While the court alternated between routine governance, dangerous intrigue, and dramatic palace revolutions, Russia gradually integrated the cultural changes that were the result of Peter the Great’s turn toward European culture. It is not the case that the Empresses and the court elite played no role in the development and deepening of Russian culture. Empress Anna was paradoxically one of the most important innovators. It was in her reign that Russia finally abandoned the simplicity of Peter’s time and acquired a court like those of other European states with the usual cultural institutions. Anna was the first to establish a court theater, beginning with an Italian Commedia dell’arte troupe, and then a regular French and German theater. She also brought an opera company, with its composer-director, the Neapolitan Francesco Araya. Anna replaced Peter’s tiny Winter Palace with a new one, more in keeping with the status of Russia’s rulers. Anna’s government was not only concerned with the court, for she also founded the Infantry Cadet Corps, using the old buildings of Menshikov’s palace. The Cadet Corps later evolved into an elite military school, but in the eighteenth century it was the main institution for the education of young Russian noblemen and had a broad curriculum that was borrowed from the academies for young nobles common in central Europe. The school taught military subjects, but also stressed modern languages, history, elementary jurisprudence, and mathematics. Not just officers, but also government ministers and many writers studied at the Cadet Corps.
Elizabeth continued in this direction, and it was she who ordered Bartolomeo Rastrelli to build the magnificent Winter Palace that stands to this day. Finally St. Petersburg had a residence for the monarch that rivaled or even outshone those of other European capitals. Elizabeth loved the theater even more than Anna, and in her court there were performances of the opera and the French theater two or three times a week. Araya kept his position to the end of her reign, writing his own operas and producing the work of other then prominent composers. In 1749 for the first time her theater put on a Russian play, Semira, by Alexander Sumarokov (1718–1777), a recent graduate of the Cadet Corps. Semira was a typical classical drama in verse in five acts, following the classical unities of time and place and imitating the French theater, Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire (then considered a great playwright and poet more than a thinker). Today it seems wooden and dull, with unexciting verse and an eminently predictable plot pitting duty against love. It was good enough, however, to enchant Elizabeth and her court, performed as it was by the boys of the Cadet Corps taking both male and female roles. Russians had no objection to female actors, the problem was that the theater was so new there simply were not any available, nor was there yet a school for girls equivalent to the Cadet Corps. The appearance of a Russian play, quickly followed by many others, required Russian actors, and by the end of the 1750s Russia had its first native theaters, the court theater as well as some short-lived enterprises outside the court network. Russia also had no school to train visual artists, and in 1756 Ivan Shuvalov founded the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. For the next century it would be the main center for Russian painting and sculpture.
Russia, however, still lacked a university. Peter’s academy of sciences had included a university, but that aspect of the academy was too small to make much impact. Again it was Elizabeth’s favorite, Count Ivan Shuvalov, who set out to correct the situation. The empress decreed the foundation of a university in Moscow that opened its doors in 1755. The university was very much on the German model, with a heavily German faculty and lectures frequently in Latin the first years, but it worked. It had two gymnasia attached to it to prepare the students – one for nobles and one for pupils from humbler stations in society. The new university had faculties of law and medicine as well as arts and sciences, and the very first graduates were to make major contributions to Russian culture.
Shuvalov had the political skills to pilot the university through the government’s offices, but he turned for the programmatic details to the Academy, and particularly to Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765), who had been pressing the idea in vain for some time. Lomonosov was in many ways the last man of the era of Peter, for he was the son of a wealthy merchant of the far north who owned fishing boats, but who was legally a peasant. Lomonosov had walked south to Moscow to enter the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in 1731. After graduation he was sent to Germany to study mining, but eventually opted for chemistry and related sciences. He had to leave Marburg University in a hurry, as his landlord’s daughter was pregnant, and he threw himself on the mercies of the Russian ambassador in Holland. Fortunately the ambassador sent him back to St. Petersburg, where he found a position in the Academy and was able to bring his German mistress to become his wife. Lomonosov’s most important scientific achievement was an early version of the law of conservation of matter and energy that was later formulated by Lavoisier in France, but Lomonosov was something of a polymath. He was a major poet, producing many odes for court occasions, an important genre at the time, for the odes were often declaimed at court occasions before the empress herself. These were not just flattery, for Lomonosov used them to present a program of enlightened and powerful monarchy that reflected his priorities and also those of Elizabeth and the court elite. He also took time off from his chemistry to engage in disputes over Russian history, and most important, to codify Russian grammar. This apparently simple contribution was fraught with consequence, for the cultural changes of Peter’s time had left the Russian literary language in a quandary. The old literary language had been formed by the Church and it was a combination of Old Church Slavic and vernacular elements. Peter’s reign had seen the introduction of thousands of new words and concepts and the restriction of the church language to traditional religious texts. Lomonosov’s contribution was to regularize all this, declaring the Church Slavic elements to be appropriate for high-style literature, but not necessarily ordinary speech or writing, and to provide a grammar for the normal written language that was essentially the spoken vernacular. Together with his own poetry and other writings, he laid the foundation for the literary language of Pushkin and Tolstoy.
Russia may not have had a university, but it certainly had a church. The time of Elizabeth was the high point of the domination of the Orthodox Church by Ukrainian bishops, who were trained in Kiev and elsewhere on Western, and to a large extent, Catholic models. They brought Latin and Western devotional literature to the Russian clergy, and continued the effort to bring their teachings to the population through sermonizing and attempts to educate the clergy. What they could not do was interfere in the process of absorption of Western secular culture. The Church in Russia, under the power of the state through the Synod, lacked the ability to ban books or interfere in the educational process. Boys in the Cadet School certainly had religious instruction, but the curriculum was entirely in the hands of laymen. As the European Enlightenment flowered, this Russian peculiarity meant that works banned in France or Italy found their way to Russia without interference from the clergy.
Starting around 1750, the Enlightenment came to Russia. For men of Lomonosov’s generation, formed in the earlier part of the century, the European culture they absorbed was essentially that of seventeenth-century rationalism. The predominant philosophy at the Academy in Lomonosov’s youth was that of Georg Christian Wolff, a follower and systematizer of the work of Gottfried Leibniz and Peter’s advisor on the Academy of Sciences. Wolff taught a deductive rationalism that depended on mathematics and logic, not sense experience, for its conclusions. Though many Lutheran theologians saw him as a threat, Wolff had no quarrel with revealed religion and was equally respectful of absolute monarchy. This was the worldview that the philosophy faculty of Moscow University propagated as well, not surprisingly, since it still held sway in German universities until the 1770s and beyond. During the middle years of the century, however, newer ideas from France and indirectly from England began to penetrate into Russian libraries and bookstores. Voltaire’s plays, some performed in Russia, illustrated classic themes of the French enlightenment, religious tolerance, enlightened monarchy, and the struggle against superstition and the clergy. As the French language began to replace German at court in these years, French writers acquired a public in Russia for the first time. In 1756 the first of Voltaire’s essays appeared in Russian translation and three years later his novel Zadig, the first major text of the mature French Enlightenment to be translated. This small stream grew into a flood in the next reign.