The most accomplished artist of the period was the Ukrainian Dmitrii Levitskii (1735-1822), who painted most of the leading figures of his time. His best-known works are the several versions of Catherine in the Temple of Justice, in which a sculpture of Justice and a plaque of a Roman lawgiver underpin the central image of the empress sacrificing her youth and strength on an altar in the service of Russia. In Levitskii's seven canvases (i770s) depicting students of the Smolnii Institute for Noble Girls, the subjects sing, dance, act in a school play and, in one case, operate a scientific instrument.[48] Many of the paintings of Vladimir Borovikovskii (1735-1825) feature young women clad in fashionable empire-line garments and set against outdoor greenery in the manner of the English portraitists. His 1794 painting of Catherine walking her dog in the gardens at Tsarskoe Selo contrasts the empress's informal appearance with a reminder of her military victories in the monument in the background.
All the leading artists of the period made their names with portraits and history painting. 'Domestic' landscapes and genre subjects from everyday life evidently were not popular with buyers, who preferred Italian and classical vistas to scenes of the humble Russian rural landscape.[49] No Russian artist produced images of appealing peasant children to evoke pleasurable feelings of compassion among well-off audiences in the manner of, for example, Thomas Gainsborough in England. In Russia, perhaps even more than elsewhere in Europe and North America, the style and content of elite art and architecture were filtered through the prism of neoclassicism, which privileged the beautiful and the idealised over the ugly and everyday. Even serfs trained in a Western idiom were expected to discard vestiges of 'rustic' aesthetics. In Portrait of an Unknown Woman in Russian Dress (1784) by the serf artist Ivan Argunov (i729-i802), it is unclear whether the attractive subject is a peasant in her Sunday outfit (perhaps a wet nurse) or a noblewoman in fancy dress. Only a few academic paintings of real peasants have survived. These include studies of a peasant wedding and a peasant meal by the serf Mikhail Shibanov (?- after 1789), both of which have an ethnographic emphasis.
Among the peasantry, meanwhile, traditional crafts such as woodwork, brassware, embroidery and lace-making flourished. Everyday objects like distaffs and boxes were elaborately carved and painted. Lubki with lurid illustrations and minimal texts could be shared by readers and non-readers alike and were a part of both the rural and the urban scenes. Popular subjects included exotic, foreign ones, such as 'The Cat-Man of Barcelona' and 'The Mighty Elephant Beast'. The images were often crude and bawdy, with depictions of and/or textual references to defecation and urination, sex and nudity, all, of course, highly stylised. Cheap paper prints of such images were sold alongside religious subjects. Icons were always in demand.
Towards the end of the century, under the influence of Western trends some members of the elite began to appreciate selected elements of folk culture. For example, there was an interest in folklore, that developed further in the nineteenth century.[50] The folk-songs collected by Nikolai L'vov (1751-1803), himself a notable poet and architect, and Ivan Prach became popular at musical evenings. Naturally classical music predominated at Catherine's court, despite the fact that the empress claimed to be tone deaf. As before, foreign composers and musicians set the tone, but native composers such as D. S. Bortnianskii (1751-1825) and the violinist Ivan Khandoshkin (1747-1804) laid the foundations of the great Russian classical music traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Catherine sponsored music and the performing arts through the Imperial Theatre Administration, run until i779 by Ivan Elagin (i725-94) and then by a series of successors.[51] The budget, frequently overspent, maintained theatrical troupes, orchestras and a ballet and opera company, which put on performances in St Petersburg and suburban palaces. During certain seasons of the year performances alternated with masquerades. On stage a repertoire of foreign and Russian plays was developed, including Catherine's own works, such as O These Times! (1772), and Mrs Grumbler's Nameday, satires about meanness, gossip and superstition, and her lavish historical pageant The Beginning of Oleg's Reign (1790). She was the author of some twenty-five plays, all of them adaptations of foreign authors, including Shakespeare.[52] In 1783-6 the Hermitage theatre (by Quarenghi) was built next to the Winter Palace and in i785 the public Bolshoi Theatre opened in St Petersburg. Ballet reached a wider public through the work of the Italian dancer Filippo Baccari, who in the i770s-80s trained dancers to perform in the Znamenskii and Petrovskii theatres in Moscow. The latter, built by the English impresario Michael Maddox, held two thousand spectators. The Bolshoi Ballet Company dates its origins from these enterprises.
It has been argued that theatre made a substantial contribution to the 'civilising' mission of the Russian Enlightenment. Theatre for paying audiences helped to create 'a sphere of civic activity' and sociability, which was largely lacking outside the court.[53] The major trend in drama was didactic and moralising, laced with comedy, with virtuous Dobronravs and Pravdins confronting villainous Chuzhekhvats and Krivosudovs. Denis Fonvizin (i745-92) created a gallery of such characters in his comedies of manners The Brigadier (first performed in 1769) and The Minor (1783). The latter work poked fun at such trends as excessive adulation ofFrench fashions and rude rustic manners. Plays could satirise foibles and abuses of the system, but not the system itself. Iakov Kniazhnin's Misfortune over a Carriage (1779), for example, lampoons cruel and thoughtless serf owners who subvert the marriage plans of their serfs for their own selfish interests in a plot where all ends well. Rustic plots were popular with noble audiences. One of the best-loved comic operas, Aleksandr Ablesi- mov's The Miller who was Wizard, Cheat and Matchmaker (1779), hinges on a quarrel between peasant parents over whether their daughter should marry a peasant or a nobleman. Some classical tragedies were also Russified, for example Kniazhnin's Vadim of Novgorod (1789).
In poetry and prose fiction we see the appearance of Russia's first more or less independent talents. It must be borne in mind, however, that in Russia, as elsewhere, talent was still measured largely by the skill with which authors handled set genres, rather than by innovative genius. Practically all the literature in Russian at the disposal of educated readers, a mere handful of the population, was borrowed from foreign models, with translations from the French accounting for one in four of all books published in the second half of the eighteenth century. Translations of novels by British and French writers were popular, providing models for the first Russian novelists, such as F. A. Emin (1735-70), who wrote about twenty-five books, and M. D. Chulkov (174392), whose Comely Cook (1770) was a particularly successful example of the tales of sexual adventures that readers enjoyed.[54] Eighteenth-century Russian erotic and pornographic literature of a stronger sort, especially the works of Ivan Barkov, fell victim to the much more draconian censorship of later tsarist and Soviet regimes.[55] For much of Catherine's reign there was a remarkably free press, without a central censorship authority, with prohibitions confined to heresy, blasphemy and pornography. In 1783 private individuals were given permission to run printing presses.
48
A recent study is S. Kuznetsov
49
For background, see Christopher Ely,
50
See Faith Wigzell, 'Folklore and Russian Literature', in Cornwell,
51
See Victor Borovsky 'The Emergence of Russian Theatre, 1763-1800', in R. Leach and V Borovsky (eds.),
i999).
52
See Lurana O'Malley,
53
E. K. Wirtschafter,
54
D. Gasperetti,
55
M. Levitt, et al. (eds.),