Music, especially opera and ballet, remained to a large extent within the court sphere. Catherine had built an opera theater in 1783 outside the palace to provide public access to the performances, and it quickly became the center of operatic and social life. The court did not let go of the opera, however, for the Ministry of the Court acquired control over all theaters in 1802. Thus the repertory of the Petersburg theaters was the result of the taste of the Ministry’s officials and even of the tsar himself. Originally Alexander I had set up four opera companies – Italian, French, German, and Russian – according to the language of the libretto and the singers, more than the nationality of the composer. The Italian company soon faded out, leaving the French company dominant until 1811, when it was closed in the patriotic atmosphere leading up to the war with Napoleon. The German and Russian companies continued, performing Italian operas as well as German with translated librettos. The Russian opera company could present only a few original works and relied largely on the European repertory.
Instrumental music flourished outside of state sponsorship, as much of Russian musical culture in these years was the product of aristocratic amateurs and private societies. The court banker Alexander Rall helped found the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Society in 1801 and the aristocrat V. V. Engelhardt’s concert hall on Nevskii Prospect provided much needed performance space for a generation. In the salon of the Russian-Polish Counts Mikhail and Matvei Wielhorski, Russian and foreign musicians met, played, and made the personal contacts that took Russian music forward. Count Matvei (1794–1866) was a superb cellist who earned praise from Hector Berlioz, and his brother Mikhail (1788–1856) was not only a gifted performer but a composer as well. Both brothers had studied with Luigi Cherubini in Paris in their youth, returned to Russia and eventually received high positions at the tsar’s court. The Wielhorski house stood on the same square as the palace of Grand Duke Michael, where his wife Elena Pavlovna held her own musical and political salon. The Philharmonic Society and the salons brought most of European music to Russia – Mozart and Beethoven being particular favorites of the Wielhorskis. Count Mikhail even performed Beethoven’s first seven symphonies at his wife’s country estate with an orchestra composed of their own and their neighbors’ serfs. Later on it was Count Matvei who introduced the young Anton Rubinstein to Elena Pavlovna, a meeting that was to bear fruit in later years.
With no professional conservatory yet in existence in Russia, musicians relied on private teachers and trips to Europe for their training. Out of this semi-amateur musical world came Russia’s first major composer, Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857). After some training in Italy, Glinka wrote a patriotic and very monarchist opera, A Life for the Tsar, first performed in 1836. The story was the suggestion of the poet Zhukovskii, who also found a librettist in Baron G. F. Rosen, a Baltic German turned Russian writer who also tutored the heir to the throne, the future Alexander II. The Wielhorskis and other aristocratic patrons of the arts provided rehearsal space. There was some quibbling from the director of the imperial theaters, but the support of Zhukovskii and the Counts Wielhorski, given their positions at the court, meant that any objections were ultimately irrelevant. The opera’s premiere enjoyed an authentic success. Glinka’s success did not, however, inaugurate a new age for Russian opera, for in 1843 Nicholas I was entranced and delighted by a traveling Italian company. He immediately hired them as a permanent troupe and gave them the facilities of the Russian opera company, which moved to Moscow. The result was two decades of brilliant performances of Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti, and their lesser contemporaries in St. Petersburg while Russian opera languished.
If music and theater remained tied to the court, Russian literature began to emancipate itself with the spectacular brilliance of the first wave of Russian writers, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, and the critic Vissarion Belinskii as well as numerous lesser but still highly skilled writers and critics. Emancipation from the court coincided with the emergence of Russian literature as a mature and original literature, the first contribution of Russia to the culture of the world. The emergence of Russian literature also brought to the fore the old issue of Russia and the West in a new form. This issue had lain dormant in the eighteenth century, when Russia’s cultural products were heavily imitative of Western models in form and content. Now a vibrant and original Russian literature, even as it followed Western trends and used them, had created a peculiarly Russian culture, one that was part of Western literature but not identical with it. The old question of Russia and the West now had a major cultural component.
Such a spectacular debut could not have been easily predicted in 1820, so closely had Russian literature continued to follow its European models. It was competent, occasionally inspired, but ultimately modest in achievement. In the early years of the nineteenth century the leading figures were Nikolai Karamzin, who had turned his attention to Russian history after 1803, and Vasilii Zhukovskii. Zhukovskii had a marvelous way with language, and his poetry remains to this day part of the heritage of Russian verse, but his best works were translations of the German and English poetry popular in the Romantic era – Goethe and Gottfried Bürger, Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Campbell. Through Zhukovskii European Romanticism came to Russia. To be sure, Karamzin and Zhukovskii were creating an audience for Russian literature that began to spread beyond the court and the capital cities, but it was an uphill battle. The Russian nobility, especially after the founding of the universities and gymnasia under Alexander, was much better educated than before, but it also knew French even better than before and often better than Russian. The main reading matter of many gentry families was French novels, and the latest fashionable novel in Paris was widely read in St. Petersburg in a few weeks. The numbers of the educated public were still small, and thus Karamzin’s and Zhukovskii’s journals, with their selection of new Russian poetry and prose among articles on history or occasionally politics, were thin small-format volumes with a circulation that rarely went much beyond a thousand copies. In this situation writers needed the patronage of court and state to survive. Much verse circulated in aristocratic drawing rooms, in the notebooks of young men and women, and only in manuscript, even when it had no political content. Zhukovskii came to play a key role. Already the most prominent poet of the age, he took up a position at the court teaching Russian to Nicholas I’s Prussian wife Alexandra and then in 1819 became the principal tutor to Nicholas’s son Alexander, the future Tsar Alexander II. For the next two decades Zhukovskii continued to live in the Winter Palace and served as the main patron for Russian literature and art.
Zhukovskii spotted Pushkin’s talents as early as 1815, when the young poet was still a pupil at the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée. On leaving the Lycée in 1817, Pushkin took a very junior position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Though he came from an ancient noble family (his ancestors had served in the boyar duma of the Moscow princes in the fourteenth century), his fortune was limited and the tradition of government service meant that he, like other writers of his generation, started out as an official. He also spent much of his time carousing in the demi-monde of St. Petersburg with his old Lycée comrades, and participating in a number of literary societies (including Green Lamp and Arzamas). All of these groups included many future Decembrists, though none of them thought he was the type to be recruited for their revolutionary activities. To be sure Pushkin was sympathetic to many of the political goals of his friends, and occasionally wrote poems expressing these views, which circulated in manuscript. These came to the attention of the Special Section of the Ministry of the Interior early in 1820, and Pushkin was sent into exile to the south, first to Kishinev and then to Odessa. A few weeks later his first major poem appeared in print, a fairy tale called “Ruslan and Liudmila”.