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 portrait 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.