PART V

Finale and Overture

9

When Did the Real Day Dawn?

The day passes and so does the night

—Taras Shevchenko, 1860

When, then, will the real day dawn?

—Nikolai Dobrolyubov, 1860

A relatively unnoticed but illuminating event of 1858 brings us full circle back to the hardship story of a serf musician and puts it in a new frame. The serf owner P. K. Vonlyarlyarsky of Smolensk Province, it will be recalled (chapter 2), had refused stubbornly to free his cellist and violinist. The enserfed cellist, Vikenty Meshkov, appeared as soloist in a Moscow society concert in which a count, a prince, and several other nobles performed. The attentive elite audience received him cordially. The talent exhibited by the remarkable artist impressed a reporter for the Russian Herald, all the more so since, he said, the serf had received only two dozen lessons and was thus largely self-taught. In a comment on social relations, the journalist wrote: “In view of the warm reception given to a serf artist by people of privilege, the mind automatically raises a question: what draws together people from utterly different rungs of the social ladder, people with nothing in common?” In reply, he posited artistic activity as a social lubricant. “An even higher feeling has

brought about this movement: what we have here is the human being who has reached out a hand to another human being.” To illustrate the barriers to that human commonality, the journalist noted that, while the proceeds of the event would not go to Meshkov for the purchase of his freedom, rumor had it that a wealthy unnamed music lover had offered to redeem the cellist for the sum of three thousand rubles. Vonlyarlyarsky, however—as in the past—-declined the offer and promised to free him on his own. According to Herzen’s account published in The Bell, Vonlyarlyarsky made it clear that there had been no offer and that he would decline one if made, since he needed the two musicians to tutor his daughters. Whether Meshkov had to wait until 1861, the year of emancipation, is unknown.¹

Narratives of Awakening

If the years 1838-48 constituted a “marvelous decade,” then the slightly longer stretch from 1848 to 1861 might be named an “explosive decade.” After Nicholas died in 1855, during the Crimean War, the consciousness of imminent change thickened in society and grew lyrical in its articulation. During the war, Ivan Turgenev in a letter voiced the hope that the fall of Sevastopol would prove to be the Battle of Jena for Russia and thus usher in renewal and reform, as had happened in Prussia after its devastating defeat by Napoleon. The Crimean War was a shocking revelation of Russia’s apparent backwardness, not only in military prowess but in all aspects of national organization. Scores of articles poured forth a stream of hope that a new era was about to dawn; and they invoked well-established similes about a new day, light after darkness, a bright morning for society and for the nation. The euphoria of expectation was palpable. A new journal devoted to sustaining the mood called itself Daybreak. Some took up another metaphor: when Ostrovsky’s The Storm appeared in 1859, the heavy climatic atmosphere in the final act followed by the crack of thunder and teeming rain was seen as emblematic of cleansing away the filth of the past. In 1857, Dobrolyubov (fig. 66) compared his country to Ilya Muromets of Russian epic who had slumbered for thirty years—a sly jab at the reign of Nicholas I—and then woke up brimming with strength to accomplish great deeds. The radical exile Herzen, who had founded his paper The Bell as an alarm clock, exclaimed that the country was “suddenly awakened.” Russians’ developing interest in their own country sharpened; they wished to know not only where it was going, but what it actually was. When emancipation came in 1861, Mikhail Shchepkin exclaimed “I don’t want to die. The times are good. Everything is moving forward. One must live.” Sofya Soboleva had a character in an 1863 story recall the moment when the dawn brought not only light but a general awakening of people, of life, of new forces:

Even in the drawing-rooms of our provincial town, the words “the modern world,” “emancipation,” “progress” had become common currency. “Thank God,” I thought. It felt as though a huge forest had woken from its enchanted sleep. Millions of voices had begun to mutter, to chatter, to make noises that might only be half-articulate as yet, but which were already distinct. And every now and then some fully formed note would sound amidst that disorganized racket, with the promise of a delightful harmony in time.²

The new tsar, Alexander II, set the reform process going with statements of intent to bring about emancipation of the serfs; and with the enunciation of glasnost, the lifting of the more absurd aspects of Tsar Nicholas’s censorship and a modest allowance of public discussion in the press. Scholars have argued for a century and a half over what made the tsar move to free the serfs. No single cause can be reasonably isolated. Russia’s economic lag, its recent defeat by smaller European powers fighting on its own soil, and the escalating and worrisome incidence of peasant disorder combined to persuade the monarch that the time for delay was past. Historians must take seriously his oft-quoted warning to the gentry that “if we do not emancipate the peasants from above, they might do it themselves from below.” Even ninety years after the bloody Pugachev uprising, the very thought of another one could still bring shivers of alarm. The number of peasant disturbances had grown exponentially in the last years of Nicholas I. One hundred thirty-nine murders of landowners and stewards and seventy failed attempts occurred in the years 1836-51; in 1852-55 alone the combined number was fifty-nine.³

The easing of censorship brought an explosion of new journals and increased circulation of older ones, though theater censorship remained stringent. One hundred fifty new newspapers appeared in 1856-60. The unofficial pages of the government provincial gazettes came alive with material that went beyond the usual doses of information on shows and entertainments, thus helping to weaken the line between the state and the public sphere. The new dispensation allowed the sometimes strident and always trenchant views of radical journalists to spread far and wide. Nikolai Chernyshevsky preached a shadowy version of peasant land redistribution bordering on socialism. Herzen’s talk of a populist “Russian socialism” came in illegally across the frontiers. Nikolai Dobrolyubov and Dmitry Pisarev glossed the plays of Ostrovsky and the novels of Goncharov and Turgenev with social and rebellious readings. In his famous 1860 review of Turgenev’s On the Eve, Dobrolyubov catalogued a long line of useless and superfluous literary characters whose real counterparts, he claimed, populated the Russian social landscape. He titled his review ''When, then, will the real day dawn?"⁴ Within a half-dozen years after the Crimean War, Dr. Nikolai Pirogov had opened the “woman question” to public gaze and M. L. Mikhailov and Chernyshevsky had enlarged its implications.⁵

The deluge of words did not dry up on the page. Salons had been buzzing for a decade about the fictions of Grigorovich and Turgenev on the peasant question. Serfdom became the holy issue of issues. The notion of liberating a mass of humanity naturally opened a whole discourse on “freedom” and justice—for Negro slaves in America; for Italians from the Habsburg yoke; and for Russian priests, women, young people, and all the downtrodden and destitute, the insulted and humiliated. Russian towns and cities were swept with a breath of bracing air and deafened with the clamor of optimistic rhetoric. A new generation of students turned words into deeds in a series of university disturbances that lasted well into the 1860s and helped feed the even more dedicated bands of outright revolutionaries who endeavored to upset the state and introduce a form of socialism across the land.⁶

Amidst the maelstrom of liberation talk, subtler movements accompanied the forces of emancipation and the attendant reforms: limited social convergence, the swelling of a merchant interest in national culture, and professional assertion—all intimately tied to creative activity. The introduction of self-government in provincial and district bodies—the zemstvos—threw together divergent social classes in deliberative institutions and spawned widespread openings for professional agronomists, physicians, and other specialists. The new law courts, judicial procedures, juries, and justices of the peace brought people of all classes into public and official venues, surrounded by a burgeoning legal profession.⁷ Grassroots movements of social activism that sprung up in the capitals and provincial towns multiplied spaces where people of diverse backgrounds purposely mingled. In the 1860s, student groups, radical circles, and even residential communes were open to men and women, Russians and non-Russians (including Jews), nobles and those at or near the bottom of the social scale. The intelligentsia ran Sunday Schools for workers in the years 1859-62. A Literary Fund with branches in Saratov, Ekaterinoslav, Grodno, Odessa, Taganrog, Tambov, Tver, and Vilna had a mixed ethnic and social makeup.⁸ Most such organizations were battered and eventually closed down as seditious; but their spontaneous formation revealed a movement toward social interaction, leaping over traditional boundaries.

By the time of emancipation, the juridical class or soslovie system had been slowly eroding. Already in the eighteenth century, alongside clergy, merchants, townspeople, and peasants—themselves subdivided—the vaguely defined raznochintsy had emerged and the gentry had ramified into as many as six categories. Even this elaboration of terms could not accommodate the variety of social and occupational divisions springing up all around. The state, in the words of Gregory Freeze, “was gradually impelled to make new, larger loopholes and to deviate significantly from the basic principle of post-Petrine social policy."⁹ Although juridical lines continued to divide society, symbolic forces pointed the other way. Up until the 1850s, for example, gentry men maintained the shaven face which distinguished them from merchants, peasants, and most other members of the lower orders. In 1849, during an official dynastic celebration, the tsar had issued an order banning gentry beards. As Richard Wortman interprets this act, ”the beard symbolized a coming together of elite and people in a national culture whose features were not defined by the autocratic power."¹⁰ The ban did not last, and in subsequent decades it became more difficult to represent clear markers between social classes in art, photography, and on the stage. Both the slight but real diminution of social barriers and the clarification and spread of professional identities flowed into the continuing development of a Russian national feeling.

The merchant estate, complex and varied, does not permit universal generalizations about its role in culture. For example, among the fifty or so wealthy serf industrialists who had made their fortunes on obrok and had been emancipated by 1861,¹¹ only a fraction ventured to support the arts. The patrons who appear in the coming pages lived mostly in Moscow, the center of Russia’s domestic wholesale trade, in greater numbers than in the capital.¹² Most Moscow merchants possessed no self-conscious or unified cultural doctrine, no armory of ideas, nor even the language to construct an ideology. Yet during the Crimean War, an active segment was converted to an alliance with Slavophilism on account of its conservative monarchism and hostility to Western liberalism. Personal bonds, journals, patriotic banquets, and shared views on national economic self-sufficiency drove the alliance. The Slavophile Ivan Aksakov saw the merchants “as a link between the peasantry and the upper classes.” The Official Nationalist Mikhail Pogodin—like Polevoi before him—shared some of the Slavophile views and praised the “remarkable, benevolent Moscow merchants” for their financial contributions to the war effort. Apollon Grigorev, prophet of the emerging “ideology of the soil” or Native Soil conservatism ( pochvennichestvo), hailed the merchantry as inclusive, bearded, moneyed, and ready to patronize both art and commerce; broader than the gentry elite; more energetic than the peasants, and thus a capacious carrier of values and the embodiment of the Russian national spirit. In this vague blend of nationalisms, their sometimes foggy intellectual formulations were downplayed, and merchant capitalists were happy to pick and choose from all of them—in politics and in art—without being bothered by nuances.¹³ Ironically, at the moment of the first wave of a continuing intellectual assault upon merchants that made previous satirical jibes seem like innocent fun, a number of merchants emerged as vital agents in “nationalizing” the arts of Russia. The denizens of the “kingdom of darkness” often bore the standard of conservative progress, Russian patriotism, and artistic patronage. One scholar has argued that merchant cultural consumption, being largely theatrical and visual, lay outside both the literary mainstream and the “verbal, secularized culture of Russia’s intelligentsia.” She rightly stresses some parallels between merchant and peasant ways of life, however much they may have differed in income and occupation: the love of visual culture—icon and lubok—and eager participation in folk fairs. Merchants were singularly active in patronizing and supporting theater and the graphic arts, more so than either literature or music. Yet the best-known patrons of art music were the widow of an industrialist, Nadezhda von Meck, who subsidized Tchaikovsky; and the timber merchant Mitrofan Belyaev, who later sponsored some members of the Mighty Five.¹⁴ There were other exceptions: merchants who, emulating what they saw as their intellectual betters, scheduled literary evenings as well as performances at the Moscow Merchant Club; those who in 1844 offered to buy a house for the playwright and fabulist Ivan Krylov; and the great millionaire art buyer, Kozma (Kuzma) Soldatenkov, who had a close personal friendship with Nikolai Rubinstein. Members of the Moscow Hunting Society, founded in 1863, included Rubinstein, Stanislavsky (when he was still Alexeev) and the merchant-patrons Savva Mamontov, Tretyakov, Soldatenkov, and others.¹⁵

The rise of professionalism generated its own possibilities and problems for creative artists. Even in the realm of revolutionary violence, the disastrous amateur plotting of the Decembrists was about to be replaced by circles that would blossom into a professional underground of propagandists and later of terrorists.¹⁶ Definitions of professionalism usually speak of formal training, standards, mutual communication in print or meetings, some self-governance, the satisfaction of pride in performance, and an avid desire for respect from state and society—in other words for status. Russian professionals also sought relative freedom from the entanglements of state control, in return for which they preached a self-defined debt to society—thus their strong links to the values of the intelligentsia. Bureaucratic arrogance towards free professions lessened somewhat after emancipation, though it never eroded completely. Physicians, engineers, and lawyers walked the long road to professional independence as they built group identities outside the constricting coils of chanceries and regiments.¹⁷

For creative artists, serfdom, foreign specialists, and the proliferation of artistic amateurs had long stood as obstacles to status. Even before the serfs were freed in 1861, the campaigns against amateurism and foreign domination intensified. As of 1861, Peter the Great’s approach to imbibing foreign culture remained in place to a large degree, not only in the content of the imports, but in the mode of receiving it: bringing foreigners to Russia, sending Russians abroad. Skills in ship design and ordnance were high on Peter’s shopping list; Catherine II and her successors added cultural products and talent to that list. At the moment of emancipation, Germans were still very visible in the instrumental music world, French and Italian figures in opera and ballet. Ironically, the call for the upgrading of professional training for Russians generated a contradiction, because in some realms of artistic expression, notably instrumental music and graphic art—neither requiring native proficiency in the Russian language—professionalism came to be identified in some quarters as antinational.

Nationhood in Counterpoint

When Anton Rubinstein returned to Russia from Europe in 1858, the classical music scene did not look promising. Glinka had held his “last salon” at his sister’s home in the summer of 1854 and bid what were to be his farewells to Lvov, Serov, Dargomyzhsky, Ulybyshev, and Balakirev. Glinka died in Berlin in 1857. As with Beethoven in Germany in the late nineteenth century, all parties claimed Glinka as their idol. A biographer of Tchaikovsky has written of Ruslan and Lyudmila that “no other work has ever had such a seminal importance in the annals of Russian music.” Yet at the moment of Glinka’s death, no one seemed ready to take up his work on a grand scale or to act as the central figure of Russian musical life. Dargomyzhsky and Serov had not yet proven themselves, and were temperamental and standoffish to boot. The Mighty Five had yet to emerge, and the seventeen-year-old student Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky still sat on the benches in law school. None displayed much organizational energy. Mikhail Vielgorsky had died in 1856; and General Lvov was beset by jealousy and had delegated much of his Capella work to his assistants. Rubinstein, a prophet returning from the wilderness, was an outsider still snubbed for his Vienna article demeaning Russian music (chapter 3).¹⁸

The birth of the Russian Musical Society and the St. Petersburg Conservatory, both dedicated to Russian music and to professionalized higher education, proved the catalyst that generated a burst of creative energy as well as a querulous flood of invective. Claims to the idea of establishing a higher music school have been made by and for many. Friedrich Scholtz, who worked in the Capella and in the Imperial Theaters, as early as 1819 had hatched plans for a “conservatory” in the form of free classes in his home. But he died in the cholera epidemic of 1830. Vladimir Stasov, no admirer of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, noted that she broached the idea of a Russian conservatory to Clara and Robert Schumann in 1844. In 1849, the ex-serf composer Daniil Kashin set up a school in Moscow for all social classes at free or low-cost tuition, but died a year later. The violinist Afanasev claimed that he wrote a proposal for a conservatory in the 1850s that Mikhail Vielgorsky and Lvov brushed off; and that it was given by the Tula landowner and cellist V. A. Kologrivov to his friend Anton Rubinstein. Another Rubinstein friend, N. D. Kashkin, reported that the Russian Musical Society scheme arose from the Rubinstein brothers at a family holiday gathering. Elena Pavlovna and Anton Rubinstein often discussed a conservatory at the Mikhailovsky Palace and in Nice. In 1858, the talk turned to action. Rubinstein, upon his return, though spurned privately by other composers, possessed a major European reputation. Feeling unfulfilled as Elena Pavlovna’s court pianist, he launched a musical salon at his Petersburg flat on the Fontanka where he and others aired their dreams about the future of Russian musical life (fig. 67).¹⁹

The founders of the Russian Musical Society, going beyond the efforts of existing Petersburg organizations, aspired, in the words of its charter, “to effect the spread of musical education in Russia, facilitate the development of all branches of musical art, and encourage talented Russian composers, performers, and music teachers.” The society, a protoconservatory in disguise, sought to perform the functions of the Academy of Arts and the Theater School, but with a national outreach to acquaint the public with Russian and foreign musical art in schools and branches all over the country. Largely the brainchild of Rubinstein and Kologrivov, the society was launched in the home of Matvei Vielgorsky in 1859. To avoid delays, it adopted the 1847 charter of the Vielgorskys’ now defunct Symphonic Society. On the board sat Rubinstein, Kologrivov, Kashkin, Dmitry Stasov (Vladimir's brother), and the Grand Duchess, who secured donations from the imperial family and aristocrats. Lvov declined to join the prize committee and forbade his singers from appearing with the Russian Musical Society. The society, under august sponsorship, held its first rehearsals (though only for two hours a week) at the Mikhailovsky Palace. The inaugural season of 1859-60 obtained first-rate musicians from St. Petersburg’s musical forces.²⁰ At the first concert in November the audience heard Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila overture, Rubinstein’s G Minor Piano Concerto, the finale of Handel’s Jephta, an excerpt from Mendelssohn’s unfinished Lorelei, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. A capacity audience of about nine hundred filled the Gentry Club. To the ten concerts per year were added chamber performances. Flushed with success after the first season, the Russian Musical Society organizers dedicated the box office receipts to the campaign for a conservatory of music.²¹

On the eve of emancipation, foreigners, state employees, serfs, and dilettantes had made up the Russian musical community rather than a professional body of free artists. It was still natural to identify amateurs as Russians and professionals as foreigners (mostly ethnic Germans). In the 1860s, popular fiction continued to poke fun at domestic music lessons. A character in the Sofya Soboleva story cited above snidely dismissed the ubiquitous piano lessons for young girls which “flooded Russia with bad lady musicians and with incompetent music mistresses.” In January 1861, Rubinstein, in the very midst of his conservatory campaign, addressed musical amateurism at large in a blistering article in The Age, tersely titled “Concerning Music in Russia.” Amateurs, he wrote, were poorly trained by foreign tutors who, to mollify the parents, exposed pupils to easy tunes rather than rigorous exercises. Amateurs could take up music as a hobby or avocation since they scorned fame and faced no critical response or shortage of money. Between the lines, one can easily discern Rubinstein’s desire to turn the tables on patronizing attitudes towards artistic public performance, an attitude that had prevented noblemen like Mikhail Buturlin from singing and General Lvov from playing the violin in a public venue. That attitude derived from pride of birth rather than achievement. As for state schools, Rubinstein believed that both the theater and Court Capella, the only musical training centers in Russia, produced mere “civil servants’ rather than ”free artists.''²² With all his faults, his volcanic temper, and his colossal ego, Rubinstein had the wit and courage to challenge the very core of the Russian social code.

Projecting his own experience, Rubinstein believed that making good music required full-time dedication, hard work, some suffering and sacrifice, and a desire for personal success, fame, and even money—as well as a willingness to face critics. Russia needed a market place of competition, an updraft of talent from every class and element, and a rigorous training system that would eventually replace foreigners with competent Russian musicians. Rubinstein did not hesitate to unveil the dirty word “ambition”—pride of profession and an upward trajectory. A telling incident of 1850, described with angry astonishment in his autobiography, had revealed to him in a flash the harsh truth about his place in the ascriptive society he lived in. After making his confession at the Kazan Cathedral, he identified himself in the confessional register as “artist.” The deacon challenged Rubinstein’s title since he was attached to no school, theater, or government body. In the end, the pianist known all over Europe simply had to write “son of a merchant.” The deacon’s persistent query, “What then are you?” and society’s obsession with rank showed Rubinstein that, since he was no noble, official, military man, teacher, or theater employee, and had received no diploma at the hands of his private teachers, he was in a sense a “nobody.” This, he claimed, fueled his determination to create in Russia the title Free Artist for the independent professional musician, equivalent to that of Free Artist of the Academy of Arts with its concomitant status.²³

Rubinstein's crusade transcended his undeniable personal ambition²⁴ as he fought to upgrade the status and proficiency of musicians, convinced as he was that Russia could not advance much further in musical glory without dedicated professional institutions. The hundred-year rise and fall of serf orchestras had produced precious few serious musicians and only one great composer who had been exposed to them—Glinka. Teachers, composers, performers of music enjoyed no civil rights as such unless employed by the school system or the Imperial Theaters.²⁵ Real talent was often squandered for lack of subsidized high-level musical training for the gifted poor. Apollon Gussakovsky (1841-75), in part a victim of this lack, was a promising composer, a portion of whose symphony was well received at the Petersburg University concerts in 1861. But, afflicted with tuberculosis and impoverished by the need to support a large family, he died at the age of thirty-four without having fulfilled his early promise, and was much lamented by Balakirev, Stasov, Musorgsky, and others.²⁶ By creating a conservatory and the social networks around it, Rubinstein hoped to achieve professionalism for musicians: specialized higher knowledge, group consciousness, and at least a partial acceptance in society of the more outstanding musical figures.

Resistance to building another imperial school for the arts surfaced in various forms, some of them bizarre. When Odoevsky tried to raise money for a conservatory in 1859 from Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, she replied: “Oh, I cannot understand music. It grates on my nerves. And where would the money come from?” Rubinstein’s 1860 petition to the Ministry of Education was turned down. His public appeal in the press backfired because of its antidilettante tone. Elena Pavlovna then lobbied in the highest circles and the Ministry of the Court gave its assent. In October 1861, eight months after the emancipation of the serfs, the conservatory was chartered, though variants on the term “school” were sometimes used to describe it. A year later it opened with classes held at first in the Mikhailovsky Palace and in private homes. In 1869, a regular base was found and in 1896 the conservatory took up abode in the place where it stands today—Theater Square, the site of the old St. Petersburg Bolshoi Stone Theater and opposite the Mariinsky Theater.²⁷

Born in the postserfdom era, the St. Petersburg Conservatory became the first higher school with open admissions for pupils of both genders and all classes and nationalities, including Jews, who could leave the Pale to study music. Literate children fourteen and above with musical talent could apply, and scholarships were available for the poor. All enjoyed exemption from taxes and army service; graduates, like those of the Academy, earned the coveted title Free Artist.²⁸ Despite Rubinstein’s determination to “Russianize” the musical profession, German music was privileged and a shortage of qualified Russians led to hiring foreign instructors for the time being.²⁹ The conservatory’s mission of training teachers, players, and singers of both sexes to make a respected professional livelihood was also meant to help fill the “silent provinces” with good music. One of its first pupils, the twenty-one-year-old Tchaikovsky, moved to Moscow in 1865, where Nikolai Rubinstein would open the that city’s conservatory in 1866. The Moscow Conservatory was by no means a mere extension of Anton’s St. Petersburg achievement. Nikolai Rubinstein, a more gregarious type than his brother, had propagandized for it to his friends, who included playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, the “Ostrovsky stars” Prov Sadovsky and Lyubov Nikulina-Kositskaya, and the editors of the Muscovite. Alexei Verstovsky, to his credit, supported the conservatory as well, though he died on the eve of its opening.³⁰

Rubinstein's triumph in creating the St. Petersburg Conservatory exceeded his personal fame as a virtuoso. He needed to routinize his charisma through an institution. The musical star of prereform Russia had been but a satellite still orbiting around the real stars—emperor, grand duchesses, aristocrats. With the conservatory in place, Rubinstein’s star quality could no longer be overshadowed in quite the same way. Tendentious as it might sound, the Soviet musicologist Boris Asafiev’s notion that Rubinstein’s struggle represented one between “lordly culture” and “raznochintsy culture” is essentially true.³¹ After the Revolution of 1917, all institutions bearing the designation “Imperial” were renamed. The St. Petersburg and Moscow conservatories would, by ordinary rules of courtesy and historical accuracy, have been named after the Rubinstein brothers. Instead they were and remain named after, respectively, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. There is of course little to debate about the musical eminence of these two pairs; the Rubinsteins did not achieve long-lasting renown as composers outside Russia. Considerations of ethnic origin probably played no role in the Soviet naming. But ethnic origins did become an issue in the 1860s when a Russian musical identity was being constructed. The conservatory, seen as a godsend to some musical figures, looked to others like a threat.

Vladimir Stasov (1824-1906), the most vocal opponent of Rubinstein’s vision and one of the most influential voices in late nineteenth-century Russian culture, vigorously promoted both the Mighty Five circle of composers and the Itinerant school of painters. Son of a prominent Petersburg architect, well traveled, and steeped in European culture, Stasov played four-hand piano arrangements at home and possessed an impressive technical musical knowledge. As a student in the 1830s and 1840s, he found a vibrant musical environment at the School of Jurisprudence, founded in 183 5 and set in an imposing edifice on the Fontanka opposite the Summer Garden, where Tchaikovsky dropped out and where—a generation later—Lenin persevered for a law degree. The director, a music lover, engaged Henselt, Knecht, and Schuberth, among others, to teach music there. Tsar Nicholas visited the “aviary” in the dorm where students squeaked out their sounds on various instruments. An official complained that the “lazy and proud schoolboys who were incapable of composing a report, ... danced and sang magnificently” and gave school concerts. Stasov conducted “duels” at the piano with Alexander Serov. Stasov claimed that the training at the school was better than that later provided at the conservatory, allegedly because the teaching was “freer.”³² Thus was planted the seed of Stasov’s antiprofessionalism.

Stasov hosted scholars, artists, and musicians (including Rubinstein) at his home, frequented concerts, and lectured on music history. A cultural organizer, Stasov wrote that “systematization, arranging in categories, had always been my passion in everything.” And as a freelance cultural critic, he reveled in polemics. “A person can only write well if he is in flames.”³³ Stasov remained inflammatory to the end of his long life. Like Rubinstein, he detested the influence of Italian opera in Russia and wanted to improve musical life, but their means conflicted. A polemic crystallized around Rubinstein’s January 1861 article, “Concerning Music in Russia,” which provoked a storm. Stasov responded within a month. Though he later poured venom on aristocratic dilettantes, Stasov now defended them because, though lazy and bereft of talent, they and their bad music caused no harm to Russian musical culture and occupied only limited social space, as opposed to bad music from so-called professionals. He opposed Rubinstein over the linked issues of ambition and academic preparation. Ambition, born of greed and the profit motive, stained the escutcheon of exalted creativity; and giving musicians the status of Free Artists would simply provide “bait” for those who aspired to title and privilege rather than to a life in art. A conservatory, said Stasov, would embody these evils and strangle spontaneous creativity with academic rules. Stasov claimed that Europe was now coming to recognize that “academies and conservatories serve only as breeding grounds for talentless people and aid the establishment in art of harmful ideas and tastes.” In a retrospective article of 1883 that achieved the status of scripture for a century, Stasov reiterated his arguments against academic degrees and titles and criticized Rubinstein’s conservatory as the undesirable equivalent of the Academy of Arts.³⁴ No one seemed to notice at the time that three or four generations of amateur music-making were consigned to the trash bin by both Stasov and Rubinstein.

The pedagogical tussle hardened into a war over national authenticity that was sharpened by personal animosities. Some of the fault lay with Rubinstein, who with his arrogant personality did not take kindly to contradiction. In later years, Konstantin Stanislavsky noted Rubinstein’s “lava-like temperament.”³⁵ While in company, Rubinstein could hold his tongue; when he picked up the pen, he too often dipped it in acid. But his adversaries surpassed him in venom and saw him as another Stolz who tried to outshine all the lazy Russian Oblomovs. Rubinstein’s draconian work habits and demands for punctuality, scheduling, and discipline seemed a standing insult to the allegedly more relaxed “Russian” manner. Stasov socialized with Rubinstein at musical events, but down deep he disdained him. “Mr. Rubinstein,” he wrote in 1861, “is a foreigner, with nothing in common either with our national character or our art,” an obvious reference to his family name, foreign training, and perhaps his Jewish origins.³⁶ Though Stasov employed what was by this time the less polite zhid as well as the neutral evrei (Jew) in his various references to Rubinstein, his anti-Semitism was selective rather than sweeping. For example, in speaking of the young composer Serov’s “Jewish talent,” Stasov patronizingly praised the “good” side of his Jewishness in contrast to Rubinstein’s.³⁷ Rubinstein’s alleged "foreignness"—his European training and musical contacts—outweighed his specific Jewishness for Stasov whose hostility would have been the same had Rubinstein been an ethnic German. Rubinstein’s association with the German-born Elena Pavlovna also counted against him, although both men disliked her. Stasov, alluding to the despised Offenbach, called the grand duchess “la belle Helene," and her ”German party"—"archreactionary" foes of Russian national culture.³⁸

Stasov's colleagues displayed even greater rudeness: Musorgsky called Rubinstein Tupinstein (“Dullstone”), the conservatory a German Musical Ministry, and Elena Pavlovna Auntie Alyona (or Arena, a sometimes affectionate, but in this case dismissive, diminutive of Elena). He also blasted Rubinstein’s concept of the “artist” as a bombastic and imported token of “fame and money.” Balakirev dubbed Rubinstein a “musical Baltic German general.”³⁹ Stasov was wont to contrast Rubinstein’s origins with the provincial and purely Russian ones of Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, and even Musorgsky, who had come to St. Petersburg at age ten. In fact, Balakirev descended from Tatars. As for the remaining members of the Five: the Petersburg-born Alexander Borodin’s biological father had a Tatar lineage;⁴⁰ and César Cui’s family background was part French and part Lithuanian, and he had studied with the Polish composer Stanislaw Moniuszko. Stasov himself was born in St. Petersburg; when he heard that his family might have had a Prussian ancestry, he exclaimed: “Germans indeed! How unpleasant.”⁴¹ Stasov’s schoolmate Alexander Serov was partly Jewish. A grandfather, Karl Gablitz (Hablitz, Gablits, 1752-1821) of Konigsberg, had converted to Orthodoxy and served with distinction under Catherine II as senator, state councillor, vice governor, scientist, and explorer. On learning of their Jewish ancestry, Serov and his sister ironically exclaimed “We are Jews!” As a mature composer, Serov became an outspoken anti-Semite. He called the Russian Musical Society the Jew Musikverein and the conservatory the Piano Synagogue. In an 1862 article on Rubinstein, Serov described the Russian musical scene as “virgin soil” exploited by foreign seekers of the “Promised Land” who resembled the Jewish tavern keeper, Yankel, in Gogol’s Taras Bulba. Serov never joined Stasov’s camp, but maintained an unrelenting animosity to the Rubinsteins.⁴²

It was against this culturally turbulent background that the assembly of Russian musical genius came into being that came to be known in translation as the Mighty Five or Mighty Little Handful (Moguchaya kuchka): Balakirev, César Cui (Tsesar Kyui, 1835-1918), Musorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov, three of whom were to achieve lasting fame outside Russia. Stasov originally coined the term in a review of a concert organized by Balakirev in 1867 for a Pan-Slav meeting to designate the composers on the program: Balakirev, Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. While Stasov served as prophet and defender of the faith, it was Mily Balakirev (1836-1910) who inspired and organized the composers’ circle, which came into being between 1856 when he met Cui and 1862 when he met Borodin. It was at first called simply pyatero or the Five. Later both designations took hold. In any case, the achievements of the Mighty Five are central to Russian musical history from the 1860s onward up to today and have been analyzed in hundreds of scholarly studies. Though long exposed by disinterested investigators, various myths persist about the Five: they held to a unified ideology; as idealists, they lacked economic or career motives; they and only they produced authentic, national, and folkish Russian music; and their foes were foreign-inspired intriguers.⁴³

After coming to St. Petersburg from Nizhny Novgorod where he had cut his musical teeth, Balakirev made a name for himself in public concerts as a pianist and composer (fig. 68). His first major work, the 1855-56 Piano Concerto in F-sharp Minor, resonates with the styles of Schumann, Chopin, and Mendelssohn (whom Balakirev later contemptuously called “Mendel”), with barely discernable Russian overtones. Balakirev, a neurotic bundle of contra dictions and an extreme Russian chauvinist, disliked Jews, Germans, Poles, and Catholics. He promoted the use of “eastern” motifs that he discovered during a visit to the Caucasus, out of which came his Islamey: Fantasy on Oriental Themes. Though he despised Europe, Balakirev wrote one of his best works, King Lear, with a European style and subject matter. An avid reader of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, he distrusted the aristocratic elite and its amateurism, touted self-teaching and spontaneous inspiration, and proclaimed the narod the fount of art. Yet his politically reactionary views made him fear the masses. Though a dyed-in-the-wool nationalist, Balakirev hated Russia’s vaunted center, Moscow, yet aspired to write a Kremlin Symphony.⁴⁴

Balakirev, sharing Stasov’s views on Rubinstein and the conservatory, longed to create a specifically Russian school of musical culture. Both he and Gavriil Lomakin have been credited with the idea of a private “counter-conservatory,” the Free Music School. The word “free” (besplatnaya) in the title meant “free of charge” and had nothing to do with Rubinstein’s notion of Free (svobodnyi) Artist. The school was inspired by the Sunday schools for the common people that flourished in St. Petersburg in the early 1860s. With permission of the city administration, the Free School opened in 1862. It issued no diplomas initially and had no official state sponsorship, though it did attract the patronage of Grand Duke Nikolai Alexandrovich and later of the tsar himself. The free tuition and the evening and Sunday schedule allowed for a broad admissions policy which attracted not only the middle classes, but shop clerks, seamstresses, chambermaids, and even factory workers. Lomakin taught vocal and Balakirev instrumental music. The curriculum allowed European music, but taught at a lower level than at the conservatory. Balakirev had had no systematic training and he preached to his disciples that they did not need it either.⁴⁵ There are indications that Musorgsky nourished an aristocratic contempt for hard work and serious application, although Rimsky-Korsakov's claim that “he gave himself over to [music] only in his leisure hours”⁴⁶ must be treated skeptically. Some of the others in the Five also proudly flaunted their indifference to formal training. The conflicting visions of the Rubinstein and Stasov camps about Russian musical life and its role in society came into sharp relief in the contrast between the conservatory and the Free Music School.

The musical schism of the 1860s, despite its sometimes absurd rhetorical posturing, probably enriched rather than hindered musical advancement in Russia. Each side doubled its efforts to outdo the other. Prior to 1861, most would-be composers who aspired to further heights had to pass through the hands of foreigners in Russia or abroad. With the growth of aspiring amateur composers and nonserf musicians came a demand for Russian home-grown education. Both the conservatories and the Free School in their different ways help fill this need.

The Volga Generation

Ironically, the reign of the new tsar, Alexander II, constricted rather than expanded public theatrical performance space by stiffening a regulatory process begun under his father. From the 1840s several directives had issued forth from the Ministry of the Court, designed to protect the ticket sales of the Imperial Theaters by limiting, forbidding, or controlling virtually all public entertainments in the capitals without prior permission of the Directorate. The campaign culminated in an 1854 law that placed all entertainment in the two capitals—balls, masquerades, concerts, and some charity affairs—under the Directorate, which now had the power to grant permits, control the repertoire, and garner one-fourth of the profits. Violators were reprimanded. The Crimean War had generated many benefit concerts in gentry, merchant, and artisan clubs outside the purview of Directorate; and the use of imperial artists in these caused dismay, since they repeated numbers already performed on the stages of the Imperial Theaters. Henceforth only charity concerts fell outside this law which was confirmed by Tsar Alexander Il in 1862.⁴⁷

In 1856-58 a Committee to Review the Deficit of the Imperial Theaters, chaired by Count V. F. Adlerberg and including director Gedeonov and writer Vladimir Sollogub, addressed the theater monopoly question and the financial problems that regularly plagued the theater system which, despite subsidies, was deep in debt. The spending pattern continued to show a preference for Petersburg over Moscow and for foreign productions over Russian ones. At the top stood ballet, followed by the three foreign companies, Russian opera, and, at the bottom, Russian drama. The level of monetary support ranged from 193,448 rubles per year for the ballet to 44,232 for Russian drama. Italian paychecks averaged 3,000 rubles per year; Russian, 1,140. More alarming, the entire outlay exceeded that of comparable European theaters. This unpleasant fact was lucidly revealed to the committee by Sollogub whom it had sent to study the theater system of Berlin, Vienna, and Paris for the 1857 season. He argued that the state’s historical role in Russian theater as a product of theater’s court origins was now obsolete. The cause of the deficit and decline of Russian theater was its lack of artistic freedom and choice. In prophetic terms, he insisted that the spread of Russian railways and the freeing of the lower classes would require new kinds of theatrical life. Otherwise, he warned, “only brilliant ballets and foreign spectacles” and not national art could flourish. Alluding to the swollen budgets for spectacles, Sollogub showed that, in number of performances, Russian drama in Petersburg had in 1857 outstripped all other genres. He proposed ending the monopoly by allowing private theaters to coexist beside the Imperial Theaters.⁴⁸

Count Adlerberg, a conservative, publicly endorsed Sollogub’s suggestions, but sent a secret memo to the tsar taking the opposite view. Adlerberg conceded the recreational function of theater, but strongly asserted its ideological role as a molder of public opinion and a moral force deflecting people from harmful pursuits such as card playing and idle talk that could lead to antistate activity. The Revolutions of 1848 and the Petrashevsky affair were barely a decade in the past. Adlerberg was also disturbed by the recent flood of plays critical of serfdom. To him, extending theater meant promoting a radical mood, since private theaters would become pulpits for antigovernment propaganda. He urged that the state monopoly be retained—especially since the French and German companies in Petersburg could not exist without a subsidy. Neither he nor others mentioned the competitive drain on audiences that a private sector would produce. Reading between the lines, a Soviet scholar not unreasonably interpreted the reverence for foreign productions among conservatives as suitably apolitical and attuned to aristocratic taste. Director Gedeonov echoed Adlerberg and raised the familiar lament about the anarchy of provincial theaters. Tsar Alexander II heeded their advice.⁴⁹ The monopoly had been put in place piecemeal by various administrative orders and practices. Now, in 1858, it was codified and remained in force until 1882, in the reign of Tsar Alexander III.

It is highly doubtful that eliminating the Imperial Theaters monopoly would have spelt financial disaster. After 1882 and the end of the monopoly, the new Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Bolshoi saw their greatest age, with operas of Borodin, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky, and the last-named's triumphs in the Marius Petipa ballets. The Alex-andrinsky Theater, graced by the popular Maria Savina, continued to draw crowds; and in Moscow, Russian drama flourished at the Maly. But, during the reign of Tsar Alexander II, while theaters proliferated in the provinces, those in the capitals were frozen.

Actors got a well-deserved jump in official status from Tsar Nicholas I, but not much change in their image. When Vasily Karatygin died in 1853, Tsar Nicholas, genuinely moved by the loss of his favorite, attended the church service and a few days later inquired of the actor’s brother about the death. Mikhail Shchepkin, by virtue of his dignity and engaging personality, had not only won hearts among all classes on and off stage, but also a certain social recognition. At a farewell banquet for him on the eve of his journey to Europe in 1853, Official Nationalists, Slavophiles, and Westernizing liberals converged to congratulate him. Mikhail Pogodin organized the affair and the toast was given by fellow Moscow University historian, Timofei Granovsky: “Honor and glory to this Russian artist who has worked in the field of art for practically half a century without growing weak in spirit, without his zeal flagging.” In 1855, Shchepkin was feted again at the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture for his fifty years on the stage, the first such testimonial to an actor. To an audience of actors, artists, and literary figures, the sculptor Ramazanov praised him for inspiring all artists. Shchepkin was also the first actor and the first ex-serf admitted to the exclusive English Club. But Shchepkin was an exception. Russia was still far from the moment when actors were universally adulated and received by all ranks of society, who would harken with reverence to their utterances about “my public” and the theater as a temple of art.⁵⁰

Gedeonov's sour complaint about the uncontrolled growth of provincial theaters was on the mark. In 1842, the Ministry of Internal Affairs had reiterated the order to privately owned commercial theaters to submit their repertoires through the governors to the Third Section for approval; and Gedeonov grumbled at the number of those theaters functioning under capricious local authorities. It had become clear that previous efforts to control provincial performances had been ineffective. Theaters could be found in every province except Olonets in the far north and Tobolsk, Amur, Trans-Baikal, the Maritime Provinces, and Yakutia in the east. A few years after the emancipation, Konstantin Pobedonostsev described how a theater was established in a provincial town on the Dnieper River by occupying a disused military building, raising about five thousand rubles in the town, and using 350 convicts for the construction! In his view, the enterprise was essential for raising civic consciousness and teaching moral lessons. Petrovskaya cites the average seating capacity of provincial theater as four or five hundred, though conceding low attendance in some. She also claims that, in the larger empire—in places like Tiflis, Vladikavkaz, and Kishinëv—theater served as an arm of Russian influence from the 1860s, a subject awaiting further scholarly investigation. In subsequent decades, the provincial theater network grew apace, aided by the spread of railways. When the monopoly ended in the capitals, Popular Theaters arose there, designed by intelligentsia, state, industrialists, and church to bring “proper” culture to the urban masses and deflect them from the tavern. From 1888 to 1905, these fell under a special censorship which denied them the production of certain works allowed in other theaters. This measure had a curious effect on nationwide theatergoing. Works such as Faust, Maria Stuart, Hamlet, The Barber of Seville, and Molière's Don Juan continued to show on provincial stages open to all classes, but could not until 1906 be presented to Moscow’s and Petersburg’s lower classes who frequented the Popular Theaters.⁵¹

The provinces also played another role in the continuing transformation of Russian theatrical life. Most of the recent plays that disturbed Count Adler-berg showed the darker shades of life in outlying regions. Their authors were part of a great mid-century flurry of interior exploration. The state made little use of those having everyday contact with the Volga lands, the far north, the Urals, and the frontier zones: merchants and obrok serf cattle dealers and traders.⁵² Under Nicholas I, the Ministries of War, the Navy, Internal Affairs, and State Domains sponsored statistical, ethnographic, hydrographic, and geographical studies and sent out research teams of scientists, journalists, novelists, portrait painters, and even a few pioneer photographers—people with a keen eye for detail—to examine the economic and social conditions of city and country life. The Imperial Geographical Society (founded in 1845) launched a systematic study of all the tsar’s lands and peoples by means of questionnaires sent out to priests, teachers, officials, landowners, seminarians, merchants, and even peasants—about local language, material culture, and folkways. Under the new tsar, the Naval Ministry, headed by the dynamic Admiral Grand Duke Konstantin, combined topographical and riverine research with ethnographic study. In launching the so-called Literary Expeditions of 1855-62, he harnessed the talents of writers for missions to the interior to examine local life. Their reports were published in the Naval Review (Morskoi sbornik). Among those commissioned was, ironically, M. L. Mikhailov—novelist, publicist, and one of the first prominent radicals to be jailed and exiled by the new regime. In November 1855 he set out from Petersburg and sojourned in Ufa, the Urals, and Orenburg, his native turf. What he saw simply deepened the sense of a brutal, unjust, and rotten system that he had already discovered as a writer.⁵³

The team assigned to inspect the length of the Volga River had a direct resonance in Russian culture: the dramatists Alexei Potekhin, Alexei Pisemsky, and Alexander Ostrovsky. To Ostrovsky was assigned the sector of the river from near its source down to Nizhny Novgorod, about eight hundred miles. Potekhin sailed from the Oka to the Volga and thence downriver to Saratov. Pisemsky took on the lower reaches and the lands around Astrakhan.⁵⁴ They observed close up and absorbed details on church services, home life, evening gatherings, feasts, and other occasions. Much has been made, and rightly so, of the Volga journeys as formative experiences for these writers, though some of their plays were written and staged before the Literary Expedition. The government chose them as writers who were already conversant with Russia’s back county. Potekhin and Pisemsky had attended the same gymnasium in Kostroma Province, and Ostrovsky summered there from the 1840s onward. The three mingled at Moscow University and in journalism circles. After their return to Moscow, these three men—a kind of 1850s “Volga generation”—used recent observations of provincial life to expand their gallery of dramatic figures and introduce situations previously unknown on the Russian stage.

Alexei Potekhin (1829-1908), son of a poor noble who worked as an estate steward, grew up in the peasant villages of Kostroma where he developed an eye for detail. Beginning in 1851, he wrote ethnographic sketches of the various social types he encountered, and incorporated some of his findings into his early plays. The Literary Expedition of 1856 widened his angle of vision. In Moscow, Potekhin moved in Slavophile and Native Soil circles and was close to Ostrovsky and the Muscovite. Potekhin’s plays—which he called “muzhik [peasant] drama”—expressed a kind of Slavophile respect for the peasants, minus the romanticism. Potekhin depicted them as generally honest, morally superior to the gentry, richly emotional, but also prone to violence. The raw drinking sequences he put on stage offended some audiences. Potekhin’s corpus of the 1850s, though burdened with plots that hardly rose above melodrama, offered the first cycle of serious plays about village life in a realistic setting, using authentic staging of folk songs and dances, and recognizable peasant orality.⁵⁵

When Potekhin’s first play, Man's Judgment, Not God’s, appeared in the Muscovite in 1853, the censors read it as a sharp indictment of serfdom and tried to keep it off the boards. But Grand Duke Konstantin found it impressive and, with Pogodin, arranged its staging in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1854. Lyubov Nikulina-Kositskaya, the ex-house serf and former provincial actress who well knew the dark side of village life as well as intergenerational conflict (see chapter 6), played the daughter who runs away from a fanatically religious father. Village intolerance and superstition suffuse the play, and the father puritanically controls his daughter’s love life. In the resolution, the father, on finding his missing child, becomes more humane and tolerant, and patronizingly announces to her: “You are forgiven by me and by God.” The daughter repents and renounces marriage to enter a convent where she will serve the Lord and her father. The jilted groom obligingly discovers that he has always loved martial heroes and battle songs and joins the army. ''I am off to serve Tsar-Batyushka [Little Father] and Orthodox Matyushka-Rossiya [Mother Russia]."⁵⁶

In The Sheepskin Coat and the Soul of a Human (1854), an unpleasant female landowner persecutes her well-educated governess who is trying to raise money to redeem her brother from serfdom. Attempts to force the governess into an unwanted marriage fail, and the brother eventually gains his freedom. This was probably the first Russian drama to treat the struggle for individual serf emancipation. The censors removed a line in the printed version about the peasants’ superiority to the upper classes and kept it from the stage until 1865.⁵⁷ Another's Wealth Avails Me Naught (1855) appeared on stage at the very end of Nicholas I’s reign. Set at a rural posting station, the play centers around a complex and plausible peasant youth who combines a violent temper with an inner decency. During a father-son battle over money, the boy is prevented by his conscience from murdering the old man. Potekhin wrote later of the performance that the actor Martynov, playing the young man, became a peasant “in face, expression, dress, movement, voice timbre, speech—all of it was peasant [muzhitskoe].” Potekhin’s world, never before seen on stage, anticipated the grimmer dramas of Pisemsky and much later Lev Tolstoy. Some in the audience thought it offended good taste: a character speaks of “Furrin' wine, Jamaker rum they calls it and they drinks it wit’ tea. . . . Smells like bedbug [juice]. What stuff!” Yet Another's Wealth was well received at the Alexandrinsky. Critics have not been kind to Potekhin: even at the time, Apollon Grigorev distinguished between the art of Ostrovsky and the lesser genres of specialists like Potekhin whose works he dismissed as “genre-ism in the worst sense of the word.” Soviet critics would later fault Potekhin, no muckraker, for his failure to inject a political message into his realism.⁵⁸

With Alexei Pisemsky’s harrowing drama A Bitter Fate (1859), we arrive at another major turning point in the relationship between public expression and social reality. His blend of sexual and social strains in the landlord-serf world reached print and then the stage. The version passed by the censor opened up an unprecedented vista of rustic violence that far surpassed Potekhin’s. A bare plot summary gives little inkling of the force contained in this play. While a serf is away in St. Petersburg, his wife has an affair with the young gentry master back on the estate and gives birth to the master’s child. When the husband finds out, the drama intensifies in confrontations among the three sides of the triangle, during which several relatively peaceful solutions are aired. But in a shocking dénouement, the husband hurls the infant to the floor and kills it. Pisemsky’s treatment of a far from rare situation is no simple indictment of an evil landowner availing himself of a vulnerable serf woman. They are both complicated individuals in love with each other. The husband is driven by an overweening pride, displayed even among his peers, that moves him to the terrible deed. In fact, he, rather than the lord, is the agent of cruelty. The landowner, a provincial Hamlet, feels genuine chagrin and sorrow for the wronged husband. In the end, the peasant man runs away, returns to give himself up, and repents.

Remarkably, Bitter Fate passed through the print censorship in 1859. One plot variant that the author considered for a time had the peasant husband actually organizing a group of violent bandits to wreak vengeance upon the estate by killing the steward, one of the less attractive figures in the final version. In the draft that Pisemsky first submitted to the censors, clearly his real choice, he set up an all too plausible solution whereby the peasant husband slays the landowner. The censors delayed, alluding to the uncertain mood of the countryside on the eve of emancipation and the recent spate of gentry and steward murders. Two incidents involving sex and violence had occurred in Pisemsky’s own Chukhlomsky District of Kostroma, both on the estate of the landowner Ermolaev. In 1847, a house serf, returning from off-farm work, developed doubts about the paternity of the child born in his absence and killed it. In 1857—two years before Bitter Fate appeared in print—another house serf on the same estate, incensed at the landowner’s beating and sexual abuse of his wife and other village women, stabbed him.⁵⁹ The resemblance between the details of these cases and Pisemsky’s drama leave no doubt that he conflated them for his plot.

In Bitter Fate, the shift in victim from the serf owner to his child, though technically deflecting violence from gentry to illegitimate commoner, came closer to the harsh realities of the rural world than anything even imaginable in previous Russian drama. The old costume plays about boyar poisonings and executions and the tinsel terrors of the imported melodramas must have seemed pallid escapism compared to the exposition of village tension and latent ferocity suggested in Pisemsky’s work. He had moved the power of the serf owner into the background, and had foregrounded what Lev Tolstoy would later call “the power of darkness”—the elemental peasant force that could erupt in violence. If Count Adlerberg had feared the plays on serfdom prior to 1858, what might he have thought about Pisemsky’s truly disturbing piece had it reached theater audiences before 1863? Although Bitter Fate received an Uvarov prize—the highest award for drama—in 1860, it could not be staged until two years after the emancipation, and then only after some resistance from the censors.⁶⁰

The “cumulative catalogue of the oppression of peasants” had been growing since the 1840s in the published fiction of Grigorovich, Turgenev, and a few others who had slipped through the censors. Drama was a different story. Pisemsky’s scenes of lethal manorial conflict—bereft as they were of a deus ex machina or kindly noble raisonneur—could not have been tolerated on stage as long as serfdom existed. Potekhin and Pisemsky, both displaying vague Slavophile and Native Soil leanings, joined those who were seeking to put real peasants on the page and the canvas. They made their characters speak in something like authentic Russian diction and invested them with dignity and sometimes potential violence. Their treatments of village life constituted the most important breakthrough in the history of peasant representation in the arts, including painting, to that moment. However stylized for the theater were their peasant characters, they strode the stage in a way utterly different from the fraudulent ones that had done so in the past and that had been created by myths, metaphysical visions, imported frumpery, and wartime patriotism.⁶¹

Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-86) made a more enduring theatrical breakthrough (fig. 69). Of gentry origin on his Swedish mother’s side, this quintessentially middle-class son of a lawyer of clerical background was born on the Malaya Ordynka in the heart of merchant Moscow. Ostrovsky withdrew from the law faculty of Moscow University in 1843 and, following his father, began working as a minor official in the courts. There he became conversant with business dealings and the merchant way of life, knowledge that he put to use in his dramas. Interested in books and theater since childhood, Ostrovsky frequented almost daily Pechkin’s coffee house, which was across the street from his offices. He animated a group known as the Young Editors of the Muscovite who met to dine, hear new literary works, and sing Russian folk songs. At various times, Gogol, Mikhail Pogodin, Stepan Shevyrëv, Alexei Khomyakov, and Shchepkin attended. The Muscovite was associated with the Native Soil ideology. In the early 1850s, the Young Editors’ circle mingled with adherents of Official Nationalism and Slavophilism, an affiliation where personal friendships often blurred the lines dividing those currents. Around Russian pancakes at Pogodin’s, old feuds could be overshadowed by elective affinities in a quest for an authentic Russian national culture. It was to this audience that Ostrovsky read some of his earliest works.⁶²

Ostrovsky received his commission to capture in words the everyday life of the peoples of the Upper Volga for the Naval Review. Already an established playwright, He embarked on an 1856-57 journey of ethnographic exploration that took him through waterways and forest roads to dozens of Volga provincial towns. Although he submitted his report in dry technical language replete with sketches of various rivercraft, Ostrovsky gained much insight about provincial Russia from his watery excursion. In the deep interior, he observed local customs, scenes, folk sayings, and speech patterns which he kept in a card file and later incorporated into his plays. A sojourn in Torzhok provided the setting for The Storm. A half dozen “Volga” plays were based on this material.⁶³ Ostrovsky's early prose sketches of Moscow life resemble the documentarylike feuilletons and physiologies of the time as well as the art of the inner city. His first phase as a dramatist, the merchant cycle, lasted until 1860, the year of The Storm, after which he branched out to portray other walks of life. The first full-length effort of the merchant period, It's a Family Affair, We’ll Settle it Ourselves (1850) drew a dismal picture of the domestic life of an Old Believer Moscow merchant, a family despot, drunk, and crooked businessman. He scoffs at the law and despises the poor as well as uppity merchants who live in manor houses. His daughter, like the painter Fedotov’s Choosy Bride, spurns her own class; takes piano, French, and dancing lessons; and aspires to marry an officer. She ends up with her father’s clerk and together they swindle the larcenous father who lands in jail. The almost unrelieved harshness of the action and the personages got the play banned from production (as written) until 1860 and won the author police surveillance. Despite the ban, the printed version of Family Affair circulated so rapidly that Taras Shevchenko in December 1850 played in an amateur performance of it in the barracks of an expeditionary force on a peninsula of the Aral Sea! Moscow merchants who read or heard about Ostrovsky’s play were incensed, all the more so since it captured certain authentic aspects of their life.⁶⁴

Don't Get into Another’s Sleigh (1853), the first Ostrovsky play to reach the stage, contrasted an honorable merchant with his daughter’s heartless aristocratic suitor. As the title poetically indicates, this work mocked social-climbing merchants and their children. As the first realistic portrait of ordinary merchant life on the Russian stage, it enjoyed a triumph in Moscow where it won back the favor that Ostrovsky had lost among the business community due to Family Affair. The Petersburg theater authorities were at first reluctant to show it but did so in 1853. Tsar Nicholas loved it: “Ce n’est pas une pièce,” he said, ''c'est une lecon."⁶⁵ Sleigh was followed rapidly in 1854 by Poverty Is Not a Vice, which treats again the familiar struggle between merchant father and daughter. The villain is a rich Europeanized merchant suitor. The hero, Lyubim Tortsov, one of the great characters in Russian drama, is the drunken but good-hearted brother of the obstreperous merchant father. His intervention enables true love to triumph for the daughter and a poor clerk. Tortsov, who uses colloquial Russian language, speech patterns, and gestures, has remained a plum role for actors ever since; and the sets and props of this play set a new standard for realistic stage settings.

Ostrovsky's masterpiece, The Storm (1859), ranks with the works of Fonvizin, Griboedov, Gogol, and Chekhov. It has been translated many times and much later was made into an opera, Katya Kabanova, by Leoš Janáček. In a Volga town, much like the ones Ostrovsky had recently surveyed in the Literary Expedition, the overbearing Volga merchant Dikoi (savage) endorses inequality and despises the lower classes, women, and the young. He is contrasted with an impoverished seminoble nephew, with his European education and mannerisms. The central character, Katya Kabanova, is tyrannized by her mother-in-law, a merchant’s widow. Locked in a loveless marriage, Katya dreams of release. “Why don’t people fly like birds?” she asks, echoing a familiar metaphor in fiction about women seeking emancipation from repressive and claustrophobic surroundings. Katya finds this liberation in an adulterous love affair with Dikoi’s nephew and then kills herself by leaping into the raging Volga River in the midst of a thunderstorm. The play, praised for a century and a half for its dramatic power, catapulted Ostrovsky into permanent fame and success (he was the co-recipient of the Uvarov Prize in 1860), and further enhanced the reputation of the ex-serf Nikulina-Kositskaya who played the role of Katya Kabanova at the Maly Theater. This work and its predecessors also led to a schism within the theater establishment and set off a scorching debate about Ostrovsky among the Russian intelligentsia.⁶⁶

Writing twenty-five years after the event, the chronicler of Russian theater A. I. Wolf said about the premiere of Ostrovsky’s Sleigh at the Alexandrinsky Theater, February 19, 1853: “From that day, rhetoric, insincerity, and Gallomania gradually began to disappear from Russian drama. Characters spoke on stage as they did in real life. A whole new world opened up for audiences. . . . Actors suddenly appeared who knew how to impersonate simply and naturally an ordinary Russian person.”⁶⁷ In the same season, the brilliant French tragedienne Rachel, “the last great paragon of neoclassical declamation,” appeared in Russia and her cadences brought a moment of nostalgia. But the short-lived discussion of her style showed once again that it had long ago become archaic.⁶⁸ When Vasily Karatygin passed away in 1852 he had already been overshadowed by his younger colleague and pupil, Alexander Martynov (1816-60). In honing his skills, Karatygin had been a bookish scholar; Martynov, like an ethnographer, haunted marketplaces to learn the speech patterns and gestures of Petersburg street life. His versatility and experience on the road enabled him to succeed as the coachman in Potekhin’s Another's Wealth Avails Me Naught, and most famously in the early plays of Ostrovsky.⁶⁹ Wolf’s punctuation mark of 1853 is exaggerated: Gallomania on stage had long been in decline and “rhetorical insincerity”—often spoken in Russian accents—did not disappear from the drama stage.

Nevertheless, while several styles of dramatic acting coexisted on the eve of emancipation, a major shift in theatrical culture had occurred, particularly in Moscow. Looking back from the vantage point of World War I, theater historian N. N. Ignatov argued that Ostrovsky’s public was “not satisfied with all human [i.e. eternal or universal] truths, but needed a special truth related to a given type in a particular environment.” And when “the public began demanding realistic drama, [actors] appeared, fully equipped to play types and characters from life that corresponded to reality.” In short, said Ignatov, ''dramatists and performers both responded to the same change in the psyche of the spectator."⁷⁰ Ignatov does not explain how and why that public made a shift or how performers detected it. Such mechanisms remain a mystery for almost all times and places. One can only suggest that, in the first instance, part of the literate playgoing public had become used to reading, hearing conversations, and seeing pictures about themselves and other social communities and now were ready to watch themselves on stage as well. Twenty years of debate in the thick journals and salon talk had clearly overflowed from the gentry intelligentsia to a wider public; and a decade of further ferment in the Crimean War and the rumors of emancipation and reform had escalated desires. Actors, directors, and dramatists had good ears and could feel the shift. Zeitgeist cannot explain it all. Individual wills and styles of the creators and performers coincided with streams of public curiosity.

The schism over Ostrovsky at the Moscow Maly Theater erupted long before The Storm broke over Russia in 1860. The two camps divided over content and acting styles. The Muscovite camp which embraced Ostrovsky’s realistic treatment of merchant life in Moscow and the provinces included Nikulina, Sadovsky, and Kolosova, all of whom had registered success in Ostrovsky’s plays. The Western camp, which respected older traditions ranging from Molière to Gogol, set Shumsky and Lensky, among others, against Ostrovsky. Ironically, the most distinguished voice among them had for years been considered by the public the quintessential Russian national and “natural” actor: Mikhail Shchepkin. This venerable ex-serf and veteran of the provincial circuit disliked The Storm and sniffed at what he and his colleagues called the vodka, greased boots, and “stinking fur coats” of merchants on stage. This was more than a reaction of one generation to another, of an established star to new challengers. Shchepkin did not seek pure “naturalism” on stage because he believed that theater required distance. He tried for a modification of the older declamatory style and closer communication with the public; and his roles reflected a deep sympathy for the underdog or the “little man.” But, just as he feared the radicalism of his friend Herzen, Shchepkin stopped short of sleazy revelations, sweeping social criticism, and muckraking on stage. Shchepkin’s sense of theatrical decorum was scandalized by what he saw as vulgarity in the new dramatic culture. The divergence over tastes blossomed into nasty feuds.⁷¹

The quarrel exacerbated the personal rivalry between Shchepkin and the rising star of the Ostrovsky productions, Prov Sadovsky (Ermilov, 1818-72). As a fourteen-year-old from a middle-class family in Ryazan Province, Sadovsky had taken to the road with his actor uncle and had roamed for years on the circuit through Tula, Kaluga, Ryazan, Elets, Lebedyan, Voronezh, and Tambov. Shchepkin discovered him in Kazan and brought him to the Moscow Maly in 1839. During the Crimean War, Sadovsky, a fiery Slavophile, forged another link between Slavophilism, theater, and the Moscow merchants. At Pechkin’s coffee house, he regaled merchants with patriotic recitations “until the tears came.” Sadovsky found a friendly reception in the circle of Ostrovsky, Pogodin, and the Young Editors. As Lyubim Tortsov in Poverty Is Not a Vice, a role made for him, Sadovsky achieved a spectacular success. When Shchepkin attempted the same role, merchant audiences made it clear that they preferred Sadovsky’s Tortsov. The two actors drifted apart. Characteristically, the provinces echoed Moscow’s choice. A Voronezh journalist as early as 1854 wrote that Ostrovsky’s corpus required a new kind of acting, one of “naturalism and simplicity.” And an observer at the Barsov actors’ hiring hall recalled that, after Ostrovsky’s Poverty, the scouts there began to seek out Tortsovs rather than Hamlets. The torch had passed from the old and beloved standard bearer Shchepkin.⁷²

The coming generation viewed all this as a triumph of “realism” on stage and thus of “truth.” Realistic acting is a matter of contemporary perception. Theater, by definition, is always illusionary, though it may range from extreme stylization (Kabuki, Noh, or Meyerhold’s “Biomechanics”) to attempts at representation in a natural manner through dramaturgical plausibility, familiar-sounding diction, and authentic costumes and sets. Yet even the most realistic theatrical speech is terser (or more long-winded), more vivid, eloquent, epigrammatic than the everyday speech of the age in which it is performed. And it is ephemeral. Shchepkin may have poked fun at the baroque postures and gesticulations of his colleagues, but the actors of his own time and the “realistic” ones for decades afterwards did not turn their backs to the audience until Stanislavsky adapted the Fourth Wall to Russian theater at the end of the century, a style in which the cast only looked at or spoke to each other and not the audience. One sees the same kind of transition from declamatory to realistic acting that unfolded in the 1850s in the silent cinema of Russia from 1908 to 1917.⁷³ The fundamental change in theater, as Anatoly Altschuller put it, was the victory of the dramatist over the actor: “Whereas in 1820 it could be said that many characters were created as much by the actors as by the playwright, by about 1850, when Ostrovsky’s plays began to appear, the persona of the author had become central in the creation of theatre.”⁷⁴

Critics have correctly stressed Ostrovsky’s realism, attention to everyday life, authentic sets, and social commentary; but they sometimes obsess on his merchant cycle at the expense of Ostrovsky’s universality and rich diversity of dramatic motifs and characters. Following on the fourteen merchant plays ending with The Storm, came thirty-three plays of great variety in theme, social content, and style.⁷⁵ None the less, that cultural clash of the late 1850s and early 1860s is essential to understanding Ostrovsky’s relation to social history. The issue was often blurred, adherents often changed sides, and all camps were divided within themselves. The question that generated heat was whether Ostrovsky was for or against the merchantry. This turned into a “national” problem because the long-despised commercial class began to replace the peasantry as the emblem of Russianness. Since despotism and corruption cohabited with decency and simplicity in Ostrovsky’s reading of the Russian merchants’ collective soul, the scope for interpretation was wide. He managed to win the approval of some merchants, Westernizers, Slavophiles, and Native Soil conservatives—and the enmity of others among those fluid groups. And of course, they divided over favorites among the plays. Critics who demanded a social or national interpretation of the arts made their own particular selection. From an esthetic point of view, their opinions are irrelevant. Ostrovsky has lasted as the most-performed playwright in Russian history because of his art and not his messages.

Westernized liberals who, like Shchepkin, held to older European traditions, were unimpressed. The more radical among them, happy with what they saw as Ostrovsky’s exposure of an evil universe in their midst, harped on the merchant characters’ negative qualities. The locus classicus of this exposure was a series of seminal essays by Nikolai Dobrolyubov. In “The Kingdom of Darkness” (1859) he meticulously catalogued all the merchants’ vices portrayed in the Ostrovsky plays up to that date: cheating, philistinism, petty tyranny at the office, soul-destroying oppression in the dark recesses of the home, and ill-treatment of the weak—especially poor people and women.⁷⁶ Based on this interpretation, he handed down a sweeping indictment of the merchant world implied in the title of his review. In Ostrovsky’s The Storm, Dobrolyubov perceived a bright “Ray of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness” (1860): Katya Kabanova’s allegedly rebellious gesture of suicide.⁷⁷ Dobrolyubov did not invent the abuses: they are all found in the plays and existed in real life as well. But he fashioned them into a potent and one-sided panorama of stereotypes that would haunt the reputation of an entire class of people right down to and beyond the Revolution of 1917. Ostrovsky’s negative images of merchants in the early plays dissolved in the more complicated scenarios of later ones. But Dobrolyubov’s image was stamped into the outlook of the Russian intelligentsia and much of the creative community. Their hostility to capitalism, business, and petty bourgeois philistinism endured. Ostrovsky's professional trajectory was not much affected by tendentious readings of his works. His support widened from the Slavophile and Native Soil schools to the merchants themselves, and to the entire theatergoing nation. The Russian playwright least known in the West became the best known in his native land. Slavophiles, with some exceptions, admired Ostrovsky because they saw bright elements of Russian life mixed in with the dark. Sleigh, Poverty, and the 1855 You Can’t Live as You Like seemed like affirmations of Russianness and a rejection of decadent Western ways.⁷⁸ The Slavophiles were moving out from their airy salon debates and the fat journals into a large public sphere and adding the merchants to the narod as vessels of Russianness. Prophets of the Native Soil were even keener in their adoption of Ostrovsky who, as an original member of the Muscovite's editorial board, was one of them. To Apollon Grigorev, merchants formed a natural bridge between the narod and western European culture. Ostrovsky, their poet, could reach a higher realism than that of accusatory criticism. For Grigorev in 1860, Ostrovsky was “a poet who can play all the tunes of popular life in every key.”⁷⁹ Ostrovsky, scenic realism, and the merchantry combined into a socio-cultural vehicle of Russianism.

How did merchants respond to their would-be poet? Their “Ostrovsky-ism,” hardly universal, did not spring up at once. Early in Nicholas I’s reign, one of them wrote to the theater administration that “it is more pleasant to see kings, dukes, and other heroes on stage than simple gentry folk whom we see every day.” We may assume that this fussy man of commerce would have enjoyed seeing his own kind even less. Even when present at all on the stage, merchants had not come off very well, whether in Matinsky’s St. Petersburg Gostiny Dvor (1779), Plavilshchikov’s Shop Clerk (1804), or Gogol’s Marriage (1842). The big merchants protested Ostrovsky’s Family Affair, but the weaker middle- and lower-ranked merchants who did not identify with its villainous characters embraced Ostrovsky.⁸⁰ As his characters and situations developed, the merchants adopted him as their own and remained the heart of his public for generations. The fact that so many actors and even some writers came of merchant stock may have been a factor. Yet surely some of Ostrovsky’s plays bolstered those traditionalists who opposed emulation of the gentry. Upward climbers had been constantly ridiculed on stage,⁸¹ but such ridicule could be found in Ostrovsky as well.

The rest of the nation joined the flood of spectators who flocked to see Ostrovsky’s works. He was “a defining event in the life of the Russian theater,” wrote Ignatov. “Kings, dukes, and marquesses had to doff their fine raiment and turn over their throne to the Russian bearded merchant in a long tunic and stovepipe boots.” The Maly Theater in Moscow, once the House of Shchepkin, became the House of Ostrovsky in the playwright’s own lifetime. Since 1853, all forty-seven of his plays have been at different times staged here. Far more than a local Muscovite hero, Ostrovsky in fact became the Russian national playwright, and his works were put on again and again in St. Petersburg and across the empire on the imperial and amateur stages and in the private, provincial, and Popular Theaters that sprouted up after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the lifting of the theater monopoly in 1882. Part of the attraction was Ostrovsky’s avoidance of tricks and declamation aimed at applause; his use of Russian gestures, customs, songs, and proverbs; and his insistence on actors’ plain dress and hairdos rather than stylized society coiffures and fancy costumes. He replaced the standard pair of divans, some chairs, a table, and a chandelier with a more realistic stage set. For this reason, some critics likened him to an explorer who had discovered a new country—his own. The visible triumph of Ostrovsky and of Russianness on stage led him and others vainly to keep certain imported works off Russian stages. Like the adherents of other dramatic styles that harden into “schools,” they failed to realize that audiences could enjoy adaptations of French farces without eroding their admiration for the products of real Russian culture.⁸²

The victory of Ostrovsky did not account for the subsequent history of theater as a whole. Musical genres and lavish spectacles continued to attract audiences as did domestic and imported farces. And, as in other countries, the innovators of serious drama held idealism and realism pretty much in equal reverence, the one for moral uplift, the other to show the need for it.⁸³ What is important about the shift in repertoire is the expansion on stage of Russian themes and characters. In the 1850s only about 10 percent of the plays passed by censors dealt with Russian life; by 1860 they predominated. The national deluge would have made the heart of Plavilshchikov sing. His old tirade against “Dido languishing for love of Aeneas and Iarbas” was echoed by a Kharkov critic who in 1858 announced that even mediocre plays taken from contemporary Russian life were more in demand than those about “the antics of dukes, marquesses, and prelates, or about the Italian stiletto, English spleen, and French caustic wit.”⁸⁴ The Contemporary observed in November 1857 that “Russian theater is gradually coming alive,” alluding to Ostrovsky on Moscow life and the staging of Shchedrin on provincial life.⁸⁵ “Coming alive” in essence meant “becoming Russian.” In the 1850s, Potekhin, Pisemsky, and Ostrovsky introduced Russian types, manners, and idioms that had previously seldom been seen on stage. The theater had joined literature and art in the continuing quest for naturalist representation and in the search for a mirror to match the photographic “realities” of the daguerreotypes. Audience willingness to see art represent Russian life brought, one by one, the social organisms of Russia before the public gaze.

Mutiny on the Embankment

In his famous 1883 article, “Twenty-Five Years of Russian Art,” Vladimir Stasov wrote of the 1850s: “Along with the opening of the new reign and the accession of Alexander II to the throne, an enormous change in Russian art occurred, a break with the past and a coursing off in new directions. To the extent that artists no longer resembled previous ones, so neither did their works. A new period emerged, a new world was born.”⁸⁶ For Stasov, the “real day” had dawned, and the Academy of Arts remained enwrapped in twilight. Here and in other writings, he launched a broadside against false art, classicism, and eclecticism which he identified with the Academy and which had nothing to do with Russia.⁸⁷ Stasov, indulging in lyrical exaggeration, ignored or forgot the long decades of preparation, the overlap, the continuing interplay of influences, the stops and goes. He argued that both music and art had taken a major leap forward at the same time. By the 1860s, the image of a stuffy prereform Academy was already embedded in fiction. In the Soboleva story quoted above, a young artist “poured vitriol on painters who lavished their labors on aping rich satins and velvets”—a clear reference to old-fashioned parade portraiture—and praised “the unshowy paintings of the Russian genre painters.” To complete what was already a cliché, the idealistic painter extolled true art and lamented his poverty as he lay dying of consumption in the presence of his love.⁸⁸

These, among many such examples, point to a neat and satisfying turning point, but that point had a dull edge. Schematic periodization can restrict the imagination as well as help organize the mind. A long-standing view of nineteenth-century art as a two-period epoch—before and after 1863 (the revolt of the Academy of Arts)—was challenged and corrected long ago by dozens of Soviet studies of a “middle period,” roughly 1840-70.⁸⁹ But even this stretch of time needs to be sliced. A transitional decade between the death of Fedotov and the secession anticipated the harsh side of the critical realism that sometimes engaged the Itinerants. But in this decade and long after, artists worked in many different styles: academic classicism, romanticism, realism, Biedermeier, and an Italian “salon” art of sentimental genre pictures. Like the rage for Italian opera, this was part of Russia’s cultural shopping around Europe. Portraits, landscapes, and genre works hung together on walls public and private. Popular graphics and photography were shaping some styles and the latter was stealing patrons away from the easel painters. Eclecticism ruled: the eve of the new day had a mottled, multicolored sky and not the dark obscurantist pall of myth-makers. Apollon Maikov in 1857 recognized and lamented the fact that the real day had not dawned.⁹⁰ The “heroization” of a native revolt owed much to the maligning of its alleged foe: the Academy of Arts. There is much truth in the picture of the Academy as a drag on cultural change. Academies normally protect tradition as long as they can and there is no questioning the decadence of that tradition in Russia by the 1850s. The great names in and out of academia were dying off: Kiprensky in 1836, Venetsianov in 1847, Bryullov and Fedotov in 1852, Tropinin in 1857, and Ivanov in 1858. Mediocre traditionalists held sway. For example, A. T. Markov (1802-78), after spending a decade abroad, gained the rank of professor in 1842 for his painting The Coliseum, a pallid, cliché-ridden, traditional treatment. T. A. Neff (originally Timoleon Karl von Neff) a Dresden-trained painter, descended to what Savinov called “cheap salonism” to please the taste of court circles.⁹¹ When the boarding school of the Academy closed in 1840, only day students were admitted, thus widening the social gulf in education among Academy students. Ivan Kramskoi recalled his envy of educated people. He and other artists such as Repin and Perov belonged to estates that were subject to tax, recruitment, and even corporal punishment, with little chance for mobility or travel.⁹² Academy degrees could shatter the juridical bonds but not erase social inferiority. As late as the 1850s, an observant English visitor noted that artists, as opposed to writers, possessed little repute or status.⁹³

With all that, the winds of change that rose after the Crimean War blew through the musty halls of the Academy. Tsar Alexander II, though he regularly visited Academy exhibits and ordered pictures, was much less intrusive than his father. In 1859 Fëdor Tolstoy was kicked upstairs as assistant president and Prince Gagarin, an amateur Byzantinist, replaced him as vice president. The new Conference secretary F. F. Lvov (1820-95), who was also secretary of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, reopened the boarding school and introduced more student choice of genre and theme. Prior to 1859, genre had been discouraged but not prohibited. Now it was openly permitted, though only for the silver medal. The Academy even bent the rules on this in the 1860s and was inundated by social thematics in dozens of genre works by now mostly forgotten painters—variously known as exposers, accusers, and muckrakers—whose critical approach went beyond the social satire of Fedotov. When they endeavored to exhibit social evils, the Academy’s response was far from uniformly negative.⁹⁴ Alexei Korzukhin won a medal for A Drunken Father; V. V. Pukirev gained a professorship for Unequal Marriage (1862) depicting a May-December wedding.⁹⁵ Far bolder was the work of V. I. Yakobi (1834-1902), a provincial noble and graduate of Kazan University who served in the Crimean War. At the Academy he won a medal for his bleak study of poverty and desperation in Beggars' Festival (1859) and a major gold medal for the politically charged Prisoners' Rest-stop (1861). One of the very first public depictions of exile, it is a harrowing scene of crowds of suffering convicts and families, with a dying man—obviously a member of the intelligentsia, perhaps a radical—stretched out on a wagon. When M. L. Mikhailov was arrested in 1861, his friend Yakobi managed to do a portrait of him in shackles (the original has not survived), lithograph copies of which were broadcast far and wide.⁹⁶

The most celebrated of the accusatory painters, Vasily Perov (1833 or 1834-1882), the illegitimate son of a poor noble in Tobolsk, was given the name Perov ( pero means pen) for his fine handwriting. He studied at the Arzamas school intermittently, and in 1852 or 1853 entered the Moscow School of Art where he imbibed the ultrarealist Sergei Zaryanko’s doctrine of direct observation of real objects. Since the Moscow school could not award medals until 1865, Perov’s came from the St. Petersburg Academy. His works created turbulence even as they won medals. The Arrival of the Police Inspector (1857) depicted a cabin, with an official about to interrogate a young peasant who is tightly held by a village elder. It contained strong pictorial suggestions of official corruption and abuse of a probably innocent man. The drunken official has apparently received as a bribe a basket of eggs on the floor behind him. As in Saltykov-Shchedrin's Provincial Sketches (1856-57), to which the painting is often compared, bureaucratic iciness is set against the humanity of the underdog. Beyond the anecdotal treatment of a single event, one could easily read an indictment of serfdom and the “system.” Arrival is commonly held to have launched the era of critical realism in Russian painting and, in the words of Elizabeth Valkenier, represented “a quantum jump from Fedotov’s satirical treatment of various classes and their foibles to an expose of institutions that oppressed the people.” And yet this work by a pioneer of the “accusatory genre” (oblichitelnyi zhanr) in Russian art was awarded in 1858 a major silver medal by the Academy, and the canvas was purchased by the merchant Gerasim Khludov.⁹⁷

Perov produced three notorious scenes of religious life in 1860-62. Anti-clericalism, though brewing for some time among segments of the Westernizing intelligentsia, had not been reflected in high art. Perov’s mentor Zaryanko in fact painted in the 1850s a perfectly reverent scene of faculty and uniformed students at worship the law school chapel (GRMFZh, 3660). Perov took a different and shocking line. His Village Easter Procession (1861) mocked a rural observance of the most joyful of Orthodox Church holidays, with its procession of icons, blessed eggs, kisses, and exclamations of “Christ has risen!” (fig. 70). Two of the parishioners lie drunk, another holds the icon upside down, and the inebriated priest can hardly stand. Both the preliminary sketch and the oil version were rejected by the Academy of Arts, the latter in the competition for a gold medal. Pavel Tretyakov bought the painting and showed it at the Society for the Encouragement of Artists until the Holy Synod had it removed. Tretyakov was warned of trouble in store for buying it, Perov was placed under surveillance, and the government forbade any reproduction of the painting until 19 0 5.⁹⁸ Perov’s Village Sermon (1861) was hardly less offensive: out of nine figures in the church only the child is paying attention; a nobleman dozes, his wife is flirting with a younger man, a peasant is scratching his ear, and a group in the background is distracted by a reading of the Emancipation Decree of 1861. Contrary to the statute on genre scenes, the controversial painting won a major gold medal, was exhibited at the Academy, and was sold to the merchant patron Kozma Soldatenkov. An 1862 work completed the assault: Tea Drinking in Mytishchi shows a corpulent and arrogant priest refusing alms to a begging veteran. Thus Perov, a man from a provincial background, challenged the academic canon and offended religious sensibility in public by offering three aspects of religious life in the countryside: robotic ritual in the midst of alcoholic stupor, everyday hypocrisy and routine observance, and ecclesiastical unconcern for the poor. This turn in art coincided with a current for reform of the clergy in the late 1850s.⁹⁹

Perov's anticlerical paintings were the first of their kind in the history of Russian easel art; Arrival was the first attack on serfdom on canvas, and the last until emancipation. Later artists would take up such inflammatory subjects as the sale of a serf woman and the Pugachev revolt. To the modern viewer, Perov’s early works may seem only suggestive compared to these. But so great was public anxiety over the coming emancipation that Perov’s pictures were bitterly attacked. Yet he was one of the first painters patronized by merchants who were otherwise conservative elements in Russian society. The Petersburg Academy, far from ostracizing Perov, appointed him a professor there in 1870, the very year he became one of the founders of the Itinerant school.¹⁰⁰ When viewed together, his work and that of the lesser-known “accusers” offer the most striking panorama to that time of the underbelly of Russian society.

The accusatory painters came, in one way or another, through the Academy of Arts rather than as rebels against it. Although they were sometimes associated with political radicals, there was little connection between them. N. N. Shumova stressed the friendships of the painters Zhuravlev, Vereshchagin, Peskov, and Shishkin with revolutionaries, and that of Yakobi with radical writer M. L. Mikhailov, though the latter had many associations with people, including Anton Rubinstein, who were not themselves radical.¹⁰¹ Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1855 master’s thesis proclaimed the function of art to mirror nature, the material world, and real human experience. Alexander Herzen, in emigration, turned an 1858 obituary of Alexander Ivanov into a manifesto demanding that painters condemn social evil. His friend Nikolai Ogarëv urged painters to expose and denounce the abuses of Russian society and the state. Ivan Dmitriev (1840-67) not only took up the doctrine, but also jeered at early realism for pallidly criticizing drunkenness and limited social problems instead of attacking its deeper ills. The intellectual and programmatic relationship of the painters with the ideology of emerging radicals who viewed art through a socially conscious prism was in fact problematic. Elizabeth Valkenier stresses the differences between the artistic generation of the 1860s and that of the 1870s, the Itinerants, especially those of the 1880s onward. Painters of the 1860s were closer to liberals and social nihilists than to political radicals and deep philosophical critics of the regime and the social order.¹⁰²

The “mutiny of the fourteen” against the Academy of Arts in 1863 in some ways resembled the mutiny of Stasov and the Five against the Conservatory, though the former revolted against a hundred-year-old institution rather than one that was just being born. The snide critics notwithstanding, the Academy had by no means become a general object of disapprobation. The ex-serf, revolutionary artist, and state convict Taras Shevchenko, upon his release in 1857, resided at the Academy in modest quarters and became an Academician of engraving. An Academy exhibit of his pictures in 1860 included a self-portrait as a fierce patriotic Ukrainian hetman with a Zaporozhian moustache. This bold work caused an uproar in the reactionary press, especially when it was purchased by Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, the liberal salon dynast who had recently freed the serfs on her Karlovka estate. The artist, who owed his freedom and his training to the Academy, died in 1861, right after the February 19 rescript freeing the serfs, and lay in state in the chapel of the Academy. The funeral journey became a major event as it passed through St. Petersburg and Moscow to Kiev, the final resting place.¹⁰³

Art mutinies and schisms were nothing new in Europe. In 1823, the Society of British Artists, seeking “publicity and profit” in a clientele of middle-class patrons, challenged the British Royal Academy. Critics divided over whether this was a healthy development or a cheap pandering to vulgar taste and thus a menace to high art and noble taste. In 1856 occurred the secession of the Macchaioli (“daubers”) from the Academy in Florence, led by Telemaco Signorini and Raffaello Sernesi, among others, some of whom went on to fight in the Risorgimento war of 1859. Dedicated to spontaneity and the application of blocks of paint directly to canvas without the prior sketch, the Daubers rejected the polished and finished academic mode and opposed, in the words of one account, the “potentially stultifying procedures taught in the Academy.” The more famous art revolt, the 1863 Salon des refuses, resulted from the French Academy’s rejection of the work of a group of young painters who then, with the blessing of Napoleon III, set up a counter-salon.¹⁰⁴

In Russia, the struggle was actually brought on by the reform process in the Academy. In 1862, a resolution to equalize all genres was hotly discussed, revised, and finally rejected—the rejection being the occasion if not the trigger of the 1863 revolt. In the following year, two themes were announced for the annual competition: in history, “The Feast of the Gods at Valhalla”; in genre, “The Liberation of the Serfs.” When a group of students requested a change in the history theme, they were denied. Fourteen of them challenged Gagarin and Lvov in the Conference Hall and withdrew from the Academy. Only two of these—Zhuravlëv and Peskov—had any radical associations and most of the others never became members of the Itinerant school which is often wrongly conflated with the “revolt of the fourteen.” They received their diplomas but no medal, stipend, or trip abroad. The secession from the gold medal competition meant the loss of court patronage and state service emoluments. Thus, the mutineers identified professionalism with personal expression and self-determination rather than defining it in terms of state sponsorship.¹⁰⁵

The story of the Itinerants is the best-known chapter in nineteenth-century Russian art history. Though it falls outside the confines of this book, certain of its features throw light on the preceding period. The main link between the “mutiny of the fourteen” and the Itinerants, Ivan Kramskoi, while still working as a photographic retoucher for Denier, entered the Academy in 1856 and a year later won a silver medal for his Death of the Wounded Lensky, inspired by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.¹⁰⁶ A friend called the evenings at Kramskoi’s where students sketched and discussed art the ''new Russian academy."¹⁰⁷ After the revolt of 1863 Kramskoi taught for the Society for the Encouragement of Artists. He formed a cooperative association ( artel) with his fellow secessionists who lived together in a shared apartment—a communal idea popular among nihilists, radicals, and art-minded people of the 1860s, including Musorgsky. In 1865, Kramskoi’s group mounted its first traveling exhibit to the Nizhny Novgorod Fair where they showed genre works dealing with peasants, soldiers, servants, and the urban poor. Only four of the original artel group became members of the Itinerants or Peredvizhniki, founded in 1870 and officially titled the Association of Traveling Art Exhibits. As with the Five, myths have been woven tightly around the group’s history.¹⁰⁸

The Itinerants did not consistently maintain a radical stance in art. After some friction with the Academy of Arts, peaceful coexistence returned in the 1870s. Ilya Repin and other Itinerants accepted posts there in the 1890s. Others moved in Academic circles and worked in traditional genres of painting. The jubilee celebrations of the arch-Academic Karl Bryullov in 1899 brought together Academy professors including Repin, to praise the once famous artist. While mavericks such as Alexander Benois denounced Bryullov’s heritage, Ilya Repin gave a pro-Bryullov speech, only a fragment of which survives.¹⁰⁹ In the content of their paintings, the Itinerants produced some accusatory canvases, but also took up politically neutral genres: landscape, history, and some portraits of by no means progressive figures. In general they diluted the social in favor of the national.¹¹⁰ Landscape, which the critic Ivan Dmitriev had called a reactionary diversion in 1863 and which Stasov saw as irrelevant, featured prominently in their offerings. More than half of the forty-seven pictures shown in 1871 by the Itinerants were landscapes. Peasants almost but not quite disappeared from landscape after the 1860s. No simple dichotomy existed between a Russian and an international school, for the “national” camp divided from the 1870s onward into positive and critical.¹¹¹

In a masterful study of European realism embracing literature, social discourse, and art, Linda Nochlin offered a working definition of what realism meant to mid-century European artists: “truthful, objective and impartial representation of the real world, based on meticulous observation of contemporary life.” She also uses or attributes to others terms and phrases such as “mundane,” “mirroring everyday reality,” a mode of “stripping [the artists'] minds, and their brushes, of second-hand knowledge and ready-made formulae,” “matter-of-fact representations,” and “scrupulous notation.” Nineteenth-century realism—unlike numerous earlier practices of “visual veracity”—implied not only verisimilitude but also contemporaneity and a wider range of subject matter.¹¹² This vivid lexicon indicates the variety of meanings of “realism” for Russians who created, viewed, and wrote about art at mid-century. The word could be applied to “lifelike” representations of biblical, historical, and mythological figures; to contemporary subject matter; or, for some, only to depictions of the sordid—poverty, drunkenness, exploitation, impiety, corruption, and a dozen other indictable practices. To a radical critic such as Ivan Dmitriev, for example, a “realistic” landscape was not real but reactionary since it was a waste of time and deflected attention from social maladies. For others, realism meant portraying what was truly Russian. The Itinerants shuttled back and forth between “good” Russian reality such as Savrasov’s The Rooks Have Returned and the “bad” as in Perov’s Last Tavern on the Road. What most realists had in common was the use of a Russian national vocabulary in their work in the way of props, setting, costume, and gestures.

The great British art patrons of the mid-nineteenth century—manufacturers, bankers, lawyers, shipbuilders, textile manufacturers, railroad men, wholesalers—had a strong preference for “realism”: social drama, domestic scenes, moral uplift, and diversions such as sport. Illusion, technical craftsmanship, and polish seemed to appeal to men whose fortunes often swung on technological achievements. A finished product symbolized both workmanship and a good work ethic. Furthermore, the new rich were more than ready to purchase new art and had little affection for the neoclassical masters. At mid-century at least, well-off Englishmen were less patronizing (in the psycho-social sense) toward artists than the old gentry clientele, and displayed a certain respect for artists as professionals, though later—with more confidence and more money—they tended to become domineering. Businessmen also (with several exceptions) owned moderate-sized homes whose walls could accommodate genre and portraits—but not large historical canvases.¹¹³ Russian merchants, many of whom had acquired superb collections of ancient Russian icons, also largely avoided academic and neoclassical works in favor of what was to them Russian “modernism”—that is, the contemporary works of the realists. Arno Mayer has argued that Russia and England were exceptions to his thesis that the European bourgeoisie patronized only traditional art.¹¹⁴ Merchants began rather early the leap from purchase of portraits to an essentially different act of buying art. Motives varied. Kozma Soldatenkov—the “Moscow Medici”—an Old Believer who married a French Catholic, collected a wide selection of Russian art, ranging from Bryullov to Perov. Vera Mamontova began collecting in the 1850s. Gerasim Khludov founded a museum holding the works of Bryullov, Fedotov, and Aivazovsky—a wholly unideological assortment. Others included the Morozovs, Ivan Shchukin, and the Botkins, most of them close acquaintances and even relatives by blood or marriage.¹¹⁵

The major figure of Russian art patronage of the late nineteenth century, Pavel Tretyakov (1832-98), embodied many of the aspects of collecting associated with his class and milieu. Born in the Zamoskvorechie district of Moscow, the heartland of Russia’s merchantry, Tretyakov became an avid reader and, for a time, theatergoer: on his first visit to St. Petersburg in 1852 at age twenty, he attended fourteen theater performances. At age eighteen, he had become head of a huge textile firm upon the death of his father. He began purchasing Dutch masters in 1854 and a few years later shifted to Russian art. On seeing the collection (which he later bought) of F. I. Pryanishnikov, an officer of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, Tretyakov vowed to create his own Russian collection as a cultural “nation-building” enterprise. He met Vasily Perov in 1860 and bought a number of his controversial works as well as Yakobi’s Prisoners' Rest Stop. Tretyakov’s admiration for Russian art stemmed from his patriotism, itself conditioned on the one hand by a conservative antiforeignism and a suspicion of bureaucracy and aristocracy (he declined an offer of ennoblement from Tsar Alexander III); and on the other by a public-spirited aspiration to make Russia’s cultural treasures available to all. Overarching this was Tretyakov’s search for personal and family recognition outside the ranks of the state. His tastes were fairly catholic—indeed sometimes more so than those of the Itinerants whom he vigorously patronized—in terms of genre and style. “Poetry and truth” were what he demanded of genre, landscape, or history. He financed portraits of people as different as Shchepkin, Ostrovsky, the nationalist Mikhail Katkov, and the Pan-Slav ideologists Rostislav Fadeev and Nikolai Danilevsky. Keeping a promise he made in 1860, Tretyakov opened in 1881 the gallery in Moscow (fig. 71) that bears his name and that eventually achieved world renown.¹¹⁶

What did the new brand of patronage mean to the artists, Itinerants and others? The word “freedom” had in the course of the nineteenth century come to mean several different things to creative figures and their supporters: juridical release for serfs and other obligated classes so that they could pursue a life in the arts; the professional designation of Free Artist; and the less specific notion of independence from powerful patrons and from the art market in general so that painters could follow their own creative impulses. The last category was of course the one that entoiled most artists in western Europe. The popular image that has come down to us on that score is precisely one of impoverished geniuses fighting for the right to work as artists. In reality, artists were caught in the dilemma of wanting to paint according to their personal lights and at the same time make a living—not always compatible desires. Relieved of the earlier disabilities after 1861, Russian artists joined the ranks of artists everywhere in facing (and loudly complaining about) that dilemma.

Arrivals, Departures

At a stretch, one might read Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 novel Oblomov as a metaphor for Russia’s struggle to awaken on the eve of emancipation. Just as his house serf Zakhar constantly tried to rouse his master from bed and was rudely rebuffed, so the peasant question nagged at dormant Russia. Oblomov had good instincts: arousal from his bed always ended the sweet reverie of his manorial utopia. After 1861, that utopia and its real-life serenity and seigniorial power were gone with the wind. As a Russian gentrywoman learned with shock and anger after news of emancipation, her serf woman could no longer—like those in Venetsianov’s Morning of a Country Lady—be commanded to bring products or perform duties.¹¹⁷ Landowners had feared a new Pugachëvshchina in the wake of emancipation, though it did not come to pass; like their European counterparts in earlier times, they also feared—or claimed to fear—the decline of manners and culture if serfs were manumitted; and they predicted an onrush of vulgarity and materialism.¹¹⁸ Ironically, some nobles revealed a materialism of their own by demanding compensation for the training given to their house serfs.¹¹⁹ But though serfdom ended, the elaborate structure of deference that had helped sustain it continued in existence. Freedom meant, theoretically, mobility and choice of vocation, though numerous obstacles to that choice remained—poverty, illiteracy, and the restraining power of the village commune. Tragically, in the 1930s communism would impose old and new obstacles—ascription and the Stalinist passport system—upon the peasant grandchildren of the liberated serfs of the 1860s.¹²⁰ And by then, the content and the styles of the art they chose to work in would be determined by government. Braving the obstacles, free Russian peasants of the late nineteenth century would make their careers in all the arts, though how and how many remains a subject inviting further investigation. For the peasants and for the other members of the lower reaches of society, the opportunities opened, as they did for the elite who more and more began taking up professions in the arts in violation of a fading gentry code. As for gentry amateurism, the great butt of professional artists, it continued to flourish right up to the Revolution as it did among other classes.

The subsequent history of the national expansion of musical, theatrical, and fine art production has been well chronicled. The capital conservatories, staffed in the late nineteenth century by Russian men and women, ethnic minorities (especially Jews), and foreigners signified a “modern” sense of national culture, taught and created by diverse people and rooted in both Russian and European traditions. Its various provincial counterparts developed along local lines as well as reflecting standards set in the center. Local Russian musical societies and orchestras followed suit.¹²¹ Even before the theater monopoly ended, several houses, with disguised names to avoid the law, came and went in the capitals. When the lid came off in 1882, commercial houses proliferated. These and the new Popular Theaters grew rapidly in the provinces as well, where the network of theaters was already firmly established.¹²² Well-heeled patrons like Savva Mamontov organized their own theaters; in his case a private opera (1885). The number of art galleries in St. Petersburg alone grew to sixty-two by 1871. The Moscow art market by 1900, though having no dense network of auctions, dealers, and appraisers, was a blaze of intellectual give and take. The Maecenases—merchants, manufacturers, and railroad magnates, Russian and non-Russian (including Jewish)—had dethroned the aristocracy as collectors and as shapers of taste, which now leaned toward modern Russian and European art. In the provinces, by 1915 twenty-eight museums, galleries, or collections possessed holdings originally in the Academy of Arts.¹²³ The Academy and the Itinerants outdid each other in provincial showings. From 1870 to the end of the regime their number grew enormously. In 1884-94, the Itinerants showed twenty-two hundred pieces, and the Academy over four thousand. The Academy tended to show more works, but the Itinerants probably had more viewers, though this is hard to estimate. The figures jumped in the 1890s as a result of greater press coverage and more interaction between artists and society, the spread of the art market, and provincial art schools in the late nineteenth century.¹²⁴

All of this brought a steady expansion of public cultural space and with it a closer contact among classes. Mingling of diverse groups as such does not necessarily entail harmony, as is clear from social practices and experience in prisons, armies, and schools. So what was the social significance of public space? To a certain extent, an elite Republic of Taste was being crowded—though not replaced—by new publics with new tastes and more sites for seeing and for buying art and performance. This provided a classic exemplar of Habermas’s “public sphere” where culture and wide discussion of its qualities act as an inclusive force in society.¹²⁵ The extension of the arts from the private into the public sphere broadened popular participation. This hardly meant a steady rise in enlightenment or morality among social classes, but it did bring a widening of their experience and their outlooks. The sheer act of gaining entry to previously forbidden or otherwise inaccessible places and seeing new things added an increment, however slight, of dignity and honor to those previously denied them.

In the broad reaches of the land outside the capitals, the process was accelerated by that great engine of modernity, the railroad, whose cultural impact awaits serious study and whose network was both anticipated and utilized by traveling artists (fig. 72). Not everyone welcomed the train. In Ostrovsky’s The Storm, the old peasant woman Feklyushka likened the railroad train to an “iron devil.” As early as 1853, Metropolitan Filaret identified it with the Antichrist, as did many another antimodernist in years to come.¹²⁶ Yet, even before Filaret thundered, the railroad passenger car was already being used as a setting for comedy. The 1852 vaudeville “Railroad” revolved around a love affair on the way from Moscow to St. Petersburg, with episodes in Tver and Vyshny Volochok. The setting caught on in the coming years in fiction and drama.¹²⁷ The railroad station, that dominant site of arrivals and departures, may be taken as an emblem for the things that were being left behind and the new destinations for the world of the Russian arts. But the railroad also had a much more direct and powerful meaning. For, although it did not bind together the far-flung communities of the nation as it did in Britain or France, it did—as in those nations—extend the reach of culture in a dramatic way over the next fifty years.

The “revolt” in the worlds of art did not mean revolution against the arts—though that idea floated prominently in the writings of journalists such as Pisarev and in fictional characters such as Bazarov. Calls for throwing Pushkin and Raphael out the window were common in this discourse. At another level, at a meeting of young people in the early 1860s, nihilist men and women were saying that music and theater were for the affluent and that musicians were of less use to the people than shoemakers. A woman, angered at a member’s admiration for Liszt, Chopin, and Glinka, said “they are founding conservatories and giving out scholarships while the people stagnate in ignorance.” In the same decade, the painter Repin visited the “anti-salon” of Valentina Serova, mother of the well-known painter, wife of the composer, and herself a composer. Repin noted that the nihilists in attendance talked all the way through a piano recital and put their rudeness on display. At least one young radical hoped that the theater would become a scene of political ferment. On March 5, 1861, the eve of the public announcement of emancipation which had been decreed weeks earlier, Pëtr Kropotkin and his fellow officers rushed to the Italian opera’s last performance of the season, believing that “some manifestation was sure to take place there”—in their meaning, a protest. But the only manifestation took the form of hurrahs and a singing of “God Save the Tsar.”¹²⁸ Political revolution in theater—a pallid one at that—would have to wait until 1905.

What of the well-known schisms and rebellions within the arts? These insurrections—when not invented—have been greatly exaggerated. The nearly parallel myths about the Itinerants and the Mighty Five persisted in Soviet and Western scholarship and among cultural consumers for such a long time that it is still difficult to dislodge them, even though Elizabeth Valkenier, Robert Ridenour, and Richard Taruskin have provided definitive demolition. The myths set up a distinct and long-lasting polarity between Itinerants and Academy and between the Five and the Conservatory—in each case pitting heroic patriots against reactionary cosmopolitans. In fact, both of the insurgent movements were originally anchored to social-professional issues as much as to those of national expression; and while they rejected or claimed to reject academic systems, they also sought artistic and social status and recognition within academic institutions. The Itinerants and the Mighty Five over time went through several reversals, or, depending on one’s view, experienced similar maturation. The artists engaged in all genres of painting: history (notably Russian history), landscape, genre, political and social commentary, and portraits of people of various political coloring. The musicians also branched out into styles and genres, such as chamber music, that were alien to the early notions of the Five. In painting, the national came to dominate over the socially critical. For composers, social criticism was almost never an issue; but, one might argue that, unlike the Itinerants, they became less rather than more national. Itinerants and Mighty Five patrons included merchants and the state: Repin painted a renowned collective portrait of the State Council; Rimsky-Korsakov filled the Imperial Theaters with his operas. These mutations were accompanied by a conservative stance: Repin and others objected to the early work of Valentin Serov; survivors of the Five did the same for some emerging composers.

Rimsky-Korsakov as early as 1871 became a professor at the Petersburg Conservatory, while simultaneously heading the Free Music School. He later befriended Tchaikovsky, a favorite target of some in the Mighty Five, and came to view his friend Stasov’s canonical account of a fundamental schism as fiction. “A special 'Russian music',” he said in the 1880s, “does not exist.” By the end of that decade, the Five had essentially dissolved with the death of Musorgsky and Borodin and the formation of the Belyaev Circle—which Cui and Balakirev repudiated. This circle, patronized by the wealthy merchant Mitrofan Belyaev, soon become the dominant musical school, with close links to the Conservatory. The Itinerant painters similarly diversified, diluted much of the social commentary of their earlier works, and accepted patronage from patriotic merchants and the Russifying Tsar Alexander III. In the 1890s, four of them took up posts at the Academy of Arts. Well before this, in Taruskin’s words alluding to both the Itinerants and the Five, “the mavericks of the 1860s were becoming the establishment of the 1880s.” For good measure, it can be noted that the once censored playwright Alexander Ostrovsky ended up as an official of the Imperial Theaters.¹²⁹

This is not to argue that no “real days” or fundamental changes dawned; it was just that the weather, fickle as usual, always brought surprises and unexpected tomorrows. Looking afresh at the century or so before the emancipation, one might be tempted to see it as an almost ahistorical period, a tranquil time before the great blows and change points so familiar to us from that segment of prerevolutionary history that has won the most scholarly attention—the years 1855-1917, with their Great Reforms, a continuous revolutionary movement, industrialization, urban technologies, the 1905 upheavals, and those of World War I and the Russian Revolution. The grand sweep of events from the fires in St. Petersburg in the early 1860s to the Petrograd eruptions of 1917, the rhythmic waxing and waning of economic life and its ugly social consequences, the brilliant cultural effusions of the Silver Age—these have pressed the historical muse to the service of drama, a drama whose final curtain bore the hammer and sickle upon its crest and whose main inspiration has often been teleological and apocalyptic. No comparable historiosophical terminals lay in wait at the end of the period covered in these pages. Neither the blood-drenched kurgans of Crimea nor the great awakening of civic consciousness in the late 1850s could match in scope or misery the fatal year 1917. The lack of a vivifying and motivating telos bestows upon this period a certain supposed emptiness, an appearance of flotation as of a sleeping community cut loose from world-historical processes, more suited to investigation by anthropologists than to the analyses of historians. But this is a misleading picture. Stasis is a relative concept; in fact, all is forever flowing, at however glacial a tempo. After all, the import of the preceding chapters lies not in the dénouement of its story but in its unrolling, the lives lived, the arts created and experienced.

Russia was still in many ways a big importer of culture in the early nineteenth century. One might even say without undue exaggeration that Russia was the object (but not victim) of an uncoordinated three-power occupation: the Germans in music, the French in theater, and the Italians in art. In the second half of the century, the importing continued, but the export factor took on world significance—especially in literature, music, and ballet. Russian creative figures came to be more than welcome in European and American cultural venues. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, painters went to Rome, composers and performers roved the European capitals, French-speaking Russian enthusiasts thronged the Comédie française and the Opéra. As I hope to have demonstrated, the earlier period contained its own complexities. The great changes of the postemancipation period did not occur suddenly but were preceded by long preparation in all fields. Nor were they simply a wave of revolts from below by creative minds; the ever-present state, wrapped in its own ambivalence about the arts, took away with one hand—but often gave with the other—the medals, the patronage, the education, and the permissions that eroded its own ascriptive cultural system.

When, then, did the real day dawn? No answer is possible because Dobrolyubov, in posing the question, like all visionaries dreamed of a permanent bright new day in human relationships—a noble hope indeed—rather than the painful odyssey of incremental reform, alternating with the disillusion and reversion that are the lot of our humanity. What awaited Russia were many dawns and many dusks, numerous arrivals and departures throughout the next half-century which was to be the most glorious and spectacular period of its cultural history and which awaits its social historian. One may say that the days passed as did the nights—and the real day kept dawning.