A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  Gumilev and Osip Mandelstam; futurists, such as Velemir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Maiakovsky; or peasant poets, such as Serge Esenin. The poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, who died in 1960, and the poetess Anna Akhmatova, who lived until 1966 as probably the last Russian poet of the first rank, also belong fully to the "silver age." In literary criticism, too, the new trends continued to enrich Russian culture after 1917, producing notably an interesting school of formalist critics, until destroyed by Soviet regimentation and "socialist realism."

  The Arts

  In art, as in literature, "realism" dominated the second half of the nineteenth century, only to be enriched and in large part replaced by the varied new currents of the "silver age." In painting the decisive turning to realism can even be precisely dated: in 1863 fourteen young painters, led by Ivan Kramskoy and constituting the entire graduating class of the Academy of Arts, refused to paint their examination assignment, "A Feast in Valhalla." Breaking with the stifling academic tradition, they insisted on painting realistic pictures. Several years later they organized popular circulating exhibitions of their works and came to be known as the "itinerants." With new painters joining the movement and its influence spreading, "critical realism" asserted itself in Russian art just as it had in Russian literary criticism and literature. In accord with the spirit of the age, the "itinerants" and their disciples believed that content was more important than form, that art had to serve the higher purpose of educating the masses and championing their interests, and they depicted such topics as the exploitation of the poor, the drunken clergy, and the brutal police. Basil Vereshchiagin, for example, observed wars at firsthand until he went down with the battleship Petropav-lovsk when it was sunk by the Japanese. He painted numerous and often huge canvases on the glaring inhumanity of wars, characteristically dedicating his "Apotheosis of War," a pyramid of skulls, "to all great conquerors, present, past, and future." To be sure, painting could not be limited to social protest, and realism naturally extended to portraits, genre scenes, landscapes, historical topics - well handled by Basil Surikov - and other subject matter. Still, the Russian artists of the period demonstrated earnestness rather than talent, and added more to the polemics of the age than to art. Even the most famous of them, Elijah Repin, who lived from 1844 to 1930, is less likely to be remembered for his contribution to creative art, than for his active participation in Russian life and culture, and for certain paintings that have become almost inseparable from their subject matter, such as one of the Dnieper cossacks and one of Ivan the Terrible just after he had mortally wounded his son Ivan.

  The development of music followed a somewhat different pattern. It, too, responded to the demands of the age, as seen, for example, in Modest

  Musorgsky's emphasis on content, realism, and closeness to the masses. Music, however, by its very nature could not be squeezed into the framework of critical realism, and fortunately it attracted much original talent in Russia at the time. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a great spread of musical interest and education in the empire, with a conservatory established in St. Petersburg in 1862, headed by the noted composer and magnificent pianist Anton Rubinstein, another one in Moscow in 1866, headed by Anton Rubinstein's younger brother, Nicholas, and still other musical schools in other cities in subsequent years. Moreover, quite a number of outstanding Russian composers came to the fore at that time. The most prominent of them included Peter Tchaikovsky and dilettante members of the celebrated "Mighty Bunch," Modest Musorgsky, Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, and Caesar Cui. The "Mighty Bunch," or "The Five" - Milii Balakirev, a professional, trained musician, must be added to the four already mentioned - in effect created the national Russian school of music, utilizing folk songs, melodies, tales, and legends, and a romanticized vision of the Russian past to produce such famous operas as Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, Borodin's Prince Igor, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko and The Tale of the Town of Kitezh. It hardly needs to be mentioned that much of the instrumental and vocal music of the "Mighty Bunch" has entered the basic musical repertoire all over the world. The same, of course, holds true of Tchaikovsky, who stood apart from "The Five," developing an elegiac, subjective, and psychological approach of his own. Indeed, few pieces in the world of music are better known than Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony or his ballets, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty.

  The "silver age" brought a renaissance in the fine arts as well as in literature. In music, where Alexander Scriabin initiated the change, it marked the appearance of the genius of Igor Stravinsky and of other brilliant young composers. In a sense, the new ballet masterpieces, for example, Stravinsky's The Firebird, Petrouchka - which also belongs to Benois - and Le Sacre du printemps, combining as they did superb music, choreography, dancing, and decor, expressed best the cultural refinement, craftsmanship, and many-sidedness of the "silver age." The Russian ballet received overwhelming acclaim when Diaghilev brought it to Paris in 1909, starring such choreographers as Michael Fokine and such dancers as Anna Pavlova and Waslaw Nijinsky. From that time on Russian ballet has exercised a fundamental influence on ballet in other countries. On the eve of 1917 Russia could also boast of leading artists in other musical fields, for instance, the bass Theodore Chaliapin, the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, and the pianist, conductor, and composer, Serge Rachmaninov, to mention three of the best-known names.

  Diaghilev's ballets made such a stunning impression in the West in part because of the superb decor and staging. Benois, Constantine Korovin, and other gifted artists of the "silver age" created a school of stage painting that gave Russia world leadership in that field and added immeasurably to operatic and theatrical productions as well as to the ballet. Other Russian artists, notably Marc Chagall and Basil Kandinsky, broke much more radically with the established standards and became leaders of modernism in painting. Still another remarkable development in the "silver age" was the rediscovery of icon painting: both a physical rediscovery, because ancient icons had become dark, been overlaid with metal, or even painted over, and began to be restored to their original condition only around 1900; and an artistic rediscovery, because these icons were newly appreciated, adding to the culture and the creative influences of the period.

  Theater, like the ballet a combination of arts, also developed splendidly in the "silver age." In addition to the fine imperial theaters, private ones came into prominence. The Moscow Art Theater, directed by Constantine Stanislavsky who emphasized psychological realism, achieved the greatest and most sustained fame and exercised the strongest influence on acting in Russia and abroad. But it is important to realize that it represented only one current in the theatrical life of a period remarkable for its variety, vitality, and experimentation. Russian art as well as Russian literature in the "silver age" formed an inseparable part of the art and literature of the West, profiting hugely, for example, from literary trends in France or from German thought, and in turn contributing to virtually every form of literary and artistic argument and creative expression. In a sense, Russian culture was never more "Western" than on the eve of 1917.

  Ideologies

  Russian social, political, and philosophical thought also underwent considerable evolution between the emancipation of the serfs and the First World War. As already mentioned, the radicals of the generation of the sixties, Turgenev's "sons," found their spiritual home first in nihilism, in the denial of all established authorities. As their spokesman, the gifted young literary critic Dmitrii Pisarev, 1840-68, said: "What can be broken, should be broken." The new radical spirit reflected both the general materialistic and realistic character of the age and special Russian conditions, such as a reaction to the stifling of intellectual life under Nicholas I, the autocratic and oppressive nature of the regime, the weak development of the middle class or other elements of moderation and compromise, and a gradual democratization of the educated public.

  While nihilism emancipated the young Russian radicals from any alle-

  giance t
o the established order, it was, to repeat a point, individual rather than social by its very nature and lacked a positive program - both Pisarev and Turgenev's hero Bazarov died young. The social creed came with a vengeance in the form of narodnichestvo, or populism, which arose in the 1860's and '70's to dominate much of Russian radicalism until the October Revolution. We have already seen its political impact in such events as the celebrated "going to the people" of 1874, the terrorism of the "Will of the People," and the activities of the Socialist Revolutionary party. Although in a broad sense Russian populism belonged ideologically to the general European radicalism of the age, it also possessed a distinctively Russian character - for Russia was a peasant country par excellence - and numerous Russian prophets. The first prophets were the radical West-ernizers Herzen and Bakunin, the former surviving until 1870 and the latter until 1876, who both preached that radical intellectuals should turn to the people and proclaimed the virtues of the peasant commune. Bakunin's violent anarchism in particular inspired many of the more impatient populists. Anarchism, it might be added, appealed to a variety of Russian intellectuals, including such outstanding figures as Tolstoy and Prince Peter Kro-potkin, a noted geographer, geologist, and radical, who lived from 1842 to 1921 and devoted most of his life to the spreading of anarchism. Kropot-kin's activities as a radical included a fantastic escape from the Peter and Paul Fortress, which was described in his celebrated Memoirs of a Revolutionist written in English for The Atlantic Monthly in 1898-99.

  Whereas Herzen and Bakunin were emigres, populist leaders also arose in Russia after 1855. Nicholas Chernyshevsky, whose views and impact were not limited to populism, but who nevertheless exercised a major influence on Russian populists, deserves special attention. Born in 1828, Chernyshevsky actually enjoyed only a few years of public activity as journalist and writer, especially as editor of a leading periodical, The Contemporary, before his arrest in 1862. He returned from Siberian exile only in 1883 and died in 1889. It was probably Chernyshevsky more than anyone else who contributed to the spread of utilitarian, positivist, and in part materialist views in Russia. A man of vast erudition, Chernyshevsky concerned himself with esthetics - developing further Belinsky's ideas on the primacy of life over art - as much as with economics, and wrote on nineteenth-century French history, demonstrating the failure of liberalism, as well as on Russian problems. His extremely popular novel, What Is To Be Done?, dealt with the new generation of "critical realists," their ethics and their activities, and sketched both the revolutionary hero and forms of co-operative organization. As to the peasant commune, Chernyshevsky showed more reserve than certain of his contemporaries. Yet he generally believed that it could serve as a direct transition to socialism in Russia,

  provided socialist revolution first triumphed in Europe. For a time Cherny-shevsky collaborated closely in spreading his ideas with an able radical literary critic, Nicholas Dobroliubov, who died in 1861 at the age of twenty-five.

  Chernyshevsky's and Dobroliubov's work was continued, with certain differences, by Peter Lavrov and Nicholas Mikhailovsky. Lavrov, 1823-1900, another erudite adherent of positivism, utilitarianism, and populism, emphasized in his Historical Letters of 1870 and in other writings the crucial role of "critically thinking individuals" in the revolutionary struggle and the transformation of Russia. Mikhailovsky, a literary critic who lived from 1842 to 1904, employed the "subjective method" in social analysis to stress moral values rather than mere objective description and to champion the peasant commune, which provided for harmonious development of the individual, by contrast with the industrial order, which led to narrow specialization along certain lines and the atrophy of other aspects of personality. The populist defense of the peasant commune became more desperate with the passage of time, because Russia was in fact developing into a capitalist country and because an articulate Marxist school arose to point that out as proof that history was proceeding according to Marxist predictions. Yet the Socialist Revolutionaries of the twentieth century, led by Victor Chernov, although they borrowed much from the Marxists and had to modify their own views, remained essentially faithful to populism, staking the future of Russia on the peasants and on a "socialization of land."

  Marxists proved to be strong competitors and opponents of populists. While Marxism will be discussed in a later chapter, it should be kept in mind that Marxism offered to its followers an "objective knowledge" of history instead of a mere "subjective method" and a quasi-scientific certainty of victory in lieu of, or rather in addition to, moral earnestness and indignation. It claimed to be "tough," where populism was "soft." Moreover, the actual development of Russia seemed to follow the Marxist rather than the populist blueprint. Beginning with the 1890's Marxism made important inroads among Russian intellectuals, gaining adherents both among scholars and in the radical and revolutionary movement. The Social Democrats, divided into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and their rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries, gave political expression to the great ideological debate and cleavage of radical Russia.

  To be sure, not all thinking and articulate Russians were radicals. But the Right, the conservatives and the reactionaries, had very little to offer. The government did little more than repeat the obsolete formula of Official Nationality, and its ablest theoretician, Constantine Pobedonostsev, determinedly refused to come to terms with the modern world. A few reactionary intellectuals not associated with the government, such as the brilliant writer

  Constantine Leontiev, engaged in violent but fruitless criticism of the trends of the time and placed their hopes - desperate hopes indeed - in freezing the social process, in freezing everything!

  Perhaps the new-style violent and demagogic Right had brighter prospects than the conservatives did. Its potential might be suggested by the nationalist rally led by Katkov in 1863, by Pan-Slavism in the late 1870's and at certain other times - although Pan-Slavism, especially when it expanded, was by no means limited to the Right - and by the "Black Hundreds" of the twentieth century. Yet all these movements lacked effective organization, continuity, and cohesion, as well as solid ideology. Pan-Slavism, for example, although it had several prophets, including Dostoev-sky, and a painstaking theoretician of the quasi-scientific racist variety, Nicholas Danilevsky, whose magnum opus, Russia and Europe, was published in 1869, remained an "attitude of mind and feeling" rather than an "organized policy or even a creed." In other words, in times of Balkan crises many Russians sympathized with the Balkan Slavs, but they forgot them once a crisis passed. As a political factor, Pan-Slavism was more a Western bugaboo than a reality. And, in general, whatever racist and fascist possibilities existed in imperial Russia, they failed to develop beyond an incipient stage. Their flowering required a more modern setting than the one offered by the ancien regime of the Romanovs.

  It can be argued that liberalism, on the other hand, represented a promising alternative for Russia. Moreover, Karpovich, Fischer, and other scholars, as well as a wealth of sources, have demonstrated that Russian liberalism was by no means a negligible quantity. On the contrary, with its bases in the zemstvo system and the professions, it gained strength steadily and it produced able ideologists and leaders such as Paul Miliukov and Basil Maklakov. The important position of the Cadets in the first two Dumas, the only Dumas elected by a rather democratic suffrage, emphasizes the liberal potential. But the government never accepted the liberal viewpoint, nor, of course, did the Russian radical and revolutionary movement accept it. The liberals thus had little opportunity to influence state policies or even to challenge them. Whether liberalism could have satisfied Russian needs will remain an arguable question, because Russian liberalism never received its chance in imperial Russia.

  The "silver age" affected Russian thought as well as Russian literature and art. Notably, it marked a return to metaphysics, and often to religion eventually, on the part of a significant sector of Russian intellectuals. Other educated Russians, especially the writers and the artists, tended to become apol
itical and asocial, often looking to esthetics for their highest values. The utilitarianism, positivism, and materialism dominant from the time of the '60's, finally had to face a serious challenge.

  Philosophy in Russia experienced a revival in the work of Vladimir

  Soloviev and his followers. Soloviev, a son of the historian Serge Soloviev, lived from 1853 until 1900 and wrote on a variety of difficult philosophical and theological subjects. A study in ethics, A Justification of the Good, is generally considered his masterpiece. A trenchant critic of the radical creed of the age, as well as of chauvinism and reaction, Soloviev remained a rather isolated individual during his lifetime, but came to exercise a profound influence on the intellectual elite of the "silver age." In effect almost everything he had stood for, from imaginative and daring theology to a sweeping critique of the radical intelligentsia, suddenly came into prominence in the early twentieth century.

  The new critique of the intelligentsia found its most striking expression in a slim volume entitled Signposts - Vekhi - which appeared in 1909. Signposts contained essays by seven authors, including such prominent converts from Marxism as Peter Struve, Nicholas Berdiaev, and Serge Bulgakov, and constituted an all-out attack on the radical intelligentsia: Russian radicals were accused of an utter disregard for objective truth, religion, and law, and of an extreme application of the maxim that the end justifies the means, with destruction as their only effective passion. Although Signposts represented a minority of Russian intellectuals and attracted strong rebuttals, a new cleavage among educated Russians became apparent - a cleavage all the more revealing because the critics of the intelligentsia could by no means be equated with the Right. Eventually Struve, 1870-1944, became a leading thinker and political figure of the moderate conservatives; Berdiaev, 1874-1948, acquired world fame as a personalist philosopher and champion of "creative freedom"; and Bulgakov, 1871-1944, entered the priesthood and developed into the most controversial Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century. Other prominent intellectuals of the "silver age" included the "biological mystic" Basil Rozanov, who was especially concerned with the problem of sex, the brilliant anti-rationalist Leo Shestov - a pseudonym of Leo Schwartzmann - and the metaphysicians Semen Frank - another contributor to Signposts - and Nicholas Lossky. By comparison with the 1860's or even the 1890's, the Russian intellectual scene had indeed changed on the eve of the First World War.