Briusov and Konstantin Balmont, who drew their inspiration from French writers such as Baudelaire and Verlaine, the Symbolists were quickly condemned as decadents. Their detractors deplored the fact that the Symbolists jettisoned a concern with ideology in favour of individual emotional experience and a quest for beauty, which was expressed at first in small, lyrical forms rather than the grand canvases of the Realist period. And they condemned the Symbolists' cultivation of amorality and the occult, which was an expression of the escape from the stifling Victorian mores of the 1880s in the aftermath of Nietzsche and the 'death' of God. In St Petersburg the leader of the new movement was the writer Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, who had published an influential article in 1893 which pinned the blame for the general decline in literary quality at the time on the didacticism of the Populist age and called for culture to be revived through a concern with metaphysical idealism and spiritual experience. The World of Art embraced music as well as literature and art, and here too Diaghilev and his colleagues had eclectic tastes. They were the first to create a Tchaikovsky cult, but they were also the first non-musicians in Russia to champion Wagner on the pages of their journal, regarding him as a founder of the Modernist movement in Russia as he had been elsewhere. The World of Art group played a key role in revitalising Russian culture, exchanging the narrow domestic focus of so much of what was produced earlier for a new cosmopolitan outlook which was consonant with the spirit of the modern city in which they lived.
Diaghilev had initially hoped to pursue a career as a musician but soon turned his energies to art: his cultural activities had begun with an exhibition of English and German watercolours in 1897. Convinced that the quality of modern Russian art was now equal to that of Western Europe, Diaghilev next decided to organise a series of international exhibitions beginning in 1898, which the aging Stasov predictably condemned as decadent. Diaghilev had anticipated this reaction. When soliciting work for his first exhibition, he had addressed the problem directly: 'Russian art at the moment is in a state of transition', he wrote to prospective exhibitors; 'History places any emerging trend in this position when the principles of the older generation clash and struggle with the newly developing demands of youth.'[90] After several more successful exhibitions, and a spell as editor of the Imperial Theatres annual, into which he breathed new life (even impressing Nicholas II), Diaghilev then began triumphantly to export Russia's cultural legacy to the West. He started with music. If Russian composers had fought a hard battle for recognition in their own country, conquering Europe presented an even greater challenge, since their music was still largely unknown. The five concerts of the first Saisons russes, which took place in Paris in 1907, were a great success, however. Chaliapin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov were amongst the musicians who travelled to Paris to help showcase some of the masterpieces of their native repertoire. In 1908, Diaghilev exported opera to Paris. The triumphant production of Boris Godunov now launched Chaliapin's career as an international soloist. In 1909, it was the turn of ballet. With stars like Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky, and revolutionary choreography by Michel Fokine, the legendary Ballets Russes company which Diaghilev formed in 1910 was to transform Western attitudes to ballet as an art form. In 1910 Diaghilev also commissioned the unknown Igor Stravinsky to write a score for a new ballet called The Firebird. It was followed in 1911 by Petrushka, and in 1913 by The Rite of Spring. All three scores drew from and transformed the Russian background Stravinsky had been brought up in. Benois, Goncharova and Bakst were amongst the many gifted artists whose vibrant sets and costumes contributed significantly to the success and originality of the Ballets Russes.
It was Diaghilev's genius to perceive that native style was an essential ingredient if Russia was to come into its own and contribute something new to world culture, if made part of a modernist aesthetics. Native style was a vital factor in the creation of the Ballets Russes, in whose success Stravinsky was to become such a lynchpin, and, after his first commission to write the score to The Firebird, it inspired the development of a neo-nationalist orientation in his music which would later explode with The Rite of Spring. In that work Stravinsky presented Russian folk life with a greater authenticity than any other composer before him. It was the apotheosis of the neo-nationalist style cultivated by the artists and aesthetes of the World of Art group and it captivated Western audiences. The neo-nationalism of the Russian avant-garde may have begun in the 1870s as a desire to preserve native crafts in the face of encroaching capitalism and urbanisation. Soon, however, particularly at Princess Tenisheva's artists' colony in Talashkino, folklore came to be seen more as a stylistic resource with which to regenerate art, and infuse it with a vigour and energy that was commonly felt to have been lost. Both Stravinsky and the artist Nikolai Rerikh (who designed The Rite of Spring) spent time at Talashkino. Ethnographic colour as artistic content had been the cornerstone of nationalist aesthetics of the 1870s but had come by this point to be regarded as distinctly outmoded. Stravinsky was the first Russian composer to turn to folklore as a source for stylistic renewal and experimentation. In so doing he moved abruptly away from the 'academic' and 'de-nationalised' style of composition that characterised so much Russian music written at that time.[91]
Stravinsky's first commission for the Ballets Russes was not the only significant event in Russian culture in I9I0. It was the year in which Tolstoy died at the age of eighty-two, and in which Symbolism lost coherence as a literary movement (although its three greatest second-generation representatives Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Bely and Viacheslav Ivanov had some of their most important work still ahead of them). The year 1910 was also a watershed for the Russian avant-garde. An exhibition provocatively entitled 'The Jack of Diamonds' opened in Moscow, and the bright colours and unconventional subject matter of the paintings provoked furious debates. Amongst the artists represented were painters like Nataliia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Vasili Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, all of whom shared Stravinsky's interest in drawing inspiration from native traditions for their own work. Goncharova, for example, who along with Larionov headed the Neo-Primitivist movement which emerged at this time, was inspired by peasant woodcuts and icons. In 1910 she painted four imposing Evangelists, which were condemned as blasphemous and removed by the police when exhibited at the equally controversial 'Donkey's Tail' exhibition in 1912. 'We can no longer be satisfied with a simple organic copy of nature', wrote Aleksandr Shevchenko about Neo-Primitivism in 1913; 'We are strivingto seeknew paths for our art... Forthe point of departure in our art we take the lubok and the icon, since we find in them the most acute, the most direct perception of life.'[92] The appreciation of Russian icons as works of art rather than as exclusively religious artefacts was a relatively recent phenomenon and had come about as a result of painstaking conservation work. The removal of layers of accumulated soot and over-painting in the early years of the twentieth century had made people in Russia aware for the first time that they too had a precious artistic legacy which went back hundreds of years.
90
V Kamensky (ed.),
91
See Richard Taruskin,
92