Russian creativity was given the conditions to flourish in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a profusion of novels, symphonies, paintings and operas poured forth which were of a calibre never encountered either before or after.
Russian culture under Alexander I (1801-1825) and Nicholas I (1825-1855)
Exactly how accurate was the pessimistic diagnosis of Russian culture set forth in Chaadaev's 'Philosophical Letters'? Born in 1794, Chaadaev had come of age during the Napoleonic campaigns, in which he served as an officer. He had then resigned his commission and spent three years in Western Europe, which probably saved him from the brutal punishments meted out to his friends and fellow liberals who had taken part in the Decembrist uprising in 1825. Nicholas I's chief of police, Count Benckendorff, proclaimed triumphantly: 'Russia's past is admirable; her present situation is more than wonderful; as for her future, this exceeds even the boldest expectations',[74] but Chaadaev had grounds for possessing a jaundiced view of Russia. Like the Decembrists, who had been profoundly shocked when they returned home after observing Western liberty in action when they occupied Paris at the end of the war with Napoleon, Chaadaev had come to the conclusion that the source of Russia's 'unhealthy atmosphere and paralysis' was the iniquitous institution of serfdom.[75] This challenged the nationalist feelings inspired by 1812. But modernisation was out of the question under a tsar terrified of further rebellion, and in 1833 his minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, formulated an official state ideology based on 'Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality' which was to set the course for cultural policy throughout Nicholas's reign.[76] Accordingly, the teachers and students at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts were uniformed civil servants who were enjoined to uphold the techniques and artistic ideals of classical antiquity. In music, there simply was no institution yet for the professional training of native composers and performers, and the already low prestige of Russian music was soonto be further undermined when an Italian opera company was installed in St Petersburg's main opera house
in 1843.7 The Russian literary canon, meanwhile, was still so small that in Pushkin's story The Queen of Spades (Pikovaia dama), set in 1833, the old countess could express surprise that there are any novels written in Russian.8
But it was in the 1820s and 1830s that Peter the Great's secularising reforms began to bring forth fruit in terms of native works of art of outstanding originality. Pushkin published the first great Russian novel (in verse), Eugene Onegin, in 1823-31. The following year Russia's first professional critic, Vissarion Belin- sky, made his debut with an article which the literary historian D. S. Mirsky memorably called the 'manifesto of a new era in the history of Russian civiliza- tion'.9 In 1833 too Karl Briullov completed his mammoth canvas The Last Day of Pompeii, described by Gogol as a 'complete universal creation' and celebrated by Sir Walter Scott, Bulwer Lytton and countless Italian academicians.10 Two other cultural landmarks were to follow in 1836, the year in which Chaadaev's 'First Philosophical Letter' was published: Gogol's play The Government Inspector (Revizor) and Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar. This was also the year in which Pushkin launched The Contemporary (Sovremennik), which was destined to become Russia's most famous literary journal in the nineteenth century and in which Orest Kiprensky, one of Russia's finest Romantic painters, died. Other important artists of the first half of the nineteenth century who were not products of the Imperial Academy, and who treated Russian themes, include Aleksei Venetsianov, who received no formal training, and Vasili Tropinin, a gifted serf given his freedom only at the age of forty-seven. Both excelled in depicting scenes from daily life.
The central figure of what is now referred to as the 'Golden Age' of Russian poetry was Pushkin of whose work David Bethea has written: 'It engages prominent foreign and domestic precursors (Derzhavin, Karamzin, Byron, Shakespeare, Scott) as confident equal, defines issues of history and national destiny (Time of Troubles, legacy of Peter, Pugachev Rebellion) without taking sides, provides a gallery of character types for later writers... and expands the boundaries of genre . . . in an intoxicating variety that earned him the name of Proteus.'11 Pushkin's work alone undermines Chaadaev's theory of Russian cultural stagnation.
7 See Richard Taruskin, 'Ital'yanshchina', in Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 186-236.
8 A. S. Pushkin, Complete Prose Fiction, trans., intro. and notes Paul Debreczeny (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 215.
9 D. S. Mirsky A History of Russian Literature from its Beginnings to 1900, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (New York: Vintage, 1958), p. 75.
10 A. Bird, A History of Russian Painting (Oxford: Phaidon, 1987), pp. 78-9.
11 D. Bethea, 'Literature', in N. Rzhevsky (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to ModernRussian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 177.
Pushkin was one of the first Russian writers to earn his living through his literary works, and the last to have to suffer the dubious privilege of having them personally scrutinised by the tsar, who appointed himself as the poet's personal censor when graciously allowing his subject to return from exile in the south. Pushkin's career exemplifies the growing rift that was opening up between artists and the state in Russia, as the nascent intelligentsia increasingly came to define itself by its opposition to the Government. The fate of Chaadaev's 'Philosophical Letter', meanwhile, exemplifies the cultural atmosphere under Nicholas I as a whole: its author was pronounced insane and placed under house arrest, the man who failed to censor the article was sacked, the journal in which it was published was shut down, and its editor exiled. It is not surprising, under these circumstances, that culture, and in particular literature, became so politically charged during the reign of Nicholas I. The headstrong young poet and hussar Mikhail Lermontov was courtmartialled for writing an outspoken poem condemning the society which allowed a genius like Pushkin to be killed in a duel.[77] Lermontov's career was also cut short: he died in a duel in the Caucasus in 1841 at the age of twenty-seven, leaving behind a corpus of remarkable lyrical poetry (representing the apex of Russian literary Romanticism) and a justly celebrated novel, A Hero of our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni), whose 'superfluous' hero is clearly the successor to Pushkin's Onegin.
74
A. Walicki,
76
See Maureen Perrie, 'Narodnost': Notions of National Identity', in C. Kelly and D. Shepherd (eds.),