Although others have picked different dates, Berlin traces the birth of Russia’s intellectual tradition to the country’s literal entrance into Europe, when Russian soldiers flooded Paris following Napoleon’s defeat at the beginning of the nineteenth century.6 Russia’s emergence as a great power coincided with the rise of Romanticism, the intellectual movement that turned its back on Enlightenment rationalism in favor of abstract mysticism. Among its main proponents were philosophers such as Hegel and other founders of German Idealism who credited an absolute spiritual force in nature, the Geist, with giving all aspects of life a single universal purpose. They believed the real and metaphysical worlds to be bound in one “organic” entity that was on an inexorable path toward progress.
Russian philosophers swallowed such ideas whole from the Germans. Friedrich Schelling, among the most influential, believed that people, as parts of the universal Absolute, can divine its patterns by using intuition to look within themselves. Such views informed attitudes toward literature and art, which came to be seen as parts of a whole. Berlin describes a supposedly Russian attitude toward literature in which private life and artistic work are inseparable. Thus the artist’s “duty” to produce beautiful objects is not simply aesthetic, it is also moral. Russia’s famous nineteenth-century writers, Berlin explained, “conceived of themselves as true craftsmen, sometimes as inspired servants of God or of Nature, seeking to celebrate their divine Maker in whatever they did.”7
Even Ivan Turgenev—the most obvious example of a Westernized writer as opposed to a determinedly Slavic one, and thus supposedly more concerned with aesthetic than moral principles—believed social and moral issues were central to his work. His Notes of a Hunter (1852), a collection of short stories about rural life and the injustices of serfdom, humanized serfs by giving them complex characters, following his creed that “every being studied with sincere sympathy can free for us the truth which is the foundation of life.” The book led to his arrest.
Nicholas I’s reactionary reign further propelled the country’s intellectuals toward the mystical. Assuming the throne in 1825, the notoriously suspicious monarch ordered executions and Siberian exile for members of the so-called Decembrists, rebelling soldiers led by a disparate group of freethinking nobles who were opposed to autocracy and serfdom. They had hatched a quixotic plot to stop Nicholas’s coronation, then carried it out in a confused attempt that one scholar described as “one of history’s prime examples of how not to make a revolution.” However, they later became venerated among the intelligentsia as the courageous fathers of the revolutionary tradition.
Nicholas’s subsequent abolition of basic rights and liberties further enshrined romantic ideas about absolute truths. The intellectuals who didn’t flee abroad abandoned overt discussion of dangerous political issues and retreated to their ivory towers to contemplate the kind of abstract questions the crown found far less threatening. “So far from inducing despair or apathy,” Berlin wrote, Nicholas’s crackdown “brought home to more than one Russian thinker the sense of complete antithesis between his country and the relatively liberal institutions of Europe which, paradoxically enough, was made the basis for subsequent Russian optimism. From it sprang the strongest hope of a uniquely happy and glorious future, destined for Russia alone.”8 The bourgeois European revolutions of 1848 only reinforced the tendency by ending in the suppression of the working classes that helped ignite them.
Reasoning along the same lines, the eminent critical theorist Boris Groys believes Russia’s backwardness made it better prepared to accept upheaval in 1917. Revolution in the West can never take place on the same scale, he writes, because Europeans respect tradition. Since Russian intellectuals associated the idea of tradition, if not tradition itself, with backwardness, they were more willing to change by rapidly assimilating new ideas. More than that, the intelligentsia believed that only quick change could sufficiently compensate for Russian inferiority and allow the country to surpass the West.9 It was partly a question of aesthetics. By being willing to organize all life in new forms, Groys writes, the Russians essentially allowed themselves to be subjected to a massive artistic experiment. True or not, Russian writers and artists led the modernist movement a century ago and created some of the twentieth century’s greatest works.
Kazimir Malevich, the main originator of the Suprematist movement whose simple black squares typify Russian avant-garde painting today, believed “the artist can be a creator only when the forms in his painting have nothing in common with nature.”10 Echoing the language of the Bolsheviks, he denounced all realist art as “savage.” Once in power, however, the Communist Party soon banned such subversive ideas. Then came socialist realism and, decades later, the Soviet collapse, which left most artists to fend for themselves. Russia’s new wealth has since funded new galleries and fueled hopes that Moscow will once again play a major role in world art. However, Putin’s political crackdowns, which have encouraged wealthy collectors to invest elsewhere, have clouded the immediate future for Russian contemporary art.
Vinzavod, a new center of Moscow’s art establishment where gallery owner Marat Guelman briefly opened a showroom, is located in an old industrial site next to a train station. The sprawling former wine cellar was kept truly industrial: the tiled vaulted ceilings of its main exhibition space remained dirty, much of the floor was kept gritty, and the space is freezing even in summer. Opening night in 2007 attracted a large crowd of hip young Muscovites who spent time seriously contemplating the spotlit exhibits: a fountain constructed of cheap Soviet plumbing fixtures, a huge bulldozer covered in a black shroud and many video installations. Smoke machines helped evoke a sense of an incense-filled cathedral. The exhibition was called “I Believe.”
Sitting on a shag rug in his incense-filled apartment, the long-bearded curator, Oleg Kulik—a major artist whose painting of a cathedral and a crashed BMW may have been the best installation in the gaudy “Art—Buy It!” exhibit that fascinated Yuri Vaschenko—told me the new show was meant to take back the sense of belief, or faith, from what he called the dogmatic contexts of religion and communism. “We don’t know there will be a tomorrow, but we believe there will be,” he said. “It’s not certain, only a hypothesis. And we don’t know it’s not good to shout at people, but we believe we lower ourselves by doing so. The exhibit is meant to assemble various statements about the beliefs according to which we live our lives.”
One of the works, Anatoly Osmolovsky’s Bread, consisted of various boards of wood intricately carved to resemble slices of dark Russian bread then mounted in a series, some in bread-like outlines, others in the form of Orthodox icons. Kulik called it “part of the Russian tradition of religious iconostases, and the effect is strange.” He said Osmolovsky’s art was related to the works “field artists produced a thousand years ago, when importance lay not in the icon itself but in the feeling it arouses between the object and the viewer.” Kulik thinks the discovery surprised even Osmolovsky. “Although he was simply making a formalist gesture, in doing so he realized that centuries of art history have been wrong,” he explained. “The most important thing isn’t the art, it’s the consciousness it awakes. Its value isn’t the price it commands, but the number of viewers who understand its qualities, who share a belief in it.”
Kulik explained that each of the works in his exhibition was meant to contribute to a new belief system based on questioning. “We want a global revolution,” he concluded—“to make people live correctly, to ensure happiness and wealth for everyone, to turn our rockets into flowering gardens.” Although that call for a new moral order is typically messianic, its relatively elaborate theoretical basis also showed just how far Russian art had come since the 1990s.
Two decades ago, Kulik came to the art world’s attention by staging street performances for which he stripped naked, went down on all fours and barked like a dog while an assistant led him around on a leash. That role represented the complete chaos brought on by the Soviet coll
apse. “Everything we understood was destroyed—the political system, the social system,” he said. “I didn’t know how to live. The only honest thing I could do was reflect my primordial state. It was an important part of starting over.”
Yuri Vaschenko agrees that the Moscow art scene reflects a period of revolutionary change, but he feels there is still a long way to go. Moscow artists, he complains, are still too heavily influenced by their Western counterparts. But he believes the city’s dynamism makes it one of the world’s most interesting places for contemporary art. “Each time I return, I find something completely new,” he said. “One building was demolished and another built right outside my window in a matter of months. Life is boiling and bubbling, and art reflects that hyperactivity.”
However, Putin’s reelection as president in 2012 after four years as prime minister caught the nascent art market off guard by encouraging the wealthy, wary of officials’ mounting greed, to spend more of their time and money abroad. Collectors began turning their backs on local artists in favor of more established Western artists whose works they saw as safer investments. Some gallery owners, including Marat Guelman, turned to the government for support, but with artists and other intellectuals becoming increasingly politicized and joining the opposition to Putin, it’s unlikely that state funding will do much to help Russian art.
Like much of its art, literature in the land of Dostoevsky and Chekhov was considered a wasteland in the 1990s, when readers flocked to buy pulpy romance novels and thrillers that had been banned under Soviet rule. Fiction writers are still struggling with the effects of decades of strictures against free expression, but authors and critics agree that Russian literature is coming back, its fresh inspiration partly provided by Putin’s authoritarianism.
Dmitri Bykov, one of the country’s most popular writers and a ubiquitous fixture on talk shows, dismisses the notion that Russia’s great literary tradition was ever in peril. “Literature reflects Russian life,” the rotund, curly-mopped Bykov, who is given to smiles and not afraid to criticize the authorities, told me. “Reality is in constant crisis,” he added. “In that sense, people saying Russian literature is in crisis is the best sign it’s actually alive and well.”
The most prominent new writers became known abroad in the late 1990s mainly for their black humor, which mocked Soviet life and Russia’s new wild capitalism and described versions of a dark, anti-utopian future. They included hermit-like Victor Pelevin—who declined to be interviewed—and Vladimir Sorokin, who told me that Putin’s regime provided a treasure trove of subject material for his grotesque plots. We spoke on the porch of his substantial country dacha, surrounded by birch trees, near the celebrated Soviet writers’ community at Peredelkino, fifteen miles southwest of Moscow.
Tall and thin with a goatee and a trademark mane of white hair, Sorokin had recently completed the sequel to his novel Day of the Oprichnik, which describes Russia in 2027. Separated from the West by a new great wall, the country is overrun by royal terror squads that indulge in gay sex and drug abuse: a metaphor for the kind of place Russia became under Putin, the author said. “Once again, the authorities in the Kremlin are completely closed off from the people,” he said. “They’re cruel, unpredictable and corrupt. They’ve taken the place of God and they’re forcing people to worship them.”
“In our society, the individual is repressed from birth on all levels,” Sorokin continued, adding that fiction writing is one of the few pursuits in which completely free expression is still allowed. Nevertheless, Sorokin has run into trouble. Members of a pro-Kremlin youth group made headlines in 2002 by ripping up copies of his novel Blue Lard and throwing them into a mockup of a giant toilet. “I felt as if I’d become trapped in one of my own stories,” he said. Charges of pornography, on which he was later taken to court, were subsequently dropped, just before a book fair in Frankfurt, Germany, at which Russia was the guest of honor. “They didn’t want to lose face,” Sorokin explained.
Although he and a handful of other writers are becoming increasingly well known abroad, Natalia Ivanova, the enterprising editor of the storied literary journal Znamya, told me the best Russian writers are younger and barely known. “Today’s Russian literature is like a cake with many layers,” she said. “We have popular mass literature and middlebrow literature, but we also have very good, complicated literature for the elite.” Znamya publishes the latter kind of work, including novels by Mikhail Shishkin, one of the country’s best writers. However, even as Russia’s literary scene expands, Ivanova said, it’s being threatened by a shrinking readership. Literature may have been the main form of escape from Soviet repression, she continued, but the proliferation of movies and television shows—many made available by the huge illegal pirating industry—threatens to turn a country of readers into one of viewers.
Although also under threat, drama, unlike literature, flourished during the 1990s. Moscow currently has more than 115 theaters, many of whose performances are packed by very discerning audiences. Among the top venues, the New Generation Theater stages plays by its director, Kama Ginkas, one of Russia’s most acclaimed. I spoke to him during a production of his play Rothschild’s Fiddle, based on Anton Chekhov’s short story of the same name. The protagonist, a master builder of coffins, is consumed by anger because people don’t die often enough. He ignores his wife and forgets the existence of his son until he is driven to despair by realizing too late he’s let life pass him by. “The frightening paradox, that Rothschild starts becoming a real person only three days before his death, is absolute genius,” Ginkas told me. “It’s the closest Chekhov got to stating something directly, albeit through black humor.” Ginkas’s spare, inventive production, with brilliant acting, was compelling.
“There are lots of monsters like Rothschild in life,” he continued. “People who are busy with business, art or whatever—but it turns out they, too, have wives and children, and they don’t realize that life is much more than just their work. To put it another way, you don’t have to be Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment to realize there are no ideological, religious or any other justifications for killing. Everyone must realize that within himself.”
Ginkas knows something about ideology, and not only from Soviet harassment. Born in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas in 1941, he survived its notorious Jewish ghetto after the Nazi invasion and began directing in Leningrad in the 1960s. He agreed to meet me in his massive studio in the theater, filled with props from previous productions, only after insisting I observe him directing a rehearsal for his next play, about the Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. He often explores themes from literature, painting and music. “My challenge is to search for ways to express in drama material otherwise not meant for the stage,” he said. “I think it’s no more difficult than staging plays, but I don’t believe in doing anything that comes easily. Your work isn’t worth anything unless you have to struggle.”
The American critic of Russian drama John Freedman is among those who rate Ginkas as one of the world’s great directors. Freedman, who co-wrote the book Provoking Theater with Ginkas, traces the success of new Russian drama to the 1996 staging of a highly praised play called Tanya-Tanya, a comedy about love in post-Soviet suburban Moscow. But the popularity of theater is hardly new to Russia. Freedman cites Mikhail Shepkin, a nineteenth-century actor who called it “a cathedral.”
“Russians go to the theater to worship,” Freedman told me. “They go to the theater to hear the truth, to hear what’s happening in their own lives.” Marina Davydova, a young theater critic for the newspaper Izvestiya, agreed. Despite the Soviet era’s censorship and isolation from the world, drama thrived even then. “It helped carry out the functions of a real parliament and a free press, which didn’t exist,” she said. “It took on a number of roles it otherwise shouldn’t have.”
Drama is again being politicized. One of the newest theaters, called TEATR.DOC, stages experimental works by young playwrigh
ts, often about topics in the news. A recent production described the prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the anticorruption crusader. Drama critics say the best Moscow theater continues to prosper because it successfully reflects the country’s rapidly changing society.
Still, both Ginkas and Davydova are pessimistic about the future. Davydova is concerned that outside the small circle of talented directors like Ginkas, middlebrow theater is deteriorating. “We could make rockets to send into space,” she concluded, “but we could never mass-produce cars properly.” Ginkas agrees, saying serious productions like his make up a tiny part of the theater scene, which continues shrinking as old intelligentsia give way to newer audiences who prefer expensive sets and sensationalized plots. “You can no longer put on a play that doesn’t concern things like AIDS or prostitution,” he said. “But what about the universal, everyday problems that matter to all of us? That we’re all mortal? That we don’t want to suffer, we want to love? That we’re jealous, we hate, we want success and fear loneliness?”
I’ve often felt more exhilarated stepping onto the street after successful productions staged by Ginkas and other leading Moscow directors than after I’ve seen similar off-Broadway dramas in New York, perhaps because in Moscow life’s inequities and brutality aren’t hidden behind a veneer of civility or suppressed by a belief in a supposed equality of opportunity. In Russia, deriving some sort of catharsis, if not necessarily understanding, through art seems less academic or diversionary than it does in the United States—more necessary for coping with life’s difficulties. Perhaps that helps explain why the bitter enmities between advocates of opposing solutions to Russia’s enduring, generally unhappy condition have been a defining part of the country’s history.
Although its relevance to universal problems was sometimes buried, no conflict defined Russian intellectual life as much as the nineteenth-century battle between the Westernizers, who believed Russia should look to Europe for its inspiration, and the Slavophiles, who wanted Russia to follow what they considered its own traditions. Among the Westernizing writers and philosophers who hoped Russia would abandon its despotic practices and adopt European ideas about individualism and liberty, the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky was especially influential. An idealist, Belinsky believed art should serve the overriding goal of combating the great evils of autocracy and serfdom as well as the resulting social ills of poverty, alcoholism and other afflictions. Content was more important than form for Belinsky, so it may have been no accident that even his supporters found some of his work unreadable. Nevertheless, his exile to Siberia, where he was crippled by malaria, helped burnish his reputation as a father of Russia’s revolutionary tradition.
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