The very process of educational reform and the new role of the natural sciences in Russia had sparked a major discovery. Mendeleev went on to work extensively to promote not just chemistry but scientific education and Russian economic development, working closely with the government on these tasks. Another case of the intersection of social changes and science was the work of Vasilii Dokuchaev, the creator of modern soil science. Dokuchaev’s insight was simply that soil could not be treated as just the top layer of rock mixed with decaying organic matter but as a distinct stratum of its own. Trained in geology and mineralogy, he came to this conclusion while working to survey the black earth districts of southern Russia for the Free Economic Society, a project explicitly designed to help Russian agriculture. The Ministry of Finance also helped sponsor other scientific and technological societies, in an effort to spark more public interest and channel it into directions that would contribute to industrialization.
In these years Russian science came into its own, not only because of the fame of Mendeleev but because dozens of lesser lights acquired solid if modest places in many new and old specialized fields of chemistry, physics, and biology. The other reason for the advances in science was its immense popularity with the intelligentsia of the reform era. For educated people the natural sciences seemed to be a model of rationality and progressive thought. They debated whether the experiments on the nervous system of frogs conducted by the physiologist Ivan Sechenov proved that the soul existed or not, a topic which Sechenov thought went way beyond the possible consequences of his modest work. Darwin was tremendously popular in Russia, though “social Darwinism” never caught on. Part of the popularity of Darwin came from the lack of interest on the part of the church in debating the details of biology or the biblical account of creation. Concerned about the spread of “materialism,” the church nevertheless avoided direct polemics with scientists. In Russia, Darwin’s works were approved by the Ministry of Education as soon as they appeared, even before Russian translations were available. The atmosphere of the time as well as government policy combined to rapidly raise the level of scientific activity in the country.
If government policy was crucial to the emergence of world-class natural sciences in Russia, its relationship to the arts was more complicated. For the writers, the relaxation of censorship was crucial, but an equally great change came from the end of court patronage and the rise of a market for books and journals. The painters also benefited from the new social environment, as the new millionaire businessmen became crucial patrons for the artists. Music was more complicated still, since the main opera and ballet theaters fell under the Ministry of the Court, while philharmonic societies and the conservatories worked with a combination of state and private funding and control.
The social and institutional environment of the arts was only one side of the story of Russia’s Golden Age. Central to the period was also the attempt to grapple with Russia’s history, its current politics and problems, and its place in the world of culture and ideas. Liberal intellectuals and later Soviet historians regularly portrayed almost all of the cultural figures of the era as either “democratic” or “critical,” but this description fits only some of them. Tchaikovsky was an admirer of the autocracy, as was Dostoyevsky, and both of them had only amused contempt for liberal democracy. Perhaps the only internationally famous figure to fully fit the liberal model was Turgenev, but it is perhaps futile to explore the views of most of the great artists, as many of them were too idiosyncratic to classify. Tolstoy is perhaps the most striking example, and not only in his later Christian anarchist phase. What they all did was to create works that were permanent parts of Russian culture, and in the case of the writers and composers, of the whole of Western culture of the modern age.
MUSIC
The musicians had the weakest base to work from and yet produced in only a few decades an enormous amount of new music, much of it part of the international repertory to this day. Before the Crimean War Glinka had been virtually the only important composer, an amateur from the nobility who made his name with the help of the Wielhorski salon and Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. She was also to play a crucial role in taking Russia into the world of professional music education, for she was the patron of Anton Rubinstein. Rubinstein was the son of a Jewish businessman from the Ukraine who converted to Christianity and moved to Moscow in the 1830s. There his children’s music teacher quickly noted Anton’s immense talent at the piano and took the boy and his parents to Berlin, where he soon found fame as a child prodigy and acquired a solid musical education and the favor of Mendelson and Liszt. On the father’s death young Anton had few resources and returned to St. Petersburg. There the Wielhorskis introduced him to Elena Pavlovna, and he became her personal pianist, an invented position designed to provide him with an income. By the late 1850s Rubinstein, now world famous, persuaded his patroness that Russia needed a real music school, and in 1861 the St. Petersburg Conservatory opened its doors, across the street from the Mariinskii Theater, where it still stands. Elena Pavlovna’s support ensured state financing to the new institution. From the very beginning Rubinstein ruled it with an iron hand, demanding deep study and long hours, and during his tenure as director the Conservatory produced many prominent musicians. The most important would be Peter Tchaikovsky, one of Rubinstein’s first students. Four years later, a similar conservatory came into existence in Moscow under the directorship of Anton’s younger brother Nikolai, also a talented pianist and composer, though not in his brother’s league. While Anton was in Berlin, Nikolai had stayed behind in Moscow, forming lifelong friendships with his neighbors, the future leaders of the Moscow industrialists, the Tretyakov brothers, and Nikolai Alekseev. The Moscow conservatory had no significant state financing and the businessmen had to periodically help it through crises, a new source of patronage for Russian art. The Moscow Conservatory was on a sound enough footing to hire Tchaikovsky as one of its professors (1867–1877) during the years of his maturation as a composer.