As regards the impact ofWesternisation, for every Karamzin who mourned his country's loss of national identity, there were several foreigners ready with an Orientalist discourse. Many travellers perceived (or were programmed to expect) something non-European about Russia, even in St Petersburg. The Reverend William Coxe wrote in the 1780s: 'The richness and splendour of the Russian court surpasses description. It retains many traces of its ancient Asiatic pomp, blended with European refinement.'[67] Armies of serf retainers, people from the Russian East, the sheer lavishness of clothes and jewellery helped to create this impression, as did the continuing high profile of Orthodox art and ritual. Religious culture was one of the 'blind spots' of both Soviet and Western scholars, who generally underestimated the role of the Church and religious belief in eighteenth-century Russia, favouring 'the story of the progressive emancipation of culture from the stiffening control of established religion', beginning with Peter's alleged 'secularisation' of Russian culture.[68]But Russia's eighteenth-century rulers and their supporters could not do without Orthodox ritual, churches and icons. Nearly all the leading artists started their careers painting icons and frescoes and continued to do so simultaneously with undertaking secular commissions. There was far more demand for icons than for portraits. Orthodox scruples about 'graven images' hampered the development of Russian sculpture. The equestrian statue to Peter I in St Petersburg (1782, Etienne Falconet and Marie Collot) was, amazingly, the first public monument to be erected in Russia.[69] The interdependence of religious and secular art awaits a full investigation.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century the cultural history of eighteenth-century Russia is still being written. Russian scholars have seized new opportunities to explore foreign influences and religious culture. The Marxist-Leninist ideological framework that prioritised the search for motifs of dissent and a 'serf intelligentsia' has largely been abandoned, while topics once off-limits or subject to ideological disapproval, such as imperial court ceremonial and noble estate culture, are being studied.[70] Work has been published in both East and West on once taboo figures, such as Potemkin, and the first studies of Catherine II's life for over a hundred years have appeared in Russian, giving due credit to her massive contribution to Russian culture. Even the once despised empresses Anna and Elizabeth are beginning to be acknowledged as patrons of the arts. Eighteenth-century Russian culture may never appeal to Western audiences as much as what preceded it and came after, but there is at least the prospect that we shall understand it better.
Russian culture: 1801-1917
ROSAMUND BARTLETT
Russian culture comes of age
To gain a sense of the achievements of Russian culture during this period, it is instructive to compare the comments made on the subject by Petr Chaadaev in a 'Philosophical Letter' he published in 1836 with the sentiments expressed by a critic reviewing an exhibition in 1909. Chaadaev felt that Russia under Nicholas I simply had no cultural achievements it could be proud of. In his opinion, Russia was neither part of the continuum of European or Asian civilisation, nor did it have any civilisation of its own - and he did not mince his words about his nation's many defects, which, significantly, were written in French rather than Russian:
At first brutal barbarism, then crude superstition, then cruel and degrading foreign domination, the spirit of which was inherited by our national rulers - such is the sad history of our youth . . . Now I ask you, where are our sages, our thinkers? Who has ever done the thinking for us? Who thinks for us today? And yet, situated between the two great divisions ofthe world, between East and West, with one elbow resting on China and the other on Germany, we ought to have united in us the two principles of intellectual life, imagination and reason, and brought together in our civilization the history of the entire globe. But this was not the part Providence assigned to us. Far from it; she seems to have taken no interest in our destiny . . . You would think, looking at us, that the general law of humanity has been revoked in our case. Alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, taught the world nothing; we have not added a single idea to the fund of human ideas; we have contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit, and we have disfigured everything we have taken ofthat progress . . . We have never taken the trouble to invent anything ourselves, while from the inventions ofothers we have adopted only the deceptive appearances and useless luxuries.[71]
The critic reviewing the Russian section of an architecture and design exhibition in Vienna in 1909, by contrast, felt quite differently. If anything, Russia's very backwardness, in his view, had made a crucial contribution to its new position of cultural pre-eminence:
A very short while ago it was a saying that if one scratched a Russian, one discovered a barbarian ... A few years ago Western art had to acknowledge the invasion of the Japanese. Last spring at our architectural exhibition the Russians spoke, and everyone's attention was attracted. We were made to envy them for the remains of barbarism which they have managed to preserve. The West has become a common meeting ground, invaded by distant and foreign peoples as in the last days of the Roman Empire, and while they wish to learn from us, it turns out that they are our teachers.[72]
Indeed, Russian artists were now increasingly assuming positions at the forefront of the European avant-garde, their achievements equal to anything produced by their counterparts in Western Europe. This was spectacularly demonstrated when Sergei Diaghilev began his triumphant export of Russian culture to Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century: the legendary Saisons russes showcased the brightest talents of Russian ballet, art and music, culminating in the epochal premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in 1913. Back in Moscow, Stanislavsky had founded an innovatory acting technique and a world-class repertory theatre which championed the plays of Chekhov, soon to be recognised as one of the greatest of modern dramatists. And once the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky had begun to reach international audiences via translations, it was not long before writers like Virginia Woolf were proclaiming Russian literature to be the best in the world.[73] By the time of the 1917 Revolution, it was no longer possible to claim that Russia had merely borrowed from other cultures, and contributed nothing original of its own. In the space of a hundred years, the country's artistic life had been transformed beyond recognition, as the feelings of inferiority which were the residue of Russia's brusque Europeanisation in the eighteenth century gave way to a pride in national achievements. The subsequent discovery of Russian culture, combined with the constraints imposed by the constant threat of censorship, had ultimately galvanised Russian artists, writers and musicians into forging a cultural identity that was distinctive precisely for its strong national character. As soon as
67
W. Coxe,
69
See L. Hughes, 'Restoring Religion to Russian Art', in G. Hosking and R. Service (eds.),
70
See, for example, O. Ageeva,
71
P. Chaadaev, 'Letters on the Philosophy of History', quoted in W J. Leatherbarrow and D. C. Offord (trans. and eds.),
72
L. Gewaesi, 'V mire iskusstva',
73
See Virginia Woolf, 'The Russian Point ofView',in