Music and art also changed rapidly at the end of the century. For the St. Petersburg musicians the appearance of a patron, the timber merchant Mitrofan Beliaev, opened new possibilities in the 1880s. Beliaev not only sponsored concerts, but he also ran a Friday evening salon that featured regular performances of new music, and even more important, he founded a music publishing firm in Leipzig to publish Russian music and paid generous honoraria. The core of Beliaev’s circle comprised the survivors of the Five, though Balakirev rarely attended the salon. The Beliaev circle was also broader in its tastes than the original Five: to their admiration of Berlioz and Liszt they added Wagner, and grew more friendly to Tchaikovsky. Rimskii-Korsakov was the strongest artistic influence, though Stasov continued to command deep respect. As time passed, a younger generation such as Alexander Skriabin and Sergei Rakhmaninov benefitted from the circle’s attention. The end of the monopoly of the Imperial theaters also allowed the formation of a private opera company in Moscow sponsored by the millionaire businessman Savva Mamontov, whose company attracted Russia’s greatest singer, Fyodor Shaliapin. Mamontov also was the patron for a whole series of innovative painters, especially Valentin Serov. For Serov the light in his paintings was as important as the subject, as in the case of the Impressionists in France. This sort of art was a sharp break with the Itinerants and their fascination with the Russian landscape and the Russian people and its dilemmas.
In St. Petersburg the Russian artistic scene was transformed under the leadership of Sergei Diagilev, the main force behind a new magazine devoted to the visual arts named Mir Iskusstva (World of Art). The journal gave its name to a whole movement, a revolution in subject matter if not in technique. Though World of Art painters had a definite look that differed from the older painters of the Itinerant school, their greatest innovation was the turn from peasant life, landscape, and portraits of the intelligentsia toward more decorative depictions of interiors, retrospective pictures of eighteenth-century France or Russia, and portraits that stressed appearance and style as much or more than the sitter’s inner life. The World of Art was also notable in that its impulses came to a large part from European painting, but there was no direct European prototype. Impressionism, Art Nouveau/Jugendstil, and other European trends played a role. The World of Art group also valued European styles from the past, the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, which the Itinerants despised. The same was the case with Russian art: Diagilev was perhaps the first to discover the value of eighteenth-century Russian portraiture. He organized regular exhibits of contemporary European art, starting with that of Finland and Scandinavia, to educate the Russian public. The goal was to promote painting that was not concerned with social issues and only rarely sought to affirm Russian nationality. Yet the artists like the writers of these years were not yet in pursuit of pure art. Almost all of them were looking for some reality behind the world of appearances, and found it in mysticism, theosophy, encounters with mediums, or occasionally even Orthodox Christianity. They also revealed a great deal of cultural pessimism, and a profound sense of ending. The World of Art painter Alexander Benois published a history of Russian art in 1898 that ended with the statement that art was now coming to an end, and would either cease to exist among humanity or be replaced by an art that served a religious idea.
Into this artistic ferment came the Revolution of 1905. The artistic world reacted variously to the events, but most of the artists were not sympathetic to the tsarist regime. In 1905 the issues were not only the general ones of political representation of the people and the social state of the workers and peasants, because the artists also chafed under the various hindrances and monopolies imposed by the state. Writers were doing well economically, but still had to deal with state censorship. Tolstoy’s last major novel Resurrection could not be published in Russia and was passed around by students in mimeographed copies. The great theaters were under the Ministry of the Court, and their capacities and repertoire were far behind the expectations of the audience in the big cities. In St. Petersburg the only state-financed orchestra, the ancestor of the later Petrograd/Leningrad/St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra was still technically the private orchestra of the tsar, and was founded only in 1882. The imperial patronage of music and the arts that made much of Russian artistic life possible in earlier decades was no longer necessary and felt as a burden.
Thus the establishment of the state Duma in 1906 and the accompanying relaxation of censorship found great approval among writers and artists, who quickly moved to exploit the opportunities. Whole new subject matter appeared in literature: the first novels to make sexuality an explicit theme and books with all sorts of heterodox religious conceptions that the Orthodox Church could no longer keep out. Alongside the more traditional locations of cultural activity, St. Petersburg and Moscow quickly developed a café and cabaret culture that attracted the leading lights of literature and art alongside the general public. A bohemian style of life was increasingly fashionable, including various experiments in sexuality and dress. Some writers acquired signature appearances, dandified clothing and hairstyles, or a studied artistic look. Sergei Diagilev had pioneered all this with his elegant suits and a lock of hair died silver to make him look more distinguished.
Private patronage became easier and more abundant as Russian businessmen prospered. After 1909 Sergei Kussevitskii was the conductor of a private orchestra in Moscow, the first in Russia to be successful. (After emigration in 1920 he became the long-time conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the founder of the Tanglewood Festival.) The most famous example of a private dance company was Diagilev’s Ballets Russes, which made its debut in Paris in 1909 as well. In the following year the company presented the premiere of Igor Stravinskii’s ballet, the Firebird and in 1913 his even more revolutionary Rite of Spring. The latter caused an uproar with its dissonances and apparent celebration of pagan sexuality and vigor, brilliantly interpreted by the lead dancer Vatslav Nijinskii. Stravinskii was the vanguard of Russian music, but not the whole of it. Of the older generation, Rimskii-Korsakov was active until his death in 1910 and among the younger musicians Sergei Rakhmaninov and Sergei Prokofiev took different paths to fame, Rakhmaninov with his rich neo-romanticism and Prokofiev already heading toward the irony and precision of neo-classicism. Not only Diagilev but also many of the musicians began to gravitate to Paris and Berlin, for the St. Petersburg theaters and orchestras with the necessary resources were usually too conservative for the new music and performance styles.
The painters also moved very rapidly. Kandinsky in Munich had a limited impact on his Russian colleagues, but in Russia painting evolved very quickly. Especially in Moscow a group of young painters in several informal groups (“Jack of Diamonds” and “Donkey’s Tail”) under the influence of Cubism and Russian folk art began to move sharply away from realist technique. One of the most talented among them, Kazimir Malevich began to turn toward full abstractionism, painting his famous “Black Square” and other fully non-representational works. Malevich evolved the notion of Suprematism, in which the artist should work with geometric forms, in their turn the key to hidden reality behind the appearance of the world. Few of his associates followed him all this way, but it was this world that produced such painters as Marc Chagall.