Acknowledgments
I have benefited a great deal from the generosity of donors over the years spent on this book. I thank the Fulbright Program for an award in 1995; the National Endowment for the Humanities for its fellowship in 1997-8 and for the Summer Institute on Art and Artifact in Russian History in St. Petersburg, organized by George Munro and Alison Hilton in 1992; the Social Science Research Council for financing, Jane Burbank for organizing, and the University of Iowa, Portland State University, and the Kennan Institute for hosting, three seminal conferences on Imperial Russia; IREX (the International Research and Exchanges Board) for an Academy of Science Fellowship in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1997-98, one of a long chain of IREX awards supporting my work; the Georgetown University Graduate School, School of Foreign Service, Provost’s Office, and Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies for innumerable research grants.
The Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York offered up its rich resources. In Washington, I thank the staffs of the Georgetown University Library, the Library of Congress Music and Performing Arts Division, and the Hillwood Museum—particularly Kristen Regina, Karen Kettering, and Anne Odom. The bright young Georgetown freshman Katherine Magalif helped me check sources during the final stages of the book and David Hagen made the pictures.
The bulk of the research was carried out in Moscow, St. Petersburg, a few provincial towns in Russia, and Helsinki. It would be superfluous to list all the archivists and librarians in the Russian cities, but I heartily thank them for their patience and industry. Special recognition however is in order: in Moscow, to Vitold Petyushenko, Research Director of the Tretyakov Gallery; Olga Butkova and Kirill Razlogov for my backstage tour of the Maly Theater; Anya Salnykova for the endless stream of books; and the guide to the Ostrovsky House-Museum. In St. Petersburg, I am indebted to Elena Barkhatova of the print and photography collection of the Russian National Library; Neli and Vasily Kuznetsov of the recordings collection at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory for many hours of listening to and copying obscure music; Pavel Lyssakov and Andrei Tolshin for a backstage tour of the Alexandrinsky Theater; Yuliya Shkitina for an inside tour of the Academy of Arts; and Liya Yangulova for copying much-needed books. At the Russian Museum, Evgeniya Petrova, Irina Karaski, Raya Dashkina, Elena Stolbova, Kira Mikhailova, and Ekaterina Shilova showed me how to unlock the treasures stored in the attic of that great museum and to view a Russia-in-pictures rarely seen on museum walls.
In Smolensk, thanks go to the archivists, librarians, local studies people, and faculty assembled for an international conference by Catherine Evtuhov, Boris Gasparov, and Andrew Wachtel; in Novospasskoe, Smolensk Oblast, to the guide at the Glinka manor house museum; and in Kursk to Alexander Reprintsev and especially Tatyana Alentieva for revealing to me more of the wonders of provincial Russian life in Tula, Orël, Kursk, the Korennaya Monastery, Voronezh, and other sites connected with this book.
The Slavonic Library in Helsinki, Finland, has been my scholarly base each summer and several winters over the last twenty-five years. Its nearly complete collection of nineteenth-century journals on open shelves a few feet from the readers’ desks, its enormous collections, its machine-like efficiency, and its superbly accommodating staff make it the best library in the world outside Russia for prerevolutionary Russian studies and much else. I salute Irina Lukka, Maire Aho, Jarmo Suonsyrja, Sara Talasniemi, Eila Tervakko, and Leena-Riita Peltola for their incomparable services. I have gained much also from the Finnish National Gallery and the White Hall from their periodic shows of Russian art; and from the city’s art, music, and theater libraries, with a special thanks to Liisa Byckling for theatrical expertise. At Helsinki University’s Renvall Institute of History and Area Studies, my second home for many years, I thank Julia Azbel, Elena Hellberg-Hirn, Tuomas Lehtonen, Arto Luukkanen, Timo Vihavainen, Mikko Ylikangas, and Pirko Hautamaki. Most of all I cherish the friendship and support of Natalia Baschmakoff of Joensuu University.
Just as rehearsals are mandatory in theater, try-out talks can help shape and refine ideas for a book. I was lucky enough to present some of them in North America at Brown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Toronto, Brock, Grand Valley, and Miami of Ohio universities, the University of Southern California, and the Hillwood Museum; and in Europe at the Renvall Institute, the Baltic and East European Graduate School in Södertorn (Sweden), the European University of St. Petersburg, Joensuu University in Finland, Cambridge University, and the State University of Kursk.
Good friends have supplied me with information, contacts, manuscripts, and CDs to feed my interests: Steven Marks, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Tanya Stites, Hubertus Jahn, Abraham Ascher, Jeffrey Burds, David Moon, Fred Skinner, Paul Heineman, Andrew Wachtel, Lindsey Hughes, David Ransel, Douglas Smith, and Stuart Campbell. Scholars too numerous to mention have shared their unpublished dissertations and other materials listed in the bibliography. Priscilla Roosevelt, Boris Gasparov, Alison Hilton, and Murray Frame by their wisdom, learning, and close reading of my book, have added immensely to its value, as has Gavin Lewis for Yale University Press. Personal thank-yous can really get out of hand in a preface. I wish I could say a few words about my cat Blackie, but my publishers won’t allow it. So I thank with all my heart my daughter Sasha; my sons Tod, Tom, and Andrei and his wife Holly Stevens; and, in addition to those mentioned above, Harley Balzer, Donald Duffy, Abbott Gleason, Ray Hanna, Brendan Humphreys, Daniel Orlovsky, Tom Quinn, Claus Westmeier, and the late Reginald Zelnik; the crowd at the Sea Horse in Helsinki and Martin’s Tavern and Cafe Milano in Georgetown: the old gang from the Kibbutz on Maneesikatu; and, most of all, the incomparable Peter Dunkley, David Goldfrank, Amy Leonard, and Howard Spendelow.
Note: for clarity and economy, I have used the now-out-of-use term “actress.” For variety I translate dvoryanstvo as both “gentry” and “nobility” and use the less-than-ideal “Gentry Club” for Dvoryanskoe Sobranie. In the text, Russian words are transliterated in a reader-friendly mode, but in a more scholarly way for the notes. The dates are all Old Style, thus two weeks behind the Western calendar in the nineteenth century.
In this book a historian takes a look at the arts; or better, a historian looks at the broad canvas on which society—its structures, practices, mentalities—interacted with the arts. Historians do different things from musicologists, art historians, and theater scholars; or at least we try. 1 Linking creative expression to society is hardly a novel venture. Literary scholars of Russia have worked this vein with brilliant results. But then, print culture is only one form of expression. In a still largely illiterate servile Russia, its resonance was demographically slight—although its filter effect over the generations has been enormous. If we look for lower-class participation in culture through the lens of published fiction, we will have to squint. Broadening the lens to include art, music, and theater catches the serf violinist, the cook-turned-ballerina, the small-town painter, the actor from the urban depths. Thousands of men and women got their lives entwined with Mozart and Molière, Ostrovsky and easel painting. Where are they to be found in standard accounts of Russian history?
The title of this book, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia, roughly indicates what it contains, and the best way to explain it is to parse the title, in reverse word order. “Russia”: while I venture occasionally into Ukraine and the Western Provinces, the bulk of attention is on European Russia. The Russia outside the capitals—the Russia of landowner estates and of provincial towns—looms large in the story as do the “two capitals,” St. Petersburg and Moscow. The significance of the provincial story lies not simply in filling out a picture, but also in charting the many lines and links connecting the two tiny dots of St. Petersburg and Moscow to the infinitely larger population in the rest of Russia. “Imperial” in the title denotes chronology: the book covers a period from various points in the late eighteenth century to a sharp terminal date, 1861, the end of serfdom. It seemed to me that the triple turn in cultural history of the 1860s—the “revolt of the fourteen” at the Academy of Arts, the schism over the conservatory and “national” music, and the innovations of Ostrovsky in the theater—lacked an illuminating prehistory. I chose the preceding period because the cultural world of serf-era Russia formed the essential background to the great transformation. The history of the early nineteenth century’s art worlds is relatively unknown in comparison with the age that followed—the era of the Itinerant painters, the Mighty Five composers, and the theater of Ostrovsky, Chekhov, and Stanislavsky.
“The arts” and their makers that I treat here belong, with some exceptions, at the high end of culture: classical music, theater, and graphic art—mostly painting. This omits folk culture, an altogether different universe, which features in this book only as it was employed by elite creators to add “national” flavor to their works. Similarly, local custom comes into play from time to time in scenes of public reaction to certain kinds of performance. I have gained valuable insights about the social dimensions of the other arts from non-dramatic literature, the most celebrated arena of cultural expression in Russian society of that era. Though they do not play a central role in this work, the literary canon, critical studies, and the now-forgotten fictions illuminate problems in ways not found in conventional historical sources. The history of the three branches of creative art forms a constantly shifting isosceles triangle with occasionally equal legs. The state-owned Academy of Arts and the Imperial Theaters provided institutional structure which the musical world did not possess. The first two also dealt in narrative forms and social codes. Since I have regretfully omitted opera, ballet, and most popular genres from this account, the musical world presented here consists mostly of art music in the home and instrumental concert performance where story line was rare. Yet, like theater, the “music world” that flourished in salons, orchestras—private and public, serf and free—upheld by concert societies and choirs and by foreign and Russian virtuosos required performance and thus audience, a fact that differentiated them both somewhat from the realm of painter and client. Underlying all the arts stood their varying social organizations and the social order itself.
I have endeavored to capture culture as it was experienced at the time; and so the ephemeral, the mediocre, and the once popular but now doomed-to-oblivion play a role. As Dostoevsky among others noted, the taste of the masses rules in their own time; the geniuses rule a bit later. Theater scholars, musicologists, and art historians draw from an arsenal of technical expertise and naturally tend to focus on their own disciplines. With some notable exceptions, they are attracted to master works and their creators and performers. In the critical idiom in which the winner takes all, one often finds the phrase “deservedly forgotten” applied to works of culture. Literary critics rightly praise works of transcendent value and eternal truths and consequently dismiss as unimportant those of “merely historical interest.” This is as it should be. But in the fight for cultural memory, historians can recover what was once important to people without descending into antiquarianism by examining works that display the atmospherics of the moment when they were produced.2 In examining art worlds3 together, I am also concerned with the relationship of a broad range of expressive art to the people who made, performed, and consumed it. As a study of culture as process and experience, the book embraces not only works and their creators, but the life surrounding creation: career pathways, institutions, management, power grids, social attitudes and taboos, juridical categories, patronage, among other things. Thus the spread of pianos and sheet music, domestic art collecting, and backstage politics make up part of the story. The history of culture is, in and of itself, a worthy and important topic in history, and not simply a vehicle for illuminating larger issues. The study of the arts, when driven by a social perspective, provides multiple entry points into seldom explored aspects of people’s lives and values.
"Society," a crucial component of the book, refers to the mutual relations between art practice and its products; and among those who engaged with the art worlds. This is not a reductionist attempt to explain the art itself strictly by its social environment. “It was certainly an error,” wrote Raymond Williams, ''to suppose that values or art-works could be adequately studied without reference to the particular society within which they were expressed, but it is equally an error to suppose that the social explanation is determining, or that the values and works were merely by-products."4 The most important social conditioner of cultural life in this period revolved around the relationship of class and status to the arts. For a long time, pupils enrolled in the Imperial Theater system came from the lower classes. Those in the Academy of Arts collectively represented a more complex and pluralistic social body. Few social restraints inhibited upper-class men from completing an education in the fine arts; and painters, architects, and sculptors stood several notches higher socially than theater people, a situation not unique to Russia. Since no analogous institution of musical training existed in Russia until the 1860s, the status of musicians remained fluid and linked to other social determinants.
The huge popularity of amateurism among the privileged classes resulted both from the dearth of professionals and from the immense cultural attraction of creation and especially performance. If one could find little Byrons and Lamartines amid the forests and steppes of Russia, one might also encounter there would-be Chopins and Viardots. Amateurism came near to being one of the “accursed questions” in cultural debates before and after the Great Reforms. One view, floated by Anton Rubinstein and his archrival in matters musical, V. V. Stasov—the only issue that brought them near to agreement—saw amateurism as an aristocratic amusement that had nothing to do with serious art. Stasov thought it harmless, but Rubinstein held it to be a brake on professionalism. Yet the dilettante patrons and performers of the early nineteenth century contributed enormously to the promotion and spread of serious art music in Russia. Homespun music-making allowed for a free mix of players—titled amateurs, professionals, and serfs—who performed string quartets and even big symphonic works. And, despite the derivative and superficial quality of Russian amateur composers contemporary with Mikhail Glinka, some of their music was well-thought-of at the time and still deserves a hearing.
I begin the title of the book with the word “Serfdom” for several reasons. In the first place, serfs, freed serfs, and children of serfs appeared in numerous capacities almost everywhere in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries where the arts were produced and performed: as painters, actors, orchestral players, singers, dancers, and even conductors and composers in gentry town houses and country manors; as individuals or entire troupes and orchestras sold to the Imperial Theaters; as trainees at the Capella or Court Chapel Choir, the Theater School, the Academy of Arts, and provincial art schools; as performers rented out on the provincial stage; and as spectators. The lives of real serfs crossed paths continuously with colleagues, managers, entrepreneurs, gentry families, the state. Their represented lives appear on canvas and as characters in drama and comedy. The interplay between the reality of serf and peasant lives and their imaging in the arts makes for one of the most arresting social-cultural phenomena of the time.
Russian belles lettres of the early nineteenth century and the myriad studies of it tell us something about the educated public’s attitude towards serfs and other lower-class members of society, and even some details about their actual lives. Print culture, however, had little impact on the majority of the population. It is quite another story with the performing and the graphic arts. Theatrical companies all over Russia, serf orchestras, and art schools at various times were filled with the nonprivileged, including the unfree. Many more remained locked on their masters’ estates. A struggle, marked by pathos and personalized politics, emerged during the final six decades of bondage that grew out of the social system of organized culture. The fight for freedom for serf artists offers a picture seldom encountered in studies of the institution which naturally concentrate on the far more numerous agricultural peasants. The protagonists of the fight included talented house serfs trained up in the arts while still in a state of unfreedom; their masters; and their sympathizers and patrons who tried to organize their emancipation so that they could live creative lives unfettered by the whims of their owners.
Serfdom also had an indirect impact on the relationship between society and cultural life: as a system, it intruded into almost every aspect of life and molded the mentalities of all classes. Ascription, making people live and die in a specified social cubicle with no hope of themselves or their heirs escaping, affected not only the lower orders. Society’s hierarchical practices and juridical norms reinforced the hermetical preferences of merchants and other classes. Courtiers who experienced malaise in salons attended by commoners inhibited, without fully preventing, a dynamic fusion of talents from all classes. The code that forbade aristocrats from exhibiting their skills in a public space further impoverished the cultural landscape. Subordination and deference at every level sprouted naturally from the patchwork of juridical estates. Russian serfdom underlay a vast system of unequal relations, personal and public: autocracy, bureaucratic hierarchies, employment practices, seigniorial authority, military regulations, family and gender bonds. Each displayed numerous forms of everyday personal expression in speech, posture, language, dress, manners, forms of address, and self-presentation. Class prejudices learned at home or in the garrison or chancery carried over to the theater school and backstage, to the Academy of Arts, and to the manor house. When some of the social barriers threatened to erode, snobbery and condescension often slammed the gates even tighter.
Expressive culture generated pleasure as it deployed power, and these became the central nexus between serfdom and the arts: the pleasure given by the material; the nuances of that pleasure among creators, performers, and audiences; the pain sometimes endured by those who were abused as free and unfree artists; and the framework of authority in which the culture was produced. Superimposing this thematic template over the social organization of the arts unavoidably highlights the social pathologies of serfdom. In exploring the fluid and sometimes ineffable connection between the light and the dark sides of the picture, I have tried to strike a balance between two familiar narratives: that of creativity and the sensual, esthetic, and enriching consumption of the arts; and that of the price some people had to pay for it.
Certain matters not present in the title thread throughout this book: private and public space, the growth of professionalism, and the emergence of national content in the arts—roughly corresponding to audience, artist, and the created work. In a recent collection of essays, several Russian scholars have attempted a synthetic and multidisciplinary approach to cultural space: “a representation of culture as an integral system, a definite sphere of social life, the patterned development of historical-cultural phenomena, and the forces shaping this development.” Like the late Yury Lotman, from whom they draw some inspiration, they scan the environment of creativity and its reception—particularly “cultural information systems as an element of cultural space."5 In plainer language, they examine the social context, over time, of shifts in cultural-social perception and the obstacles and accelerators that determined those shifts. In my schema, private space indicates the domestic sphere, hearth and home, the locus of family life, joined from time to time by relatives and friends. Public space, where everyone or almost everyone has access, may be either unrestricted and free of charge (fairgrounds and folk fairs) or open only to those with tickets (commercial theaters). This kind of arena, with a different name, has been called a “sphere of broad and largely unplanned encounter” among unequals, a place to ”make diversity agreeable."6 The public and the private represent the ends of a continuum between which lay a third sphere that I call social space—sites of private association such as Gentry Club, officers’ mess, regular salon, large-scale home entertainment—broader than family but still restricted. Kinship, law, and money are the determining and differentiating factors in these spaces. The private is set by institution and biology and cemented by affection. The social is created by invitation of one’s peers, often juridically defined. The public is unrestricted or defined by the market and sometimes by dress codes.
Applying elementary social-spatial concepts yields complex combinations and variants over time. To take one development, when the owners of a domestic serf theater or orchestra regularly invited neighboring gentry into their home as guests and spectators for extended visits, private space escalated into social space. The proliferation of such cultural-social spaces under serfdom—that is the manorial theater or musical ensemble—indirectly constricted public space. As manorial entertainments became more lavish in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, lesser gentry flocked to the big houses for diversion as well as to district and provincial Gentry Clubs (Noble Assemblies). As a nearly closed caste, the gentry, except on certain feast days, needed no “public space” in which to disport themselves. Well before the end of the period here studied, however, public space began to expand, much more so in the provinces than in the capitals. The incursion of commercial theater troupes (ironically often staffed by serfs) and visiting virtuosos opened up constantly growing venues where a mixed public could assemble. How this and other modulations of cultural space worked out in detail is unrolled throughout the chapters; and its implications for the emergence of a public sphere will become clear.
Recent literature has recounted the constant struggle for professionalism in the late nineteenth century against many obstacles. The question of who had it, how much they had, and who else could get it persisted up to the Revolution of 1917. In the pre-reform era, the term was hardly used. The struggle in the arts for professionalization—the legal and social-psychological recognition of trained practitioners as accepted members of the community—varied greatly, from the entitled academic artist to the unrecognized musician to the shady denizen of the stage. At the Academy of Arts, even serfs could work their way to freedom and status. The Academy designation for its graduates, Free Artist, became a watchword for other cultural occupations bereft of that honor. Russian performers of the Imperial Theater system had steady employment, regular (if mostly low) salaries, and retirement benefits. Trained musicians and composers in the capital (unless employed by the Imperial Theaters) had few of these things. Lacking the equivalent of the Academy and the Theater School, musicians had to await the opening of the conservatories before attaining something like the status and consciousness of being professionals.
Needless to say, serfs who remained unfree could never gain anything like the status that the word “professional” implies: independence, respect, guild membership. Beyond the capitals things were not much better for those—free, unfree, or semifree—who toiled in the world of art. Except for the few scattered art schools with ties to the Petersburg Academy, almost no professional training centers existed. The classical music scene was dominated by gentry amateurs, and the provincial theater by serfs and other lower- or middle-class elements. In one sense, serfdom and amateurism formed a vise that constricted the growth of strictly professional actors and musicians during the early nineteenth century. And yet, the enormous spread of serf and amateur performance and its audiences laid the foundations for the astonishing explosion of the arts after the emancipation of 1861. The distribution of private and social versus public space made the amateur-serf combination prevail in music and theater. Once provincial theater spread and grew, actors’ isolation from the private and social spaces of estate culture proved to be an advantage: performing for mixed audiences of “their own kind” (merchants, townspeople) as well as gentry promoted the use of a vernacular delivery and thus fed into an increasingly “Russian” theater culture.
The emergence of Russian national consciousness in social thought and literature from the eighteenth century onward is familiar scholarly territory, usually seen through the lens of literature, the salon, and the thick journals of the intelligentsia. The national and social narratives contained or implied in canvases, stage plays, and musical works have their own stories to tell about what it meant to be Russian. National consciousness is an awareness turned into self-definition via the imagery of difference, affinities, essentialism. It can be, among other things, an ideology with philosophical underpinning, historical perspectives, and mythologies. It can also begin with self-discovery. That moment arrived in the eighteenth century when Russians found the vocabulary to set themselves off from the much-too-emulated French.7 The Napoleonic wars widened and reinforced an identity fashioned from a reverse image of a hated enemy. But the imported culture had become too entrenched by 1812 to allow its overthrow. Accompanying the political reaction of the latter part of Tsar Alexander’s reign came a resurgence of French cultural hegemony, though diluted by other European inflows. The cycle turned again in the reign of Nicholas I.
As national impulses emerged in public discourse, the monarchy sought to control, deflect, or sublimate them into dynastic ideology, finally shaping up as Official Nationalism under Tsar Nicholas, a doctrine that accommodated the European elements in the self-image of the Russian monarchy. During his long reign (1825-1855), a process of renationalization took place at several levels and at different tempos. At the top, the tsar required speaking Russian at court, effected symbolic linkages with “the people” at ceremonies, presented a family image at odds with the loose court morality of the eighteenth century, built Orthodox churches in what was seen as a Russian style, and promoted the Church itself which had suffered somewhat at the hands of the Protestant-mystical policies of Alexander I. Tsar Nicholas’ Minister of Education, Sergei Uvarov, articulated the doctrine of Official Nationalism in a triune formula of Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Narodnost. At the base of its rather vague elements, lay specific implications: absolute rule, Russia as a European monarchy in the tradition of Peter the Great, the supremacy of the Orthodox faith, and a spiritual union of tsar and people. These themes were taken up with alacrity by painters, playwrights, and composers and reached their apogee with the historical-dynastic dramas of Kukolnik and Polevoi and with Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar in 1836.8
At that very moment “a shot rang out in the dark night”: Pëtr Chaadaev’s famous philosophical letters which threw down a challenge to Official Nationalism and at the same time created a schism between two other national voices. The Westernizers sought patriotically to turn Russia more steadily toward the West, not that of European dynasticism but of modern legal and political forms. Their friendly Moscow adversaries, the Slavophiles, rejected much of the European baggage of Official Nationalism and harked back to Muscovy, projecting a vision of Russia as an organic, spiritual community, the product of a unique national development. No sooner had Slavophilism reached a certain maturity in the late 1840s than it began to merge unnoticed with Official Nationalism, both of which were transformed and subsumed in yet a new vision of Russia—Native Soil conservatism. Needless to say, these ideological formations, so often reified beyond recognition, were in continual flux and never achieved the kind of coherence suggested in writings by and about their leading figures.
By the 1850s, several streams of cultural life were flowing together: “realism” and increasing national thematics in art and theater, a quest for an authentic Russian musical style, and a merchantry that began to patronize Russian art. In the background, a chorus of voices sang the newly synthesized Russian ideology and fused it with the changing relationship among the arts, their institutional setting, and the social and geographical background that shaped a national tone. Literature, drama, and painting fed each other native and popular motifs. Artists bridled at the constraints of the academic style. Serfs arrived on stage and on canvas draped in a gritty realism and a touch of menace. Provincial actors, including ex-serfs, brought their modes of smalltown stagecraft and speech inflections to the Imperial Theaters. And Moscow emerged as the center of what seemed to contemporaries to be both “real” and "Russian"—concepts eventually conflated with the notion of artistic “truth.” The process owed much to personal inspiration and the curiosity of individual creators. The widening of the social ambit of all the arts from the 1830s onward, reaching a long apogee in the subsequent decades, generated a parallel breadth of vision and self-discovery by individual creative figures of inner forces, ambivalences, and psychological tensions that laid the foundations of Russia’s greatest era of artistic creativity.
The opening chapter contains a panorama of socio-cultural space followed by two chapters on music (at home and in public), three on theater (capital and provincial), and two on art (academic and otherwise). The final chapter takes up the convergence of social and cultural developments on the eve of the Great Reforms and looks forward to what is to come. The bibliography will give a sense of where I have found my material. I have shared the interest of the scholars of the Moscow-Tartu school in hard surfaces, material things, dance steps, apparel, even meals in reconstructing the semiosphere of an age.9 I have often found myself arguing with Soviet scholars about their readings of culture that displayed political correctness, overblown and retrospective Russian nationalism, esthetic elitism (often contradicted by a democratic populism), and the moralizing traditions of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia. Yet many of them, even those who wrote in the Stalinist years, made meticulous use of the sources and managed to retain an accuracy and decency in their interpretations under very difficult conditions. Two often coexisting tendencies in the literature have painted the picture in contrasting colors. The nostalgia school tends to exalt the beauties created and the refined pleasures enjoyed in aristocratic homes and palaces, provided by the talent of their human property. The victim school dwells on the pain induced by seigniorial power and unfree labor. Both elements are essential to the story and indeed both pervaded the rich Soviet historiography of serfdom and culture, creating a tension between a veneration for high culture and an ideology that stressed class exploitation.