PART I
1
Every manifestation, every kind of utterance in social life, belongs to the boundless historical domain.
—Adam de Gurowski, Russia as It Is (1854)
Cultural tours of cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow, valuable and necessary though they be, all too often resemble a museum visit. The galleries themselves are hung with paintings by periods, genres, or themes constructed out of modern museum ideologies. The opulent palaces no longer house residents but are the haunt of curators and visitors. City tours focus precisely on the edifices where organic life has ceased to exist, buildings with no function other than visual instruction. The places that still work in many ways as they did in 1830 or in 1860 are theaters, concert halls, and art academies. The first two are accessible to the modern public but only as audience in the front of the house. The “innards” of the performance centers are never the topic of a historical-cultural lecture. The former Imperial Academy of Arts, standing resplendent on the banks of the Neva, is still an art school but not a part of any city tour itinerary. Those seeking to get the feel of how people lived amid the surviving cultural artifacts usually consult guidebooks, though these also reflect a modern sense of what is historically and aesthetically important. Almost all Russian-produced evocations of past urban life—particularly of St. Petersburg—draw upon the words of contemporary writers to summon up for us the ambiance, the life force, the details, and the mystique that have long ago passed from the scene but live on in the minds of the intelligentsia. Dozens of works on such themes as Pushkin’s Petersburg and Griboedov’s Moscow are built around these and other central figures in Russia’s glorious literary canon. But the literary-biographical allusions all too often obscure or ignore the experience of others who lived at the time and the place.
Two Dots on a Map
The coming chapters will, I hope, bring to the reader some sense of what private and public cultural places meant to the people who lived, worked, studied, painted, and performed in them in those decades between the reign of Catherine II and the end of serfdom.1 St. Petersburg, with a population of a half-million in 1858, ranked after London, Paris, and Istanbul.2 Every capital has another capital somewhere inside it. Petersburg’s capital-within-a-capital, not wholly defined by geography, formed an archipelago of power, cosmopolitanism, an interacting social elite, and the headquarters, so to speak, of high cultural production in the Russian Empire. Petersburg consisted of two concentric circles. The inner one formed the core of production and consumption; the larger, embracing most of the city, served as one of the great objects of early nineteenth-century visual art. The size of the inner circle is surprisingly small: a strip of Vasilevsky Island across the Neva River from the main part of town; and a rough triangle formed by the northern bend of the Neva; the Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg’s main thoroughfare; and the Fontanka Canal, with an outlier at Theater Square. The island’s embankment held the Academy of Arts, founded in the eighteenth century; and the university, slightly to the north, founded in 1819 and home of a well-known concert series in the 1840s. Across lay the Winter Palace, home of the royal family, of a private theater, and of a picture gallery—nucleus of the world-famed Hermitage (fig. 1). The residential rooms of the palace also played host to musical performance by the dynasts themselves and their courtiers. A few yards away, in a courtyard off the Moika River, stood the elegant Capella, the court choir.
St. Petersburg’s major cultural zone lay along and near the Nevsky, with its center on Mikhailovsky Square. The Soviets renamed it Ferdinand Lassalle Square after the nineteenth-century German socialist and renamed it again in 1940 Square of the Arts. The land was planted in the eighteenth century with thousands of maples in rows, but used as a dump heap until 1823 when it was chosen for Grand Duke Michael’s new palace and gardens, designed by Carlo Rossi. The Mikhailovsky Palace, now the Russian Museum, served as a musical venue under Maria Fëdorovna in the reign of Tsar Alexander I and Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna under Nicholas I. Elena Pavlovna engaged Anton Rubinstein as her house pianist in the 1850s; together they helped launch Russia’s first conservatory of music in 1862. Across the street, on the western edge of the square appeared in 1833 the then least Russian of the capital’s theaters: the Mikhailovsky, later Maly, now the Musorgsky Opera Theater. Opposite, in a two-story flat (it is now a school), lived a key figure of art music in the first half of the century, Mikhail Vielgorsky, who held there a grand musical salon. A few steps away, across Italyanskaya Street, stood the Gentry Club or Noble Assembly, completed in 1839, which now houses the St. Petersburg Philharmonia. Three blocks to the east, on Karavannaya Street, General Alexei Lvov, a major mover in the musical world under Nicholas I, ran his own salon and private concert venue. In the other direction from the Gentry Club, around the corner on the Nevsky as it crosses the Catherine (Griboedov) Canal, is located the Glinka Small Hall which, as the Engelhardt House, played host to the most prestigious concert music of the first third of the nineteenth century.3
Of the two remaining zones, one lay nearby, off the Nevsky a block east of Sadovaya Street on the corner of which stood the Imperial (now Russian National) Library. Looming over a square that separates it from the Nevsky, the Alexandrinsky (later Pushkin) Theater still proudly stands, a monument to the mastery of its architect, Carlo Rossi. Behind the theater, southward toward another square and the Fontanka Canal, stretched Theater Street, also designed by Rossi, with matching edifices on either side. Inside the buildings on the east side were nested the illustrious Theater School and the management of the entire Imperial Theater system, the Directorate. The school remains and the main theater library has been added on the corner. Gostiny Dvor (Merchants' Arcade), then and now the city’s largest shopping center, and Apraxin Dvor along the Sadovaya stood one and two blocks respectively from the Alexandrinsky Theater, a fact that accounted for the large number of merchants in that theater’s audience. Theater Square, hardly a zone at all, emerged near the intersection of the Moika River and the Kryukov Canal, a few kilometers below the Nevsky. It included only the Bolshoi Kamenny or Great Stone Theater, the imperial system’s oldest and its major opera and ballet theater until replaced by the Marinsky in 1860. St. Petersburg’s three imperial theaters, together with the two in Moscow, constituted a state theater monopoly in the capitals; no other public theater could function in these two cities until the 1880s.
Intermixed among these zones, lay a multitude of private cultural sites. A few blocks from the Great Stone, the apartment of the Kukolnik brothers hosted the Brotherhood—composer Mikhail Glinka, playwright Nestor Kukolnik, and painter Karl Bryullov. Like the flats of Vielgorsky and Lvov, it served as an important private music-making center. Many schools offered music training, including the newly founded Law School on the Fontanka Canal which fostered the talents of Alexander Serov, Vladimir Stasov, and Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. But classical music performance, unlike art and theater, lacked not only a professional conservatory but even a permanent concert venue. Space had to be rented; musical leaders had no state-sponsored institution (except the Capella and the theaters). They met at salons; and later on—as in the case of the Balakirev circle—at the university or through word of mouth. Interlacing all these special sites, a tangled archipelago of aristocratic homes served as music salons, gathering places for theater enthusiasts, and privately owned art collections. Carriages manned by liveried servants, usually serfs, linked the entire system together day and night.4
Beyond the central core lay the palatial suburban houses on the islands in the northwestern part of the city, and seasonal festive sites like Ekaterinhof, a few miles west of Petersburg proper. The most famous suburban entertainment center, Pavlovsk, possessed a resort-like park with a "Vauxhall" or entertainment center and a ballroom. About thirty kilometers from the capital, it was connected to it by Russia’s first railroad line in the reign of Nicholas I. Johann Strauss, among others, offered the city’s commuters the light music entertainment for which he was famous.5
Social life at the top in this glorious capital—where smoking; an unbuttoned uniform; or wearing a flower, glasses, or beard in public (by one in government or military service) could be fined—revolved around highly ritualized receptions at court, private balls, theatergoing, and the fashionable round of visits and soirées. In the aristocratic weekly “at homes,” wits were expected to hold forth in nimble conversation—usually in French. The related soirée (and its larger cousin, the “rout”) was more kinetic than the salon. As the size of a gathering increased, serious talk tended to give way to lighter conversation. The grandest upper-class social occasion, the ball, emulated the court in formality and order of the dance. Women here displayed not only their physical charms and sense of fashion, but also the bon mot and the correct social skills. The sociability of the ball included status striving, flirtation, and matchmaking. The novelist Ivan Goncharov in the 1840s wrote of social lions who prided themselves on savoir faire and savoir vivre in matters of table, wines, and effortless drawing-room behavior—all without excessive enthusiasm; and dandies, so obsessed with outward appearance that some were known to starve themselves in order to purchase finery. Russian dandies, whose hour peaked in the 1820s, emulated London beaux and Parisian flâneurs whose costume, lisping speech, and balletic movements underlined their devotion to leisure and pleasure. Such attitudes among the highest ranks of society tended to inhibit the ardent pursuit of a creative life or career.6
Since aristocratic sociability put so much stress on form, contemporaries took note of its desiccating effect. “It is at social gatherings,” wrote Nikolai Karamzin in 1790, “that one enjoys friends least. Such occasions are not designed for discussion, conversation, or display of sentiment. Each person must say only a word in passing, and then move aside so as to yield the stage to others. Everyone is uneasy lest he say something indiscreet and thus reveal his ignorance of good form. In short, this is a perpetual vicious comedy that goes by the name of social necessity, a comedy without meaning and above all without interest.” A lady-in-waiting at the Russian court, Anna Tyutcheva, declared that “inflated ritualism is a vast emptiness, a profound boredom, and complete lack of serious interests and intellectual life.” Even body language and facial expression felt the bonds of politesse. Sofiya Khvoshchinskaya (1828-65) who spent a half-dozen years in an aristocratic boarding school, told of her classmates’ “restrained grimaces” reflecting the institute’s "manière d'être" and the mechanical perfection of “good breeding.” In polite society, the effete mannerisms and the “languid gaze and drawling tone” of dandies could drain social contact of natural expression and sympathy.7
The segment of the capital’s population living in the triangle and on the islands essentially dominated its cultural output, but only indirectly—as managers, patrons, and audiences. Gentry folks, lofty aristocrats, or simple landowners could perform for whomever they wanted at home. But a mantle of taboo covered public performance, contaminated as it was by its association with money, professionalism, deference, and exposure to public opinion. The powerful social prejudice—shared by other European upper classes well into the twentieth century—curtailed for a long time the potential pool of creative talent that could appear in Russian public life. None the less, the aristocracy basked in the reflected light of St. Petersburg’s cultural offerings. Pierre Bourdieu speaks of space in terms of cultural capital: prestige accrues to those who live in the capital and at its center with access to power and culture: theaters, university, museums, and each others’ homes and salons. This capital is cumulative since the pleasure and privilege and the psychic benefits of the space are multiplied by the additional access to knowledge.8 The capital as cultural and intellectual magnet and the brain drain from the provinces are hardly an earth-shattering discovery. After all, in Balzac’s novel, when Rastignac climbed the heights of Paris, he vowed someday to conquer it and not Dijon. The magnetic power was not the exclusive possession of St. Petersburg but of its sister Moscow as well. Provincials were constantly coming into the capitals through will and wealth, promotion or reassignment, peasant temporary work, or a chance relative. A surprising level of economic mobility combined with relative social immobility meant that poor folks often had rich relatives in the capitals. The confrontation of the provincial with the big city has rightly been called the ''great central myth of the nineteenth-century realistic novel: the solitary ambitious or underprivileged hero face to face with the corrupt and impersonal metropolis."9 The theme was played with several variations in the Russian theater as well as in real life by artistic Rastignacs.
Around the enchanted circle of St. Petersburg, sometimes living among it, another population toiled and served—a universe of merchants, lower officials, free and unfree servants, ordinary townspeople, and the denizens of the lowest depths of crime, beggary, and prostitution. The terms raznochintsy and meshchane have spurred thousands of pages of analysis and contention and have often been used interchangeably. Raznochintsy (“people of various ranks”), a huge, porous, and ill-defined population and the core of Russia’s middle social layers, could include the “clerkish legions” who toiled in government offices, educated commoners, and some members of the urban lower class ( meshchane), depending on who was using the word. The taxable meshchane or townspeople belonged neither to the merchant, peasant, nor gentry estates. The vague term included porters, dredgers, coachmen, sales clerks, shop assistants, hawkers and vendors, and all kinds of humble laborers; as well as children of priests, declasse gentry, the offspring of army doctors or estate stewards, and those who fit nowhere else in the order of social estates. Together they far outnumbered all other town residents and yet remain the least studied of all Russian social categories. In practice, raznochintsy and meshchane often overlapped. Much has been made of the plight of the victimized urban lower middle class, Dostoevsky’s poor town folk, including a motley assortment of penniless students and various educated but impoverished types who lived in dingy flats or rooms without running water. Some writers pitied them and others assaulted their alleged meshchanstvo: crudeness and vulgarity of taste and behavior, a philistinism lower than that of merchants. Yet these sectors of the city population played their own role both as subjects and audiences of urban drama on the Russian stage and of graphic caricature.10
At the bottom of the social heap lay a world far removed from the showy homes of the elite, a dark-hued underground of pungent smells and bustling humanity; of taverns, brothels, tenements, lodges, and flophouses. Here and in other Russian cities, crime, alcohol, and prostitution raged long before statisticians began to lament their “emergence.” Artists and feuilletonists began exploring the “back alleys” of St. Petersburg in the 1830s and 1840s. Vsevolod Krestovsky entered this dank world with Petersburg Slums: A Book About the Well-Fedand the Hungry (1864), set in 1858, a close imitation of Eugene Sue’s Mystères de Paris of the 1840s, but with a Russian setting. Dostoevsky followed in 1866 with Crime and Punishment. Both novels were set in the squalid Haymarket Square.11 The denizens of the lowest depths never became characters on stage in this era and few ever gained entry even to the gallery of the Imperial Theaters. Yet some of the poorest and weakest urban dwellers—orphans and abandoned children, sons and daughters of serfs—made it into the theater school and the Academy of Arts as students who were set on a path of potential professional success.
The Russian imperial capital served then, as it still does, as an infinite urban tableau for depiction by visual artists. Its breathtaking panorama combined with a heartless sterility were captured in Pushkin’s great poem, The Bronze Horseman (1833); its ghostly menace was celebrated throughout nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, and many others. A dominant paradigm in St. Petersburg’s cultural history has been mythic and metaphorical, a celebration or lament about the city’s aura and mystique. St. Petersburg has long generated philosophical and literary vistas, whereas Moscow has more often been approached as a “local study” (kraevedenie).12 As a visual city, the northern capital, with its empire style, reached its zenith in the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I, with the General Staff on Palace Square, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Admiralty, the Stock Exchange, the Senate and Synod buildings, the Imperial Library, and the buildings noted above. Luxuriant gardens, parks, squares, and broad avenues that divided and connected great mansions added further luster to a magnificent city, as did pleasure craft with liveried oarsmen, merchant barges, watch boats, and canal taxis that plied the many waterways of the capital. Artists at the Academy were drawn to the opulence of the capital, its architectural beauties and the sumptuous interiors adorned by crystal chandeliers, parquet floors, fine furniture, urns, and clocks. Especially admired was the “dynastic zone”: the shores of the Neva and the Admiralty, the Kazan and Spassky Districts, the royal and grand ducal palaces, the grand cathedrals. Interspersed, as if on guard, stood government and military ministries and the barracks of the Guards Regiments.
Aside from the built environment, a prominent feature of Petersburg life that caught the eye of painters of the academic tradition was the military review. Extraordinarily flamboyant uniforms, worn even off duty, identified each unit. The northern sunlight glanced off metallic casques and lances as patrols trotted along the Nevsky or the streets near the Admiralty, the only paved thoroughfares in this period. Tens of thousands of soldiers and elite Guards officers, garrisoned in specially named streets, squares, and neighborhoods, provided the cast for the regular spectacles of coordinated movement. The obsession with geometric formations of tsars Peter III, Paul, and Alexander I came to full fruition under Nicholas. Inspections, maneuvers, changings of the guard, and mounted escorts gave the capital the countenance of an encampment. What came to be known as paradomania so offended the (easily offended) visitor, the Marquis de Custine, that he called Petersburg “a military camp converted to a town.” The city’s public, however, did not share Custine’s sniffy attitude. People of all classes swarmed around the Field of Mars or Palace Square to soak in the visual performances. Graphics show pie sellers hawking their wares to the onlookers. Painters trained in composing group postures, battles, and urban perspectives had a field day capturing the contrast between the orderly ranks of the marchers, the flashing sabers, and the restless crowds.13
Academy painters and others reared in the European tradition naturally clung to the enchanted circle for a long time as a cityscape suitable for artistic representation. Street vendors and other humble urbanites made up the often stylized extras in the theatrical oil canvases that privileged a long perspective and grandiose squares filled with ladies and gentlemen enjoying leisure. Eventually, artists took on the grittier realities and picturesque scenes of the daily round in courtyards, back streets, dockyards, market squares, and town taverns. Organ grinders, stonebreakers, and washerwomen on the canals entered the world of urban representation. Even before Dostoevsky began peopling Haymarket Square south of the Nevsky with his unforgettable characters, that place, the source of feed for the thousands of the city’s mounts and cart and carriage horses, was captured in graphic art, with all its energy and earthy tumult.14 However, in pictures, only gradually did building sites begin to sprout once invisible laborers exerting their bodily strength in the innumerable construction, post-fire rebuilding, and repair operations that kept thousands busy throughout this entire period.
Evenings at the Russian opera or drama in St. Petersburg in the first half of the nineteenth century offered viewers luxuriant sets of Carthage, Athens, sixteenth-century London, the seventeenth-century countryside of Kostroma, and a host of other locales, but seldom of the Russian capitals, aside from standard drawing-room sets. The cityscape itself had yet to make an impression on playwrights whose Petersburg settings were generic. Fashion shops and merchant arcades appeared, even in play titles, but exterior—as usual in drama—remained subordinate to character and plot. In the course of the half-century, those plots began to expand their social content from the eighteenth-century gentry-and-servant genres to plays about merchants and other non-noble urban classes engaged in commerce or apartment hunting.
It was often said that a journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg could be like a trip to Europe, and the reverse journey was more like a trip to “Russia.” In terms of national imagery and cultural geography, Moscow differed from Petersburg in almost every way. As an ancient city founded in 1147, and the older capital once the hub of the great Muscovite state, Moscow exuded tradition (fig. 2). Fëdor Glinka called it “ancient city, city of the heart.” Russian emperors lived in Petersburg, but had to be crowned in Moscow. The Kremlin and Red Square summoned up memories of hefty boyars, barbaric executions, tsarist pomp, and what some foreigners called Asian (or in those days “Asiatic”) splendor. Narrow lanes twisted through old neighborhoods that bore a strong sense of place in memoirs and fiction, such as the Arbat, Kitai-Gorod, Old Equerries, and Zamoskvorechie districts. The ring boulevards of Moscow seemed to encircle a rotund old lady, in contrast to Petersburg, whose ramrod character was suggested by linear streets. Moscow looked outward in every direction into the vastness of Russia; its northern sister gazed across the seas to the outer world. The older city’s hundreds of Orthodox churches and twenty-nine monasteries (to St. Petersburg’s four) marked a density of pious observance contrasting with the secular look of the Petersburg baroque and neoclassical skyline. Merchants and gentry lived in both capitals, to be sure; but thousands of Moscow’s population of about one third of a million in 1840 engaged in trade, as opposed to the hundreds in Petersburg. Retailers overwhelmed street life in their outdoor markets or covered stalls and one was much more likely to see in Moscow rows of carts bearing goods to the shops than a smart military detail on parade. A Modern Guidebook to Moscow of 1833 spoke of its “rustic simplicity and pleasantness,” where there is “fresher air, cleaner and healthier than in other European cities.”15 As a minor artifact of local boosterism, the book endowed Moscow with a rural “Russianness.”
Moscow was no Geneva, Amsterdam, or Hansa town. Though merchants and tradespeople outnumbered the gentry in Moscow, the old aristocracy still dominated its cultural and social life. The conflagration of 1812 reduced the city to an ashen landscape of “great burnt out houses without window frames or roofs, tumble down walls”; and rebuilding went on into the 1820s.16 Great noble houses used space lavishly, replicating country estates with extended wings, outbuildings, stables, and gardens right in the middle of town. The two-story home on Strashnaya Square of Mariya Rimskaya-Korsakova's husband had twenty rooms, stables, and a carriage house. A typical salon hostess of the 1810s and 1820s, she circulated among the Obolenskys, Golitsyns, and Tolstoys and regularly hosted large dinner parties and balls for a hundred guests.17 The Moscow Gentry Club boasted a Columned Hall—where Tsar Alexander II scolded the gentry in the late 1850s for their reaction to emancipation plans, and where Stalin held his show trials in the 1930s—which could accommodate five thousand persons. It hosted a weekly ball during the winter months.18 In the early nineteenth century, the club catered only to gentry members and their gentry guests; wealthy merchants gained admittance on special occasions such as a tsar’s visit, but had to sit behind the columns, view the doings from a distance, and not mingle with the gentlefolk.
The wealthy merchant princes toiled over accounts in their offices and planned elaborate delivery and pickup journeys to the great fairs and beyond to India or China. Many of the thousands of merchants of Moscow and elsewhere rose from humble beginnings, including serfdom, to great wealth; many also fell back into the lower classes due to bankruptcy. The high risk factor made them conservative and often ready to swindle a competitor or customer. Since the bazaar retailers were especially notorious for sharp practices, they helped stamp this image upon those titled as merchants, partly accounting for their shady reputation among the rest of the population. In any case, many merchants deserved the sobriquet arshinnik, a cheat who cuts corners on the product. Like merchants in other societies that marginalized them, they tended to protect each other, give generously to charity, and take care of their own.19 The Russian merchantry found it hard to shake their image among the intelligentsia as a “kingdom of darkness.” Indeed many lived in poorly lit homes cluttered with heavy furniture and icons on the walls. But the darkness metaphor was also applied to their way of life: patriarchy, mercenary marriage deals, tyranny over lowly clerks. Since most merchants were religiously observant Orthodox or Old Believers, skeptics charged them with obscurantism, superstition, and hostility to culture and modern ways.
Shunned by high society and inward-looking, the Moscow merchantry, except for the very rich, thus largely lived its own life, partly due to ascription and partly by choice. The traveler in Vladimir Sollogub’s 1845 novel, The Coach, noted in the merchants he met a sense of identity that was linked to “integrity” of national character. Their morality valorized sharp dealing with those outside the professional clan but not within it. Authenticity implied a refusal to climb upward, shave the beard, don the “German” wardrobe, or marry into gentry. For in doing so one lost personality, character, identity, and true self—and one became two “halves,” both of inferior quality. The bulk of the merchantry limited their socializing to other middle groups of society. In the Moscow Merchant Club, founded in 1786, members mixed regularly with teachers, professors, physicians, other professionals, intelligentsia, figures from the art world, and occasional gentry guests. Until banned in 1859 by a reactionary governor of Moscow, even meshchane and artisans were admitted. Ordinary merchants made little effort to “gentrify” in everyday life. They invited their social betters to banquets, but the gesture was rarely returned because most merchants lacked foreign languages and gentry-defined social skills. Despite many exceptions, club rules, social practices, and even sumptuary laws kept class lines in place.20
The exceptions, wealthy merchant and manufacturing families, made or tried to make a transition to European culture or gentry-like ways. Even the humbly born founders of great merchant fortunes in the early nineteenth century were, in the words of a scholar, already adopting some aspects of Western “dress, manners, and hygiene, and ... forms of entertainment.”21 They sired a generation, born roughly between 1830 and 1850, which finished high school but not university, traveled to Europe, and dipped more deeply into the well of Europeanized Russian culture. A Russian-speaking foreigner in the 1850s found a wealthy merchant’s home decked out like a gentry mansion. The family wore imported clothing and the males were clean-shaven; the daughters sang Verdi arias for the company; and they all dined on French cuisine as they spoke French.22 Gentrifying merchants and those who dealt on a national or international scale of business had an enormous range of contacts from all kinds of social layers and were far from being hermetically sealed prior to 1861. Growing ambivalence and variety of outlooks best describe merchant views of self and others. Subtle changes in identity and self-presentation were reflected in costume. Traditional merchants favored dark double-breasted suits, with beard, hair, and boots in a peasant style. In the 1840s, by one account, three variants of merchant facial appearance could be detected: fully bearded, a trimmed beard, and clean-shaven—the last among the merchant aristocracy who emulated Russian gentry and European men. The less adventurous retained the caftan and boots, but made of fine cloth and good leather. The uneasy mixture of European and traditional garb was matched among merchant wives.23
Given the social dynamics of a class as visible and tension-generating as the merchantry, it is no surprise that their lives intersected with the arts. In painting, this came in three forms: merchant as target, as sitter, as collector. The graphic artists, notably Fedotov, were happy to enlist merchants and their families as objects of satire along with other social types. Merchants themselves, from the eighteenth century onward, commissioned portraits, in oil and later in photographs, the history of which vividly illustrates the gradual modulations in self-image. In the 1850s appeared the first generation of merchant patrons of Russian art that went beyond family portraits and set the tone for the famous merchant collectors later in the century. In stage representation, Moscow merchants were, right up to the early plays of Alexander Ostrovsky in the 1850s, depicted monotonously as cheats and patriarchal interferers with a daughter’s love interest. On the other side of the curtain, Moscow merchants joined their colleagues all over Russia in patronizing the theater on a regular basis, though some of them boycotted it as an immoral institution. Any number of merchant sons and daughters, with or without family blessing, made a career for themselves on the Russian stage.
The Moscow topography of cultural production and support also marks it off from that of the capital. Like Petersburg, it had its cultural salons and private performance venues. In the realm of public concerts, Moscow lacked anything like even the Engelhardt House and had to negotiate performance events with the often haughty Gentry Club or the Moscow branch of the Imperial Theater Directorate. There existed no powerful, court-affiliated amateurs or concert societies equivalent to those in St. Petersburg. An embryonic art school grew into a major institution from the 1840s onward. Although it remained fully dependent on the Academy of Arts until the 1860s, it spawned its own practitioners of realism in art. Public exhibit space was severely limited. The two major theaters of the imperial system with a continuous history at one location in Moscow appeared only late in the reign of Alexander I: the new Maly (1824) and the Bolshoi (1825). The mini-Directorate in Moscow, though subordinate to St. Petersburg, began to achieve great power and dynamism in the 1830s and 1840s, not only as the headquarters of Moscow performance art but as a staging area for musical virtuosos and theatrical tours to the provinces as well.
Moscow developed certain kinds of public and semipublic spaces that had no parallel in St. Petersburg, and led the way particularly in extending the reach of theater into public conversation: university, coffeehouse, and an actors’ hiring hall. Moscow University, the country’s oldest, had its own jail; and yet radicals like Herzen recalled the democratic atmosphere among students. The serious ones revered the best professors and eagerly discussed their ideas in a favorite tavern, the Brittania Club, across the street from the university on Mokhovaya Street, site of the present-day Manège complex. Amidst the general conviviality of song, drink, and food, students aired their current views on Moscow theater life, among other topics. One recalled that Muscovites, lacking the Hermitage and the Academy of Arts, saw the theater as their city’s cultural focus.24 Indeed some actors who graduated from the university retained strong ties. Another student hangout, Pechkin’s Coffeehouse on Hunter’s Row, across the street from both imperial theaters, played host to a much wider clientele: actors, playwrights, critics, members of the intelligentsia, and merchants. Pechkin’s, the closest thing to the cafes and restaurants that sprang up in the theater districts of European cities, acted as a hatchery of taste. A few blocks away, Barsov’s Tavern became the site of a theatrical agency where managers, theater owners, and performers sought each other out for short or long term engagements in the provinces. Barsov’s, unlike anything in St. Petersburg, came to be the hub of the fast-growing provincial stage. Indeed, Moscow played a crucial role in provincial culture through the density of musical and theatrical estates nearby; a Russianness shared with the provinces; and a web of roads (and later railroads) leading to central Russia, the Volga, and Ukraine. Moscow became the focus of national intellectual currents such as Slavophilism and Native Soil conservatism and eventually the virtual capital of a Russian national theater.
A word about the capitals’ foreign population who played an important role—both positive and negative—in Russian life and culture and its representation. Most important by far were the French, who deluged Russia during the Revolution and the Napoleonic era. Not all, like Prince Polignac, could enjoy a Potocki estate, complete with servants and serfs, for their use. Nor could all receive court appointments or ranks in the military or civil service. Some got work as teachers, tutors, owners of food and fashion businesses. Those reduced to an unfamiliar humble status anticipated in reverse the emigré Russian counts and princes who became valets or taxi drivers in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s. Though members of an archenemy nation for two decades, the French stamped their language, manners, fashion, taste, and culture upon Russians through teaching and social interaction. Many a fake Frenchman assumed that identity for panache: it was widely believed that the Swiss restaurateur Branger was the cousin of the song writer Jean-Pierre de Beranger. In Moscow, a kind of foreign quarter, including many French-speaking Russians, lay near the French church and the Kuznetsky Most. The resident Irish pianist John Field lived there most of his adult life and never learned a word of Russian. Germans from the German states as well as Baltic and other Russianized Germans inhabited both capitals and held a dominant place in the world of instrumental music right up to the 1860s. Italians and other invaders of 1812 often stayed on and some were hired by Moscow aristocrats as majordomos.25
The Seigniorial Abode
With the emancipation of the nobility from obligatory service in 1762 and a vast giveaway of estates into private hands under Catherine II, the socio-cultural space of provincial Russia became animated. Many nobles deserted the capitals and settled into manorial nests (fig. 3). The affluent and ambitious created the cultural universe so eloquently described in Priscilla Roosevelt’s volume on the Russian country manor. Of the roughly estimated 886,782 nobles in European Russia at the end of the period, a top layer of 2,000 to 3,000 wealthy magnates owned five hundred souls or more.26 Well below them, as many as two-fifths of the gentry landowners were considered poor because they possessed only a few dozen or fewer souls—male serfs, the unit of measure. Rich lords maintained homes in the capitals; the country seat, their main source of income, provided either a seasonal or a permanent retreat. Serf villages provided them with unpaid labor ( barshchina) or cash and/or goods (obrok). In short, the serfs fed their masters. Between them and the lord, stewards of various social backgrounds managed the estates. As buffers, stewards often got depicted on stage as villains out to cheat the lord, harass the peasantry, seduce a serf girl, or send a love rival into the army out of turn. The more enterprising gentry opened spas, distilleries, factories, or commercial theaters. A few “improving landlords” won success in adopting European crop systems, animal husbandry, and technology. The Free Economic Society in the 1830s opened agricultural exhibitions that brought together landlords and merchants who shared a common interest in the economic progress of their region. Such societies remained underdeveloped.27 Old-fashioned conservatism, fear of state interference, lassitude, and popular Slavophilism played their part. One other factor might have been in play: “improving landowners” were roasted on the Russian stage. The playwright Alexander Shakhovskoi coined the adage ''Even Russian bread won’t grow in the foreign manner."28
In their fond memories, the Russian gentry overwhelmingly associated the estate not with business but with family and social life. The manor house as home marked the family’s identity (fig. 4). One rarely encounters field serfs or stewards in estate memoirs. What comes through the mist of recollection most vividly is everyday life, often seen as an idyll: parents and siblings, tutors and house serfs; the porch, the garden, the nearby forest and brook; family and seasonal rituals, home entertainments, sleigh rides, and guests. The middle and lower ranks of the gentry in particular, those who could not afford lavish upkeep in the capitals, came to identify their lives with the countryside—their manor, the neighbors’ estates, and sometimes the provincial or district town—an identity that varied from one region to another. The gentry of Tver Province, for example, looked upon family and estate as the emotional focus of life and tended to flock with their own kind. The well-off offered charity to some of the poorer gentry without mingling socially with them.29
With the exception of the few recluses who preferred to take their pleasures privately, the more affluent landowners in town and country shared their cultural treasures with friends and neighbors. Since estates were far-flung and isolated, hospitality and generosity became hallmarks of home living in the countryside for those who had the means. In a flourish of symbolism, retired artillery officers, when moved to entertain, would fire a cannon as the signal for a general dinner invitation to the neighbors. General Nashchokin greeted his guests with musicians on a tower. Alexandra Shchepkina, the sister of the short-lived promoter of German romantic philosophy Nikolai Stankevich and the daughter-in-law of the great serf actor, Mikhail Shchepkin, recalled that on the steppes of Voronezh Province, any gentry family who lived within twenty to thirty miles was considered a neighbor. Guests spent the night and the host’s children would watch in the morning as the carriages disappeared over the flat horizon. In Ekaterinoslav Province during the same period, a landowner hosted a wedding and, since his home could not accommodate all the guests, he had built on the spot a temporary structure with a wooden dance floor.30 In a land with relatively few stopovers, the socially active estate whose owners could afford to entertain guests on a regular basis became a hotel without a concierge and without a final tally. It could contain separate guest rooms or even suites as well as valet and catering services. Both guests and owners could live a life apart from the servants and from the service area while fully enjoying their social space at dinner, tea, shows, the hunt.
Throughout the period, landowners amplified their pleasures by means of artistic display and performance. The countryside attracted more and more noble families, including those exposed to foreign places, wars, and new knowledge; and students who shuttled between home and Moscow and the new university towns. From the 1820s, the estate as a fictional setting proliferated and historians have often singled it out as a hothouse of daydreams about beauty, social harmony, or liberation. But manor houses were more often showcases of power and pleasure than staging areas for the budding intelligentsia. For every Herzen or Bakunin—privileged sons of the gentry mansion—hundreds of landowners and their families took the servile order as a natural condition and translated their overlordship of other human beings into pleasure-giving institutions of art, music, and theater and into schools of culture. Catherine II encouraged the spread of culture to the countryside; she claimed to believe that people who sang and danced could think no evil. Gentry culture flowered in this period: in the wildernesses sprang up an archipelago of culture created jointly by lords and their serfs. Nobles who created cultural estates became Kulturträger, bearers of civilization into the backlands. Though their outreach remained largely limited to friends and neighbors, there is abundant evidence of cultural interaction between gentry and town folks.
Aside from commissioning architecture, sculpture, landscaping, and decorative arts, culturally aspiring landowners sought portraits of themselves and their families and pictures of their estates. Those unable or unwilling to pay professionals had their own serfs turned into artists via home training by a hired teacher, apprenticeship to a local icon painter, or a stint at the Academy of Arts or one of the half-dozen provincial art centers. Training serf musicians mostly followed this pattern. But since no conservatory existed, wealthy lords sometimes sent their serfs to Europe for professional training. Serf actors and other stage performers usually got the least training. Needless to say, any serf artist or performer could, at the whim of a master, be bought and sold or returned to manual labor. These staffing strategies eventually blossomed into serf choirs and full symphonic orchestras; serf painters of every degree of talent; and hundreds of serf theaters that spread their way across rural Russia. The principal content of these arts was European: portraits and landscapes in the academic mode; ballroom, chamber, and symphonic music; and the imitated or copied repertoires of the Imperial Theater system in the capitals, itself largely European in origin or inspiration. For most owners of cultured estates, Western art was seen as a marker of attainment and refinement which in no way conflicted with national identity.31
The notion of a “socio-cultural environment,” floated by some recent Russian scholars, involves not only the place where people live but a cultural space that transcends it. It encompasses those regions where the inhabitants of estates have traveled physically and mentally: their books, memories of things learned, past life—the plays and music they have seen performed, the pictures they have viewed and still view. The recollected experience of nobles in a well-endowed manor house who had been to or lived in the capitals and abroad, had read widely, and knew foreign languages, formed as much part of their cultural space as their cultural furniture: piano, library, theater, or orchestra. The social imaginary of the cultivated estate residents stretched outward and backward in time through texts, classical gardens, family portraits, music, and exotic scenes on stage. The accumulated and recalled impressions or mental learning or artistic enjoyment extended the closed arena of home out into the world and deep into the past. Put another way, in the period of its richest flowering, “the manor house was tied by a thousand threads to the artistic culture of the epoch.”32
Motivation for building cultural worlds on the estate took on many shades: good taste, a craving for distinction, slavery to fashion, the spell of luxury, and a show of authority. And all along the continuum prevailed extreme variations in the human treatment of the artistic servants. Critics have rightly highlighted vanity or vainglory, pride in showing off a string quartet, a vaudeville, or an opera. But there are nuances in pride: of property, of power, of refinement. of generosity, of organizational ability. Among the cultural magnates, genuine connoisseurs attended to every detail of training, rehearsal, and artistry; spared no expense; and often plummeted themselves and their family into poverty and debt. Some masters cast a benevolent net of kindness over their serf artists. For others, whim, caprice, and fancy led to abusive behavior and the display of uninhibited “feudal” powers. The estate, a universe of cultural and social tension until the release of the serfs, often rang with blows and shouts that alternated with the lines from Molière or the strains of Boiledieu. Fear, guilt, masking, speaking French in front of the servants, punishment, and resistance were all part of the story. Sadly, the combination of lash, harem, drill, and stage constituted a mode of expression for some masters in the servile order. The theater, garrison, and harem estates were miniature polities where an otherwise nearly functionless gentry wielded domestic power. Polarities sprung from concrete differences in juridical status and from the contrast between the bondage of serf artists and the fabled sense of “freedom” felt by nobles who built and lived in their own physical world, unencumbered by duty and service to the state. At the same time, many lords viewed the maintenance of estate culture as a mode of “acting European” though, ironically, some outsiders saw it rather as Asian barbarism, especially on those estates which offered glittering superficiality above the dirt and rust, stink and ruin beneath the surface.
Prior to the 1850s, the arts had little to say about the deeper levels of manorial culture or serf artistry itself. Only rarely did graphic art assault the life-styles of the gentry. Playwrights did so regularly, though always within limits of a nonsystemic critique. Individual “sinners” among the nobility felt the sting of satire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for excessive foreign emulation, corruption, failure to serve the state, abuse of serfs, sentimentalism, extravagance, and even agronomic experimentation. The miscreants were treated as exceptions; in plays about a nobleman’s abuse of underlings, another nobleman would step in to restore justice—thus supporting the axiom that absolute monarchy, serfdom, ascription, and indeed the Russian social order as a whole were themselves God-given.
The seignior-serf world of culture eventually collapsed, though not fully until February 19, 1861. Among economically rational gentry, serf artists could be profitable. Landowners sent off individual artists, musicians, singers, or actors on obrok (temporary labor, with part of the wages due to the master) or on loan to the town, to a neighbor, to another theater. Sometimes whole companies were traded, rented, or sold together with families. The Imperial Theater system frequently purchased serf performers from cash-strapped owners. When public advertisement of serf sales without land was officially forbidden in 1801 (though the law was rarely observed), sellers frequented the fairs to do their transacting. Whenever patrons sought to purchase the emancipation of talented serfs, serf owners who knew the market value struck hard bargains. The price range for a creative serf ran from about two thousand to eight thousand (and on occasion as high as ten thousand) rubles while that of ordinary serfs ran to the hundreds of rubles. But the training and trading of serf artists as an investment was more than overbalanced by the enormous drain on seigniorial finances; many of the bankruptcies of this era were caused by those who simply invested too heavily without consideration of the costs. Estates of the grandees flourished until the ravages of war, inheritance laws that fragmented estates, the wages of squandering, and even an antiserfdom sensibility made their inroads into the system.33 Yet, as Priscilla Roosevelt rightly observes, economic decline, with all its pain, did not define the life of the rural gentry. In fact that life was defined as defiance of the decline. In something resembling the active creation of social oblivion, some landowning families stubbornly maintained their patterns of life.34 Even so, the creation of great cultural centers and elaborate manor houses declined from the 1820s onward both because of financial pinch and because some gentry began to prefer smaller-scale residences. Extravagant gamblers and prodigal spenders on luxury eventually had to take out a mortgage or face the auctioneer’s hammer.
Slaves of Art
Creating nests of cultural life required more than money. Only about 2 to 3 percent of nobles could afford to build and maintain the two hundred or so staff required, say, for a large house, church, planned garden, and other amenities; and to hire foreign conductors, musicians, ballet masters, and set designers. The middling and poorer Maecenases of art had little alternative but to deploy their serfs on the front lines of creativity and performance. But even the grandees drew on their serf population for rank-and-file performers. The belief, just starting to erode in other parts of Europe, that artists were hardly better than artisans or servants remained intact in Russia; playing a violin or dancing on stage seemed only a step away from craft skills or household and farm chores. Owners of large estates could draw from armies of field hands, drivers, under-stewards, and various technical workers. For more modest landlords, household serfs made up the recruitment pool: cooks, scullery maids, butlers, and valets. Serf artists of all kinds could be differentiated and segregated from field serfs and domestics in treatment, apparel, and even housing. Just as often, they shared the status of stable boys, millers, blacksmiths, and domestics, even alternating in these roles on a regular basis. An ex-serf recalled in his memoirs how owners inhibited initiative and pride of work by shuttling serfs from farm to house, turning cooks to coachmen, lackeys to clerks or shepherds.35
The dvorovye (household serf) category, including obrok serfs as well as house serfs proper, provided the majority of serf artists. Based on the incomplete and approximate data of the revisions (a loose form of population counting) in the reign of Nicholas I, their percentage of all serfs rose from 4.14 in the eighth revision of 1835, to an estimated 4.79 to 4.85 in the ninth of 1851, to 6.79 in the tenth revision of 1858-9. This translated into a total of 1,035,924 serfs in 1851, and of 1,467,378 in 1858-9 in a serf population then estimated at 20,158,231.36 The conversion by landowners of field serfs into house serfs accelerated in the 1850s. Tsar Nicholas I, who with his advisers considered house serfs both lazy and dangerous, took a few measures, mostly moot, to prevent their increase, but would not forbid conversion of village serfs into house serfs.37 But by the late 1850s it became clear to the authorities that landowners, fearing emancipation, were increasing the relative number of house serfs, to whom owners would not be obliged to give land in any settlement. So on March 2, 1858, conversion was forbidden.38 Figures for the provinces reveal clearly the human foundations of provincial culture in that the provinces with the highest numbers of dvorovye were for the most part those that had a high density of orchestras and theaters.39
How much did serf owners intrude into the lives of their serfs, aside from their latent right to punish miscreants with beatings, reassignment to the army, or even exile to Siberia? One form of “playing” with serfs, psychologically related to their use as actors, took place on “regimental manors,” which, though more common in the eighteenth century, could be found right up to the end of serfdom. Retired officers trained as parade martinets retained their drill-ground spirit and attempted to transform serfs into toy soldiers with elaborate uniforms and constant drill. The power to move human beings around in an endless display of dressage appealed to ex-officers who had no other outlets for their energies. The state-run Military Colonies had the peasant-soldier alternate farming with parade drill. Playing with the intimate lives of serfs went far beyond the colonels’ games. The ex-serf N. N. Shipov recalled that early in the nineteenth century an absentee landowner of the Saltykov family prevented his serfs from marrying out of their class, even though a few of them had enriched themselves in trade. The nobleman D. N. Sverbeev noted that in the 1820s widows and maidens were sold into marriage to landowners who owned villages where intermarriage was impossible due to tight kinship relations. Peasants themselves on a Smolensk estate married by lining up and casting lots in the late 1830s. Landowners sometimes punished servants with an unwanted marriage and gave away serfs to priests and merchants who legally could not own them. Elizaveta Vodovozova, a gentry woman of Smolensk Province, recalled that her neighbors believed strongly in controlling serf marriages; and they resented her father, who did not, as a bad example. A later account claimed that even good folks controlled the lives of their house serfs, including sex and marriage, and attempted to keep lovers apart for various reasons.40 Against this must be put the finding that among female landowners, it was “common practice to manumit serf women who wished to marry on neighboring estates.” Another study argues convincingly that serf marriage was not widely controlled by owners, though it deals only with village serfs.41 Playing the colonel or the matchmaker were deviant forms of that game-playing and play-acting that characterized so much of Europeanized Russian gentry life.
House serfs, living or working in proximity to the masters, were ideal objects of manipulation. The everyday life of servants in Russia has not received the same attention as that of servants in the West (fig. 5).42 The picture is so varied as to defy generalization. Bigger homes provided wings or outbuildings for their servants, but in most others gentry families and their servants—unlike the upstairs-downstairs partitioning of English upper-class homes—lived together. There were rarely servants’ quarters as such, and domestics normally slept on the floor or in some makeshift resting place. In modest homes, servants had little privacy, except the interior privacy of their thoughts. Overstaffing meant that even in the large manor houses servants were under foot. Yet the worlds of servants and gentry diverged in almost every way. The juridical inequality was reinforced by way of life, values, clothes, deportment, language—and punishments.
Adjacent to virtually every elegant manor house, with its ornate formal gardens, stood a stable to which errant house serfs—including artists, actors, musicians—were regularly sent to be beaten. Fëdor Bobkov (1831/2-1898), a house serf, remembered details of relations among the fifteen to twenty house serfs who were, he relates offhand, sometimes beaten. But of atrocious abuse, he knew only by hearsay. Tsar Alexander I’s right-hand man, Count Arakcheev, portrayed by contemporaries as a backwoods barbarian, beat and abused his serf architect I. S. Semënov, later a professor. Thrashing, sometimes severe, became a regular part of the life of musicians and performers of both sexes. Baron Nikolai Wrangel, a man learned in the arts, left a gripping memoir of a childhood that coincided with the last years of serfdom. While loathing serfdom, he tried to be fair to his fellow gentry, most of whom he thought to be humane. Yet he recounted numerous tales about the cruelty of his neighbors and the murder of masters by serfs. His most famous and much-quoted anecdote concerned the lord who forced a male and female serf to stand nude for hours in the garden posed as Hercules and Venus. In a rage, they jumped from their pedestals one day and brained him. Callousness also led to the sale of serfs without land (though forbidden since 1801), gambling them away, and the rending of family ties. The renowned painter Vasily Tropinin, to note only one instance, was given away as part of a dowry.43 An even more abhorred practice, one treated gingerly on the stage, was the breach of recruiting norms—selling serfs as inductees or putting them into the ranks out of turn.44
Though landowners’ sexual use of female house serfs was fairly common (fig. 6), establishing a seigniorial seraglio overshot the norm. Harem masters were able to enjoy the carnal favors of scores or even hundreds of women. A few masters filled their beds simultaneously with a cluster of serving girls. Herzen spoke with scorn of his uncle’s serf harem. In the 1820s, landowner Pëtr Kashkarov (Koshkarev), in addition to wife and mistress, had a dozen young girls sleep in his bedroom, attend his weekly bath, read to him, and play cards. Yuri Lotman characterized this style of life as a mix of European secularism and paganism, typical of a large segment of the Russian gentry. It suited perfectly the tastes of those lords who blended carnality with a flair for music and theater. General Izmailov, owner of eight hundred servants, kept about thirty girls locked up in his home. Viktor Sinelnikov, an elderly bachelor and in-law of Avdotiya Panaeva, owned about two thousand souls and maintained a two-story stone building housing a harem of dozens of serf girls. For this, the local authorities eventually took his estate in trust. Such sanctions remained largely a dead letter although one landlord who had ravished some sixty young serf girls was punished. Peasants sometimes acted on their own to beat or murder the guilty party. There were also cases where girls’ parents happily provided them to the lord in hopes that their offspring would have a better life. On rare occasions, the lord would take a serf girl as a bride.45
It is difficult to separate the abuses of household serfs from other kinds. In notorious cases of a landowner’s mistreatment of his or her people, the state would intervene by taking the estate into official guardianship for oversight. In 1838, 140 estates were so handled and in 1854, 193. But these interventions arose only in response to outrageous cases. The tribulations of house serfs were less liable to public notice. The Decembrist leader, Colonel Pavel Pestel, in his revolutionary program Russian Justice, explicitly named household servants as the worst-off of all serfs. Alexander Nikitenko (1804/5-77), a serf who became a highly educated government censor, wrote in his diary in 1851, referring to recent years, that “ignorance and unlimited power made most Russian nobles behave cruelly in those days.” As the author of a statistical study writing on the eve of emancipation understated it, the great majority of house serfs ''have lived right up to today a life that poorly corresponds to the strict demands of civil societies."46
To be sure, the bad cases made good stories and caught the attention of writers then and later. In many a normal gentry home, the power of the master or mistress was often tempered by the capacity of the house servant—like the impudent lackey and the wily maidservant of comedy—to “resist,” up to a point. As master and lackey grew old together, a kind of coupling could develop—reminiscent of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—such as that of the mutually grousing fictional pair, Oblomov the lazy lord and his servant Zakhar, in Ivan Goncharov’s celebrated novel, Oblomov (1860). The very presentation of their names—family for the master; first name for the serf—set the relationship of this matched set that generated entropy rather than synergy, a twinned image of the institution of serfdom in which servants everywhere usually were—and were depicted as—both lazy and loyal, even under frontier tyrants such as Sergei Aksakov’s grandfather.47 Though one must allow for a sterilized nostalgia in the elegiac pictures of “old-time life” that color so many gentry memoirs, one cannot ignore their overwhelming emphasis on the remembered kindness of their own parents towards serfs and their own fond recollection of beloved servants and nannies and “happy peasants.”48 Without joining that sometimes idealizing chorus, it is necessary to remember that the life of the average house serf in no way entailed the kind of physical toil, danger, and generally harrowing existence endured by soldiers, factory workers, miners, or railroad conscripts.49 The less-sentimentalizing observers noted that homes were overpopulated with servants who could and did often avoid work.
Among the house serfs and others recruited from the villages, thousands managed to get some kind of education or training in creative artistic work that raised them above their ascribed station. Serfs attended the primary schools established by Catherine, resulting in the social mix described by the serf painter Tropinin and the serf actor Shchepkin. By an 1827 decree, they could go no further into gymnazia or university. When the bright young Nikitenko discovered that he was barred from further schooling due to his serf status, he contemplated suicide. The less well-known serf Savva Purlevsky (1800-1868) related his feelings of impotence in the face of sudden changes of fortune: transfers; the death of the master; the sending of young serfs to St. Petersburg, Siberia, into the mines, or to the army. Having witnessed both kindness and cruelty, he experienced self-discovery and desperation simultaneously when, as he learned to read, he said to himself “I am a serf” and found that reading and travel had generated new thoughts incompatible with serfdom. The revelation led him to take flight. This reaction resonated with those of the contemporary American Black slave, Frederick Douglass, who wrote: “I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.” Serf artists, on constant display, had to honor their lords in performance or product. They could suffer, in ways unknown to tillers of the soil (though these knew suffering enough of their own), from exposure to a world of high culture and refined tastes. Possessing talent, they were ever subject to the arbitrary will of the owner who could and did send an artist to the kitchen or a musician to the plow. Unlike field serfs who had various collective modes of everyday resistance, disobedience inside the manor house was wholly counterproductive and could lead to physical punishment or worse.50
A system that allowed the development of literate and artistically talented men and women and then kept them in bondage made a mockery of Tsar Nicholas’s stated policy for landowners: do not mistreat serfs, but do not give them too much education. M. P. D. de Passenens, a French expatriate who had lived in Russia from the 1790s to 1812, published in Paris in 1822 a raging but well-informed indictment of “Russian slavery” and its negative effects upon every phase of life—including creativity. He argued that serfdom “stifles the embryos of genius and arrests the development of talent.” Granting that the state offered some scholarships to artists, he personally observed that the majority of talents were ignored and that desperate artists fled the muses and fell into the arms of Bacchus. Although no comparable book appeared inside Russia during the existence of serfdom, the pathos of artists in servitude generated among Russians stories and conversations about underdogs and villains. Before 1861, tragic tales about serf artists circulated widely among the intelligentsia and some made it into print as fiction or observation. Shchepkin and Tropinin were fertile in producing anecdotes about their own and other’s lives, a bit embellished for effect, but essentially true. Accounts of sexual abuse and harassment, beatings, and the depressed serfs’ descent into alcoholism or suicide made their way into the public consciousness, and got magnified in the decades after emancipation by memoirs and treatments of the issue at the hands of the Russian intelligentsia as part of their retrospective glance at what had just been abolished. Ekaterina Letkova’s 1883 canvas of abuses was the first to use the term ''serf intelligentsia."51
After the Russian Revolution, Soviet scholars who focused on serfdom as part of their demonization of the old regime took up this appealing issue with determination. Elena Kots in 1926 synthesized the anecdotal literature published since Letkova and put a Marxist gloss on it in a still useful book entitled The Serf Intelligentsia.52 Other Soviet scholars enriched the investigation with great detail on the individual arts and argued about the meaning of a serf intelligentsia in the economic-historical interpretation of “feudalism” and its decline. Subsequent Soviet approaches, while retaining the sweeping condemnation of gentry exploitation, in time partly diluted the assault by an elitist perspective and a certain ambivalence that forced to the surface almost unwittingly a pride in the achievements of the grandees whose serfs built such wondrous places as Kuskovo and Ostankino and Marino, to say nothing of the exaltation of serf-owner geniuses like the composer Glinka.
In recent times, the question of the Russian gentry’s role in culture in the high age of serfdom has elicited widely divergent judgments. As in the case of St. Petersburg, the micro-world of estate and manor house has long been mythologized by nostalgic memoirs, idealized images in the arts, and all sorts of elegiac appreciations. Prominent among them were the often uncritical encomia of the first-wave emigrés of the 1920s and 1930s, now echoed in the post-Soviet gentry press. Typical of the latter is a well-meant but misleading homage to old-time gentry life published in the post-Soviet Petersburg journal, Gentry Club, which skips over this period of Russian history entirely, ignores serfdom, and focuses only on the undeniable glories of the gentry class.53 A new generation of scholars, without demonizing it in the old Soviet way, have recognized the more complex realities of that life. Recent Western and Russian investigators have tried to evoke both the genuine accomplishments of the past and the exploitative base that allowed them.54
The climate for manumission at any level was never hospitable before 1861, in spite of the many aborted efforts to address the abolition of serfdom as an institution. Yet since tsars Alexander and Nicholas abhorred serfdom in principle and since no proserfdom ideology ever appeared publicly, hope always hung in the air. Between 1816 and 1819, serfs were freed in the Baltic regions without land. Before, during, and after these proceedings, several schemes for full or partial emancipation surfaced, some requested by Alexander I, some hatched by the revolutionary Decembrists. Nicholas I formed a committee to examine the question. The sporadic if never dead reform discussion has been laboriously reconstructed from the record by a number of historians who all note that very little came of government efforts. Private manumission was permitted by laws dating from 1803 and 1842. Only about 140-150,000 serfs were freed under both laws—the vast majority being field serfs. An 1847 law on auctioning indebted estates led to an estimated 964 male peasants redeeming themselves at an average price of seventy-six rubles per person. A few liberal landowners freed some or all of their serfs. Composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's father opposed serfdom, freed his servants one by one, and then took some of them back as hired labor. Serfs who managed to enrich themselves could buy freedom. One serf entrepreneur in the eighteenth century paid Count Sheremetev 130,000 rubles for his freedom, one of several examples. But the vast majority could not afford even a modest redemption fee. For various reasons, the government occasionally forbade manumission. The State Council was the court of last resort for voluntary freeing of serfs and sometimes owners were turned down. Finally there was the reluctance and inertia of the serfs themselves: the reform-minded A. M. Unkovsky offered to liberate his house serfs in the 1850s, and only a few accepted.55
Tracking the fruitless legislative plans at the top, a cryptic abolitionist literature in the reign of Nicholas I began to tap readers’ humanitarian sentiment and private sensibility. Some of it is canonical. Nikolai Karamzin’s Poor Liza (1792) deals with an innocent serf girl who drowns herself after being jilted by a young man of the gentry. Dmitry Grigorovich’s “The Village” (1846) presented a “physiology” of rural life—that is, rich in realistic detail—and its suffering peasants. His treatment of village woes in this and ''Anton Goremyka" (1847), won praise for its naturalism from the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky and drew sympathetic tears from society ladies. Ivan Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter, published serially from 1847, is seen by many critics as the first well-rounded depiction of peasants in Russian literature—and thus indirectly an indictment of serfdom. His "Mumu" (1854) criticized cruel nobles and serfdom itself more explicitly.56 Aside from these familiar works, a lesser-known body of fiction, discussed in the coming chapters, dealt precisely with serf artists, musicians, and stage performers caught between the pride in their art and the demeaning position they held in society. Together they formed a literary discourse whose main theme went beyond that of the suffering peasant in Grigorovich or the noble peasant in Turgenev to the specially gifted and creative serf who endured the unendurable or escaped into personal tragedy.57
While officials wrestled with reform and writers published stories about talented men and women held in bondage, another relatively little-known discourse arose in conversations and correspondence among nobles, statesmen, and artistic institutions that bristled with entreaties, threats, negotiations, and contracts of purchase, transfer, and manumission of serf artists. Prominent individuals such as the poets Vasily Zhukovsky and Kondraty Ryleev, the painters Karl Bryullov and Alexei Venetsianov, courtiers and patrons such as Mikhail Vielgorsky, and many others lobbied and raised money to free particular artists who caught their attention. Venetsianov agitated for the release of Taras Shevchenko, who did get his freedom; and for Grigory Soroka, who did not. Landowners, bureaucrats, courtiers, and sometimes members of the royal family engaged in similar activity through pressure, letter-writing, and money-raising by lottery. Magnates and art patrons organized precisely for these purposes. The Society for the Encouragement of Artists and the Academy of Arts negotiated with landowners about freeing certain talented serfs in order to allow them further study. Those creative serfs lucky enough to achieve liberation perhaps shared the sentiments voiced by Nikitenko who wrote, after a difficult struggle for freedom: ''I can only say Glory to the Almighty and proclaim my eternal gratitude to those who helped me to be born again."58
Needless to say, efforts to secure freedom for serf artists met with resistance from those landowners, later called “planters,” who defended serfdom on principle or who declined to free individual serfs. The Tver Province gentry in this period displayed a pattern of paternalism coexisting with a fierce defense of serfdom and a loathing to grant freedom.59 During the reign of Tsar Alexander I, some serf owners feared any kind of tampering with the system as a dangerous signal, an invitation to pretension and false hopes. Seigniorial anxiety put serf artists aspiring to freedom in the bind of setting a precedent. Baron Korff, advisor to Nicholas I, opposed giving too much help to house serfs, lest it cause resentment in others.60 Some nobles perceived that their exclusive rights, status, and freedom were at stake. Timofei Prostakov (1748 -1854), a serf architect belonging to an earlier Rimsky-Korsakov, gained a reputation among rich nobles for his fine work. But their intercession for his freedom had no effect. Rimsky told Tsar Alexander I that he would give up anything but not free his property. The widow who owned the serf butler and lackey Bobkov, citing the gospels, told him that “slavery was established by God,” though she eventually offered him freedom which he declined. A gentry woman in Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter exclaimed in anger: “O Lord Jesus Christ! Am I not free to use my slaves [kholopyakh] as I wish?” Her friend agreed that moving serfs was “harmful for an orderly household.”61 This anecdotal evidence supports the generally held view that the attitude was widespread.
In cases of refusal, elements of spite sometimes surfaced. Kropotkin observed that serf owners, including his mother, reacted angrily to any kind of real or perceived airs and pretensions on the part of servants and serfs such as the “too gentlewoman-like manners” of a serf girl. The gratuitous malice exhibited by landowners resembled, at least in the telling, the exaggerated villainy of melodrama. Personal animosity drove more than one stubborn serf owner’s refusal to release a talented serf, and not only in the art world. The ex-serf N. N. Shipov (b. 1802), whose father was a literate and wealthy serf cattle dealer on obrok, recalled a serf who offered the unheard-of sum of 160,000 rubles to redeem his family. The owner declined because he had once felt shame, envy, and regret at the huge success of one of his freed serfs who had become a prosperous Moscow merchant. Conversely, in 1839 a British visitor met landowners who prided themselves on allowing their serfs to accumulate as much wealth as they liked. But, far from rewarding that success with freedom or even profiting from a redemption fee, they enjoyed showing them off as waiters.62
How much more might the serf artist’s skill have generated tension? The sleazy character Skotinin in Denis Fonvizin’s The Minor says: “How can I feel kindly towards servants? They are so clever compared to me” (Act V). Un-talented art-loving landowners may have suffered from inferiority and envy at the artistry displayed by underlings in a society where power, virtue, and accomplishment supposedly resided exclusively at the top. Fragmentary and elusive evidence suggests that some landowners, offended by what they deemed the “ingratitude” of serf artists who sought to better their condition, punished them for it. As Nikitenko recalled: “The ugly, unvarnished unjustness of my social status [as a serf] would hit me in the face. It had locked me out of high school and continued to close off future paths toward knowledge, toward the light. But meanwhile, my rebellious mind did not cease to evoke the seductive mirage of the university.” His master’s uncle, a general, turned against Nikitenko as soon as he unveiled his aspirations to education and freedom, and Nikitenko’s life became a roller coaster of euphoria and despair. He recounted the familiar scenario of high-born arrogance as a drama, with near misses and cliff-hanging moments; dangers, dark villains, and virtuous protectors—as in the freedom tales of Shevchenko and other emancipated serfs. To the masters, the very entreaties for a serf’s freedom by those in high places increased his value and thus stiffened their refusal to free a man with ''audacious pretensions."63 Other serf owners clearly resented efforts of fellow nobles to persuade them of the public value of the human beings they possessed and to pressure them into freeing a serf. The epic struggles of actors like Shchepkin to gain freedom from their masters were prime examples of this obsession with the ownership and deployment of human skill and art as well as the artifacts themselves, a near-atavistic throwback to classical slavery. No mechanism ever came into being that could overrule the serf owner and liberate his serf.
If nobles were sometimes gently mocked on stage, their right to own serfs went unchallenged. Serfs, whether in the field or in the household, provided little more than comic relief. Like their counterparts in landscape painting, they acted as mere extras or staffage, background shadows unendowed with much intelligence or character, except for the occasional wily servant of drawing-room comedy. Peasants as real people had even less visibility than merchants, and came into play only in the 1850s, toward the very end of this era. Peasants on canvas graduated a bit earlier from the status of stick figure near a manor house to their representation as tillers, artisans, housekeepers, dreamy children, carousers, and—eventually—even as menacing, impious troublemakers. Real serfs, at the same time, continued to serve their masters, sometimes as “slaves to art” and always as slaves in art.
Provincial Space
A young Europeanized Russian aristocrat stationed in the town of Orël in the 1820s, Count Mikhail Buturlin, found the amenities there rather thin after years in Moscow and Florence and on his cousins’ estates. All businesses were concentrated in the Gostiny Dvor, he noted, but there were few good shops and no bookstore. The only hotel was at the empty far end of town. Government offices, residences, the manège, and the Gentry Club occupied the central square. Along a boulevard stood the stables and garrison. Dirty taverns near the river were hung with misspelled signs such as “City of Odesta” and “Keev.” Yet later on in the account, Buturlin lingers over the many hours he spent at Count Kamensky’s once famous serf theater. Another traveler, Mikhail Zhdanov, visiting Tver on the Volga a few decades later, saw a Vaux-hall where the locals met, especially during the folk fair. All the beau monde appeared, he noted, and the place teamed with hussars and uhlans who made the dance floor swirl with uniforms. But, he complained in metropolitan accents, there was little in the way of conversation or good society. Alas, only four or five homes in the town were worth a visit, since the gentry lived on their estates and preferred to visit each other.64 Zhdanov was tacitly comparing Tver with the capitals and their elaborate ballroom conversations and late-running dances and suppers. In that same year, Tver was recorded as having two monasteries, thirty-two churches, eight schools, a hospital, an alms house, and a prison. Its two-storied Gostiny Dvor held 455 booths. An annual fair, eighteen taverns, and twenty-two public houses served a population of about twenty thousand residents. For a traveler like Zhdanov, the place held no charms. Such impressions of provincial towns could be multiplied indefinitely.
Towns did not do much better at the hands of information gatherers. A pathbreaking handbook compiled by Prince Gagarin in 1843 is revealing about what he considered worth enumerating. A review of the data in these volumes on about twenty towns, mostly provincial capitals, shows that not a single hotel was listed as such, although public houses, inns, or eateries abounded as did vodka shops and taverns. Most of these towns possessed one or more monasteries, several churches, a hospital, an almshouse, and a jail. A Gostiny Dvor was present in over half, some with hundreds of booths; the others had dozens of shops and market days twice a week. Virtually every town had at least one annual fair, most of them more than one. Big places like Kazan and Kharkov could boast universities and stately bridges and squares; or, like Smolensk and Tula for example, turreted kremlin walls. There is no mention of a theater anywhere in this survey even though many of these towns, including all those mentioned, had regular or temporary theaters or permanent companies. The thirst for data that tormented the imperial statisticians at midcentury was limited: no mention of brothels (made tentatively legal the year after Gagarin’s volumes appeared). In this otherwise handy survey, interestingly enough, no government building is listed either, no governor’s mansion, no municipal council, no merchant or noble club, and only rarely a military complex—cadet school or barracks.65
Sole reliance on such a source gives a distorted picture of the provincial town, one not balanced by any romanticized versions; these, on the contrary, reinforce the then widespread belief that all Russian provincial towns were hollow shells with so many buildings carefully counted, and with lots of people doing nothing in public except perhaps eating and drinking in taverns, shopping, going to church, and occasionally landing in a hospital ward or a jail cell. Literary treatment captured the vibrancy of their noise and scandal, particularly the works of Saltykov-Shchedrin, who knew the lay of the land, and Gogol, who had little personal experience with provincial life.66 Yet the cultural experience of many provincial towns, while no match for the great capitals, had its own coloration that was a part of the texture of life for its inhabitants—and not only the gentry and the wealthy merchants. Ironically, some of the most sarcastic travel accounts unwittingly reveal the vivid palette of life at the despised margins. Provincial towns were an integral feature of the entire cultural system, a network of performance for Russian and foreign artists, a source of future stars, a marketplace of audience choice, a testing ground for talent, a first entree for lucky youngsters into the artistic life.
In the system created by Catherine II in 1783, each of the fifty provinces of European Russia (the number wavered) possessed provincial and district town capitals. In the 1840s the authorities, who knew little enough about them, began to count and catalogue the towns, officially numbered at 693, excluding those in Finland and Poland. Few towns had reached the size of fifty thousand. Many were marked by standardized forms: a central square, government buildings, church, markets, straight streets, sometimes named after the class who lived or operated there, such as Great Nobility Street or Lower Middle Class Street. The regime’s dictated models for buildings and façades and the frequent comments by haughty visitors from the capitals reinforced erroneous impressions of the provinces as an undifferentiated backland. In terms of environment, climate, appearance, and function, provincial towns varied enormously: perched on a cliff, like Smolensk on the upper Dnieper; centered on a square kremlin, like Tula; bisected by a deep ravine and river, like Orël; sprawled over seven hills and three rivers, like Kursk; or surrounded by the Don and other waterways, like Voronezh—to say nothing of the great Volga cities set on the high bank, from Tver to Astrakhan. These towns, spacious and verdant, were a far cry from the images of a townlet tucked away in a forest or the middle of the broad steppe. Smaller, newer towns, creatures of the state, served as administrative centers or garrison posts with undeveloped institutions. Still others played specialized roles, such the spa resort Lipetsk where some families spent an entire summer,67 or seaports and border towns where smuggling was common. Urban life could be suddenly transformed by a royal visit or the appearance of an “inspector general” from the center. When cholera or the plague struck, normal social intercourse was suddenly ruptured. Authorities set up quarantine stations and police cordons around afflicted neighborhoods and forbade public gatherings, even church services. Sometimes riots, murders, executions, and deportations ensued. Quarantines could swell the population by thousands, or strand and kill traveling performers.68
Given the diversity, one must be cautious in generalizing about ordinary town life in the prereform era. Yet the provincial capitals, where most of the nonmanorial cultural activity occurred, certainly showed certain patterns. Their populations were greatly reduced versions of the capitals: clean-shaven officials and gentry and their families; bearded merchants and clergy, as well as most other townsmen; and a wide assortment of peasants and servants and sometimes quartered troops. The governor, aside from presiding over the administration of the province, possessed social and cultural sway as well. He could license or close a theater, promote amateur performances, host visiting artists-or persecute them. He and the marshal of the nobility, an unsalaried elected figure, stood with their wives at the center of the local beau monde and sometimes competed in that realm. The headquarters for the social round of the gentry—urban or manorial—was the Gentry Assembly or Club. Originally a mere legal entity in the eighteenth century which had to rent or purchase a headquarters, furniture, and decor, it graduated almost everywhere into a focus of politics, socialization, and courtship; and in some cases into a cultural center. Some noble families maintained homes in town and country, but most lords commuted. The density of resident nobles and the frequency of their inflow from the estates became markers of a town’s social vivacity for high-born visitors seeking their own kind. One of the virtues of town life, for those who disliked living in far-off estates, was sociability. Even a distant frontier post like Ufa in the midst of Bashkir country served as a magnet: Sergei Aksakov’s grandmother could hardly wait to leave the countryside and get back to the streets and social life of her town.69
Visits by the military enlivened small-town life. When an army division was assigned to a province, one regiment was quartered in or near the provincial capital and the others in the district towns. For townspeople, the drill and the rituals of reveille and retreat offered a charming spectacle. For officers, when not hunting, drinking, or dancing, local theater productions and concerts offered relief from the tedium of peacetime garrison duty. Most of all, dashing officers provided male partners and fresh faces at the ball. To the traveler Zhdanov, Saratov in 1839 was a boring town except when artillery officers were stationed there. The appearance of a bivouacked unit could produce all kinds of unexpected results. For the serf boy Alexander Nikitenko, stuck in Ostrogozhsk in the 1810s, the stationing of young dragoon officers, fresh from European adventure and bursting with literary and political ideas, was an intellectual stimulus to his quest for emancipation. In the same town, the painter Ivan Kramskoi much later found a job in photography in the 1850s due to the presence of a garrison forming up for the Crimean War. The sordid side of army life intruded also into the local landscape. Fiction and memoirs attest to the debauching behavior of garrison officers. In Orël Province in the 1820s, hussar officers organized “Athenian Nights” featuring a “Patagonian Dance” in which some local beauties cavorted in a half-drunken state and then dined with the officers in the nude. Officers sought out local courtesans. Simon Karlinsky has pointed out how Gogol distorted reality in his eccentric picture of a garrison party in the unstaged piece, “The Carriage,” depicting a bachelor affair without the presence of a lady of the evening. Townspeople, priests, and merchants found less enchantment in the billeted soldiers who often ate them out of house and home because they themselves had been mulcted by their commanding officers.70
In almost all the provincial and district capitals that I have "visited"—via the sources—the gentry ball represented the most important social event.71 In Tambov in the 1850s, the marshal of nobility, governor, prominent magnates, and organizers of charity benefits took turns hosting. The triennial winter gentry elections, often the scene of corrupt lobbying and pressure, made a perfect occasion for a ball, since the bulk of the landowners came into town to vote. Dressed to the nines, the families arrived in carriages at the Gentry Club where noble misses made their debuts and junior officers flirted or courted. With music provided by a governor’s or a landowner’s orchestra (serf or professional), couples swung to the noble strains of the mazurka and the waltz in an established order of dances, as in the capitals, while others conversed about politics. In the wee hours of the morning, a late supper was served by lackeys. Some of the more imaginative governors arranged ornate amusements: Governor Kochubei of Orël Province in the 1840s had two horsemen and a bear appear in the ballroom.72 The ball, in the minds of provincials, was far more of a social event than a cultural one. Yet Gentry Clubs in various places served also as centers of self-entertaining amateur theatricals and recitals and eventually as sites of public concerts and commercial theaters.
In a contrasting world, small-town merchants, arrayed in guilds like those in the capitals and free of military and certain other obligations, constituted the lifeblood of the town, which they helped to run. Beneath them socially and juridically, the townspeople, ranging from 66 to 90 percent of the provincial urban population, were like their capital equivalents, a mixed bag of artisans, small businessmen, ex-priests, children of certain soldiers, small farmers, and freed serfs. They paid taxes, provided recruits, and were subject to other obligations. Though women and serfs did not vote, townsmen did so and joined the merchants in local administration. The market square played a central role in socializing, commerce, and exchange of information for men and women. As early as the 1790s, 513 towns were offering 722 market days per week. In Rostov, for example, near the church and the kremlin, stood a Gostiny Dvor packed thickly with rows of indoor and outdoor market buildings and stalls, some of them run by women. Flatboats on the river overflowed with wares; nearby stood shops filled to the brim with goods, a tea house, and a tavern. On market days, these places came alive with commerce and conversation. Alexander Artynov, a peasant-turned-merchant, recalled how he and his colleagues did business and chatted all day long and, on off days, gathered again to talk and play checkers.73
In the tavern, a venue for male and sometimes female conviviality, conversation and singing were lubricated by spirits, followed by salty snacks to assuage the effects of the alcohol. Cheating and watering of drinks were common. A dense concentration of taverns prevailed in the Western Provinces of Lithuania, Belorussia, and Ukraine: about 53,000 licensed taverns, as opposed to 10,000 in all the provinces of Great Russia. Yet the Russian drinkers had wide access to the abundant bottle shops and stalls and to illegal premises and home distilleries. Thus towns or large villages of two thousand people had on average one tavern in addition to other outlets. In Kaluga Province in the late 1850s, of the 614 liquor outlets, 274 were taverns; the provincial capital had twenty-nine taverns; and the fourteen district capitals roughly averaged ten outlets each. In these haunts—as in village feasts—the oft-noted extremism in peasant and urban lower-class drinking could lead to a rapid leap into oblivion or to fights and rowdiness. In the “vodka riots” of 1859 in fifteen provinces, troops were brought in to quell the disturbances in half of them. The cause was the sudden, arbitrary, and illegal rise in vodka prices; the form was tavern smashing, destruction of stock, and oaths of abstinence. The great bulk of the rioters were peasants, meshchane, and soldiers on leave.74 The taverns served as socializing headquarters at virtually every whistle-stop for touring theater people and other performing artists; and, as houses of temptation, they became the scourge of troupe entrepreneurs and the ruin of many an actor. Long ignored in the world of art, when genre painters began to include them on their canvases, the uproar was instantaneous.
Provincial and district towns had both socially ghettoized fraternization and mingling across classes—depending on the place and the moment. Churches, for example, were open to people of all classes. Though it was customary to stand, gentry sometimes sat up front and had servants bring velvet pillows for kneeling. Monasteries, which graced many provincial capitals, also brought all kinds of people together. In Tikhvin in the 1820s, women used the local monastery, with its religious festivals, as a social meeting place. The monastic stables at Rostov could hold as many as six hundred horses. Certain monasteries combined the sacred and the profane: Korennaya, Troitskoe, Kirillo-Beloozersky, and the Makarev offered festival, holiday, pilgrimage, and fair all at once. Outdoor church processions through the town or around the walls took place on holy days. Classes also mingled temporarily at the folk fairs (narodnoe gulyane) held on saints’ days and at Advent and Easter time. These mammoth celebrations in towns big and small, with their puppet booths, rides, food stalls, and general revelry lent a carnival atmosphere to town life, after which the normal hierarchical social relations were resumed. The folk fair came to have an extraordinary attraction to educated Russians of all classes, served as a subject for huge canvases, and—in moments of patriotic fervor—was stylized on stage by professional performers long before it was adopted into the great ballets of the early twentieth century. In contrast, an equally omnipresent feature of town life on festive days, the wall-to-wall fist fight, got no attention from cultural creators. Hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of young townsmen from various trades, neighborhoods, or ethnic groups would line up and rush at each other fists flying, and then repair to the nearest tavern to toast victory or drown defeat.75
The fair, familiar in provincial life as a site of mixed social gathering, attracted whole towns whose people devoted themselves to commerce, sociability, and entertainment. In the 1790s, 864 urban fairs and 3,180 rural ones have been counted. By 1860 the total number had reached about 6,000 in European Russia, about a fifth located in provincial and district capitals. Though under the jurisdiction of the Department of Internal Trade in the Ministry of Interior, fairs suffered little from bureaucratic interference. In 1822 at the trading town of Khislavichi, owned by Count Saltykov, the annual summer fair included a gentry ball with merchants in attendance. At Dorogobuzh, a district town in Smolensk Province, the weeklong fair was studded with evening ballroom affairs attended by officers of the nearby regiment. At the Romny Summer Fair, considered one of the best, attendees bought and sold while their children enjoyed the amusements. The fair came alive with horses and all manner of conveyances. A visitor in 1803 observed the enthusiastic faces of the commoners tented in the fields like a bivouac preparing for war. The annual fair at Nizhny Novgorod, successor to the Makarev Fair, surpassed them all in scope and variety. Like the folk fair which it partly resembled, the fair became a suitable subject for painters of provincial genre.76
The archipelago of provincial towns fit into the Russian cultural system as a whole on several levels. Artists living in or traveling to the provinces began to break away from established landscape and move into genre scenes of provincial life. In terms of portraiture, the capitals may have provided the template, but local variations appeared as well in studies of gentry and especially of small-town merchants. Entire schools of portrait painting had already emerged in the eighteenth century in certain provinces and continued on as a “primitivist” local counterweight to the polished and often static parade portraiture taught at the Academy of Arts. Indeed the outreach of the Academy itself expanded by accepting the affiliation of a half-dozen non-Petersburg schools where local styles sometimes took root and where serfs and other lower-class pupils learned their art and even won medals. Long before emancipation, an inpouring of peasants and other rural dwellers into the cities77 multiplied urban types and generated new representations of them.
The stark facts of geography in the early nineteenth century dictated the thinness of “capital culture” in the lands of northern and eastern Russia. The predominance of state peasants, the paucity of an implanted landlord culture, the low population density, the sparsity of towns, and the climate kept these regions relatively free of the cultural traffic that enlivened the seigniorial provinces. The “two nations” created by the gulf between gentry and serfs was cross-cut by the geographical gulf between private and state lands. The vaunted reforms on state peasant lands of the 1830s which introduced some schools and medical points did nothing to bridge the gap. Siberian settlements lagged well behind the European heartlands. The exiled Decembrist Baron Andrei Rosen wrote that Kurgan, his place of exile in Tobolsk Province in 1832, had not changed since 1800 when another exile, the dramatist August Kotzebue, had been there. Eventually the Decembrist exiles and their redoubtable wives brought culture to Siberian exile in the form of schools, libraries, newspapers, musical circles, chamber groups, and amateur art.78 For mobile artists of any kind, travel could be a nightmare. Not much more than fifteen hundred miles of first-class paved roads existed, leading Tsar Nicholas to say that “Russia suffers from space.” Mud, snow, back roads, and springless vehicles evoked the complaints of foreigners such as Custine, Berlioz, and Balzac. Byways were choked at times by an endless stream of peddlers, pilgrims, military men, couriers, officials, merchants, peasants off to trade or work, traveling cooperatives of workmen, gentry huntsmen, voyaging families, or convicts. Checkpoints at intervals on the highways were guarded by veterans with halberds. The Petersburg-Moscow railway opened in 1851, but few cultural stopovers lined this route. Getting from Moscow or Vladimir to the Nizhny Novgorod fair and its theaters before the advent of railway lines there proved hazardous, and the roads around the Nizhny Novgorod Fair were still infested with bandits and thick with forests and swamps. Early in the century, pirates sailed the Volga.79
Despite hazards, music and drama flowed through many channels in provincial Russia. Early in the nineteenth century there emerged a kind of entrepreneurial network operated by socially exalted figures close to the court and theater administrators in the capitals. They invited the best-known musical virtuosos of the day, from Franz Liszt to Henri Vieuxtemps, to play for Russian audiences in many towns. Stars of the musical system also included those born in the Russian Empire who had made a European reputation, such as Henryk Wieniawski and Anton Rubinstein. Thus the genius of foreign artists (the first pair) and those of Jewish background (the second) were made available to audiences of the interior who had little or no access to the great halls of the capitals. The Imperial Theaters also sent their stars to tour the provinces. In parallel, but on a much larger scale, a chain of commercial theaters with casts made up of all social classes developed into a circuit of troupes moving from town to town, producing hundreds of stage works largely copied from the capitals’ repertoires. The audiences were socially diverse as well; and, as memoirs attest, far more interaction between actors and the public—in the house, backstage, and in the town—took place in provincial towns than in the state-run theaters of the capitals.
In approaching the prosaics of the provincial town, much is often missing from those literary studies that screen reality through belles lettres, particularly canonical works. In a recent collection entitled The Russian Provinces: Myth, Text, Realities, the “myth” and the “text” clearly predominate over the “realities.” This filtering approach has its limits for historians of cultural events, realia, people, and places. One does not always get a completely accurate picture of the Russian provinces from Gogol, of French village life from Balzac, and of English court practices from Dickens. Yet these authors offer much about the mental sets of the people of their times and places. Here the theoretical and literary perspectives of the above-noted collection throw useful light on the mutual images of capitals and provinces. Concerning provincials’ self-image, one of the contributors to the collection sets up a dichotomy between “provincialness,” the blissful ignorance of backwardness; and “provincialism,” a self-conscious inferiority complex vis-a-vis the capitals.80 Real-life conversations and stage treatments are full of wide-eyed admiration of St. Petersburg. Performed in the 1840s, N. I. Kulikov’s vaudeville, Mischievous Girl, had a young provincial woman, returning from a visit to the St. Petersburg theaters, deliver a breathless account of its fashions, acting, ballet, and singing. Self-effacement even operated between district and provincial capitals. The local characters in A. F. Veltman’s 1838 novel Heart and Head are made to wonder if a visitor is bored after having lived in a provincial center.81 Conversely, snobbish disdain of capital residents for the provinces led many to equate their city with good manners, cultivated behavior, and of course, real culture. Mikhail Zagoskin’s comedy Mister Bogatonov, or a Provincial in the Capital (1817), one of many such warnings, declared, á la Molière, that one could not simply acquire the garb of urbanity by “arriving” in the capital. All this is familiar, but, as a recent scholar argues, people of the capital also felt anxiety that both they and the real provinces were provincial vis-á-vis Europe. This combination of contempt and unease clearly paralleled the social malaise of the insecure and the wonderment about national identity of Russians poised between Europe and the empire’s “eastern” hinterlands.82
Notwithstanding barriers set up by cultural images, self-images, neuroses, and stereotypes, social and cultural threads gradually tightened the bond between provinces and capitals. From the center came ideas, artifacts, and practices brought by royal entourages, educated travelers, landowning families, regimental garrisons, returning students, touring actors, and musical virtuosos. Local gentry, steeped in Petersburg fashion, came to town for social events and sometimes built town houses. They also spread cultural activities from the capitals to the provincial towns, either by visiting Moscow and St. Petersburg regularly or by adopting what they read in journals. In 1803, a visitor to Romny Fair in Poltava Province was astonished by the lavish women’s costumes in the latest French taste. Another observer, deep in Kursk Province in 1831, noted the unsuitability of the gentry’s foreign raiment to the climate.83 A more dramatic instance of metropolitan invasion of distant towns came with the mass egress of noble families from Moscow to the provinces in 1812. Nobles without estates congregated in remote towns in central Russia, the Volga, and Ukraine. Many of these high-born refugees had traveled in Europe but never in the interior of their own country. They brought with them news and information, ideas, manners, and styles.84 Much of Moscow “society” was transferred to Nizhny Novgorod by wartime exigencies. The memoirs and letters show a shock to the system—the longing for Moscow’s Tverskaya Street as well as their own homes. A natural reassembly of the “noble assembly” was effected through balls and visits, the invitation list defining who had been who in the deserted Moscow. Clad in wigs and ball gowns, they reconstructed the card tables of Tverskaya and hurled curses (in French) at the French.85 The state played a crucial role in communication by establishing in 1838 provincial gazettes, bearers of laundered news items, book reviews, and fragmentary cultural coverage.86 The thickness and effectiveness of the town networks depended heavily on proximity to the capitals or to dense clusters of cultured landowners. The difference in exposure between a place like Perm and one like Kursk or Nizhny Novgorod was enormous.87 Conversely, Petersburg and Moscow readers learned of provincial doings from the coverage in “thick” journals such as Son of the Fatherland, Readers’ Library, Contemporary, and a few others, however jaundiced that coverage sometimes was. Just as central organs of St. Petersburg were enlarging their own knowledge of Russia’s interior by means of statistical studies and geographical surveys (discussed in chapter 9), the educated denizens of provincial Russia were learning more about themselves and how they fit into the empire as a whole—within, of course, the limits of censorship and the stingy need-to-know policies of the state.
The arts filled in the colors and shapes by presenting and representing topography and various elements of the population on stage and on canvas or in printed feuilletons or sketches. The provincial intelligentsia (an under-studied subject),88 interspersed among or leading local salons and other groupings, played a crucial role in cultural life and its links to the capitals. This sector of small-town society, a scattering of gentry and raznochintsy, maintained two-way communication with the capital. Writers, journalists, self-appointed critics fed the thick journals of the capital with a constant stream of news and comment about local goings-on in the realm of music and theater and, to a lesser degree, fine art. They also found outlets in the few local journals and papers and occasionally in the provincial gazettes. They sat in audiences, made judgments in print (and often vocally) on what they saw and heard, mingled with visiting artists, and tried to impose their own notions of what constituted genuine or refined or simply “Russian” culture. Occasional accents of local pride, a mild version of postemancipation provincial boosterism, could be heard, presaging the time when that cultural giant of the capital V. V. Stasov would laud the provincial origins of national composers. The process of self-revelation was gradual and uneven across the vast empire; but one can say with confidence that, from the late 1830s and early 1840s onward, the provinces of Russia were on a slow but continuous trek toward cultural integration with the rest of the country.