Catholic or Protestant; you could buy an icon or an edition of the Psalter in most towns, but not an oil painting or a book of poetry. At the same time, there is compelling evidence of growing receptiveness to selected aspects of Western culture, for example, in the desire of the boyar elite to acquire portraits with coats of arms. Patterns of borrowing and receptiveness suggest a timid but growing attachment to 'the West' as a desirable source of new ideas, filtered through 'fraternal' cultures (notably Ukraine), contradicted by discourses of the dangers of alien customs and limited by economic and social realities. Hence seventeenth-century Muscovites failed to assimilate many things that were commonplace for members of the European elites, including statues, classical mansions and pictures of their wives and daughters. Boyars still had to adhere to the royal calendar and independent, participatory cultural life outside the tsar's household was extremely restricted. Unlike many of his Western contemporaries, the average Russian boyar did not compose or play music, read or write poetry or philosophy, speak foreign languages, travel abroad or take an interest in architecture (as opposed to building), horticulture or science. There were exceptions, such as Matveev and Golitsyn, but by and large in their accomplishments and culture Muscovite nobles were closer to the rest of the population than to their European counterparts. A consistently 'Westernising' programme for the arts was patently absent during the reigns ofthe seventeenth-century tsars. Foreign 'novelties' belonged to 'closed' society; they were not intended for and still less imposed upon a wider public as later were Peter I's dress reforms, for example. Religion dominated high culture.
Soviet historians, obliged to demonstrate an atheistic world-view, dealt with the awkward fact of the prolonged control of established religion over seventeenth-century Russian culture by emphasising the 'discovery of the value of the human personality' (lichnost') behind religious facades. They minimised or denied the religiosity of religious art, underlining instead its humane (gumanitarnye), popular (narodnye) and 'life-enhancing' (zhizneradostnye) qualities.[391] Icons and frescos were scrutinised for evidence of realism, naturalistic landscapes, peasant physiognomies and everyday (bytovye) details. Soviet architectural historians detected 'progress' in an increase in the number of domestic and civic buildings constructed of stone and brick rather than wood. Cult architecture could be the bearer of advanced features, too. Churches, for example, were said to have 'drawn closer' to civic buildings in their design. Soviet scholars, particularly during the Stalin period, played down foreign borrowing
and exaggerated the indigenous roots of new ideas, especially 'democratic'
ones.[392]
The evidence presented above shows that traditional religious culture remained strong and that Western, secular trends operated within limits. Tsar Alexis conducted experiments in horticulture with the help of foreign experts, but he also had holy water sprinkled to form signs of the cross on fields. He employed foreign medics, but carried around a tooth of St Sabbas to cure toothache. Simeon Polotskii wrote his works explicitly 'for the spiritual benefit of Orthodox Christians' (polzy radi dushevnyia pravoslavnykh khristian). Literature and art were firmly rooted in the acceptance of well-defined hierarchies and in a world of opposites in which a constant struggle is waged between good and evil and where ultimately people must renounce worldly things.
There was fierce opposition to what were perceived as 'Latin and Lutheran' innovations in religious art. In 1674, for example, Patriarch Ioakim banned the sale of paper prints 'made by German heretics, Lutherans and Calvin- ists, according to their own damned persuasion, crudely and wrongly'. He and his predecessors denounced icons that 'depict everything after the manner of earthly things'.[393] Their Old Believer opponents agreed with them in this respect. The most frequently quoted pronouncement on the subject is Archpriest Avvakum's complaint that some icon painters made Christ 'look like a German, big-bellied and fat, except that no sword is painted on his hip'.[394] Henceforth Old Believers strove to preserve ancient artistic traditions. Warnings were aimed at both non-canonical compositions and non- traditional, three-dimensional depictions that added improper 'worldliness' to images which, according to Orthodox tradition, should intimate the divine world beyond the icon, not imitate the flesh and blood of the here and now. The Church had no quarrel with secular painting as such. Indeed, Patriarch Nikon had his portrait painted several times.[395] In general, seventeenth-century debates demonstrate a new awareness of the shifting boundaries between the sacred and profane and an attempt to establish what was permissible for the devout Orthodox. There was an increased concern with individual morality as opposed to asceticism.[396]
In 1690 Patriarch Ioakim was still appealingto Tsars Ivan and Peter to 'resist new Latin and alien customs and not to introduce the wearing of foreign dress'.[397] The culture of the 1690s, still inadequately studied, bears witness to the proliferation of Western influences. Among the royal family's orders from the Armoury we find images of patron saints not on wooden panels but in oils on canvas,[398] battle paintings 'after the German model' and pictures on canvas depicting 'troops travelling by sea' copied from German engravings.[399]Armoury artists found themselves making regimental banners and decorating the new ships that Tsar Peter built at Voronezh. The victory parade held in Moscow in 1696 to celebrate the capture of Azov from the Turks took place against a backdrop of classical architectural devices, allegorical paintings and wooden sculptures set on triumphal gates inscribed with the words of Julius Caesar: 'I came. I saw. I conquered.'[400]
Peter's Great Embassy to Western Europe (1697-8) consolidated his view of what constituted 'civilised' art and architecture. In January 1698 he became the subject of the first portrait of a Russian ruler wholly in the Western manner, painted in London by Sir Godfrey Kneller.[401] By 1701 only two icon painters remained on the Armoury payroll and by 1711 nearly all Armoury personnel were transferred to the new capital of St Petersburg.[402] Yet we are still far from the 'liberal' atmosphere that Western thinkers such as David Hume regarded as essential for the flourishing of the arts.[403] There was still no sign of an independent public sphere. The arts in Russia remained firmly harnessed to higher authority, even though power shifted from the Church to the state.
From the early eighteenth century most things 'pre-Petrine' were regarded as a blank. Russia must achieve cultural salvation by imitating and assimilating
Western culture. The idea that Russian art began with Peter held sway for the next century and a half, roughly coinciding with the period that classicism dominated the arts in Russia and most of Europe. Only from the mid- nineteenth century did Russia's seventeenth century begin to be rehabilitated and recreated in the Russian imagination. Its buildings were widely imitated in the Neo- or Pseudo-Russian style. Artists, illustrators and designers - Ivan Bilibin, Apolinarii Vasnetsov, Andrei Riabushkin, Viacheslav Shvarz - tried to capture the century's spirit. Faberge and Ovchinnikov recreated the shapes and colours of seventeenth-century objets de vertu for elite clients.96 A romanticised seventeenth-century style became the fashion preference at the court of Nicholas II, who liked to see himself as a latter-day Tsar Alexis. This imagined seventeenth century is a fairy-tale world of turrets and cupolas, exotic fabrics, elaborate carvings and jewel-like surfaces that awakes nostalgia for a pre-Western, pre-classical world. In this vision, far from being the period that prepared the ground for Westernisation, the seventeenth century remains the last bastion of true Russian culture.
392
For discussions of the problems of Soviet scholarship, see Cracraft,
pp. 40-53.
393
D. A. Rovinskii,
394
See N. E. Andreyev, 'Nikon and Avvakum on Icon-Painting', in his
397
Full text in N. Ustrialov,
398
G. V Esipov (ed.),
400
See Richard Wortman,
403
Gianluigi Goggi, 'The Philosophes and the Debate over Russian Civilization', in Maria Di Salvo and Lindsey Hughes (eds.),
i996), pp. 299-305.