Culture and political thought in Russian empire from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 2

Russian culture in the eighteenth century

LINDSEY HUGHES

Russia and the West: 'catching up'

Two edicts issued within a few weeks of each other offer a foretaste of the trajectory of Russian culture in the eighteenth century. At the end of December 1699 Peter I replaced the Byzantine practice of counting years from the creation of mankind with numbering from the birth of Christ, 'in the manner of European Christian nations'. Henceforth the year would begin in January, not September.[1] On 4 January 1700 townsmen were ordered to adopt Western dress, a decree that was extended later in the year to women.[2] In both cases, Peter's potentially recalcitrant subjects were provided with visual aids: examples of New Year festive greenery and mannequins wearing 'French and Hungarian' dress were displayed in public places to prevent anyone 'feigning ignorance' about what was required. Both these measures presupposed 'Christian Europe' as Russia's model. Both offended Orthodox sensibilities. Traditionalists protested that Peter was tampering with Divine time and that the 'German' dress and the clean-shaven faces imposed on men a few years earlier were ungodly. Elite Russians in Western fashions entered a Western time scale, while the mass of the traditionally clad population, who had little need to know what year it was, continued to live by the cyclical calendar of feasts and saint's days. Historians agree that these and subsequent reforms widened the gap between high and low culture: the elite 'caught up' with the West, while the lower classes 'lagged behind'.

With this in mind and with a focus on high culture, we shall examine developments in architecture, the figurative arts, theatre, music and literature from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Exploring these topics within the framework of individual reigns reflects the fact that Russian high culture was overwhelmingly dependent on initiative and funding from the sovereigns and their circle. From the 1690s to the 1790s the dominant trend was the assimilation of the devices of classicism in its various guises - baroque, rococo, neoclassicism. The sources of inspiration shifted over time, as Polish- Ukrainian influences were replaced by German and French, with a phase of 'Anglophilia' in Catherine Il's reign, but the basic process remained one of imitation and apprenticeship. Often Russia's eighteenth century has been presented as a means to an end, the end being the internationally recognised achievements ofRussian literature, music and, eventually, the visual arts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The century justified its existence by producing the poet Alexander Pushkin (born 1799). Even Soviet nationalist historians, who eulogised several key figures of the Russian Enlightenment, were uncomfortable with the 'century of apprenticeship' and the debt that Russian culture owed to foreign models. In this chapter I hope to put these issues into perspective.

The reign of Peter I (1682-1725)

Elite Russian culture at the beginning of the eighteenth century developed in a peculiar hot-house environment, show-cased in St Petersburg. The new capital's creator, Peter I, summoned foreign architects to construct palaces, and foreign artists to fill them with pictures. He instructed agents abroad to purchase what could not be produced at home.³ Once seen as revolutionary, Peter's cultural programme is best regarded as an intensification and acceleration of innovations that occurred less ostentatiously in the seventeenth century. Peter's father Alexis (1629-76) is the first Russian ruler of whom we have more or less authentic painted likenesses and the first to maintain a court theatre and a court poet. Alexis's daughter Sophia (1657-1704) was the first Russian woman to be the subject of secular portraiture. Poets praised her wisdom in syllabic verse. ⁴

Such developments derived from two main cultural strands that continued into Peter's reign and beyond. Firstly, there was Latinate Orthodox culture

3 See N. V Kaliazina and G. N. Komelova, Russkoe iskusstvo Petrovskoi epokhi (Leningrad: Khudozhnik, 1990); M. V Piotrovskii (ed.), Osnovateliu Peterburga. Katalog vystavki (St Petersburg: Ermitazh, 2003).

4 See L. Hughes, Sophia, Regent of Russia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990) and my chapter in volume I of The Cambridge History of Russia..

filtered through Ukraine and Belarus and propagated by the Slavonic-Greek- Latin (Moscow) Academy, established in 1687 on the model of the Kiev Academy.[3] Its teachers, pupils and artists produced syllabic verses, allegorical engravings, school drama and programmes for parades and firework displays, employing the devices of the Polish Renaissance and baroque. Secondly, Western craftsmen entered the tsars' service, many employed in the Kremlin Armoury workshops. The Moscow Academy and the Armoury catered to many of Peter's cultural needs both before and after his first visit to the West (1697-8). In the 1690s, for example, Armoury artists painted pictures of'troops going by sea' copied from German engravings and decorated the ships that Peter built at Voronezh.[4] In 1696 the Academy organised a programme of classical architectural devices, allegorical paintings and sculptures on triumphal gates for a victory parade to celebrate the capture of Azov from the Turks.[5]Such parades, inspired by Imperial Rome, continued to be held in Moscow and later St Petersburg to celebrate Russia's successes against the Swedes in the Great Northern War (1700-21).

Only after his major victories in 1709-10 could Peter devote attention to the construction of St Petersburg. The city was to be designed according to a regular plan (never fully implemented), in contrast to Moscow's haphazard maze of streets. Unlike in Moscow, where the tsars' court mainly operated within the constricted, walled space of the Kremlin, with men and women segregated, in St Petersburg a number of riverbank sites accommodated Peter's mixed-sex parties and masquerades, parades and regattas. Key landmarks were constructed ofbrick, stuccoed and paintedinbright colours and decorated with bands of flat white pilasters and window surrounds. Characteristic touches in interiors were the use of blue and white Delft tiles, carved wooden panelling and allegorical frescoes. Some historians apply the all-purpose term 'Petrine Baroque' to the architecture of early St Petersburg, although in fact there was no attempt to impose a uniform style beyond achieving a generally Western look.

The supervisor of many projects was the Swiss-Italian Domenico Trezzini (1670-1734), whom Peter hired to build the Peter and Paul fortress.[6] In 1710 Trezzini designed Peter's modest Summer Palace, with relief sculpture by the German Andreas Schluter (1665-1714) and Dutch formal gardens. Across the river the boldest point on the skyline was Trezzini's cathedral of saints Peter and Paul (1712-33), with its tall golden spire. The basilical structure departed radically from the centralised Greek cross of Russo-Byzantine church architecture, while the gilded iconostasis resembled a triumphal arch. The churches in Trezzini's St Alexander Nevsky monastery were more traditional in style. Significantly, this was to be the only monastery in early St Petersburg, located well away from the centre of the growing city.

For a while the French architect Jean Baptiste Le Blond (1679-1719) looked like eclipsing Trezzini, but he died after spending only three years in Russia. His activity was centred at the grand palaces at Peterhof and Strel'na on the Gulf of Finland, Peter's versions of Versailles, with extensive formal gardens, terraces, fountains and sculptures. Peterhof also owed a great deal to Johann Friedrich Braunstein, in Russia 1714-28. Among his several pavilions in the grounds was Peter's favourite retreat, the small Mon Plaisir palace, which housed what was probably Russia's first art gallery. Gottfried Johann Schadel (1680-1752) from Hamburg worked mainly for Peter's favourite, Aleksandr Menshikov (1673-1729), building the prince's impressive Italianate residences at Oranienbaum (1713-25) and on Vasilevskii island (1713-27). The only extant building by Georg Johann Mattarnovy (died 1719) is the Kunstkamera, which housed Peter's notorious collection of 'monsters' and other curiosities.

1

PSZ, 3rd series, no. 1735, pp. 680-1, no. 1736, pp. 681-2.

2

PSZ, 4th series, no. I74i,p. 1. On calendar and dress reform, see L. Hughes, Russiain the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) and 'From Caftans into Corsets: The Sartorial Transformation of Women during the Reign of Peter the Great', in P. Barta (ed.), Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilization (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 17-32.

3

R. Lucas, 'Dutch and Polish Influences in Russian Architecture 1660-1725', Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter (hereafter, SGECRN) 8 (1980): 23-7; M. Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism in Early Modern Russia (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1995); N. Chrissides, 'Creating the New Educational Elite. Learning and Faith in Moscow's Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, 1685-1694', unpublished PhD thesis, Yale University (2000).

4

See Hughes, Russia in the Age, pp. 12-20, and 'The Moscow Armoury and Innovations in 17th-century Muscovite Art', CASS 13 (1979): 204-23.

5

See details in Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony inRussianMonarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), vol. I, pp. 42-4.

6

On architects and architecture, seeJ. Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); W Brumfield, AHistoryofRussian Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Iu. V Artem'eva and S. A. Prokhvatikova (eds.), Zodchie Sankt-Peterburga. XVIII vek (St Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1997); L. Hughes, 'German Specialists in Petrine Russia: Architects, Painters and Thespians', in R. Bartlett andK. Schonwalder(eds.), The German Lands and Eastern Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan,

1999) , pp. 72-90.