Not all Russian artists wished to antagonise the regime in the 1830s and 1840s. Glinka's patriotic opera A Life for the Tsar, the first full-length Russian opera, is also a celebration of the official ideology of nationality propagated by Sergei Uvarov. For that reason it was enthusiastically endorsed by Nicholas I, but then became a problematic work for the nationalist composers who came to prominence in the 1870s. Gogol too was an ardent monarchist, whose political outlook grew more rather than less conservative as he grew older. Epitomising the new breed of non-noble raznochinets, Belinsky, by contrast, forged his career by championing new literary talent in Russia and promoting a radical social agenda. In his preoccupation with civic content, he was largely immune to Gogol's stylistic brilliance in works such as the first part ofhis novel Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi, 1842). His dismay with the writer's preoccupation with moral rather than social values culminated in a vituperative 'Letter to N. V Gogol' following the publication of the latter's reactionary Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847). Gogol's defence of serfdom provoked Belinsky to furious rhetoric. Russia did not need sermons and prayers or an encouragement in the shameless trafficking of human beings, he thundered, but 'rights and laws compatible with good sense and justice'. Fresh forces were 'seething and trying to break through' in Russian society, he continued; 'but crushed by the weight of oppression they can find no release and produce only despondency, anguish and apathy. Only in literature is there life and forward movement, despite the Tatar censorship.'[78]
Such an incendiary document could not be published in Russia but it circulated widely in manuscript. A reading of Belinsky's letter to Gogol at a meeting ofthe Petrashevsky Circle in St Petersburg in 1849 brought about Dostoevsky's exile to Siberia. The young Turgenev, who also began his literary career in the 1840s, was exiled to his estate for over a year in 1852 for praising Gogol in an obituary. Belinsky himself did not live long enough to witness the publication that year of Turgenev's A Huntsman's Sketches (Zapiski okhotnika), in which peasants were sympathetically depicted for the first time in Russian literature as human beings and individuals. Turgenev shared Belinsky's Westernising sympathies, and so A Huntsman's Sketches was welcomed by progressive circles who seized upon its veiled attack on serfdom, but the stories were also praised by the Slavophile community for the dignified way in which the peasant characters were depicted.
Of the three great Russian novelists who began their literary careers in the latter part of Nicholas I's reign, Tolstoy was the last to make his debut. By this time, the era of poetry had long given way to one of prose, and Tolstoy's essentially autobiographical novella Childhood (Detstvo, 1852) is written in the realist style which would dominate Russian literature for the ensuing decades. This trend is also evident in the genre paintings of Pavel Fedotov (e.g. 'The Major's Marriage Proposal', 1848), often seen as one ofthe best satirists of contemporary Russian life. At the same time, however, artists representative of the 'second wave' of Romanticism were tackling large-scale, monumental themes (e.g. Aleksandr Ivanov's Appearance of Christ to the People', 1857).
Russian culture under Alexander II (1855-1881)
During Alexander II's reign Russian culture flourished. The spirit of optimism encouraged by the 'Great Reforms', together with the relaxation of censorship and other restrictions unleashed an unprecedented creative energy among artists, musicians and writers. The dramatic change of mood can be seen by comparing the two generations depicted in Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (Ottsy i deti, 1861). There is a stark contrast between the urbane and unashamedly romantic older gentlemen of the 1840s with the brash young 'men of the 1860s', a new breed typified by the hero Bazarov, who rejects art and religion in favour of science and practical activity. Compare also the static first part of Goncharov's Oblomov, written in the 1840s, with the rest of his novel, completed later and published in 1859, in which an impoverished nobleman attempts to abandon his supremely indolent lifestyle and enter the real world. The rich legacy of symbolism inherited from the Russian Orthodox Church and deeply embedded in the writings of all the great nineteenth-century novelists, is nowhere more apparent than in the character of Oblomov, whose rejection of modern Western ideas and slow decline back into his former state of inertia is prophetic of Russia's path in the 1860s and 1870s as the programme of reform faltered, and censorship was once again tightened.
What is also remarkable about Russian culture under Alexander II is the way in which all the arts were now dominated by nationalist concerns. Peter the Great's Europeanisation of Russia had engendered ambivalence towards native culture amongst the Russian aristocracy which persisted until the middle of the nineteenth century. It had been responsible, for example, for the derision which greeted Pushkin's attempts to write folktales in the early 1830s. Pushkin had recognised the enormous potential of fairytales for the creation of a truly national culture (he was so adept at imparting a Russian spirit to his verse imitations of Western legends that works such as The Tale of Tsar Saltan and The Golden Cockerel[79] soon became part of Russian folklore), but his snobbish critics had considered the oral folk tradition fit only for peasant consumption. That situation changed with the publication of Alexander Afanasiev's pioneering collection of Russian folktales, the first volume ofwhich appeared in 1855, the year of Alexander II's accession. Afanasiev's 640 tales represent the Russian equivalent of the famous anthology published by the Brothers Grimm at the beginning of the nineteenth century,[80] and were to have a huge influence on composers, writers and painters alike, stimulating further interest in Russian native culture.
The new sense of national pride felt by Russian artists was not always inspired by identical motivations. The transformation of Russian musical life brought about by the virtuoso pianist Anton Rubinstein, for example, was occasioned by his consternation at the lack of respect Russian musicians were paid in their own country (this was another legacy of the Europeanisation of the elites in the eighteenth century). Rubinstein had studied and frequently performed in Germany, and could not but be struck by how revered musicians were there. In Russia, a country where one's position in society was still determined by the Table of Ranks, musicians had no professional status, nor could they benefit from any institutionalised training. Rubinstein determined to raise the prestige of Russian musicians first by setting up the Russian Musical Society in 1859, with the help of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna's patronage. It was the first organisation in Russia to hold orchestral concerts throughout the winter season. Next Rubinstein succeeded in founding the St Petersburg Conservatoire in 1862. Tchaikovsky was one of its first graduates three years later, and he went on to teach at the Moscow Conservatoire founded in 1866 by Anton Rubinstein's brother Nikolai. Because Rubinstein had based the Conservatoire curriculum on the German model he revered, and because he was of Jewish extraction, charges of lack of patriotism were often levelled at him by other musicians who were sometimes jealous of his success. 'The time has come to stop transplanting foreign institutions to our country and to give some thought to what would really be beneficial and suitable to our soil and our national character', wrote the critic Vladimir Stasov in 1861, for example.[81] It was Stasov, a full-time employee of the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg, and an ardent Slavophile, who played a leading role in promoting a group of five nationalist composers which formed at this time led by Mily Bal- akirev (another piano virtuoso), and who coined their nickname 'the mighty handful'. Neither Balakirev, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky nor Cui had received professional training, and all combined writing music with other careers (in Borodin's case, teaching chemistry at St Petersburg University). In defiant opposition to the Conservatoire and its 'academic' methods, Bal- akirev founded a Free Music School in 1862 aimed at educating the general public.
79
Their original plots in fact came from the pen ofthe American writer Washington Irving, whose 1832 collection of tales
80
See Roman Jakobson's commentary
81
V Stasov,