The stereotype of the Russian merchant - greedy and deceitful, narrowly conservative and philistine, the embodiment of everything that was dreary and depressing in provincial towns - became a literary commonplace. In the novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy the traders who swindled the squires of their land symbolized the menace of the new commercial culture to the old-world values of the aristocracy. Take the scene in Anna Karenina, for example, where Stiva Oblonsky, the hopelessly spendthrift but endearing nobleman, agrees to sell his forests to a local merchant at far too low a price. When Levin tells Oblonsky of their true value, Oblonsky's sense of honour as a nobleman forces him to go through with the deal, even though he knows that the merchant took advantage of his ignorance. All over Europe it was commonplace for the nineteenth-century cultural elites to hold trade and commerce in contempt, and such attitudes were equally pronounced in the intelligentsia. But nowhere else did they have such an effect as in Russia, where they poisoned the relations of the middle classes with the cultural elites and thereby closed off the possibility of Russia going down the capitalist-bourgeois path - until it was too late. Even as late as the 1890s merchants were excluded from the social
circles of Moscow's aristocracy. The governor of the city, the Grand Duke Sergei, would not have a merchant at his ball, even though merchants paid the largest share of the city's taxes and some lent money personally to him. Consequently, many merchants had a deep mistrust of the aristocracy. The textile magnate and patron of the arts Pavel Tretiakov, an old-style Moscow merchant and an Old Believer, forbade his daughter to marry the pianist Alexander Ziloti, on the grounds that he was a nobleman and thus only after her inheritance. He reacted in a similar way to the marriage of his niece to A. I. Tchaikovsky (the composer's brother), another nobleman, and not only that, but a nobleman from Petersburg.
Yet one could also form a brighter view of the Moscow merchants from Ostrovsky's plays. Indeed, for this reason there were merchants like the Botkins, Moscow's tea importers, who patronized his work. Another group who liked Ostrovsky's plays for their positive message about the merchantry were the so-called 'native soil' critics (pochven-niki), whose outlet was the journal Moskvitianin (The Muscovite). The influential critic Apollon Grigoriev was a leading member of the 'native soil' movement, along with the writer Fedor Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail. Ostrovsky's plays, they said, had spoken a 'new word' on Russian nationality. As a social group that lay somewhere between the peasantry and the educated classes, the merchants, they believed, were uniquely qualified to lead the nation in a way that reconciled its Muscovite and Petrine elements. Ostrovsky's merchants were neither Slavophile nor Westernist, Mikhail Dostoevsky argued in a review of The Storm. They had flourished in the European culture of the new Russia, yet had managed to retain the culture of the old; and in this sense, Dostoevsky claimed, the merchants showed the way for Russia to progress without social divisions.87 This interpretation was a reflection of the 'native soil' ideals of national integration that followed in the wake of the emancipation of the serfs. The decree evoked high hopes of a spiritual rebirth in which the Russian nation, the noble and the peasant, would become reconciled and reunited around the cultural ideals of the intelligentsia. The mixed-class origins of the 'native soil' critics, most of whom were raznochintsy types (from a minor noble background, with close connections to the world of trade), perhaps led them to idealize the merchants as the pioneers of a
new classless society. Yet the merchants were in fact developing in an interesting way - they were breaking out of the old cultural ghetto of the Zamoskvoreche - and this was reflected in Ostrovsky's later plays. In The Final Sacrifice (1878) the usual themes of money and domestic tyranny are almost overshadowed by the appearance of a new generation of merchants' sons and daughters who are European in their ways. When an actress would not play the part of a merchant's wife in the first production of The Final Sacrifice, arguing that she did not want to be seen in a peasant shawl, Ostrovsky reassured her that the merchant's wife now dressed more fashionably than the ladies of the aristocracy.88
By this time, indeed, there was a group of fabulously wealthy merchant dynasties, many far wealthier than the aristocracy, that had branched out from their family concerns to form vast conglomerates. The Riabushinskys, for example, added glass and paper, publishing and banking, and later motor cars, to their textile factories in Moscow; and the Mamontovs had an immense empire of railways and iron foundries. As they grew in confidence, these familes left behind the narrow cultural world of the Zamoskvoreche. Their sons adopted European ways, entered the professions and civic politics, patronized the arts, and generally competed with the aristocracy for pre-eminence in society. They acquired lavish mansions, dressed their wives in the latest clothes from Paris, gave brilliant parties, and dined at the elite English Club. Some of these young industrial barons were even rich enough to snub the aristocracy. Savva Morozov, the Moscow factory magnate and principal financier of the Moscow Arts Theatre, once received a request from the governor of Moscow to be shown around Morozov's house. Morozov agreed and invited him to come the next day. But when the Grand Duke appeared with his retinue he was greeted by the butler, who informed him that Morozov was away.89
Despite the old mistrust between the classes, many of these magnates felt a strong desire for acceptance by the leaders of society. They did not want to join the aristocracy. But they did want to belong to the cultural elite, and they knew that their acceptance depended on their public service and philanthropy - above all, on their support for the arts. This condition was particularly important in Russia, where the cultural influence of the intelligentsia was far stronger than it was in the West. Whereas in America and many parts of Europe, money was
enough to become accepted in society, even if the old snobbish attitudes prevailed, Russia never shared the bourgeois cult of money, and its cultural elites were defined by a service ethic that placed a burden on the rich to use their wealth for the people's benefit. Noble clans like the Sheremetevs spent huge sums on charity. In the case of Dmitry Sheremetev these sums represented a quarter of his income, and became a major reason for his growing debts in the middle of the nineteenth century. But Moscow's leading merchants also took their charitable duties very earnestly indeed. Most of them belonged to the Old Belief, whose strict moral code (not unlike that of the Quakers) combined the principles of thrift, sobriety and private enterprise with a commitment to the public good. All the biggest merchant families assigned large chunks of their private wealth to philanthropic projects and artistic patronage. Savva Mamontov, the Moscow railway baron, became an opera impresario and a major patron of the 'World of Art', out of which the Ballets Russes emerged. He had been brought up by his father to believe that 'idleness is vice' and that 'work is not a virtue' but 'a simple and immutable responsibility, the fulfilment of one's debt in life'.90 Konstantin Stanislavsky, the co-founder of the Moscow Arts Theatre, was brought up with a similar attitude by his father, a Moscow merchant of the old school. Throughout the years from 1898 to 1917, when he acted and directed at the Moscow Arts, he carried on with business at his father's factories. Despite his immense wealth, Stanislavsky could not contribute much to the theatre's funds, because his father had allowed him only a modest income which did not allow him to 'indulge in whims'.91