composers. Staunchly monarchist, he was among the
intimates of Tsar Alexander III. His music, which embodied the ‘Imperial
style’ The Imperial style was virtually
defined by the polonaise. At the climax of the ball in War and Peace, where
the Emperor makes his entrance and Natasha dances with Andrei The Sleeping Beauty (1889) and The
Queen of Spades (1890) 1907 Benois staged a production of
Nikolai Cherepnin’s ballet Le Pavilion d’Armide in Paris The Firebird: a ‘fairy
tale for grown-ups’. the myth of peasant innocence
and youthful energy. a stylized abstraction of folklore.
Stravinsky’s use of folk music, especially the peasant wedding songs (devichniki
and khorovody) in the Ronde des princesses and the finale. the tale of Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird, and the tale
of Kashchei the Immortal. shift their emphasis from
a tale of pagan magic into one of divine rescue (by the Firebird) consistent
with Russia’s Christian mission in the world. Stravinsky’s use of folk music:
peasant melodies and their ‘classicism’ Petrushka (1911): a
musical uprising by the lowlife of St Petersburg. Benois scenery conjured the
vanished fairground world of the Shrovetide carnival of his beloved childhood
in St Petersburg. Fokine’s mechanistic choreography echoed the jerky ostinato
rhythms which Stravinsky heard in vendors’ cries and chants, organ-grinder
tunes, accordion melodies, factory songs, coarse peasant speech and the
syncopated music of village bands The Rite of Spring (1913) and the
painter Nikolai Roerich, researched the rituals of neolithic Russia, which he
idealized as a pantheistic realm of spiritual beauty where life and art were
one, and man and nature lived in harmony. Folklorists such as Alexander
Afanasiev The Slavs’ Poetic View of Nature (1866-9), a sort of Slavic Golden
Bough. primitivist sets were based on
archaeology. Then there was Nijinsky’s shocking choreography: This rhythmic
violence was the vital innovation of Stravinsky’s score. Like most of the
ballet’s themes, it was taken from the music of the peasantry. 7.
Stravinsky, The Peasant Wedding Les Noces 1923 “Ballets
Russes: The Art of Costume” from the National Gallery of Australia, “The Art of
Natalia Goncharova” from GrinnellCollege, All-Art.org, Maria
Buszek.com, Art Experts,
Inc., Rollins
College, Russian-Women.net In the autumn of 1917 his beloved estate at Ustilug was ransacked and destroyed by the peasantry. Four Russian Songs (1918-19). The Peasant Wedding (Svad-ebka), a work begun
before the First World War and first performed in Paris (as Let Noces) nine
years later, in 1923: a ballet that would re-create the wedding rituals of
the peasantry: a sort of talisman of the Russia he had lost The freedom of accentuation in the
peasant song had a clear affinity with the ever-shifting rhythms of his own music in The Rite of Spring; both had the
effect of sparkling play or dance. an essential ur-Russia, the ancient
peasant Russia that had been concealed by the thin veneer of European
civilization since the eighteenth century: Russia before Peter the Great and
before Europeanism… a peasant, but above all Christian, Russia the wedding rite had four main parts:
matchmaking, the inspection of the bride, the betrothal, the prenuptial
rituals, the blessing of the bride with the family icon, the wedding ceremony
itself, the marriage feast, the marriage feast a collective rite - the binding of the bridal couple to the patriarchal culture of the peasant community -- voluntary surrender of the individual will to collective rituals and forms of life Chapter 5. In Search of the Russian Soul 1. 19th
c. religious revivalism: the Old Believers 1. 19th c. Religious Revivalism: the Old Believers
The monastery of Optina Pustyn was the last
great refuge of the hermitic tradition that connected Russia with Byzantium,
and during the 19th century it came to be regarded as the spiritual centre of the national
consciousness. It was at the forefront of a revival in the medieval
hermitic tradition and a hermitage, or skete, was built within its walls. The
building of the skete was a radical departure from the Spiritual Regulations
of the Holy Synod, the official organ of the Orthodox Church. The Church was governed by the Holy Synod,
a body of laymen and clergy appointed by the Tsar to replace the
Patriarchate, which had been abolished in 1721. Peter the Great's reforms had established the
subordination of the Church to the Imperial state. The Church was dependent
on the state’s finances to support the parish clergy and their families.
Impoverished and venal, badly educated and proverbially fat, the parish
priest was no advertisement for the established Church. As its spiritual life
declined, people broke away from the official Church to join the Old
Believers. Hesychasm: the Orthodox religion regards grace as a natural state, implied in the act of creation itself. The hesychastic monks believed that they could find a way to God in their own hearts by practising a life of poverty and prayer with the spiritual guidance of a ‘holy man’ or ‘elder’ who was in touch with the ‘energies’ of God. The model of this type of wies elder had been Nil Sorsky, a hermit in the wilderness of the Volga’s forest lands during the late fifteenth century. Paissy’s ideas were gradually embraced in
the early decades of the nineteenth century by clergy who saw themselves as leading a
general return to ‘ancient Russian principles’. The
nineteenth-century search for a true Russian faith looked back to
the mysticism of medieval monks. They advanced a spirtitual life that
was more essential and emotionally charged than the traditional
faith. Slavophiles like Kireevsky were drawn to this revivial
because of their Romantic aversion to abstract reason. The new revival
offered a religious version of their own striving for community -
a sacred microcosm of their ideal Russia. Unlike the Western Churches, whose theology
is based on a reasoned understanding of divinity, the Russian Church believes
that God cannot be grasped by the human mind: the Divine Mystery of His
revelation emphasizes the mystical experience of the Divinity. The revival put its emphasis on ritual and art, on the
emotional experience of the liturgy, as a spiritual entry to the divine realm.
The Russian Church is contained entirely in
its liturgy and the emotional experience in provides for the faithful.
Russians pray with their eyes open - their
gaze fixed on an icon. the Orthodox confess, not to a priest, but to the icon
of Christ with a priest in attendance as a spiritual guide. This was not
just a painted board - for centuries it had absorbed these passions and these
hopes, the prayers of the afflicted and unhappy. The icon was
Russia received its Christianity from
Byzantium and not from the West. The faithful considerd Russia to be The whole of Russian life in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries was permeated with religious rituals.
Easter was a truly national moment - a moment of communion between the classes. The Easter service is the most important service, and the most beautiful, in the Russian Church. traditons included the procession of the icons on the Easter Monday.
The sanctity with which many Russians regard religious rituals was the cause of a schism in the
Orthodox community that split the Russian nation into two in the 1660s.
Many Old Believers refused to shave off their beards or put on Western clothes. There was a strong anarchistic and egalitarian element in the Old Believer communities. Many lived in Utopian communities which represented a broad social movement of religious and political dissent.
The Old Believers held up the ideal of a
Christian nation which seemed to strike a chord with those who felt alienated
from the secular and Westernizing state. These simple farming communities Dostoevsky once maintained that ‘this
ceaseless longing, which has always been inherent in the Russian people for
a great universal church on earth was the basis of ‘our Russian socialism’.
Religious dissent and social protest were bound to be connected in a country
such as Russia, where popular belief in the god-like status of the Tsar
played such a mighty and oppressive role. 2. Nikolai Gogol and
Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol came from a devout family in
the Ukraine. Gogol’s parents met when his father had a vision in the local
church. It can be argued that from an early age Gogol felt a need to experience the divine presence as
a drama in his soul. Gogol never had religious doubts. His faith had much in common with the Protestant religion,
he also became close to the Catholic tradition. In the final version of Dead
Souls, which he never published, Gogol planned to introduce the figure of
a priest who would embody Orthodox and Catholic virtues. Gogol’s fiction was the arena of his
spiritual search. Contrary to the view of many scholars, there was no real
divide between the ‘literary works’ of Gogol’s early period and the
‘religious works’ of his final years, although he did reveal a more explicit
interest in religious issues later on. All Gogol’s writings have a
theological significance - they were indeed the first in a national tradition
that granted fiction the status of religious prophecy. ‘The Overcoat’, for
example, has echoes of the life of St Acacius. The work to which he then devoted all his
energies was envisaged as a three-part novel called Dead Souls - an
epic ‘poem’ in the style of Dante’s Divine Comedy -
in which the providential plan for Russia was at last to be revealed.
The grotesque imperfections of provincial Russia were exposed in the
first, and only finished version which was published in 1842. IN
the second part of his tale, Gogol intended to describe Russia’s
resurrection and its spiritual ascent on an ‘infinite ladder of human
perfection’. Gogol's
champions were the Slavophiles, whose fantasy of Russia as a holy union
of Christian souls was naturally attractive to a writer so disturbed by
the soulless individualism of modern society. The Slavhophiles
beleived that they could create a sobornost
(from the Russian word ‘sobor’ which
was used for both ‘cathedral’ and ‘assembly’) as the basis of a new
social system. The system rejected any coercive political system and
insisted that the community membership had to be a freely chosen. The Slavophiles believed that the True
Church was the Russian one. Unlike the Western churches, which enforced their
authority through laws and statist hierarchies like the Papacy, Russian
Orthodoxy, as they saw it, was a truly spiritual community, whose only head
was Christ. They espoused a social Church, some would say a socialistic one,
and many of their writings on religion were banned as a result (Khomiakov’s
theological writings were not published until 1879). The Slavophiles were
firm believers in the liberation of the serfs: they pointed to the
peasantry’s communal way of life (‘a Christian union of love and
brotherhood’), to their peaceful, gentle nature and humility, to their
immense patience and suffering, and to their willingness to sacrifice their
individual egos for a higher moral good - be that for the commune, the nation
or the Tsar. The concept of a national soul or essence
was commonplace in the Romantic age, though Gogol was the first to give the
‘Russian soul’ this messianic turn. The lead came from Germany, where
Romantics like Friedrich Schelling developed the idea of a national spirit as
a means to distinguish their own national culture from that of the West.
Prince Odoevsky, the archpriest of the Schelling cult in Russia, argued that
the West had sold its soul to the Devil in the pursuit of material progress.
‘Your soul has turned into a steam engine’, he wrote in his novel Russian
Nights (1844); Nationalists attributed a creative spontaneity and
fraternity to the simple peasantry that had long been lost in the bourgeois
culture of the West.
In the novella Taras Bulba (1835), Gogol had attributed to
the Russian soul a special kind of love that only Russians felt. ‘There are
no bonds more sacred than those of comradeship! the
kinship of the spirit, rather than the blood, is something only known to man. In the unforgettable troika passage at
the end of the first volume of Dead Souls, Gogol revealed his purpose in the rest of his master work: a divine mission to reveal
the sacred truth of the ‘Russian soul’ The trouble was that Gogol could not picture
this holy Russia. He neglected the questions of serfdom and
the autocratic state, ludicrously claiming that both were perfectly
acceptable so long as they were combined with Christian principles. He eventually despaired of his own religious vision, ‘this
is all a dream and it vanishes as soon as one shifts to what it really is in
Russia’. As he struggled to achieve inspiration for his messianic task, Gogol's talent languished. His 3. Belinsky’s
Retort: Russians are pagans. In his famous letter to Gogol, Belinsky had acknowledged that the Russian peasant was full of pious reverence and fear of God. “But he utters the name of God while scratching his backside. And he says about the icon: “It’s good for praying - and you can cover the pots with it as well.” 'Look carefully’, the literary critic concluded, ‘and you will see that the Russians are by nature an atheistic people with many superstitions but not the slightest trace of religiosity.’
The Church itself was increasingly
concerned by the image of a heathen peasantry. The peasants did not hold their priests in high esteem. For all the claims of the Slavophiles and
the intense devotion of the Old Believers, the Russian peasant had never been
more than semi-attached in the Orthodox religion. Even though he thought of himself, first of all, as
‘Orthodox’, and only later (if at all) as ‘Russian’, only a thin coat of
Christianity had been painted over his ancient pagan folk culture.
Natural gods were frequently
combined or interchangeable in the peasant’s Christian-pagan religion. There
was Poludnitsa, goddess of the harvest, worshipped through the placement of a
sheaf of rye behind the icon in the peasant’s house; Vlas, the protector of
the herds, who became in Christian times St Vlasius; and Lada, the deity of
good fortune. At the core of the Russian faith is a
distinctive stress on motherhood which never really took root in the West.
Where the Catholic tradition stressed Mary’s purity, the Russian Church
emphasized her divine motherhood - the bogoroditsa. Russia’s Christian rituals and ornaments
were similarly influenced by pagan practices. From the sixteenth century, for
example, the procession of the Cross in the Russian Church moved in clockwise
circles with the sun (as it did in the Western Church). In the Russian case
it has been suggested that this was in imitation of the pagan circle dance (kborovod)
which moved in the direction of the sun to summon up its magic influence
(as late as the nineteenth century there were peasant proverbs advising on the
wisdom of ploughing in the direction of the sun’s movement). The onion dome
of the Russian church was also modelled on the sun. Embroidered towels and belts had a sacred
function in peasant culture - they were often draped around the icon in the
‘holy corner’ of the peasant hut - and individual patterns, colours and
motifs had symbolic meanings in various rituals. The twisting threaded
pattern, for example, symbolized the creation of the world (‘the earth began
to twist and it appeared’, the peasants said). The colour red had a special
magic power: it was reserved for belts and towels that were used in sacred
rituals. In Russian the word for ‘red’ (krasnyi) is connected with the
word for ‘beautiful’ (krasivyi) - which explains, among many other
things, the naming of Red Square. It was equally the colour of fertility -
which was regarded as a sacred gift. There were different belts for every
stage of life. Newborn babies were tied up with a belt. Boys were given a red
‘virgin belt’. Bridal couples girded themselves in red. It was not unusual for a gentry
family to observe all the strictest rituals of the Church and, without any
sense of contradiction, to hold simultaneously to pagan superstitions and beliefs
that any European would have dismissed as the nonsense of serfs.
Fortune-telling games and rituals abounded. Tolstoy gave the nameless pronoun ‘it’ to the
idea of death in those brilliant passages where he explores the experience of
dying in The Death of Ivan Ilich. It is difficult to say what was more important
in the evolution of this complex religious sensibility, the relatively
superficial nature of the aristocracy’s religious upbringing which allowed
space for other beliefs or the multinational influences on that class, but
either way it made for a culture that was far more complex than the type we
might imagine from the mythic image of the ‘Russian soul’. 4.
Dostoevsky’s Socialism: Father Zosima’s Russian Church In 1878 Dostoevsky made the first of
several trips to Optina Pustyn. Many of the scenes he witnessed at Optina
would reappear in it, and the long discourse of the elder Zosima on the
social ideal of the Church, which really should be read as Dostoevsky’s own profession
de foi, was borrowed from the writings of the monastery, with long parts
lifted almost word for word from The Life of the Elder Leonid (1876)
by Father Zedergolm. The character of Zosima was mainly based on
the elder Amvrosy , ‘Devout Peasant Women’, he
re-creates a scene which takes us to the heart of the Russian faith. Zosima
gives comfort to a desperate peasant woman who is also grieving for a little
son: “Don’t you know,” said the saint to her,
“how bold and fearless these little ones are before the throne of our Lord?
There’s none bolder or more fearless than they in the Kingdom of Heaven:
Thou, O Lord, hast given us life, they say to God, and no sooner had we
looked upon it than Thou didst take it away. And so boldly and fearlessly do
they ask and demand an explanation that God gives them at once the rank of
angels. For don’t forget, he’s living, he’s living,
for the soul lives for ever, and though he is no longer in the house, he’s
always there unseen beside you. Dostoevsky was a
man who yearned for faith. But the death of little children was a fact he
could not accept as a part of the divine plan the centre of The Brothers Karamazov and its
discourse about God. It involved a general whose hunting dog was wounded when
a serf boy on his estate threw a stone. The general had the serf boy
arrested, stripped naked in front of the other villagers, and, to the cries
of his desperate mother, torn to shreds by a pack of hunting dogs. why he cannot believe in the existence of a God if his
truth entails the suffering of little innocents. In a letter to a friend Dostoesvky said that
Ivan’s argument was ‘irrefutable’ How could one believe in God when the world
created by him was so full of suffering? It was a question he was bound to
ask when he looked at the society in which he lived. How could God have made
Russia? The teaching of the Gospels always remained
at the core of Dostoevsky’s personality he became a socialist, the type of
socialism to which he subscribed had a close affinity with Christ’s ideals 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of
a radical underground movement which met at the house of the young socialist
Mikhail Petrashevsky in St Petersburg. His offence was to have read out
Belinsky’s by-then famous but forbidden letter to Gogol of 1847 in Dostoevsky and his comrades were condemned
to death, but at the final moment, when they were on the parade ground
waiting to be shot, they received a reprieve from the Tsar Dostoevsky’s years in the Omsk prison camp
were to be the turning point of his life. . ‘I have learned to know, if not Russia,
then at least her people, to know them, as perhaps very few know them.’72
What Dostoevsky found among his fellow convicts was a level of depravity that
shook him from his old intelligentsia belief in the people’s innate goodness
and perfectibility The House of the Dead (1862), was an almost total absence of remorse. I saw among these people not the slightest
trace of repentance, not one sign that their crime weighed heavily on their
conscience, and that the majority of them consider themselves to be
completely in the right a vision of redemption to restore the writer’s faith.
The revelation appeared, as if by a miracle, at Easter time, if we are to
believe Dostoevsky’s own later recollection in A Writer’s Diary. Suddenly, a long-forgotten incident from
his childhood came into his mind. When he was aged nine he was staying at his
family’s country home, and one August day he wandered off alone into the
woods. He heard a sound, thought that someone shouted ‘There’s a wolf!’ and
ran terrified into a nearby field, where one of his father’s serfs, a peasant
called Marey, took pity on the boy and tried to comfort him ‘maternal’ act of kindness I cannot peer into his heart, after all. all the Russian convicts had some tiny glimmer of
goodness in their hearts (although, always the nationalist, he denied its
existence in the Polish ones). Over Christmas some of them put on a
vaudeville, the convicts’ ability to preserve any sense
of decency, in the dreadful conditions of the camp, seemed little short of
miraculous, and the best proof there could be that Christ was alive in the
Russian land he saw this barbarism as the ‘filth’ of centuries of
oppression concealing, like a ‘diamond’, the peasant’s Christian soul. Do not judge our People by what they are,
but by what they would like to become. Dostoevsky was released and allowed to
return to St Petersburg in 1859 emancipation of the serfs, which was in its final stages of
preparation, had given rise to hopes of a national and spiritual rebirth. Dostoevsky compared the Decree to Russia’s
original conversion to Christianity in 988. He belonged at this time to the
group of writers known as the ‘native soil’ movement (pochvennichestvo). For Dostoevsky, in particular, this turning
towards ‘Russia’ became his defining credo. He was a repentant nihilist, as
he described himself, an unhappy atheist who longed to find a Russian faith ‘The Life of a Great Sinner’. It would
chart the spiritual journey of a Western-educated Russian man a ‘gigantic novel’, his four great novels - Crime and Punishment, The
Idiot, The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov - were all variations
on its theme. Shatov in The Devils (1871), can never quite commit to an unambiguous belief in God. ’I - I shall believe in God. Dostoevsky’s novels can be read as an open
discourse between reason and belief all true belief must be maintained in the
face of all reason the Grand Inquisitor, the Grand Inquisitor argues that the only way to
prevent human suffering is, not by Christ’s example, which ordinary mortals
are too weak to follow, but by the construction of a rational order which can
secure, by force if necessary, the peace and happiness that people really
want. He condemned as ‘Western’ all faiths which
sought a reasoned understanding of Divinity or which had to be enforced by
papal laws and hierarchies (and in this sense the Legend of the Grand
Inquisitor was itself intended by Dostoevsky as an argument against the Roman
Church). a mystical belief outside of all reasoning , ‘if someone proved to me that Christ was
outside the truth, and it really was that the truth lay outside
Christ, I would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth’. Like Karamazov, Dostoevsky took delight in
this ‘Russian faith’, this strange capacity to believe in miracles. the urge to go on believing, despite his doubts,
because faith was necessary for life; rationalism led only to despair, to
murder or to suicide - the fate of all the rationalists in his novels.
Dostoevsky’s answer to the voice of doubt and reason was a sort of
existential ‘credo ergo sum’ the redemptive quality of the Russian peasant soul. In
all his novels the quest of the ‘Great Sinner’ for a ‘Russian faith’ is
intimately linked to the idea of salvation through reconciliation with the native
soil. Crime and Punishment, the old woman had been ‘useless’ to society and that
he, meanwhile, was poor. He thus persuades himself that he killed the
pawnbroker for altruistic reasons, just as the revolutionaries legitimized
their crimes, when in fact, as he comes to realize with the help of his lover
and spiritual guide, the prostitute Sonya, he killed her to demonstrate his
superiority. The suffering of such convicts had long
been seen by Russian writers as a form of spiritual redemption. The journey
to Siberia became a journey towards God the poem by Nekrasov (‘Russian Women’) which compared
Maria to a saint. Dostoevsky shared this veneration of the Decembrists and
their suffering wives. the voluntary nature of their suffering. humility, which Dostoevsky argued was the
truly Christian essence of the Russian peasantry - their ‘spiritual capacity
for suffering’.88 It was the reason why they felt a natural tenderness
towards the weak and poor, even towards criminals, whom villagers would help
with gifts of food and clothes as they passed in convoy to Siberia.
Dostoevsky explained this compassion by the idea that the peasants felt a
‘Christian sense of common guilt and responsibility towards their
fellow-men’.89 This Christian sense emerged as the central theme of The
Brothers Karamazov. At the heart of the novel stand the teachings of the
elder Zosima - that ‘we are all responsible for each other’, even for the
‘murderers and robbers in the world’, the thought of his wanton cruelty to the poor batman
the evening before. Suddenly he realized that he had no right to be waited on
‘by a man like me created in God’s image’ Dmitry Karamazov Wrongly convicted of his father’s murder,
Dmitry wants nevertheless to suffer in Siberia to purify himself and expiate
the sins of other men. Suffering thus awakens consciousness. a dream. During the hearings before his trial he
falls asleep and finds himself in a peasant’s hut. He cannot understand why
the peasants are so poor, why the mother cannot feed her baby, which continually
cries. One can find a human heart there also, in
the mines, under the ground, next to you, in another convict and murderer a Church of social action and responsibility. the Church was losing ground to the socialist
intelligentsia and to the various sectarians and mystics who were searching
for a more meaningful and socially responsible spiritual community. Dostoevsky’s writings must be seen in this
context. He, too, was searching for such a Church, a Christian brotherhood
like the Slavophiles’ sobornost’ Ivan His Utopia, a socio-mystical ideal, was
nothing less than a theocracy radical expansion of the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical
courts. the idea of Holy Russia was to raise the state to the
level of a Church. Ivan’s reforms of the courts would substitute the moral
sanction of the Church for the coercive power of the state: instead of
punishing its criminals, society should seek to reform their souls. Zosima
rejoices at this argument. No criminal can be deterred, he argues, let alone
reformed, by ‘all these sentences of hard labour in Siberian prisons’ Optina’s Father Zedergolm) he final scene of The Brothers Karamazov, where
Alyosha (who has left the monastery and gone into the world) attends the
funeral of the poor child Ilyusha, struck down by tuberculosis. a group of boys They gather at the stone where Ilyusha’s
father had wanted to bury his son ‘How good life is when you do something
that is good and just!’99 The censors banned large parts of
Dostoevsky’s novel, claiming that such passages had more to do with socialism
than with Christ.101 It is perhaps ironic for a writer who is best known as
an anti-socialist, but Dostoevsky’s vision of a democratic Church remained
close to the socialist ideals which he espoused in his youth. The emphasis
had changed - as a socialist he had believed in the moral need for the
transformation of society, whereas as a Christian he had come to see that
spiritual reform was the only way to effect social change - but essentially
his quest for Truth had always been the same. Dostoevsky’s whole life can be
seen as a struggle to combine the teaching of the Gospels with the need for
social justice on this earth, Dostoevsky’s vision of a democratic Church
remained close to the socialist ideals which he espoused in his youth. The
emphasis had changed - as a socialist he had believed in the moral need for
the transformation of society, whereas as a Christian he had come to see that
spiritual reform was the only way to effect social change - but essentially
his quest for Truth had always been the same. Dostoevsky’s whole life can be
seen as a struggle to combine the teaching of the Gospels with the need for
social justice on this earth, our Russian ‘socialism’ the ceaseless longing, which
has always been inherent in the Russian people, for a great, general,
universal union of brotherhood in the name of Christ. It is not in Communism, not in mechanical
forms that we find the socialism of the Russian people: they believe that
salvation is ultimately to be found in worldwide union in the name of Christ.
That is our Russian socialism! 5. Tolstoy vs.
Chekhov on Faith and Death 28 October 1910 Tolstoy crept out of his
house at Yasnaya Polyana determined to end his days at the monastery of
Optina, whose mystical approach to Christianity, uncluttered as it was by the
rituals and institutions of the Church, was very close to Tolstoy’s own
religious faith. Father Sergius (1890-98) The monastery was not far from his estate
at Yasnaya Polyana, and on several occasions over the previous thirty years
he had walked there like a peasant to calm his troubled mind by talking about
God with the elder Amvrosy. The ascetic life of the Optina hermits was an
inspiration to Tolstoy: so much so that Father Sergius (1890-98 Optina, whose mystical approach to
Christianity, uncluttered as it was by the rituals and institutions of the
Church, was very close to Tolstoy’s own religious faith. To judge from A Confession, Tolstoy’s
turn to God was a sudden one - the result of a moral crisis in the latter
half of the 1870s. But in fact the search for faith was a
constant element of Tolstoy’s life and art For Tolstoy, God is love: where there is
love, there is God. The divine core of every human being is in their
compassion and ability to love. Sin is loss of love - a punishment itself -
and the only way to find redemption is through love itself ‘Family Happiness’ (1859) to his final
novel, Resurrection (1899) Tolstoy had a mystical approach to God. He
thought that God could not be comprehended by the human mind, but only felt
through love and prayer the spirit is released from the personality
and merges with the universe.104 the hermits’ way of prayer at Optina. Tolstoy came to reject the doctrines of the
Church - the Trinity, the Resurrection, the whole notion of a divine Christ -
and instead began to preach a practical religion based on Christ’s example as
a living human being. His was a form of Christianity that could not be
contained by any Church. It went beyond the walls of the monastery to engage
directly with the major social issues - of poverty and inequality, cruelty
and oppression Christian socialism He was a pacifist. In his view, the only
way to fight injustice and oppression was by obeying Christ’s teachings. His Christian anarchism was hugely
appealing to the peasantry, and as such it was perceived as a major threat to
the established Church, even to the Tsar. By 1899, when Tolstoy published Resurrection,
he was better known as a social critic and religious dissident than as a writer
of fiction. It was the novel’s religious attack on the institutions of the
tsarist state -the Church, the government, the judicial and penal systems,
private property and the social conventions of the aristocracy - that made
it, by a long way, his best-selling novel in his own lifetime. e more the Church and the state attacked
Tolstoy, the greater was the writer’s following, until he was finally
excommunicated in 1901 ‘I Cannot Remain Silent’, written in the
wake of the Bloody Sunday massacre which sparked the Revolution of 1905 he Dukhobors pacifists who rejected the authority of
Church and state All the core elements of ‘Tolstoyism’ - the
idea that the Kingdom of God is within oneself, the rejection of the
doctrines and rituals of the established Church, the Christian principles of
the (imagined) peasant way of life and community - were also part of Dukhobor
belief. his living Christianity The number of sectarians had grown
dramatically, from somewhere in the region of 3 million members in the eighteenth
century to perhaps 30 million in the first decade of the twentieth century an answer to their yearning for a new and
more ‘essential’ kind of Russian faith the personal root of his religion was a
fear of death which became more intense with every passing year ‘On Life’ (1887), In 1897 Tolstoy paid a visit to Chekhov Tolstoy, Chekhov noted with his usual
cutting wit, was ‘almost disappointed’ not to find his friend at the point of
death As Chekhov lay there spitting blood, he
harangued him with a lecture about death and the afterlife. Chekhov listened
attentively, but in the end he lost patience and started arguing. He viewed
the mysterious force, in which Tolstoy thought the dead would be dissolved,
as a ‘formless frozen mass’, and told Tolstoy that he did not really want
that kind of eternal life. In fact, Chekhov said, he did not understand life
after death. He saw no point in thinking about it, or in comforting oneself,
as he put it, with ‘delusions of immortality’. Chekhov saw the Church as an ally of the
artist, and the artist’s mission as a spiritual one. As he once said to his
friend Gruzinsky, ‘the village church is the only place where the peasant can
experience something beautiful’.123 ‘The Bishop’, ‘The Student’, ‘On the
Road’ and ‘Ward No. 6’) are profoundly concerned with the search for faith.
Chekhov himself had religious doubts - he once wrote that he would become a
monk if the monasteries took people who were not religious and he did not
have to pray. ‘On the Road’ (1886) , ‘faith is a gift of the spirit. It is a
talent: For without faith in a better world to
come, life in Chekhov’s Russia would be unendurable. their faith, as Chekhov himself did, in the ability of
work and science to improve life for humanity. They mankind may, even in the remote future,
come to know the truth of a real God - that is, not by guessing, not by
seeking in Dostoevsky, but by perceiving clearly, as one perceives that twice
two is four. ‘I am going away to die,’ Chekhov told a
friend on the eve of their departure. ‘Everything is finished.” No other writer wrote so often, or so
imaginatively, about the actual moment of dying - his depictions of the
deaths of Ivan Ilich and of Prince Andrei in War and Peace are among
the best in literature. But these are not just deaths. They are final
reckonings - moments when the dying re-evaluate the meaning of their lives
and find salvation, or some resolution, in a spiritual truth The Death of Ivan Ilich (1886) Gerasim was the only person who recognized
the position and was sorry for him. ‘We shall all of us die, so what’s a little
trouble? The Death of Ivan Ilich was based upon the death of Tolstoy’s friend, Ivan
Ilich Mechnikov the Russian upper classes to draw comfort from their
servants’ presence at the moment of their death. From diaries and memoirs it
would seem that, far more than the priest who came to take confession and
administer last rites, the servants helped the dying overcome their fears
with their simple peasant faith which ‘enabled them to look death in the
face’. Tolstoy in Three Deaths (1856), by
Leskov in The Enchanted Pilgrim (1873), by Saltykov-Shchedrin in Old
Days in Poshekhonie (1887 Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward (1968), erf-like fatalism in which death was viewed as a release
from suffering. When they talked about their lot, the peasants often referred
to the afterlife as a ‘kingdom of liberty’ Turgenev’s Sketches, in the story
‘Living Relic’, where a sick peasant woman yearns for death to end her
suffering. Like many of her class, she believes that she will be rewarded for
her suffering in Heaven and this makes her unafraid to die. Others explained
such peasant fatalism as a form of self-defence. nearly half the children died before the
age of the souls of little children go straight up to
heaven’.145 Such thoughts must have been of real comfort. For the peasantry
believed in a universe where the earth and spirit worlds were intimately
linked in one continuum There were good and bad spirits in the
Russian peasant world, and how a person died determined whether his spirit
would also be good or bad. the spirits of the dead led an active life. Their souls
ate and slept, they felt cold and pain, and they often came back to the
family household, where by custom they took up residence behind the stove. It
was important to feed the dead Easter and Pentecost, it was important for
the family to give remembrance to the dead and feed their souls, in graveside
picnics, with ritual breads and pies and decorated eggs. Breadcrumbs would be
scattered on the graves to feed the birds : ‘When I am dying I should like to be
asked whether I still see life as before, as a progression towards God, an
increase of love. If I should not have the strength to speak, and the answer
is yes, I shall close my eyes; if it is no, I shall look up.’ thousands of mourners made their way to
Yasnaya Polyana, where amid scenes of national grief that were not to be
found on the death of any Tsar, Tolstoy was buried in his favourite childhood
spot. Chapter 6. Descendants of Genghis Kahn 1. Kandinsky
and the Mongol Tradition Kandinsky thought he might become an
anthropologist. a trip to the remote Komi region, 800 kilometres
north-east of Moscow, to study the beliefs of its Finno-Ugric tribes.
Travelling by train as far as Vologda, where the railway stopped, he then
sailed east along the Sukhona river, entering the forests of ‘another world’,
as he recalled, where the people still believed in demons and spirits.: a meeting point between Christianity and the old
shamanic paganism of the Asiatic tribes. It was a ‘wonderland’ where ‘the
people’s every action is accompanied by secret magic rituals’.1 Ust-Sysolsk,
the region’s capital, where Kandinsky lived for three summer months in 1889 He was looking for the remnants of the
paganism which Russian missionaries had described in that region from
medieval times: legendary tales about the Komi shamans who beat their drums
and flew off on their horse-sticks to the spirit world. in their private lives, as Kandinsky ascertained, they
still looked to the old shamans. a
forest monster called ‘Vorsa’. a
‘living soul’ they called an ‘ort’ They
prayed to the spirits of the water and the wind; they spoke to the fire Scratching the surface of Komi life
Kandinsky had revealed its Asian origins. ceramic
pottery with Mongolian ornament. a
chapel with a Mongolian roof, the theory of a Ural-Altaic family of languages that
united the Finns with the Ostiaks, the Voguls, Samoyeds and Mongols in a
single culture stretching from Finland to Manchuria. 1850s by the Finnish
explorer M. A. Castren; shamanistic motifs,
for example, appear in the Kalevala, or ‘Land of Heroes’, the Finnish
national epic poem. Like a shaman with his horse-stick and drum, its hero
Vainamoinen journeys with his kantele (a sort of zither) to a magic
underworld inhabited by spirits of the dead. One-fifth of the Kalevala is
composed in magic charms. The Kandinskys took their name from the
Konda river near Tobolsk in Siberia, where they had settled in the eighteenth
century. The family was descended from the Tungus tribe, it is possible that
he had Komi blood as well.9 ‘Scratch a Russian and you will find a
Tatar,’ Napoleon once said. The coats of arms of Russian families - where
Muslim motifs such as sabres, arrows, crescent moons and the 8-pointed star Mongol
legacy: Turkic-speaking nomads with Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde: some of the
most famous names in Russian history: writers like Karamzin, Turgenev,
Bulgakov and Akhmatova; philosophers like Chaadaev, Kireevsky, Berdiaev;
statesmen like Godunov, Bukharin, Tukhachevsky; and composers like
Rimsky-Korsakov. the
families of Turkic origin who came to Russia from the west Families
of mixed Slav and Tatar ancestry Russian
families who changed their names to make them sound more Turkic Russia’s grandest dynasties - the
Sheremetevs, Stroganovs and Rostopchins gogul-a type of steppeland
bird Turgenev
derives from the Mongol word for ‘swift’ (tiirgen); Bulgakov
from the Turkic word ‘to wave’ (bulgaq) Godunov
from the Mongol word godon (‘a stupid person’); Korsakov
from the Turkic word qorsaq Akhmatova Adopting Turkic names became the height of
fashion at the court of Moscow between the fifteenth and seventeenth
centuries During the eighteenth century, when Peter’s nobles were obliged to
look westwards, the fashion fell into decline. Nabokov, for example, claimed (perhaps with
tongue in cheek) that his family was descended from no less a personage than
Genghiz Khan himself. Kandinsky lecture on the findings of his
trip to the Imperial Ethnographic Society in St Petersburg. (1890) intellectuals were now looking towards the East for spiritual
renewal. The defining myth Russia had evolved as a
Christian civilization, Its culture was a product of the combined influence
of Scandinavia and Byzantium. A struggle by the agriculturalists of the
northern forest lands against the horsemen of the Asiatic steppe. To suggest
an Asiatic influence on Russia’s culture was to invite charges of treason. In
the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, cultural attitudes
shifted. 1860s, Stasov was denounced by the
Slavophiles and other when he tried to show that much of Russia’s folk
culture, its ornament and folk epics (byliny), had antecedents in the
East. Yet by the end of the 1880s, when Kandinsky made his trip, there was an
explosion of research into the Asiatic origins of Russia’s folk culture Anthropologists found shamanic
practices in Russian peasant sacred rituals.13 Others pointed out animistic
beliefs had been handed down to them from the Mongol tribes. Like the
Bashkirs and the Chuvash (tribes of Finnish stock with a strong Tatar
strain), the Russian peasants used a snakelike leather charm to draw a fever;
and like the Komi, or the Ostiaks and the Buriats in the Far East, they were
known to hang the carcass of an ermine or a fox from the portal of their
house to ward away the ’evil eye’ the
ritual use of totems was practised by many Asian tribes. When a child was
born they would carve a wooden figurine of the infant and bury it together
with the placenta in a coffin 2.
The Mongol Inheritance (despite the Eurocentric national myth) In 1237 a vast army of Mongol horsemen left
their grassland bases on the Qipchaq steppe to the north of the Black Sea and
raided the principalities of Kievan Rus’. The Russians were too weak and
internally divided to resist, and in the course of the following three years
every major Russian town, with the exception of Novgorod, had fallen to the
Mongol hordes. For the next 250 years Russia was ruled, albeit indirectly, by
the Mongol khans. The Mongols did not occupy the central Russian lands. They
settled with their horses on the fertile steppelands of the south and
collected taxes from the Russian towns, over which they exerted their
domination through periodic raids of ferocious violence. It is hard to overstress the sense of
national shame which the ‘Mongol yoke’ evokes in the Russians. Unless one
counts Hungary, Kievan Rus’ was the only major European power to be overtaken
by the Asiatic hordes It took until as late as 1380, when the
power of the Mongols was already weakening, for the Russians to wage their
first real battle against them; another century of in-fighting between the
Mongol khans passed – before the Russian princes found the wherewithal to
fight a war against each one in turn. the Mongol occupation was a story of the Russian
princes’ own collaboration with their Asiatic overlords. According to the national myth, the Mongols
came, they terrorized and pillaged, but then they left without a trace;
Russia’s Christian civilization, with its monasteries and churches, remained
unaffected. They may live on the Asiatic steppe but they face towards the
West. Dmitry Likhachev, the leading twentieth-century cultural historian of
Russia, ‘we received extraordinarily little’ - and his book, called Russian
Culture, This national myth is based on the idea of the Mongols’ cultural
backwardness. They ruled by terror, bringing (in Pushkin’s famous phrase)
‘neither algebra nor Aristotle’. Karamzin, in his History of the Russian
State, did not write a thing about the cultural legacies of Mongol rule. In fact the Mongol tribes were far from
backward. If anything, particularly in terms of their military technology and
organization, a
sophisticated system of administration and taxation: dengi (money), tamozbna
(customs) and kazna (treasury large
urban settlements with palaces and schools, well laid-out streets and
hydraulic systems, craft workshops and farms. without
rich pastures or trade routes, the northern forest lands were of little
benefit to their nomadic life. their true wealth
derived from silk-route colonies in the Caucasus, Persia, Central Asia
and northern India. Pushkin wrote to Chaadaev in 1836, it was
then that Russia became separated from the West To this end we were obliged to lead a
completely separate existence which, while it left us Christians, almost made
us complete strangers in the Christian world… I do not by any means admire
all that I see around me… but I swear to you that not for anything in the world
would I change my country for another, the taboo which Asia represented to the
educated classes of Russia at that time Abram Gannibal: A favourite at Peter’s
court, Gannibal was sent to study in Paris. He rose to become a major-general
under the Empress Elizabeth, who granted him an estate with 1,400 serfs at
Mikhailovskoe, near Pskov. Russian Europhiles like Chaadaev found
nothing to impress them in the Mongol legacy; Karamzin pointed to the Mongols
for the degeneration of Russia’s political morals. The Asiatic character of Russia’s
despotism became a commonplace of the nineteenth-century democratic
intelligensia and was also later used as an explanation for the Soviet
system. Herzen said that Nicholas I was ‘Genghiz Khan with a telegraph’ -
and, continuing in that tradition, Stalin was compared to Genghiz Khan with a
telephone The khans demanded, and mercilessly
enforced, complete submission to their will from all their subjects, peasants
and noblemen alike. Moscow’s princes emulated the behaviour of the khans when
they ousted them from the Russian lands and succeeded them as Tsars in the
sixteenth century. Indeed, they justified their new imperial status not just
on the basis of their spiritual descent from Byzantium but also on the basis
of their territorial inheritance from Genghiz Khan. The title ‘Tsar’ had been
used by the last khan of the Golden Horde. Genghiz Khan’s descendants held a
prominent position in the Moscow court and, by any estimate, a sizeable
proportion of the Russian aristocracy had the great khan’s blood running
through their veins. Simeon Bekbulatovich and Boris Godunov were both Tsar
descendants of the Golden Horde. The Mongol invasion involved a huge
migration of nomadic tribes who had been forced to find new pastures on the
steppe through the overpopulation of Mongolia. Many of the immigrants became
absorbed in the settled population and stayed behind in Russia when the
Golden Horde was pushed back to Mongolia. The idea of a peasantry of purely
Russian stock must be seen as no more than myth. imported Tatar words were particularly common in the
languages of commerce and administration, where the descendants of the Golden
Horde dominated. Turkic phrases also left their mark on the
language of the street - perhaps most notably in those ‘davai’ verbal
riffs which Russian customs were equally influenced by
the Tatar immigration Russian folk taboos connected with the
threshold and honouring a person by throwing them into the air Nabokov’s father the shamanistic cults of the Mongol tribes were
incorporated in the Russian peasant faith, as Kandinsky and his fellow
anthropologists had argued The Holy Fool (yurodivyi In Russian folklore, the ‘fool for the sake
of Christ’, or Holy Fool for short, held the status of a saint - though he
acted more like an idiot or madman than the self-denying martyr demanded by
St Paul. Childhood, Tolstoy: a Holy Fool at Yasnaya Polyana Writers and artists portrayed the Holy Fool
as an archetype of the simple Russian believer Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot In Russia (1916) Mikhail Nesterov The Fool’s untutored and largely improvised
sacraments probably owed more to the Asian shamans than they did to the
Russian Church: whirling dance, drum and bells; he wore his chains in the belief,
which was shared by Asian shamans, that iron had a supernatural quality. the image of the raven Many common elements of Russian clothing
were also Asiatic in their origins The food of Russia, too, was deeply
influenced by the cultures of the East basic Russian dishes, such as plov (pilaff),
lapsha (noodles) and tvorog (curd cheese the Russian taste for
horsemeat All the major tribes of Central Asia - the
Kazakhs, the Uzbeks, the Kalmyks and Kirghiz - were offshoots of the Golden
Horde; Lenin was descended from one of these Kalmyks. His paternal
grandfather, Nikolai Ulianov, was a Kalmyk son from Astrakhan 3.
Orientalism and the Conquest of Siberia To commemorate the
defeat of the Mongol khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan Ivan the Terrible
ordered the construction of a new cathedral on Red Square in Moscow. St
Basil’s in 1560, a triumphant proclamation of the country’s liberation from
the Tatar culture that had dominated it since the thirteenth century Moscow’s victory against the Tatars was
conceived as a religious triumph, and the empire which that victory launched
was in many ways regarded as an Orthodox crusade. The conquest of the Asiatic
steppe was portrayed as a holy mission to defend the Church against the Tatar
infidels. Moscow as the Third Rome so the Russian national consciousness was forged by
this religious war against the East. the
oldest terms for a foreigner (for example, inoverets) carry
connotations of a different faith. the
word in Russian for a peasant (krestianin), the Russian Empire The Russians were driven east by fur, the
‘soft gold’ that accounted for one-third of the Imperial coffers at the
height of the fur trade in the seventeenth century Close on the heels of the fur trappers came
the Cossack mercenaries Then came the
Tsar’s troops, who constructed fortresses and exacted tributes from the
native tribes, followed shortly after by the Church’s missionaries, who set
out to deprive them of their shamanistic cults. Surikov’s enormous painting Ermak’s
Conquest of Siberia (1895) the real point of the conquest was to undermine the
shamans who enjoyed a divine status in the Asiatic tribes. without a clear geographical divide to distinguish them
from their Asian colonies, the Russians looked instead to cultural
categories. a tendency to think of all of Russia’s newly
conquered territories (Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia) as one
undifferentiated ‘east’ - an ‘Aziatshchina’ - which became a byword
for ‘oriental langour’ and ‘backwardness’. The image of the Caucasus was
orientalized, with travellers’ tales of its wild and savage tribes.
Eighteenth-century maps consigned the Caucasus to the Muslim East, though
geographically it was in the south, and historically it was an ancient part
of the Christian West. In Georgia and Armenia the Caucasus contained
Christian civilizations which went back to the fourth century, five hundred
years before the Russians converted to Christianity. In the eighteenth-century imagination the
Urals were built up into a vast mountain range, as if shaped by God on the
middle of the steppe to mark the eastern limit of the civilized world.* to justify the whole colonial project in the east, the
steppe was reconstructed in the Russian mind as a savage and exotic
wilderness whose riches were untapped. It was ‘our Peru’ and ‘our India’.37 the economic decline of Siberia in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the promise of a virgin continent suddenly became
supplanted by the bleak image of a vast wasteland. transformation into one vast prison camp. The term ‘Siberia’
became synonymous in colloquial expressions with penal servitude, wherever it
occurred, with savage cruelty (sibirnyi) and a harsh life (sibirshchina). This Siberia was a region of the mind, an
imaginary land to which all the opposites of European Russia were consigned. Politically, Russia was as imperialist as
any Western state. Yet culturally there was a deep ambivalence, so that in
addition to the usual Western stance of superiority towards the ‘Orient’
there was an extraordinary fascination and even in some ways an affinity with
it.* The Russians might define themselves as
Europeans in relation to Asia, but they were ‘Asiatics’ in the West. Educated Russians themselves cursed their
country’s ‘Asiatic backwardness’. This makes Russia an extremely big
exception to Edward Said’s provocative argument in Orientalism: that
the arrogant European sense of cultural superiority imposed on the ‘Orient’
an ‘antitype’ or ‘other’ which underwrote the West’s conquest of the East the Russians who moved out into the
frontier zones, some to trade or farm, others to escape from Tsarist rule,
were just as likely to adopt the native culture as they were to impose their
Russian way of life on the local tribes Europeans did not need to settle in their
colonies (and did not have to take much interest in their cultures) to siphon
off their wealth. But such things were almost bound to happen in a
territorial empire as enormous as the Tsar’s, where the Russian settlers in
the remotest regions, six months’ journey from the capital, were often forced
to adopt local ways. Potemkin, Prince of Tauride, for example,
revelled in the ethnic mix of the Crimea, which he wrested from the last of
the Mongol khanates in 1783. precisely at that moment when Russian
troops were marching east and crushing infidels, Catherine’s architects at
Tsarskoe Selo were building Chinese villages and pagodas, oriental grottoes,
and pavilions in the Turkish style.48 Grigory Volkonsky, the father of the famous
Decembrist, who retired as a hero of Suvorov’s cavalry to become Governor of
Orenburg between 1803 and 1816. Many of the Bashkirs joined the Cossack
leader Pugachev in his rebellion against the harsh regime of Catherine the
Great in 1773-4. They besieged Orenburg (a story told by Pushkin in The
Captain’s Daughter) and captured all the other towns between the Volga
and the Urals brutal campaign of pacification against the
steppeland tribes Despite his brutal treatment of the Bashkir
population, Volkonsky was an expert on their Turkic culture. Volkonsky lived like a Persian sultan in
his exotic palace, surrounded by a retinue of Kirghiz and Kalmyk household
serfs whom he regarded as his ‘second family’.57 He also kept a secret harem
of Bashkir ‘wives’.58 4. Russian
Orientalism: Lermontov, Balakirev, Stasov, Rimsky-Korsakov ‘A fairytale land
from The Thousand and One Nights,’ proclaimed Catherine the Great on
her first trip to the newly annexed Tatar lands of the Crimea in 1783 the Russian translation of The Thousand and One
Nights (1763-71), portrayed the Orient as a hedonistic kingdom of sensual
luxury and indolence, seraglios and sultans, as everything, in fact, that the
austere north was not. This ‘Orient’ was not a place that could be
found on any map. It was in the south, in the Caucasus and the Crimea, as
well as in the east. The two compass points of south and east became combined
in an imaginary ‘Orient’ - an exotic counter-culture in the Russian
imagination - and it was made up as a sort of pot-pourri from many different
cultural elements. In Borodin’s Prince Igor, for example, the
melismatic music of the Polovtsian Dances, Long before the Russians ever knew their
colonies as ethnographic facts, they had invented them in their literature
and arts. It was Pushkin who did more than anyone to
fix the Russian image of the Caucasus. He reinvented it as the ‘Russian
Alps’, a place for contemplation and recuperation from the ills of urban
life, in his poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus the ‘Caucasian cure’ Pushkin’s generation was deeply influenced
by the ‘southern theory’ of Romanticism expounded by Sismondi in his De la
litterature du Midi de I’Europe (1813), which portrayed the ancient Arabs
as the original Romantics. Lermontov once said that Russian poetry
would find its destiny by ‘following the East instead of Europe and the
French’.67 The Cossacks were a special caste of
fiercely Russian soldiers living since the sixteenth century on the empire’s
southern and eastern frontiers in their own self-governing communities in the
Don and Kuban regions along the Terek river in the Caucasus, on the Orenburg
steppe and, in strategically important settlements, around Omsk, lake Baikal
and the Amur river in Siberia. (‘Cossack’ or ‘quzzaq’ is a Turkic
word for horseman Gogol emphasized the ‘Asiatic’ and
‘southern’ character of the Ukrainian Cossacks in his story ‘Taras Bulba’: in
fact, he used these two terms interchangeably. In a related article (‘A Look
at the Making of Little Russia’ Tolstoy, who had come to know the Cossacks
as an officer in the army, also thought of them as semi-Asiatic in character.
In The Cossacks (1863) Lermontov, who went there a decade later,
embraced the Caucasus as his ‘spiritual homeland’ A Hero of Our Times In the early 1830s he was a student of
oriental literature and philosophy at Moscow University. From that time he
was strongly drawn to the fatalistic outlook which he saw as Russia’s
inheritance from the Muslim the legends told by Shora Nogmov, Izmail Bey, in 1832 a bitter condemnation of the Russian Empire This same mixed identity, semi-Russian and
semi-Asiatic, was assigned by Lermontov to Pechorin, the subject of A Hero
of Our Times. with Bela, the daughter of a Circassian
chief, there was no clear boundary between the ‘civilized’
behaviour of the Russian colonists and the ‘barbarous’ acts of the Asiatic
tribes. The composer Balakirev symphonic poem Tamara (1866-81), based upon
Lermontov’s poem of that name. Lermontov’s Tamara (1841) retold the
folk story of a Georgian queen whose seductive voice lured lovers to her
castle in the mountains overlooking the Terek river. the common stock of ‘oriental sounds’ -
sensuous chromatic scales, syncopated dance-like rhythms and languorous
harmonies designed to conjure up the exotic world of hedonistic pleasure a stunning new device the harmonies were based on the pentatonic (or
five-tone) scale common to the music of Asia. The distinctive feature of the
pentatonic or ‘Indo-Chinese’ scale is its avoidance of semitones and thus of
any clear melodic gravitation towards any particular tone. It creates the
sense of ‘floating sounds’ which is characteristic of Southeast Asian music the hallmarks of the Russian music school developed by
the kucbkists - the ‘Mighty Handful’ (kuchka) of nationalist
composers which included Balakirev, Musorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Balakirev’s fantasy for piano Islamei Borodin’s Prince Igor and
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade Along with Balakirev, Stasov was the major
influence on the development of a Russian-oriental musical style. 1882 Stasov wrote an article on ‘Twenty
five Years of Russian Art’ Stasov believed that the influence of Asia
was ‘manifest in all the fields of Russian culture: in language, clothing,
customs, buildings, furniture and items of daily use, in ornaments, in
melodies and harmonies, and in all our fairy tales’.80 the ornamentation of the lettering to similar motifs
(rhomboids, rosettes, swastikas and chequered patterns, and certain types of
floral and animal design) from Persia and Mongolia. Stasov turned next to the study of the byliny,
the epic songs which contained Russia’s oldest folk myths and legends, Stasov argued that the folk heroes (bogatyrs)
of the byliny were really the descendants of the oriental gods Stasov argued that the folk heroes (bogatyrs)
of the byliny were really the descendants of the oriental gods
Ilia Muromets descended from the mythic kings who reigned
over India for centuries, or from the oriental gods who transcended human
time.84 Stasov caused considerable outrage among
the Slavophiles and other nationalists with his Asiatic theory of the byliny The whole philosophy of the Slavophiles had
been built on the assumption that the nation’s culture grew from its native
soil. For over thirty years they had lavished their attentions on the byliny,
going round the villages and writing down these tales in the firm belief
that they were true expressions of the Russian folk. the ‘mythological school’ of folklorists
and literary scholarship the ancient beliefs of the Russian people
could be reconstructed through their contemporary life and art In the early 1860s the byliny had
suddenly become a new and vital piece of evidence for the mythological school The publication of these Songs, in
four volumes between 1861 and 1867 Turgenev’s novel Smoke (1867), Sadko (1897), the opera by Rimsky-Korsakov. The spirit of rebellion which Sadko showed
against the Novgorod elites symbolized the struggle of the Russian school
against the musical establishment. But more importantly, as Stasov hoped, the
opera was a chance to draw attention to the Eastern elements of the Sadko
tale the skomorokh was known to wear a
bearskin and a mask, to bang his gusli like a drum, and to sing and
dance himself into a trance-like frenzy, chanting magic charms to call upon
the spirits of the magic world.93 In the draft scenario Stasov underlined
these shamanistic powers by having Sadko’s music serve as the main agency of
transcendental flight to the underwater world and back again like Balakirev, Rimsky used the pentatonic scale to
create an authentic oriental feel.+ With the help of the Slavophile folklorists
who had criticized Stasov, Rimsky made Sadko a ‘Russian opera’, with a
civic Christian message for the public at the end. In the end, it seems, the conception of Sadko
as a story linking Russia to the Asian steppe was far too controversial
to produce on stage. Sadko, after all, was a national myth - as
important to the Russians as Beowulf is to the English or the Kalevala
to the Finns. 5. Chekhov’s
Report from Sakhalin; his Travel Writing: The Russian Landscape In April 1890 Chekhov left from Moscow on a
three-month trek to Sakhalin One of Chekhov’s heroes was the traveller
and writer Nikolai Przhevalsky, Chekhov wanted to become a Przhevalsky - to
carry out some obvious achievement for humanity and write something of
greater consequence than the ‘trifling tales’ he had penned the treatment of the prisoners in Sakhalin During the three months he spent on
Sakhalin, Chekhov interviewed several thousand prisoners, working up to
eighteen hours every day and recording all the details on a database of cards
which he had printed up for his research The Island of Sakhalin (1893-4), the unmistakable authority of truth. In
one of the final chapters of that work Chekhov gave an unforgettable
description of the brutal beatings which were meted out on an almost casual
basis to male and female prisoners alike. The passage made such an impression on the
Russian public that it helped to bring about the eventual abolition of
corporal punishment - first for women (in 1897) and then for men (in 1904). Isaak Levitan was The two men were such close friends, they
shared so much in common in artistic temperament, that their lives and art
were intertwined in many different ways. Levitan appears in various forms in
Chekhov’s works - perhaps most famously (and almost at the cost of their
friendship) in ‘The Grasshopper’ as the lecherous artist Ryabovsky Both men shared a passion for the humble,
muddy countryside of Moscow’s provinces, whose melancholic poetry was
captured perfectly in both their works. Levitan thought this passage from the story
‘Fortune’ (1887) was ‘the height of perfection’ in landscape art What Chekhov most admired in Levitan’s art
(and Levitan in Chekhov’s) was its spiritual response to the natural world. Savrasov, whose famous painting The
Rooks Have Returned (1871) Chekhov found in Levitan the sort of images
he wanted to create in his reader’s mind. In ‘Three Years’ (1895) he gives a
description of Levitan’s painting A Quiet Dwelling (1891 Levitan
painting, The Village (1888). Evenings on the Volga (1888), Chekhov, too, was inspired by a visit to
the Volga steppe-lands at this time. His approach to landscape in ‘The
Steppe’ (1887), Vladimirka (1892) he combined landscape art with a social
history of the steppe. It was Levitan’s attempt to achieve in painting what
Chekhov had achieved in Sakhalin. The idea of the painting had come to
Levitan on a hunting trip with his lover, the young artist Sofya
Kuvshinnikova (the one described by Chekhov in’The Grasshopper’). Chekhov’s ‘Steppe’ is also dominated by
this atmosphere of suffering four men cross the steppe in a ‘shabby
covered chaise’ both the beauty and the bleak monotony of
its vast space the epic history paintings of Vasnetsov and
Vrubel, After Igor’s Battle with the Polovtsians
(1880), Bogatyrs (1898), it is the landscape which is the real
subject of the painting Vrubel’s panneau of the legendary ploughman
Mikula Selianovicb (1896) the Russians were as ‘broad and
unrestrained’ in nature as the boundless steppe Gogol took in his ‘Thoughts on Geography’,
published in his collection Arabesques in 1835. He also expounded it
in his story ‘Taras Bulba’, where the vast size of the steppe is used as a
projection of the Cossacks’ open nature and expansiveness. Many artists
thought that the boundless plains were a spur to contemplation and religious
hope On the other hand, the sheer monotony of
the never-ending steppe drove many Russian poets to despair. Mandelstam
called it the ‘watermelon emptiness of Russia’ and Musorgsky, ‘the
All-Russian bog’. The loneliness of living in a country
house, Saltykov-Shchedrin gives a wonderful
description of this mental slumber in The Golovlyov Family (1880): Oblomovshchina critic Nikolai Dobroliubov, who first
coined the term soon after the book’s publication in 1859, Oblomovshchina Oblomov’s dressing gown (khalat). the Asian origin of his hero’s dressing
gown Lenin used the term when he grew frustrated
with the unreformability of Russian social life. ‘The old Oblomov is with
us’, he wrote in 1920, 6.
Manifest Destiny, Russian Style It was ‘Providence that had called
upon the Russians to reclaim the Asian steppe’; and because of ‘our close
relations with the Asiatic world’, this was to be a peaceful process of
‘reunion with our primeval brothers’, rather than the subjugation of a
foreign race. Russia’s cultural homeland was on the
Eurasian steppe. racial superiority to the Asiatic tribes, the military conquest of the Central
Asian steppe produced two opposing reactions Vasily Vereshchagin enormous battle
scenes of the Turkestan campaign 1874 his experience of
the war had given rise to doubts about the ‘civilizing mission’ of the
Russian Empire in the East. On one occasion, after the Russian troops had
massacred the people of a Turkmen village, Vereshchagin dug their graves
himself. None of his compatriots would touch the dead.129 Vereshchagin came to see the war as a senseless massacre. ‘We see a
violence that could not be French or even from the Balkans: it is
half-barbarian and semi-Asiatic - it is a Russian violence.’127 After its defeat in the Crimean War,
the war in Turkestan showed the world that Russia was a power to be reckoned
with. But Vereshchagin’s almost photographic battle images revealed a
savagery which had not been seen by civilians beforefirst real view of the
Imperial war which the Russians had been fighting Three Conversations on War, Progress
and the End of History (1900), the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. described a vast Asiatic invasion of Europe under the
banner of the Antichrist. The opening lines of his memorable poem
‘Pan-Mongolism’ (1894) for the past ten
years against the Muslim tribes as the Tsar’s troops conquered Turkestan. Andrei Bely was another disciple of
Soloviev. In Petersburg Set in the midst of the 1905 Revolution:
Petersburg is swept by howling winds from the Asiatic steppe that
almost blow the city back into the sea The Scythians (1918) Russia had protected a thankless Europe from the
Asiatic tribes: The Scythian poets were fascinated by this prehistoric
realm. In their imaginations the Scyths were a symbol of the wild rebellious
nature of primeval Russian man. They rejoiced in the elemental spirit (‘stikhiia’)
of savage peasant Russia, and convinced themselves that the coming
revolution, which everybody sensed in the wake of the 1905 one, would sweep
away the dead weight of European civilization and establish a new culture
where man and nature, art and life, were one. The Asiatic image of ancient Scythian
Rus’ was conjured up by Roerich in the set designs and costumes for The
Rite of Spring and Rimsky’s opera The Snow Maiden (plate 18).
The Idols (1901) his essay ‘Joy in Art’ (1909), The Messenger: Tribe
Has Risen against Tribe (1897), In 1897, he made plans for a series of
twelve paintings on the founding of Russia in the ninth century Roerich, who
was a fully-trained archaeologist before he became famous for his Scythian
designs for The Rite of Spring excavations of the Scythian kurgans
Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals came to see the Scyths as a sort of
mythical ancestor race of the eastern Slavs. European avant-garde. The
‘Scythian poets’ - as that loose group of writers which included Blok and
Bely and the critic Ivanov-Razumnik the ‘Scythian temperament’ Dostoevsky portrayed the Crimean War
as the ‘crucifixion of the Russian Christ’. The root of Dostoevsky’s turning
to the East was the bitter resentment which he, like many Russians, felt at
the West’s betrayal of Russia’s Christian cause in the Crimean War, when
France and Britain had sided with the Ottomans against Russia to defend their
own imperial interests. In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, while in
Asia we shall be the masters. In 1881 he told the readers of his Writer’s
Diary: In Europe we were Tatars, while in
Asia we can be Europeans. When we turn to Asia, with our new view of her,
something of the same sort may happen to us as happened to Europe when
America was discovered. For, in truth, Asia for us is that same America which
we still have not discovered. Dostoevsky advanced the notion that
Russia’s destiny was not in Europe, as had so long been supposed, but rather
in the East. construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway
in the 1890s The Bronze Horseman. Odoevsky used it, too, as the basis of his story ‘A
Joker from the Dead’ in Russian Nights Karl Bruillov’s famous painting The Last
Days of Pompeii (1833 The city is divided into warring
class-based zones, and the two main characters, the senator Apollon
Apollonovich Ableukhov and his student revolutionary son Nikolai
Apollonovich, are on opposing sides of the barricades. Benois’ illustrations for The Bronze Horseman
(1905-18), Bely portrays Petersburg as a fragile
Western civilization precariously balanced on the top of the savage ‘Eastern’
culture of the peasantry. The thunder of those chargers from the
steppe was the approaching sound of 1917 the Eurasianists. Stravinsky Eurasianism was essentially a phenomenon of
the emigration insofar as it was rooted in the sense of Russia’s betrayal by
the West in 1917-21 The founding manifesto of the movement was Exodus
to the East, a collection of ten essays published in Sofia in 1921, Trubetskoi, the geologist Vladimir Lamansky had shown
that the soil structure was the same on either side of the Ural mountains:
there was one vast steppe stretching from the western borders of the Russian
Empire to the Pacific of Lamansky, the Eurasianist geographer Savitsky
showed that the whole land mass of Eurasia was one continuum in biogeographic
terms. essay ‘On the Higher and Lower Strata of Russian Culture’
(1921), Trubetskoi set out to prove the Asian influence on Russian music, dancing
and psychology. the pentatonic scale the dancing of the East, especially that of the
Caucasus. the Cossack dance, with heels hitting
fingers and high jumps Female dancing also showed an Eastern
character, with great importance placed on keeping the head still and on
subtle doll-like movements by the rest of the body This ‘Eastern psyche’ was manifested in the
Russian people’s tendency to contemplation, in their fatalistic attitudes, in
their love of abstract symmetry and universal laws, in their emphasis on
religious ritual, and in their ‘udal’ or fierce bravery. ‘Turanian psychology’ Even Russian Orthodoxy polemic and resentful posturing against the
West because of their emotive power, Eurasianist ideas had a
strong cultural impact on the Russian emigration of the 1920s, when those who
mourned the disappearance of their country from the European map could find
new hope for it on a Eurasian one. Stravinsky, for one, was deeply influenced
by the mystical views of the Eurasianists, particularly the notion of a
natural Russian (‘Turanian’) inclination for collectivity, which the music of
such works as The Peasant Wedding, with its absence of individual
expression in the tinging parts and its striving for a sparse, impersonal
sound, was intended to reflect.
The link between the ‘primitive’ and modern
abstract art is not uniqueto the Russian avant-garde; it was an inspiration
to artists as diverse as Gauguin and Picasso, Kirchner and Klee, Nolde and
Franz Marc. However, the Russians’ ‘primitives’ were in their own back yard. Russian Primitivists: ‘barbarism’ (Malevich and Kandinsky, Chagall,
Goncharova, Larionov and Burliuk) took their inspiration from the art of
Russian peasants and the tribal cultures of the Asiatic steppe Larionov and his wife Goncharova a ‘peasant aesthetic’ that was closer to the symbolic
art forms of the East than the representational tradition of the West; Haycutting
(1910). the painter Shevchenko: “Yes we are Asia and are proud
of this.” Before the First World War, Kandinsky lived
in Munich, where he and Marc were the co-editors of The Blue Rider almanac:
a synthesis between Western, primitive and oriental cultures Motley Life (1907) All Saints II (1911) the
Komi shaman Pam Oval No. 2 (1925 beaks
and eyes to represent the bird form circles
for the sun and moon a
hooked curve symbols
he had seen on the drums of Siberian shamans Buriat shamans hit their sticks (called
‘horses’) while they danced: the tops were shaped like horses’ heads, the
bottom ends like hoofs. Among Finno-Ugric tribes the shaman’s drum itself was
called a ‘horse’ and was equipped with reins, while the drumstick was
referred to as a ‘whip’. the hobby horse; the Kalevala the
hero Vainamoinen; Hungarian taltos, For the Symbolist circles in which
Kandinsky moved, the horse was a symbol of the Asiatic steppe upon which
Russia’s European civilization had been built. Petrov-Vodkin’s
Bathing the Red Horse (1912 a
leitmotif of Scythian poetry, from Blok’s ‘Mare of the Steppes’ to Briusov’s
‘Pale Horseman’. Chapter 7.
Russia Through a Soviet Lens 1. Akhmatova
at Fountain House 1.
Akhmatova at Fountain House Akhmatova arrived at the Fountain House,
the former palace of the Sheremetevs, when she went to live there with her
second husband, Vladimir Shileiko, in 1918 last owner, Count Sergei, the grandson of
Praskovya and Nikolai Petrovich To save his home from the violence of the
mob, he turned it over to the state, signing an agreement with the newly
installed Soviet government to preserve the house as a museum, before fleeing
with his family abroad. Shileiko, a brilliant young scholar of
Middle Eastern archaeology Akhmatova had known Shileiko since before
the war, when he was a minor poet in her bohemian circle at the ‘Stray Dog’
club with Mandelstam and her previous husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev. The Sheremetev motto, ‘Deus conservat
omnia’ (‘God preserves all’), the guiding redemptive principle of Ahkmatova’s life
and art. Akhmatova, like her new home, was from a
vanished world. school at Tsarskoe Selo, where, like Pushkin, she imbibed
the spirit of French poetry. In 1911 she went to Paris Her early poetry was influenced by the
Symbolists. But in 1913 she joined Gumilev and Mandelstam in a new literary
group, the Acmeists, who rejected the mysticism of the Symbolists and
returned to the classical poetic principles of clarity, concision and the
precise expression of emotional experience. Evening (1912), and then Rosary (1914): On the eve of the First World War,
Akhmatova was at the height of her success Freedom, merriment and a bohemian spirit
filled these years ‘In Memoriam, 19 July, 1914’ (1916): The February Revolution had swept away, not
just the monarchy, but an entire civilization. But almost overnight all the institutions
of authority collapsed - the Church, the legal system, the power of the
gentry on the land, the authority of the officers in the army and the navy,
deference for senior figures - so that the only real power in the country
passed into the hands of the local revolutionary committees (that is, the
Soviets) of the workers, peasants and soldiers. Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in October
1917 and instituted their Dictatorship of the Proletariat The cost of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk,
signed in March 1918, was one-third of the Russian Empire’s agricultural land
and more than half its industrial base, as Poland, the Baltic territories and
most of the Ukraine the Bolsheviks established the Red Army to fight
against the Whites (a motley collection of monarchists, democrats and
socialists opposed to the Soviet regime) and the interventionary forces of
Britain, France, Japan, the USA and a dozen other western powers which
supported them in the civil war of 1918-21. the practical ideology of the Russian Revolution owed
less to Marx - whose works were hardly known by the semi-literate masses -
than to the egalitarian customs and Utopian yearnings of the peasantry. surplus wealth was immoral, all property was theft, and
that manual labour was the only true source of value. quasi-religious status in the popular
consciousness: the war on private wealth was a bloody
purgatory on the way to a heaven on earth the Bolsheviks were able to draw on the revolutionary
energies of those numerous elements among the poor who derived satisfaction
from seeing the rich and mighty destroyed, regardless of whether such
destruction brought about any improvement in their own lot. armed workers to raid the houses of ‘the
rich’ and confiscate their property House Committees Palaces like the Fountain House were
sub-divided and made into apartment blocks. a campaign of mass terror Akhmatova was dismissed as a figure from
the past. rooted in a classical tradition that had
been thrown out in 1917 Her energy was consumed by the struggle to
survive For the old intelligentsia conditions were
particularly harsh. In the Dictatorship of the Proletariat they were put to
the bottom of the social pile. third-class ration , ‘just enough bread so as not to forget
the smell of it’, in the words of Zinoviev, the Party boss of Petrograd.8 Gorky took up the defence of the starving
Petrograd intelligentsia House of Artists World Literature (Zamyatin, Babel, Chukovsky, Khodasev-ich,
Mandelstam, Piast’, Zoshchenko and Blok and Gumilev) owed their survival of
these hungry years to Gorky’s patronage. In August 1921, Akhmatova’s former husband
Nikolai Gumilev was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka, jailed for a few days,
and then shot without trial on charges, the first great poet to be executed by the
Bolsheviks Anno Domini MCMXXI (In the Year of Our
Lord 1921) Akhmatova felt the moral obligation to be
her country’s ‘voice of memory’. she felt a Christian imperative to remain in Russia and
to suffer with the people in their destiny. Akhmatova was a poet of redemption, the
‘last great poet of Orthodoxy’, according to Chukovsky Fountain House a blessed place, the spiritual kernel of St
Petersburg, which became the Ideal City of her poetry. Praskovya, who shared her ‘gift of song’
and lived, like her, persona non grata, in the Fountain House. During his famous meeting with the poet at
the Fountain House in 1945, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin asked Akhmatova Berlin, The Arts in Russia Under Stalin (1945) cultural history of the palace Pushkin, above all, the poet she adored,
who was a friend of Praskovya’s son, Dmitry Sheremetev, Akhmatova was drawn even closer to Pushkin
from the middle of the 1920s. Akhmatova and Shileiko were divorced in
1926. her new lover, Nikolai Punin Punin was an art critic, a leading figure
in the Futurist movement, but, unlike many of the Futurists, he knew the
cultural value of the poets of the past. he had even spoken out against Trotsky, who
had written an attack in Pravda against the poetry of Akhmatova and
Tsvetaeva a warning of the terror to come Punin’s apartment in the Fountain House retained
the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Petersburg. There were always visitors,
late night talks around the kitchen table, people sleeping on the floor.
Apart from Punin’s former wife, her mother and daughter and a houseworker
called Annushka, there were always people staying in the tiny four-roomed
flat. frequent arguments over food and money The kitchen; washing on lines, its wetness
slapping one’s face. The wet washing was just like the ending of a nasty
story, like something out of Dostoevsky, perhaps Berlin, The Arts in Russia Under Stalin (1945) Socialist Realist novel, How the Steel
Was Tempered (1932), Nothing better illustrates the
everyday reality of the Revolution than this transformation of domestic space Soviet ‘war against the palaces’ By forcing people to share communal flats,
the Bolsheviks believed that they could make them communistic in their basic
thinking and behaviour. from the 1920s, new types of housing were
designed to bring about this transformation in mentality the Constructivists in the Union of
Contemporary Architects, obliteration of the private sphere by
building commune houses (dom kommuny) where all property, including
even clothes and underwear, would be shared by the inhabitants, Zamyatin’s We (1920). Narkomfin (Ministry of Finance) house, the Constructivist Moisei Ginzburg and
built in Moscow between 1928 and 1930, stop short of the full communal form, induce the individual to move away from private
(‘bourgeois’) forms of domesticity to a more collective way of life.
Architects envisaged a Utopia where everybody lived in huge communal houses,
stretching high into the sky, with large green open spaces surrounding them Le Corbusier the city as a vast laboratory for
organizing the behaviour and the psyche of the masses, as a totally
controlled environment where the egotistic impulses of individual people
could be remoulded rationally It had always been the aim of the
Bolsheviks to create a new type of human being. Marxists, they believed that human nature
was a product of historical development, and could thus be transformed by a
revolution in the way that people lived. the brain was an electromechanical device
responding to external stimuli I. P. Pavlov’s research on the conditioned
reflexes of the brain (dogs’ brains in particular), Lenin spoke of Pavlov’s work as ‘hugely
significant for our revolution’ Trotsky To produce a new, ‘improved version’ of man
- that is the future task of communism. And for that we first have to find
out everything about man, his anatomy, his physiology and that part of his
physiology which is called his psychology. Man must look at himself and see
himself as a raw material, or at best as a semi-manufactured product, and
say: ‘At last, my dear homo sapiens, I will work on you.’29 The artist also had a central role to play Stalin who first used the famous phrase, in
1932, Stalin who first used the famous phrase, in 1932, Lenin spoke of Pavlov’s work as ‘hugely
significant for our revolution’ Trotsky To produce a new, ‘improved version’ of man
- that is the future task of communism. And for that we first have to find
out everything about man, his anatomy, his physiology and that part of his
physiology which is called his psychology. Man must look at himself and see
himself as a raw material, or at best as a semi-manufactured product, and
say: ‘At last, my dear homo sapiens, I will work on you.’29 The artist also had a central role to play Stalin who first used the famous phrase, in
1932, the artist as the ‘engineer of the human soul’. the Soviet avant-garde the Constructivists, the Futurists, the
artists aligned to Proletkult and the Left Front (LEF), Vsevolod Meyerhold in
the theatre, or the Kinok group and Eisenstein in cinema all broadly shared
the communist ideal. revolutions against ‘bourgeois’ art, They viewed the brain as a complex piece of
machinery which they could recondition through reflexes provoked by their
mechanistic art (cinematic montage, biomechanics in the theatre, industrial
art, etc.). architecture and documentary film,
photomontage and poster art, designs for clothes and fabrics, household
objects and furniture, The Constructivists 1921 as ‘constructors’ and ‘technicians’, they
declared their commitment, by contrast, to the design and production of
practical objects which they believed could transform social life Varvara Stepanova and Vladimir Tatlin
designed workers’ clothes and uniforms Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Klutsis used
photomontage to smuggle agitation into commercial advertisements and even
packaging. El Lissitzky simple, lightweight furniture folding bed break down the conjugal relations of the
bourgeois family Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) movement Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky, in 1918 the Forward (Vperedist) group of the Social
Democrats (Gorky, Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky) The object was to educate a tier of
‘conscious proletarian socialists’, a sort of working-class intelligentsia The Vperedists clashed bitterly with Lenin,
who was dismissive of the workers’ potential as an independent cultural
force, but after 1917, Lunacharsky became the evocatively titled
Commissar of Enlightenment, while Bogdanov assumed the leadership of the
Proletkult movement. a Socialist Encyclopaedia Diderot’s Encyclopedic The main ideological division concerned the
relationship between the new and old, the Soviet and the Russian, in the
proletarian civilization. On the extreme left wing of Proletkult . ‘It’s time for bullets to pepper
museums’, Mayakovsky, the founder of LEF Rastrelli, the great palace-builder of St
Petersburg, should be put against the wall (rasstreliat’ in Russian
means to execute). the poem ‘We’ Kirillov, Utopian faith that a new culture would be
built on the rubble of the old. The most committed members of the Proletkult
were serious believers in the idea of a purely Soviet civilization that was
entirely purged of historical and national elements. This ‘Soviet culture’
would be internationalist, collectivist and proletarian Shostakovich factory whistles in the climax of his
Second Symphony (‘To October’) in 1927 But was it possible to construct a new
culture without learning from the old? moderate members of the Proletkult educating workers in the old culture New Economic Policy (NEP). Lenin, a conservative in artistic matters,
had always been appalled by the cultural nihilism of the avant-garde. His cultural politics were firmly based on
the Enlightenment ideals of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia raise the working class to the level of the old elite
culture. pressure on the Proletkult came from below as well as above. There was little real enthusiasm for
communal housing, which never escaped its associations with grim necessity. In the Moscow Soviet’s model commune house,
built in 1930, the residents put up icons and calendars of saints on the
dormitory walls.38 The unlifelike images of the avant-garde were just as
alien to a people whose limited acquaintance with the visual arts was based
on the icon. Chagall was asked Why is the cow green and why is the house
flying through the sky, why? What’s the connection with Marx and Engels?’39 3.
Eisenstein’s Montage; Meyerhold’s Bio-mechanics and Mayakovsky’s Poetry Lenin: ’For us the most important of all
the arts is cinema,’ In a country such as Russia, where in 1920
only two out of every five adults could read,43 the
moving picture was a vital weapon in the battle to extend the Party’s reach
to the remote countryside, where makeshift cinemas were established in
requisitioned churches and village halls. Trotsky said the cinema would
compete with the tavern and the church: in the early 1920s nearly half the audience
in Soviet cinemas was aged between ten and fifteen years the art form of the new socialist society -it was
technologically more advanced, more democratic, and more ‘true to life’ than
any of the arts of the old world. ‘The theatre is a game. The cinema is life’ the Kinok group, formed in 1922 by the
brilliant director Dziga Vertov, his wife, the cine newsreel editor Elizaveta
Svilova, and his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, ‘agit-trains’ propaganda films for Soviet
agitprop ‘The audience was made up of illiterate or
semi-literate peasants. They could not even read the subtitles. These
unspoiled viewers could not understand the theatrical conventions.’48 the future of the cinema in Soviet Russia was to be
found in non-fiction films. Kinok was an amalgam of kino (cinema) and oko (eye) The group declared war on the fiction films
of the studios, the ‘factory of dreams’ which had enslaved the masses to the
bourgeoisie, and took their camera out on to the streets to make films whose
purpose was to ‘catch life as it is’ - or rather, insofar as their aim was
‘to see and show the world in the name of the proletarian revolution’, to
catch life as it ought to be.49 cinema verite aspired to a relatively objective naturalism the kinoki arranged their real-life images in a
symbolic way. The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), is a sort of symphony of images from one day
in the ideal Soviet metropolis, What do we see when we look at a film? Life
‘as it is’ or as it is acted for the cameras? Lev Kuleshov and Montage:
intercutting shots to create shocking contrasts and associations, montage
aimed to manipulate the audience’s reactions, directing them to the ideas the
director wanted them to reach. films as a sequence
of symbolic movements and gestures. Kuleshov believed that the visual meaning
of the film was best communicated by the arrangement (montage) of the frames,
and not by the content of the individual shots experiment with making new movies by
cutting up and rearranging bits of old ones (storyboarding). To demonstrate his theory he intercut a
single neutral close-up of the actor Ivan Mozzukhin with three different
visual sequences: a bowl of steaming soup, a women’s body laid out in a
coffin, and a child at play. All the other great Soviet film directors
of the 1920s used montage: Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Boris Barnet and,
in its most intellectualized form, Sergei Eisenstein the orchestration of the visual images and
the use of movement and of mimicry to suggest emotions and ideas Montage required a different kind of acting Francois Delsarte and Emile Jacques
Dalcroze, systems of mime, dance and rhythmic gymnastics
(eurhythmies). The Delsarte-Dalcroze system had been
brought to Russia by Prince Sergei Volkonsky in the early 1910s. The grandson
of the Decembrist had been Director of the Imperial Theatre between 1899 and
1901, The one real legacy of Volkonsky’s brief
tenure was the discovery of Diaghilev, whom he promoted to his first position
in the theatre world as the editor and publisher of the Imperial Theatre’s
annual review.* Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. The
essence of Volkonsky’s teaching was the conception of the human body as a
dynamo whose rhythmic movements can be trained subconsciously to express the
emotions required by a work of art.+ similar theories of ‘biomechanics’ were championed by the
great avant-garde director Meyerhold. Gordon Craig’s conception of the actor as a
‘supermarionette’: the movements of Craig’s actor were choreographed by the
director, whereas Volkonsky’s actor was supposed in internalize these
rhythmic impulses to the point where they became entirely unconscious Pudovkin, Barnet and Eisenstein.graduated
from the Kuleshov workshop. Sergei Eisenstein Eisenstein took part in the Bolshevik
demonstrations against the Provisional Government October (19Z8), sometimes known as Ten Days That Shook
the World. Eisenstein joined the Red Army as an
engineer Eisenstein saw the Revolution as a struggle
of the young against the old. Strike (1924) he came to support the Revolution ‘had
little to do with the real miseries of social injustice… but directly and
completely with what is surely the prototype of every social tyranny - the
father’s despotism in a family’ ‘Why I Became a Director’, he locates the
source of his artistic inspiration in the collective movement of the Red Army
engineers building a bridge near Petrograd: In 1920, on his
return to Moscow, Eisenstein joined Proletkult as a theatre director and
became involved in the Kuleshov workshop Kuleshov in The Extraordinary Adventures
of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1923) typage - the use of untrained actors or ‘real types’ taken
(sometimes literally) from the street the biggest influence on Eisenstein was the director
Meyerhold, whose theatre school he joined in 1921. Vsevolod Meyerhold was a central figure in
the Russian avant-garde. theatre as a highly stylized, even
abstract, form of art, not the imitation of reality, and emphasized the use
of mime and gesture to communicate ideas to the audience commedia dell’arte and the Japanese kabuki theatre Delsarte and Dalcroze. one of the few artistic figures to support the
Bolsheviks when they nationalized the theatres in November 1917. He even
joined the Party 1920 Meyerhold was placed in charge of the
theatre department in the Commissariat of Enlightenment, ‘October in the Theatre’ he began a
revolution against the old naturalist conventions of the drama house. Eisenstein was one of Meyerhold’s first
students. Through Meyerhold, Eisenstein came to the
idea of the mass spectacle - to a theatre of real life that would break down
the conventions and illusions of the stage. Eisenstein’s style of film montage also
reveals Meyerhold’s stylized approach. In contrast to the montage of
Kuleshov, which was meant to affect the emotions subliminally, Eisenstein’s
efforts were explicitly didactic and expository juxtaposition of images was intended to
engage members of the audience in a conscious way - and draw them towards the
correct ideological conclusions October, Eisenstein intercuts images of a white horse
falling from a bridge into the Neva river with scenes showing Cossack forces
suppressing the workers’ demonstrations against the Provisional Government in
July 1917. In Bolshevik propaganda the general mounted
on a white horse was a standard symbol of the counter-revolution which intercuts scenes of Kerensky living
like an emperor in the Winter Palace with images of Napoleon It was meant to make the audience perceive
the suppression of the July demonstrations, as Lenin had described it, as the
crucial turning point of 1917. ‘For God and Country’: the march of the
counter-revolutionary Cossack forces led by General Kornilov against
Petrograd in August 1917 a visual deconstruction of the concept of a
‘God’ He also used montage to extend time and
increase the tension - as in The Battleship Potemkin (1925), in the
famous massacre scene on the steps of Odessa. The scene, by the way, was
entirely fictional: there was no massacre on the Odessa steps in 1905 -
although it often appears in the history books. the Winter Palace to shoot the storming scene
for October, The Jordan staircase Eisenstein’s October
was a much bigger production than the historical reality Meyerhold was storming barricades with his
own revolution in the theatre Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe (1918;
revived in 1921) a monumental platform projecting deep into the
auditorium. At the climax of the spectacle he brought the audience on to the
platform to mingle, as if in a city square, with the actors in their
costumes, ‘We will show you life that’s real – but in
this spectacle it will become transformed into something quite
extraordinary.’63 1922 production of Belgian playwright
Fernand Crommelynck’s Magnanimous Cuckold (1920) the stage (by the
Constructivist artist Liubov Popova) became a kind of ‘multi-purpose
scaffolding’; the characters were all in overalls and identified themselves
by performing different circus tricks. Sergei Tretiakov’s 1923 play The Earth
Rampant, cars and machine-guns, not just on the stage but in the aisles
as well. The lighting was provided by huge searchlights Meyerhold used montage by dividing the five
acts into thirty-three small episodes with pantomimic interludes to create
contrasts of tempo and mood Gogol’s The Government Inspector in
1926, a little stage trolley and wheeled it to the front of the main stage to
simulate the cinematic idea of a close-up. Buster Keaton and, above all,
Chaplin’s emphasis on mime and gesture made him close to Meyerhold’s
theatrical ideal. ‘biomechanics’
approached the actor’s body as a biomechanical device for the physical
expression of emotions and ideas: the acrobatic circus, fencing, boxing,
ballet and eurhythmies, gymnastics and modern dance. The system was
consciously opposed to the Stanislavsky method (in which Meyerhold was
trained at the Moscow Arts Theatre between 1898 and 1902), in which the actor
was encouraged to identify with the inner thoughts and feelings of his
character by recalling moments of intense experience in his own life. Akin to
the Red Army’s programme of physical culture, the army’s system of gymnastics
for the ‘scientific organization of labour’ in an experimental military
settlement. Meyerhold envisaged the actor as an
artist-engineer who organizes the ‘raw material’ of his own body on the
scientific principles of time and motion. He saw his system as the theatrical
equivalent of ‘scientific management’ in industry. the American engineer F. W. Taylor, who
used ‘time and motion’ studies Lenin was a huge fan of Taylorism. Its
premise that the worker was the least efficient part of the whole
manufacturing process: a means of discipline that could remould the worker
and society along more controllable and regularized lines. the power of machines to transform man and the
universe. Futurists’ idealization of technology; in
the fascination with machines which pervades the films of Eisenstein and
Vertov; in the exaltation of factory production: Henry Ford, inventor
of the egalitarian Model ‘T’ Aleksei Gastev: As a ‘proletarian poet’
(the ‘Ovid of engineers, miners and metalworkers’, as he was described by
fellow poet Nikolai Aseev),70 Gastev conjured
up the vision of a future communist society in which man and machine merged.
an ‘iron messiah’: experiments to train the workers so that they would end up
acting like machines; turn the worker into a sort of ‘human robot’ - a word,
not coincidentally, derived from the Russian (and Czech) verb ‘to work’: rabotat’. Gastev envisaged a Utopia where ‘people’
would be replaced by ‘proletarian units’ identified by ciphers such as ‘A, B,
C, or 325, 075, o, and so on’. These automatons would be like machines,
‘incapable of individual thought’, A ‘mechanized
collectivism’ would ‘take the place of the individual personality in the
psychology of the proletariat’. the Soviet paradise Zamyatin satirized in his novel We,
which is the inspiration of George Orwell’s 1984. Thanks to the influence of Meyerhold, two
great artists were brought into the orbit of the cinema. One was Dmitry
Shostakovich, his Gogolian opera The Nose (1930). composing for the cinema to earn some extra money and keep
himself out of trouble (in total he would score the music for over thirty
films). Writing for the screen had a major
influence on Shostakovich’s composing style Films using montage, in particular,
demanded new techniques of musical composition to reflect their polyphonic
dramaturgy Third (‘May Day’) Symphony (1930), with its
fast-paced montage of musical tableaux. Shostakovich’s first film score, for The
New Babylon (1929), a cinematic reconstruction of the revolutionary
events of the Paris Commune in 1871. Mayakovsky played the part of the ‘Person
of the Future’ - a proletarian deus ex machina who appeared on stage
hanging from the ceiling - in the first (1918) production of his play
Mystery Bouffe. Mayakovsky spread his talents wide: to his
poetry and his work in theatre and the cinema, he added journalism, writing
radio songs and satires, drawing cartoons with brief captions for the lubok-like
propaganda posters of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) and creating
advertising jingles for state stores and slogans for the banners which
appeared on every street. the allegory 150,000,000 (1921), a
Soviet parody of the bylina, Mayakovsky embraced revolution as a
quickening of time. He longed to sweep away the clutter of the past, the
‘petty-bourgeois’ domesticity of the ‘old way of life’ (byt), and to
replace it with a higher and more spiritual existence (bytie). Pro eto (About This) (1923), a love song to Lily Brik, with whom he was
living, on and off, in Petersburg and Moscow in a menage a trois with
her husband, a poem ‘about byt, and by this I mean a way of life which
has not changed at all and which is our greatest enemy’. his love for Lily
complicates his own crisis of identity, because in his imagination she is
tied to the ‘petty-bourgeois’ byt of Russia in the NEP redemptive vision of a future communist Utopia, where love is
no longer personal or bodily in form but a higher form of brotherhood. 4. Socialist
Realism, the Great Purges and Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’ In 1930, at the age of thirty-seven,
Mayakovsky shot himself suicide note The Briks explained his suicide as the
‘unavoidable outcome of Mayakovsky’s hyperbolic attitude to life’.85 His
transcendental hopes and expectations had crashed against the realities of
life. Lily Brik, it has been revealed, was an agent of the NKVD,\ ‘He had to
be removed - so they got rid of him,’ concluded Eisenstein.86 there was no longer room in Soviet
literature for the individualist The last works of Mayakovsky had been
viciously attacked by the Soviet authorities. The press condemned The
Bedbug (1929), a dazzling satire on Soviet manners and the new
bureaucracy, with a sparkling score by Shostakovich The Bath House, which opened in Meyerhold’s theatre in Moscow just
one month before the poet’s death, was an awful flop, and its hilarious
critique of Soviet bureaucrats again roundly condemned in the press. Mayakovsky’s retrospective exhibition of
his artwork Mayakovsky said that he could no longer
achieve what he had set out do - ‘to laugh at things I consider wrong… and to
bring the workers to great poetry, without hack writing or a deliberate
lowering of standards’. RAPP (the Russian Association of
Proletarian Writers the literary wing of Stalin’s Five-year Plan for
industry, RAPP saw itself as the militant vanguard of a cultural revolution
against the old intelligentsia. the Five-year Plan and the class war. assault on ‘bourgeois specialists’ in the professions and
the arts. By the beginning of the 1930s, any writer
with an individual voice was deemed politically suspicious. The writers were expected to be positive and the only
acceptable subject for satire were the foreign enemies of the Soviet Union.
Then there was Mikhail Bulgakov, whose Gogolian satires about censorship (The
Crimson Island), daily life in Moscow in the NEP (Adventures of
Chichikov), Soviet xenophobia (Fatal Eggs) and his brilliant comic
novel The Heart of a Dog (where a Pavlov like experimental scientist
transplants the brain and sexual organs of a dog into a human being) Andrei Platonov, an engineer and Utopian
communist ( The Epifan Locks (1927), a timely allegory on the grandiose but
ultimately disastrous canal-building projects of Peter the Great; Chev-engur
(also 1927), a fatal odyssey in search of the true communist society; and
The Foundation Pit (1930), RAPP’s ‘class war’ reached fever pitch,
however, in 1929 with its organized campaign of vilification against Zamyatin
and Pilnyak. Pilnyak’s Red Mahogany, a bitter
commentary on the decline of the revolutionary ideals of the Soviet state,
was published in Berlin in 1929. the Five-year Plan: a cultural revolution in which all
the arts were called up by the state in a campaign to build a new society. to raise the workers’ consciousness, to
enlist them in the ‘battle’ for ‘socialist construction’ For the militants of RAPP this could only
be achieved by writers like Gorky, with his impeccably proletarian
background, not by left-wing ‘bourgeois’ writers who were deemed no more than
‘fellow travellers’ Gorky was hailed as the model for this
Soviet literature. he could not bear the life of an exile he convinced himself that life in Stalin’s Russia
would become more bearable once the Five-year Plan had swept aside the
peasant backwardness which in his view had been the cause of the Revolution’s
failure. Gorky had initially supported the RAPP
campaign Writers’ Union: o halt the destructive
‘class war’ led by RAPP; and to restore to Soviet literature the aesthetic
principles established by Tolstoy. In October 1932, a famous meeting attended
by Stalin and other Kremlin leaders, as well as fifty writers and other
functionaries, took place at Gorky’s Moscow house the doctrine of Socialist Realism: the
doctrine of Socialist Realism Gorky’s understanding was that Socialist
Realism would unite the critical realist traditions of nineteenth-century
literature with the revolutionary romanticism of the Bolshevik tradition:
humble everyday reality with a vision of the Revolution’s heroic promise. Stalin’s version of the doctrine, portray
Soviet life, not as it was in reality, but as it should become: a panegyric or iconic form of art which conformed
strictly to the Party’s narrative of socialist development. no longer the creator of original works of art, but a
chronicler of tales which were already contained in the Party’s own folklore. Gorky’s early novel Mother (1906), Dmitry Furmanov’s Chapaev (1923)
fixed the model of the civil war hero; while Fedor Gladkov’s Cement (1925)
and Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered in Stalin’s Russia, where the overwhelming mass of the
reading public was new to the conventions of literary fiction, and there was
less awareness of the difference between the real world and the world of
books. People approached literature, as they had perhaps once approached the
icons or the stories of the saints, in the conviction that it held up moral
truths for the guidance of their lives. for the reader in the Soviet Union there are, as it
were, no clear divisions between the reality in which he lives and the world
he reads about in books. Isaiah Berlin the response of Soviet readers and theatre
audiences purer, more direct and naive than ours the rise of the Socialist Realist film. the Soviet public preferred foreign films,
action-packed adventures or romantic comedies to the propaganda films of
Vertov or Eisenstein The avant-garde directors of the 1920s
-Vertov, Pudovkin, Kuleshov - were all condemned as ‘formalists’,
intellectuals who were more concerned with cinema as art than with making
films that could ‘be understood by the millions’.100 Eisenstein’s October,
which had been released on the eve of the conference, was bitterly
attacked for its ‘formalist’ preoccupation with montage, for the lack of any
individual heroes in the film which made it hard for a mass audience to
identify with, for the typage casting of the Lenin character Sovkino, the Soviet film trust under the
command of Lunacharsky’s Commissariat In 1930 Sovkino was finally disbanded, the Soviet cinema was nationalized as one
vast state enterprise under the centralized direction of Soiuzkino (Ail-Union
Soviet Film Trust Boris Shumiatsky, became the ultimate
authority in the world of Soviet cinema (until his own arrest and execution
as a ‘Trotskyite’ in 1938), Shumiatsky ran a sort of ‘Soviet
Hollywood’, with huge production studios in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad and Minsk
reeling off a succession of smash-hit Soviet musicals, romantic comedies, war
adventures and Western-modelled frontier films (‘Easterns’) like Chapaev (1934),
Stalin’s favourite film . ‘Life is getting gayer, comrades,’ Stalin
famously remarked. But only certain types of laughter were allowed. This was
the climate to which Eisenstein returned in 1932. Stalin accused Eisenstein of defecting to
the West. The NKVD bullied his poor mother Eisensteinfilm based on Turgenev’s ‘Bezhin
Meadow’the story of Pavlik Morozov, a boy hero who, according to the version
of his life propagandized by the Stalinist regime, had been murdered by the
‘kulaks’ of his remote Urals village after he had denounced his own father,
the chairman of the village Soviet, as a kulak opponent of the Soviet
campaign for collectivization.* . In August 1936, with most of the film
already shot, Eisenstein was ordered by Shumiatsky to rewrite the script.
With the help of the writer Isaac Babel he recommenced shooting in the
autumn. The suppression of Bezhin Meadow was
part of the continuing campaign against the artistic avant-garde. Karl Radek, a former Trotskyite who was now
making up for his past errors by proving himself the good Stalinist,
condemned the writings of James Joyce - a huge influence on Eisenstein and
all the Soviet avant-garde. Radek described Ulysses as ‘a dung heap
swarming with maggots and photographed by a movie camera through a
microscope’ January 1936, Pravda published a
diatribe against Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Chaos Instead of Music’; ‘Meyerholdism’ an attack on all modernists Meyerhold, in particular, who was brave and
self-assured enough to speak out publicly in defence of Shostakovich and
against the Party’s stifling influence on art, was subjected to denunciations
of a feverish intensity. He was condemned in the Soviet press as an ‘alien’,
and even though he tried to save himself by staging the Socialist Realist
classic How the Steel Was Tempered in 1937, in 1939 he was arrested, tortured brutally by the NKVD
to extract a ‘confession’, and then, in the arctic frost of early 1940, he
was shot. a counterrevolution in cultural politics. As the
1930s wore on, the regime completely abandoned its commitment to the
revolutionary idea of establishing a ‘proletarian’ or ‘Soviet’ form of
culture that could be distinguished from the culture of the past. Instead, it
promoted a return to the nationalist traditions of the nineteenth century,
which it reinvented in its own distorted forms as Socialist Realism. This reassertion of the ‘Russian classics’
was a fundamental aspect of the Stalinist political programme, which used
culture to create the illusion of stability Pushkin and Turgenev, Chekhov and Tolstoy
(though not Dostoevsky),* Landscape painting, which had been a dying
art in the 1920s, was suddenly restored as the favoured medium of Socialist
Realist art, particularly scenes that illustrated the heroic mastery of the
natural world by Soviet industry Levitan or Kuindzhi or the Wanderers, It was only in the Khrushchev thaw that
print runs of Dostoevsky’s works were augmented Glinka, Tchaikovsky and the kuchkists, who
had fallen out of favour with the avant-garde composers of the 19 20s, were
now held up as the model for all future music in the Soviet Union. Stasov’s championing of art with a
democratic content and progressive purpose or idea was mobilized in the 1930s
as the founding argument of Socialist Realist art. campaign against the ‘alien’ modernists.* It was a gross
distortion of the critic’s views. Stasov was a Westernist In 1937 Soviet Russia marked the centenary
of Pushkin’s death. Nineteen million copies of his works sold
in the jubilee alone, and tens of millions of subscriptions were taken for
the new edition of his complete works which had been planned for 1937 The cult of Pushkin ‘Pushkin Our Comrade’,
the writer Andrei Platonov ’Poetry is respected only in this country’, Mandelstam would tell his friends in the 1930s.
‘There’s no place where more people are killed for it.’115 At the same time
as it was erecting monuments to Pushkin, the Soviet regime was murdering his
literary descendants. Of the 700 writers who attended the First Writers’ Congress
in 1934, only fifty survived to attend the Second in 1954. Stalin was not ignorant of cultural
affairs. He read serious literature He knew the power of poetry in Russia, and
feared it The turning point was the murder in 1934 of
Sergei Kirov, the Party boss in Leningrad. Stalin exploited the murder to unleash a
campaign of mass terror against all the ‘enemies’ of Soviet power, which
culminated in the show trials of the Bolshevik leaders Bukharin, Kamenev and
Zinoviev in 1936-8 Mandelstam was the first to be taken. In
November 1933 he had written a poem about Stalin which had been read in
secret to his friends. It is the simplest, most straightforward, verse he
ever wrote, Akhmatova was visiting the Mandelstams in
Moscow in May 1934 when the secret police burst into the flat. Stalin’s resolution, however, was to
‘isolate but preserve’: Nikolai Bukharin had intervened on
Mandelstam’s behalf ‘poets are always right, history is on
their side’.123 The Mandelstams were exiled to Voronezh During this last visit Akhmatova wrote a
poem for Osip Mandelstam, the person whom she thought of almost as her twin.
It was about the city they both loved: the arrest of Lev Gumilev, Akhmatova’s son, in 1935. One spring evening at the Fountain House
Lev recited the Mandelstam poem, which by that time he, like many people,
knew by heart. But among his student friends that night was an informant of
the NKVD, who came to arrest him, along with Punin, in October 1935 Fountain House was full of NKVD informants the reality of living together was a far
cry from the communist ideal it did not take much for fights to turn
into denunciations to the NKVD Lev was re-arrested in March 1938. For
eight months he was held and tortured in Leningrad’s Kresty jail, her poetic cycle Requiem (written between 1935
and 1940; first published in Munich in 1963). In Requiem Akhmatova became the
people’s voice As Gordon says to Dudorov in the epilogue
of Doctor Zhivago, ‘When war broke out its real dangers and its menace
of death were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie, a relief
because it broke the spell of the dead letter.’134 By necessity, they spoke to one another
without thinking of the consequences. From this spontaneous activity a new
sense of nationhood emerged. As Pasternak would later write, the war was ‘a
period of vitality and in this sense an untrammelled, joyous restoration of
the sense of community with everyone’. on 22 June 1941, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Foreign
Minister, gave a radio address in which he spoke of the impending ‘patriotic
war for homeland, honour and freedom’. Communism was conspicuously absent from
Soviet propaganda in the war. It was fought in the name of Russia, of the
‘family of peoples’ in the Soviet Union, of Pan-Slav brotherhood, or in the
name of Stalin, but never in the name of the communist system. To mobilize
support, the Stalinist regime even embraced the Russian Church The regime glorified the military heroes of
Russian history - Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoi, Kuzma Minin and Dmitry
Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov – Russia’s artists enjoyed a new freedom and
responsibility in the war years. n 1945, Isaiah Berlin, on a visit to
Russia, was told that the poetry of Blok, Bryusov, Sologub, Esenin,
Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, was widely read, learnt by heart and quoted by
soldiers and officers and even political commissars. Akhmatova and Pasternak, received an amazingly large number of
letters from the front, quoting from both published and unpublished poems the moral value of such writers could not fail to
impress itself on the Party’s bureaucrats, and conditions for these artists
gradually improved. Akhmatova was allowed to publish a collection of her
early lyrics, From Six Books. her patriotic poem ‘Courage’ Akhmatova’s address: As the German armies
circled in on Leningrad, Berggolts’s husband, the literary critic Georgy
Makogonenko, turned to Akhmatova to raise the spirits of the city by talking
to its people in a radio broadcast. Shostakovich also took part in the radio
broadcast In between the fire fighting, he began
composing marches for the front-line troops, and in the first two weeks of
September, as the bombs began to fall on Leningrad, he worked by candlelight,
in a city now deprived of electricity, to finish what would be his Seventh Later that same day, 16 September 1941, the
Germans broke through to the gates of Leningrad. For 900 days they cut the
city off from virtually all its food and fuel supplies; perhaps a million
people, or one third of the pre-war population, died by disease or
starvation, before the siege of Leningrad was at last broken in January 1944. On 5 March 1942. the
symphony received its premiere in Kuibyshev. It was performed by the
orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre, which had also been evacuated to the Volga
town. Broadcast by radio throughout the land, it transmitted, in the words of
the violinist David Oistrakh, who was listening in Moscow, ‘the prophetic
affirmation… of our faith in the eventual triumph of humanity and light’. themes of Petersburg: its lyrical beauty
and classicism, evoked nostalgically in the moderato movement the Bolero-like march of the first movement is
not just the sound of the approaching German armies, it comes from within). double-speak in his musical language Yet beneath the ritual sounds of Soviet
rejoicing there was a softer, more melancholic voice - the carefully
concealed voice of satire and dissent only audible to those who had felt the
suffering his music expressed. These two voices are clearly audible in
Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (the composer’s ‘Socialist Realist’ rejoinder
to those who had attacked Lady Macbeth), which received a half-hour
ovation of electrifying force when it was first performed in the Great Hall
of the Leningrad Philharmonia in November 1937. a distant echo of the funeral march from
Mahler’s First Symphony and, whether they recognized the march or not, they
must have felt its sadness - for nearly everyone in that audience would have
lost someone in the Terror of 1937 the symphony was finally performed in the
bombed-out Great Hall of the Philharmonia on 9 August 1942 Ordinary citizens were brought together by
music; they felt united by a sense of their city’s spiritual strength, by a
conviction that their city would be saved The war was a period of productivity and
relative creative liberty for Russia’s composers. Prokofiev was particularly eager to prove
his commitment to the national cause. After eighteen years of living in the
West, he had returned to the Soviet Union at the height of the Great Terror,
in 1936 his score for Meyerhold’s 1937 production
of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, Fifth Symphony (1944) expansive and heroic themes that perfectly expressed the
spirit of the Soviet war effort. in War and Peace - an opera whose theme was
obviously suggested by the striking parallels between Russia’s war against
Napoleon and the war against Hitler. As he was working on the score of War
and Peace Prokofiev was asked by Eisenstein to compose the music for his
film Ivan the Terrible, released in 1944. Alexander Nevsky (1938), Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. These two epic film
dramas are essentially cinematic versions of the great nineteenth-century
history operas carry the emotions of the ‘music drama’, as Eisenstein
describes it in a note outlining his new Wagnerian cinema. Montage was abandoned for a clear
sequential exposition of the theme through the combined effect of images and
sound In the famous battle scene on ice he even
shot the film to match the score.156 Stalin was delighted with Alexander
Nevsky. Stalin saw Ivan the Terrible as a medieval
prototype of his own statesmanship. the lessons Stalin drew from Ivan’s reign: that force,
even cruelty, were needed to unite the state and drive the foreigners and
traitors from the land. Pasternak wrote to Olga Freidenberg in
February 1941 ‘Peter the Great is no longer an
appropriate model. The new passion, openly confessed, is for Ivan the
Terrible, the oprichnina, and cruelty. This is the subject for new
operas, plays and films.’157 The first part of the film to emerge in his
imagination was the confession scene Ivan was conceived as a tragedy In Part One of the film
Eisenstein depicts the heroic aspects of Ivan: his vision of a united state;
his fearless struggle against the scheming boyars; his strong
authority and leadership in the war against the Tatars of Kazan. Part Two of his epic film (not publicly
released until 1958). The Tsar now emerges as a tormented figure,
haunted by the terror to which he is driven by his own paranoia and his
isolation from society. The parallels between Ivan and Stalin were
unmissable This is not a film -it is some kind of
nightmare!’161 In February 1947 Stalin summoned Eisenstein to a late-night
interview in the Kremlin at which he delivered a revealing lecture on Russian
history you have to show why he had to be cruel. One of Ivan
the Terrible’s mistakes was to stop short of cutting up the five key feudal
clans. Eisenstein was permitted to resume
production on Part Three on the understanding that he incorporate
approved material from the previous film in it. Eisenstein took inspiration from Pushkin,
whose own great drama Boris Godunov had served as a warning against tyranny
in the wake of the suppression of the Decembrist revolt by Tsar Nicholas I “I could not make a film like that without
the Russian tradition - without that great tradition of conscience. Violence
can be explained, it can be legalized, but it can’t be justified. If you are
a human being, it has to be atoned” 6. Post WWII
Repression: The Cold War and the Arts The Leningrad to which Akhmatova returned
in 1944 was a shadow of its former self In 1945 Isaiah Berlin had just arrived as
First Secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow. the well-known literary critic Vladimir Orlov, who told
Berlin that Akhmatova was still alive and residing in the Fountain House, a
stone’s throw away. In her eyes, Berlin was a messenger between
the two Russias which had been split apart in 1917. Through him she was able
to return to the European Russia of St Petersburg - a city from which she
felt she had lived apart as an ‘internal exile’ in Leningrad. ’So our nun now
receives visits from foreign spies,’ Stalin remarked in August 1946, Akhmatova was attacked in a decree by
the Central Committee which censored two journals for publishing her work. A
week later Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s chief of ideology, announced her
expulsion from the Writers’ Union, delivering a vicious speech in which he
described Akhmatova as a ‘left-over from the old aristocratic culture’ and
(in a phrase that had been used by Soviet critics in the past) as a
‘half-nun, half-harlot or rather harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer’ In 1949, Lev was re-arrested, tortured into
making a confession and sentenced to ten years in a labour camp near Omsk It is a sign of her utter desperation that,
in an attempt to secure her son’s release, she even wrote a poem in tribute
to Stalin.* The Central Committee decree was the
beginning of a new onslaught on the freedom of the artist - the last refuge
of freedom in the Soviet Union - and Akhmatova was the obvious place to
start. the living symbol of a spirit which the
regime could neither destroy nor control: Attacked by the same decree as Akhmatova
was Mikhail Zoshchenko Zoshchenko was the last of the satirists
-Mayakovsky, Zamyatin and Bulgakov had all perished - and a major thorn in
Stalin’s side. The immediate cause of the attack was a children’s story, ‘Adventures
of a Monkey’, published in Zvezda (one of the journals censured in the
decree) in 1946, in which a monkey that has escaped from the zoo is retrained
as a human being ‘Lenin and the Guard’ (1939 a rigid Party line was laid down by Zhdanov the Zhdanovsh-china (‘ Zhdanov’s ideology reflected the Soviet
triumphalism which had emerged in the communist elites following the victory
against Hitler and the military conquest of eastern Europe in 1945 mpose an Orwellian conformity to the
Party’s ideology on all the arts and sciences The declared aim of this new purge was to
seal off Soviet culture from the West. Tikhon Khrennikov, the Zhdanovite
hardliner at the head of the Composers’ Union Tchaikovsky and the Russian music school of
the nineteenth century as the starting point for all composers in the Soviet
Union. Immense national pride in the cultural and
political superiority of Soviet Russia went hand in hand with anti-Western
feeling during the Cold War. Absurd claims were made for the superiority
of Soviet science under the direction of Marxist-Leninist ideology, which led
to the promotion of frauds and cranks like the pseudo-geneticist Timofei
Lysenko, who claimed to have developed a new strain of wheat that would grow
in the Arctic frost. This triumphalism also found expression in
the architectural style which dominated plans for the reconstruction of
Soviet cities after 1945. ‘Soviet Empire’ combined the neoclassical and
Gothic motifs of the Russian Empire style that had flourished in the wake of
1812 with the monumental structures that trumpeted the magnificence of the
Soviet achievement. ‘Stalin’s cathedrals’, metro stations, ‘palaces of culture’,
cinemas and even circuses the Moscow metro station
Komsomolskaia-Kol’tsevaia, built in 1952 Soviet pride in Russian culture knew no
bounds in the post-war period. The Russian ballet was pronounced the best,
the Russian classics Russian became a compulsory language in all
schools and children were brought up on Russian fairy tales and literature.
Soviet ‘folk’ choirs and dancing troupes The long-term plan of Soviet policy was to
channel these ‘folk cultures’ into higher forms of art on the lines set out
(or so it was believed) by the Russian nationalists of the nineteenth century Reinhold Gliere (the composition teacher of
the young Prokofiev) wrote the first ‘national opera’ of Azerbaijan the first Uzbek opera, Gulsara (1937),
an epic Soviet tale of women’s liberation from the old patriarchal way of
life his regime’s suspicions of all foreign influence turned
to hatred of the Jews. This anti-Semitism was thinly veiled by Soviet (that
is, Russian) patriotic rhetoric In January 1948, the well-known Jewish
actor Solomon Mikhoels, chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC),
was killed by state security troops. The murder of Mikhoels was linked to the
arrest of several dozen leading Jews accused of taking part in an
American-Zionist conspiracy organized by the JAFC against the Soviet Union.+ Israel’s growing links with the USA after
1948 unleashed Stalin’s lifelong hatred of the Jews.187 Thousands of Jews were forcibly evicted
from the regions around Moscow and despatched as ‘rootless parasites’ to the
Siberian wilderness, where a special ‘Jewish Autonomous Region’ had been
established in Birobidzhan In 1953 Stalin ordered the arrest of
several Jewish doctors who worked for the Kremlin on trumped-up charges (the
so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’) of having poisoned Zhdanov and another Politburo
member, A. S. Shcherbakov Vasily Grossman’s novel Stalingrad, based on his work as a war correspondent, was banned
principally because its central character was a Russian Jew. The Black
Book (first published in Jerusalem in 1980), Grossman’s still-unrivalled
memoir-based account of the Holocaust on Soviet soil, which he assembled for
the Literary Commission of the JAFC, was never published in the Soviet Union. Life and Fate (first published in Switzerland in 1980), he
portrayed the Nazi and Soviet regimes, not as opposites, but as mirror images
of each other. Pasternak’s Russian translations of
Shakespeare are works of real artistic beauty, if not entirely true to the
original. He was Stalin’s favourite poet He bore the guilt for the suffering of
those writers whom he could not help through his influence. After all his optimism in the war Pasternak
was crushed by the return to the old regime of cruelty and lies. He withdrew
from the public scene and worked on what he now regarded as his final message
to the world: his great novel Doctor Zhivago that the novel’s central theme is the
importance of preserving the old intelligentsia, represented by Zhivago Shostakovich found another way to save his
sanity. he promised to write music which ‘the
People’ could enjoy and understand Between 1948 and 1953, Shostakovich wrote
the music for no less than seven films. two of his songs from Alexandrov’s Meeting
on the Elbe (1948) became hits, Yet all the time Shostakovich was writing
secret music ‘for the drawer’. Some of it was musical lampoon, like Rayok,
or The Peep Show, a cantata satire on the Zhdanov era most of the music which he composed at this time was
deeply personal, especially that music with a Jewish theme. Shostakovich
identified with the suffering of the Jews. Shostakovich first used Jewish themes in
the finale of the Second Piano Trio (1944 the Thirteenth Symphony (1962), the ‘Babi
Yar’ with its requiem, the words composed by the poet Yevtushenko, for the
Jews of Kiev who were murdered by the Nazis in 1941; and virtually all the
string quartets from No. 3 (in 1946) to the unforgettable No. 8 (in 1961). Science fiction was rapidly becoming the
principal arena for liberal, religious and dissident critiques of the Soviet
world view. In Daniel Granin’s Into the Storm (1962), The science fiction novels of the
Strugatsky brothers (Arkady and Boris) were subversively conceived as
contemporary social satire in the manner of Gogol and, drawing much from
Dostoevsky, as an ideological critique of the Soviet materialist Utopia Predatory Things of the Century (1965) Andrei Sinyavsky in his Unguarded
Thoughts (1966 Science fiction films were equally a
vehicle for challenging Soviet materialism. Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Solaris (1972) Chris rediscovers his capacity to love,
when Hari, his ex-lover, whom he had driven to suicide through his emotional
coldness, is brought back to life, or a mirage of it, by the powers of the
star. Hari looks at Bruegel’s painting Hunters
in the Snow which helps her to recall her former life on earth. The
camera scans in detail over Bruegel’s painting as Bach’s F minor Choral
Prelude, interspersed with the sounds of the forest and the chimes of the
Rostov bells, rejoices in the beauty of our world. medieval icon painters Tarkovsky celebrated in his masterpiece, Andrei
Rublev (1966). All his films are about journeys in search
of moral truth. Stalker (1979), guides a scientist and a writer to ‘the zone’, a
supernatural wilderness abandoned by the state after some industrial
catastrophe. He is straight out of the Russian tradition of the Holy Fool. the basis of true faith is the belief in the
Promised Land: it is the journey and not the arrival. The need for faith, for
something to believe in outside of themselves, had
defined the Russian people, in their mythic understanding of themselves,
since the days of Gogol and the ‘Russian soul’. Tarkovsky revived this
national myth as a counter to the value system of the Soviet regime, with its
alien ideas of rational materialism. ‘ the last iconic image of his film Nostalgia (1983),
in which a Russian peasant house is portrayed inside a ruined Italian
cathedral. within the Soviet monolith there were many different
voices that called for a return to ‘Russian principles’. One was the literary
journal Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard), What, in the end, was ‘Soviet culture’? Was
it anything? Can one ever say that there was a specific Soviet genre in the
arts? The avant-garde of the 1920s, which borrowed a great deal from Western
Europe, was really a continuation of the modernism of the turn of century. It
was revolutionary, in many ways more so than the Bolshevik regime, but in the
end it was not compatible with the Soviet state, which could never have been
built on artists’ dreams. The idea of constructing Soviet culture on a
‘proletarian’ foundation was similarly unsustainable Socialist Realism was also, arguably, a
distinctively Soviet art form. Yet a large part of it was a hideous
distortion of the nineteenth-century tradition, not unlike the art of the
Third Reich or of fascist Italy. Poem without a Hero, a ‘kind of final memorial to her life as a poet and
the past of the city - St Petersburg - which was part of her being’. Mandelstam in a prayer-like poem which
Akhmatova quotes as an epigraph to the third chapter of her own poem. We shall meet again in Petersburg Akhmatova died
peacefully in a convalescent home in Moscow on 5 March 1966. Thousands of people turned out for her
funeral in Leningrad. The baroque church of St Nicholas spilled its dense
throng out on to the streets, where a mournful silence was religiously
maintained throughout the requiem. The people of a city had come to pay their
last respects to a citizen whose poetry had spoken for them at a time when no
one else could speak. |
