Stasov also waged a vigorous campaign on behalf of the nationalist and 'anti-academic' cause in the Russian art world at this time. His criticism of the conservatism of the Academy of Arts, which continued to adhere rigidly to its classical ideals, spurred on some of its students to action. In 1863, fourteen of them finally rebelled against the academy's failure to engage with the pressing problems of the day when they were set 'The Entry of Wotan into Valhalla' as the assignment for the Gold Medal; after the jury refused to change the assignment, the students simply walked out. Stasov retained a close association with the Free Artists' Co-operative set up that year by the leader of the protest, Ivan Kramskoi. Another key figure during this period was the radical critic and novelist Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who assumed Belinsky's mantle when the latter died in 1848 in championing the cause of literature as a weapon for social reform, and came, like him, from a lowly provincial background. Chernyshevsky's pivotal essay The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, published in 1855, set a strongly pro-realist agenda for all of Russian art in the late 1850s and 1860s, and ensured that debates were always highly charged. Proclaiming art to be inferior to science, and declaring that 'beauty is life',[82] it was the first of many assaults on the old idealist aesthetics. Chernyshevsky's active involvement in subversive politics resulted in his arrest in 1862, but his subsequent imprisonment enabled him to sketch out his socialist vision for the future in his influential novel What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat'?, 1863) before being exiled to Siberia.
Chernyshevsky's utilitarian view of art, his theories of rational self-interest and his atheism in turn came under attack from Dostoevsky when he returned from exile in 1859. Indeed, beginning with Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol'ia, 1864), Dostoevsky's mature work may be seen as a sustained polemic against the ideology of Chernyshevsky and his followers. Tolstoy retained an Olympian distance from the ideological battles in the capital, both intellectually and physically, having retired to his country estate following his marriage in 1862. His first great novel, War and Peace (Voina i mir), written between 1863 and 1869, was unusual for fiction written at this time in not having a contemporary theme (as Anna Karenina, by contrast, would) but was typical in its Russocentrism, and in its generic challenge to Western convention. As Tolstoy himself put it in one of his draft prefaces, 'in the modern period of Russian literature there is not one work of art in prose even slightly better than average that could fully fit into the form of a novel, epic or story'.[83]
Against the background of Russian Populism, the lengthy realist novel of ideas remained the dominant literary form during the turbulent years of Alexander II's reign. The realist mood also pervaded music written in the 1860s and 1870s, as in Mussorgsky's song cycle The Nursery (1870), in which the composer imitates the speech of a child and his nurse, and Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin (1878), based on Pushkin's novel in verse set in the
Russian provinces. Despite major differences in their artistic sensibilities, both Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky considered themselves to be 'realists' (an anomaly that is matched by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, who also saw themselves in the same light, despite the wide gulf which separates each of their writing styles). Both composers also sought to establish their careers as opera composers, which became more feasible after the opening in 1860 of the St Petersburg Mariinsky Theatre, the new home for the beleaguered Russian Opera. The world premiere in 1862 of Verdi's Laforza del destino, commissioned at great cost by the Imperial Theatres, marked the apogee of the Italian Opera's prestige in Russia and partly explains the ambivalent response to Mussorgsky's unconventional operatic writing when he first presented the score of Boris Godunov for performance in 1869 (the premiere tookplace in 1874 after substantial revisions). Khovanshchina, begun in 1872 and incomplete at his death in 1881, was another innovative large-scale historical opera, focusing this time on events prior to the accession of Peter the Great. Its subject was suggested by the indefatigable Stasov, who also inspired Borodin in 1869 to start work on Prince Igor, a re-working of a classic of medieval Russian literature. The intense interest in the forces of Russian history seen in these operas is partnered by a similar trend in painting of the time, particularly in the work of Vasily Surikov, which includes his Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy (1881).
As in the other arts, narrative content also tended to prevail over purely formal qualities in painting at this time. By 1870, the young rebels who had broken away from the Academy of Arts had founded a Society of Wandering Exhibitions in order to engage more directly with contemporary life and exhibit work outside Moscow and St Petersburg.[84] The so-called Wanderers were influential on the early career of the prolific Ilya Repin, best known for his socially tendentious canvas entitled The Volga Barge-Haulers (1873). Stasov continued to champion the cause of the Wanderers in St Petersburg, but the group had also acquired a powerful new ally in Moscow: a merchant called Pavel Tretiakov. One result of the Great Reforms was Russia's belated modernisation, and it was Moscow's merchant entrepreneurs who became its chief beneficiaries. Moscow had always been the country's commercial capital, but could never compete with the sophistication of St Petersburg. As its industrialists began to make immense fortunes from the building of railways and factories in the 1870s, however, the city began to lose its image as a provincial backwater, and soon became the centre of the National movement in Russian art. Tretiakov, who came from a family of textile magnates, was one of the first Moscow merchants to become a patron of the arts, and one of the first to purchase paintings by the Wanderers, before their work became fashionable. As a passionate Slavophile, Tretiakov's aim was also to exhibit his increasingly large collection of Russian art, and work was begun in 1872 to build a new gallery to house it. With national identity the burning issue of the day, it is not surprising that Russian landscape painting, which first emerged as a distinct genre at this time, featured strongly in Tretiakov's collection. Under the inspiration of works of literature such as Lermontov's poem 'Motherland' 'Rodina', 1841) and the famous passage in chapter 11 of the first part of Gogol's Dead Souls, which were among the first to celebrate the humble features of the Russian landscape, painters began also to see their intrinsic beauty. They now became a powerful national symbol, to be revered precisely for their lack of similarity to the more immediately appealing vistas of Western Europe (as in Polenov's Moscow Courtyard, 1878). Ivan Shishkin executed countless detailed paintings of Russian trees (such as In the Depths of the Forest, 1872), for example, not because he lacked inspiration to paint anything else, but because he took pride in the grandeur of his country's natural state and felt that Russia was primarily a country of landscape. A pivotal and symbolic canvas was Aleksei Savrasov's 'The Rooks Have Arrived', exhibited at the first Wanderers' exhibition in 1871.[85]
83
D. Fanger, 'The Russianness of the Nineteenth-Century Novel', inT. G. Stavrou(ed.),
84
See E. K. Valkenier,
85
See Christopher Ely,