This 'official' religious life found a constant shadow and counterpoint across the river, in the sketes and communities ofthe Old Belief. This universe, where priests were a rarity and needed, if at all, to be imported from Old Believer communities at Belaia Krinitsa in Austria, was run by powerful female religious figures and funded by wealthy male merchants. Hundreds of thousands of faithful, from merchants' daughters sent to the sketes for a convent education to peddlers of icons and 'old-print' (i.e. Slavonic) books, found a home or a touchstone in the powerful communities, even after Nicholas I's (with Melnikov's critical help) massive campaign shut many of them down in the 1850s. Melnikov's unforgettable portrayal of this universe inspired a whole movement in art, music and literature, including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Invisible City ofKitezh, Modest Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina, Mikhail Nesterov's Taking the Veil, and Andrei Bely's Silver Dove.
Civic and cultural life
As in many provincial towns, cultural life in the first half of the nineteenth century revolved around a very small number of institutions: apart from the domestic living room and an occasional ball or concert, the Gentry Assembly and above all the town theatre provided a venue for social gatherings and entertainment. For a few days in 1847, the local Guhernskie vedomosti engaged in a debate over whether there was, in fact, anything to do in Nizhnii, or not. The newspaper's contributor A. P. Avdeevtooka Gogoliantone, lamenting the boredom and limitations of provincial life ('You cannot imagine how difficult is the situation of a person taking up his pen to write the chronicle of a city, when there are decidedly no events in this city that could possibly deserve attention').[89] Finally, mimicking Gogol directly, he decided to describe theatre-goers as they left a performance. The editor, P. I. Melnikov, responding with local patriotism, insisted that Nizhnii Novgorod with its gentry elections, balls, masquerades, plays and religious processions, was better than most other places,[90]and exalted the physical beauty and architecture of the city. The Nizhnii Novgorod theatre provided the focal point of cultural life. It originated in the immensely successful serf troupe of the landowner Prince Shakhovskoi which, transported to an ugly and unwieldy but permanent building on the Pecher- skaia Street in 1811, metamorphosed into a public institution.[91] Performances took place thrice weekly, and daily in holiday season; a second theatre on the fairgrounds played daily in the summer months.[92] A Russian and European repertoire - Griboedov, Ostrovsky, Tolstoy, alongside Shakespeare, Calderon and Kotzebue - attracted local audiences and foreign visitors, among them Baron Haxthausen who in 1843 pronounced the performance of the opera, 'Askold's Grave', not bad ('passablement bon').[93]
One of the key moments in Nizhnii's cultural and intellectual life tookplace outside the city and even the province: the founding of Kazan University in 1804 provided a regional centripetal focus and helped to create a local intelligentsia that was able to complete its education without travelling to the capitals, or abroad. Such figures as Stepan Eshevskii, Konstantin Bestuzhev-Riumin, and Melnikov wended their way downriver to study at Kazan, attending lectures by Shchapov, Lobachevskii and other more or less illustrious professors, subsequently returning to teach history, ethnography, mathematics and other subjects to students at the Nizhnii Novgorod gymnasium. When Eshevskii finally removed to Moscow in 1862, his first course of lectures there surveyed the provinces of the Roman Empire, proposing as its central thesis the retention of local culture - in the form of language, custom, religion and even social organisation - in the face of the centralising aims of the Roman state. An interesting early product of the Nizhnii Novgorod gymnasium is the Statistical Description of Nizhnii Novgorod Province written by the senior instructor, Mikhail Dukhovskii, and published under the auspices ofthe Kazan
University Press in 1827. Although the pamphlet bears little resemblance to our notion of statistics, it comprises a sober breakdown of types of industry and agriculture, population, architecture, ethnicity (which noted, among other things, the virtually complete assimilation of indigenous populations), religion, a detailed district-by-district survey, and a good deal of data and also colour on the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair.[94] An added, if serendipitous, impetus, to local cultural activity resulted from the temporary exile of Moscow literary circles specifically to the city in the wake of Napoleon's invasion in 1812. Nikolai Karamzin, S. N. Glinka and Konstantin Batiushkov found temporary refuge in Nizhnii's wilds, where their salons and gatherings doubtless fuelled the proverbial 'mixture of French with Nizhegorodian'.[95] Finally, the above- mentioned Gubernskie vedomosti - established by decree throughout European Russia beginning in i838 - became itself a crucial agent in stimulating local historical, scientific and aesthetic interests. Particularly under Melnikov's editorship in 1845-50, the Vedomosti became an organ for the construction of a local, non-state-centred, narrative of Russian history, as well as for conveying useful local meteorological, statistical and ethnographic material.[96]
Still, the blossoming of provincial culture and civic life unquestionably belongs to the post-reform period. The new institutions - the zemstvo, the courts, the municipal duma - as well as some old ones - merchant guilds, corporations, the gentry assembly - were invested with real power to make decisions on a local level. Elections to the zemstvos, controversial court cases and important decisions on urban infrastructure - electric lighting, sanitation, transportation - became the stuff of animated public discussion. Nine full-fledged lawyers resided in town in 1877, as well as twenty-five persons authorised to intervene for other parties in the circuit or communal courts. Private societies and brotherhoods operating in the city in the 1870s included: a commercial club, a military club, a hunting society, societies for co-operation with industry and trade, a mutual insurance fund in case of shipwreck, a mutual aid society for the private service sector, a literacy society, a local physicians' society, a branch of the Russian Musical Society, the brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius, and the ubiquitous all-estate club; there were twenty in all. As the century drew to an end, the old soslovie organisations - merchant guilds and the meshchanstvo society in particular - began to function as corporations, providing social standing to small-scale entrepreneurs and creating a forum for commercial transactions. Some of the most prosperous merchants became known for their service to charity, among them Nikolai Bugrov (1837-1911), major industrialist and banker who became famous for his aid to Old Believer communities and for founding a homeless shelter (i880) that made it onto the pages of Maxim Gorky's novels.[97]
91
A. S. Gatsiskii,
94
Marie-Noelle Bourguet also notes the descriptive nature of the 'statistics' of the Napoleonic period. M.-N. Bourguet,
95
See Smirnov,
96
C. Evtuhov 'The