In Russian literature, drama, poetry, and prose, a public independent of the court was just barely coming into existence at the end of Catherine’s reign. Other art forms remained closely tied to the patronage of court and nobility. The court musical theater and orchestra was largely the preserve of imported musicians, and the centrality of the court in cultural life meant that the nobility heard an extensive range of European music. Native traditions remained in church music, a particular specialty of Ukrainians associated with the choirs in the imperial chapels. The most successful of these Ukrainians was Dmitrii Bortnyanskii (1751–1825), Russia’s first composer, who was equally comfortable with European concerti and Russian choral singing. None of the musicians were noblemen, a fact that hampered their acceptance as serious artists. A similar situation obtained in the visual arts, where the Academy of Art dominated the scene. Catherine reorganized the Academy to give it more autonomy and better financing while retaining its mainly French instructors, and she secured for the artists a more privileged social status to fit their profession. The Russian students were all of non-noble and sometimes even serf origin, who were intended to go on to provide art for the palaces of the empress and the nobility as well as the church. The Academy also provided stipends for the students to spend time in Paris and Rome, enormously broadening the training and experience of its students. In retrospect its worst defect, other than its very “official” character, was its precise copying of European models that accorded ill with Russian possibilities and traditions. As in the European art academies, the most prestigious genre was historical painting in the style of classicism. Attempts to depict Russian history in this style found praise at the time but produced pictures that to later taste were wooden at best and often comic. Ancient Russians appeared in fantastic armor more reminiscent of the Romans than medieval Russia. More attractive to later taste were the portrait painters, who ironically had little or no ties to the Academy. The first to gain a name was Ivan Argunov (1727–1802), a serf of the extremely wealthy Sheremetev family. His successors included Fyodor Rokotov, a serf of the Repnins, and two Ukrainians, Dmitrii Levitskii (Argunov’s pupil), and Vladimir Borovikovskii, the only nobleman among them. Their charming portraits of noble men and women as well as of Catherine herself filled Russian palaces and country houses and were comparable in quality to many of the French and English portraits of the time, if less inventive than the latter.
Catherine’s time marked the beginning of Russian classicist architecture, which transformed St. Petersburg into the city familiar today. She was firmly against the Baroque exuberance of her predecessor Elizabeth’s chief architect Rastrelli. Catherine and her contemporaries built with unmistakable Roman allusions, a proper architecture for a great imperial capital and its elites. Strict symmetry, Roman columns and triumphal arches were the order of the day. The crowning achievement of the age was the monument to Peter the Great, the “Bronze Horseman” in Pushkin’s immortal phrase. The work of the French sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet and his wife, it displayed Peter in the garb of a Roman emperor on horseback standing on a giant rock with the simple inscription “Catherine the Second to Peter the First” in Latin and Russian. Unveiled in 1782 to great ceremony, the statue remains Catherine’s most powerful contribution to the city of St. Petersburg.
The years after Pugachev were not just filled with artistic projects and court entertainments, for these were the years of extensive reform of Russian government and society. Finally the Legislative Commission bore fruit, albeit indirectly: Catherine knew how the nobility thought about the issues and what might prove useful while not antagonizing them. The first task was to reorder the administration of the provinces and the towns, which involved creating a new court system. Catherine’s 1775 decrees broke up the large administrative units into some forty new provinces, which in turn divided into five or six smaller units. At the level of these smaller units government essentially stopped, leaving the countryside to the nobility and the peasant communities. The most powerful local figure was the provincial governor appointed by the empress. These were invariably noblemen, sometimes including great aristocrats but more often military men. In the same decree Catherine established courts for the nobility that were to combine appointed judges with local noblemen elected to assist them. These were courts for nobility only. In areas where free peasants predominated there were also to be courts with peasants elected alongside officials to provide justice. As ever, it was the village level that was weakest and where state power often existed only on paper. In the towns, Catherine also established courts, for the townspeople alone, that consisted of appointed judges and elected assessors. Thus justice was divided among special courts for each social group and combined state-appointed judges with elected assessors.
The new legislation implied greater responsibility on the part of the nobility and the elite of the townspeople, yet many basic aspects of their status and relationship to the state remained undefined. The answers to this problem were the 1785 Charters of the Nobility and of the Townspeople. The Charter of the Nobility confirmed and broadened the rights already in practice from Peter’s time and added others, including the 1762 decree on freedom from obligatory state service. Nobles could not be deprived of life and property without a trial by a court that was composed of their peers. Their nobility was hereditary, and could not be terminated without a conviction in court of specified crimes like murder or treason. They were not subject to corporal punishment, and the right to own land and serfs was guaranteed to them alone. Nobles in each province were to come together to form a provincial Assembly of Nobility, electing its own marshal and determining its own membership. The marshal was to act as the leader of the local gentry, conveying its wishes to the capital and the government’s orders to the nobility. The marshals had little formal power, but as the chief representatives of the local nobility, and often with powerful connections in St. Petersburg, they were formidable figures. Provincial governors, in spite of their formal power, found it wise to cultivate the marshals of the nobility. In the towns Catherine’s decrees divided the town population by simple wealth, and put most of the administration, like the courts, in the hands of the town elites. The population was to elect a governing body from among the wealthier citizens to manage the business side of town life, leaving the courts and police as specified in the 1775 provincial reform. Townspeople were also not to be deprived of life and property without conviction in a court of their peers. Lesser townsfolk were subject to corporal punishment. There was also elaborate sumptuary legislation that specified limits to ostentatious display by the lower orders. Though restricted to the upper and middle classes, the Charters were the first fruit of Enlightenment thought about the rights and duties of the citizen to be enacted into Russian law.