A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Bushkovitch, Paul

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

  Figure 13. Peter Tchaikovsky as a young man.

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

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

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

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

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

  THE VISUAL ARTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

  LITERATURE

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

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

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

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

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

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