In spite of the failure in China the Soviet leadership was convinced that the setbacks were only temporary. Stalin, as well as his opponents in the party, was convinced that a new war was inevitable sooner or later – a war between the western powers, for the “contradictions”, in Marxist terminology, between Britain, France, and Germany were too serious to be resolved in any other way. War would lead to another social crisis like that after World War I. In 1928 the Comintern made a sharp turn to the left, proclaiming that a new era of instability and revolution was coming soon, a notion that the depression beginning in 1929 seemed to confirm. Stalin was entirely behind the new Comintern line, especially as it urged the Communists to focus their attack on Social Democrats in the hopes of weaning the working class away from moderate leaders. At the same time he did not want to provoke a war with the great powers, and the policy of the Soviet state was much more conciliatory than the Comintern’s proclamations. Stalin needed peace on his frontiers, as he was about to launch a giant upheaval.
18 Revolutions in Russian Culture
Unlike Russia’s state and society, its culture did not experience such a sharp break in 1917. The period from about 1890 to the middle of the 1920s was full of artistic revolutions, happening simultaneously and in entirely different directions. These revolutions shared many characteristics with artistic movements in the rest of the world, but paradoxically the Russian culture of the Silver Age, as it is known (by comparison to the Golden Age in the nineteenth century) has never acquired an audience outside of Russia comparable to that which the writers and musicians of the earlier period secured. Perhaps one of the main reasons is that most of the truly talented writers of the Silver Age were poets, masters of that most untranslatable of art forms. The natural scientists, in contrast, began to acquire an international audience, in large part because of the efforts of the Soviet regime to encourage and use the sciences to build a new society.
LITERATURE, MUSIC, AND ART
The writers and artists who came to maturity in the 1890s were a mixed lot: symbolists and realists in literature, the “World of Art” group in the visual arts. In about 1910 new waves, or often wavelets, came on to the scene. A whole series of new movements in poetry, futurism, acmeism, and other groups contended for the attention of readers and critics, while the Ballets Russes introduced both new forms of dance and the radical (it seemed) new music of Igor Stravinskii. The speed of innovation only increased. Working in Germany, Wassily Kandinsky produced entirely abstract work by 1911, and in St. Petersburg Kazimir Malevich painted his “Black Square” in 1915. The revolution and civil war split Russian culture in two, with many of the great names of the time staying abroad or emigrating, and others remaining behind with varying degrees of sympathy for the Bolsheviks. The émigrés largely continued their earlier styles, while in Soviet Russia the situation was more complex. Some saw the new order as of the same essence as their artistic revolution, while others espoused even more radical notions and still others tried to combine modernism with socialist content. By the end of the twenties, with the aging of the émigrés and the new Soviet order in art, a new phase began.
The generation of the 1890s confronted not just new ideas but also new conditions of work. The Russian publishing industry had expanded enormously since the Emancipation, and by 1900, prominent writers could actually live and even prosper on the earnings from their writing alone. Maxim Gorky was the first to be able to do so and in a spectacular fashion. As recounted in his autobiography, he came from a family of minor traders and earned his living by casual labor until he started writing. Virtually a tramp, he followed the course of the Volga working on the boats and taking factory jobs for short periods. By 1905 he was the best-paid author in Russia with a worldwide reputation and he spent his time mostly in Capri or Paris. Gorky was also typical of the artistic currents of the time, a fact muffled by later Soviet attempts to cast him as the father of “socialist realism.” Gorky’s prose was “realist” only by comparison to that of his contemporaries, for it also reflected his worldview, a kind of anarchistic rebelliousness and admiration for strong individuals. European critics immediately branded him a follower of Nietzsche, which was incorrect (Gorky read Nietzsche for the first time long after he formed his ideas and style) but it was an understandable mistake. His other great fascination was with religion, though not with official Orthodoxy but with what he saw as the semi-pagan and mystical religion of the people. It was the latter fascination that drew him to the Bolsheviks, for he saw in Marxism a kind of religion of the future that could lead the people to salvation.
Equally famous in the 1890s were the plays of Anton Chekhov. Chekhov’s great fame was preceded by over a decade of writing short stories for newspapers, and in some ways he was aesthetically closer to the generation of Tolstoy and Turgenev. In his theatrical practice, however, he was in the Russian vanguard, for the most famous stage for his plays was the Moscow Art Theater. The Moscow Art Theater was the first major Russian dramatic theater that was not an Imperial Theater, for the court had abandoned its monopoly in 1882. The Moscow Art Theater was strictly a private enterprise operation with the sponsorship of local businessmen such as Savva Morozov, the heir to the family textile fortune. It was also the first major laboratory for the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, who reformulated theatrical performance in Russia and much of the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Stanislavsky’s demand that the actor live his role from the inside was a new departure over the (as he saw it) declamatory styles of the nineteenth century.
If Gorky, Chekhov, and Stanislavsky remained influential or at least revered for decades afterward, they were not entirely typical of an era dominated by Symbolism and other new trends. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii was the most prominent of the symbolists, beginning his career with a series of critical articles attacking the utilitarianism of the liberal and radical artistic theories of the previous generation. His call was for a sort of pure art, but in fact his own works were suffused with the philosophical and religious ideas of his generation. His subject matter was far from that of the earlier Russian classics – his first great success being a trilogy of novels set in ancient Rome (Julian the Apostate), the Renaissance, with Leonardo Da Vinci as its hero, and the Russia of Peter the Great. The idea was the eternal struggle of paganism and Christianity, with Peter as a sort of neo-pagan in the tradition of the emperor Julian and Da Vinci. Now largely forgotten, Merezhkovskii was a dominant figure for a generation. A more vital legacy was in the poetry of the younger symbolists, especially Alexander Blok.