Soviet culture and foreign policy from the Cambridge history of Russia, volume 3

Culture, 1900-1945

JAMES VON GELDERN

Russian culture in the first two decades of the twentieth century came under influences that could be found in most European cultures. New audiences transformed taste cultures. The decline ofmonarchies and ascent ofindustrial capitalism made art patrons of the bourgeoisie.[1] Modern technology turned the lower classes into a mass audience. Aristocratic arts institutions faced competition from new organisations, many of them private and open to the general public. Cultural life reached social groups once excluded on the basis of class or nationality. The fast-paced, fragmented life of the modern city insinuated itself into all art forms, from the cinema to painting and poetry, and artists struggled to create satisfying art forms from the chaos of modern life.[2]

Russian culture was also influenced by circumstances distinct from other cultures. The first was the intelligentsia, a self-defined class of educated people who sustained social and cultural life under the profoundly undemocratic conditions of tsarism.[3] The second was the October Revolution, which separated Russia from European cultures after 1917, and fundamentally reconfigured the cultural life of the country The Bolsheviks considered themselves heirs to the great tradition of the intelligentsia when they seized power on 25 October 1917. As an underground party before the revolution, they had organised the working masses by propaganda and education. After the revolution, they used the resources ofthe state to foster an entirely new consciousness in Soviet citizens, particularly those who came of age after they took power.

Few would argue the reach of this cultural programme, though many would dispute the quality of the transformation and the benefits gained by the Soviet people.

If the Bolsheviks felt themselves heirs to the great tradition, others considered them betrayers of the tradition. A deep split had begun to appear within the intelligentsia around the dawn ofthe twentieth century, as materialists and idealists forwarded alternative versions of the intelligentsia mission. Radical materialists devoted their attention to the sciences or politics as most promising for the betterment of humanity. Some of the most undeviating adherents of materialism could be found in the revolutionary underground, including Vladimir Ul'ianov (Lenin). Other members of the artistic intelligentsia found this unswerving commitment to social change commendable but sterile. They sought a better life in the refined beauty of artistic creation, and their search to recover the unique power of art constitutes the opening chapter of twentieth- century Russian culture.

Modernism had many manifestations and inspirations in Russia and cannot be traced to a single source or moment.[4] A figure who inspired the respect of many, who stood as a symbol of integrity and transcendent talent and whose birth as an artist coincided with the birth of the century was the poet Aleksandr Blok.[5] His first published collection, Verses on a Beautiful Lady (Stikhi o prekrasnoi dame) (1904), was greeted by older Symbolist poets as an embodiment of their movement, yet Blok stood beyond any specific movement, and spoke to many different readers. His was a poetic world beyond material reality, of ideals that could never be fully expressed and would be destroyed by engagement with everyday life. Though his ethereal early verses were distant from social issues, Blok never turned his back on the world around him. He responded to the social upheavals of his day with poems of urgent foreboding, most remarkably The Twelve (Dvenadtsat') (1918), one of the first artistic responses to the October Revolution. Taken by Bolsheviks to be a paean to the revolution, Blok's poem was, much like Andrei Belyi's modernist novel Petersburg (1916), an ambivalent recognition of social turmoil, and an attempt to find value in it. The unmatchable lyric power of Blok's verse and his faithfulness to his vision served as inspiration to later generations who suffered under the Soviet regime. He insisted that artistic vision gave the clearest view of the future and stayed faithful to his singular genius by avoiding political allegiance.

Organised cultural life in Imperial Russia was dominated by the autocracy until late in the nineteenth century. The Romanov dynasty lavishly supported the performing arts, as with the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow or the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, and it sponsored the Academy of Art and schools that discovered and trained Russia's immense artistic talent. The theatre monopoly guaranteed that Russia's finest talents performed on the imperial stages, and produced a performing tradition in drama, opera and ballet that achieved first- rank status in Europe. The imperial grip on the arts world loosened early in the twentieth century When the theatre monopoly was lifted in 1882, private theatres appeared, such as the Korsh Theatre, Aleksandr Tairov's Chamber Theatre, and the Moscow Art Theatre, home to Konstantin Stanislavsky and his productions of Chekhov's plays.[6] In the visual arts, private art schools, such as the Moscow Art School, introduced young artists to the modernist trends sweeping Europe, and patrons from merchant families, such as the Mamon- tovs, Morozovs, Shchukins and Tret'iakovs encouraged new directions. These factors and relaxed censorship allowed for a nascent public sphere that freed aesthetic achievement from the narrow tastes of the ruling class. Art could operate according to its own rules, without support from the autocracy or permission from the censor.

The pre-revolutionary capitals of St Petersburg and Moscow offered artists, writers and performers a community in which they mingled intimately and stayed abreast of new developments around the world. They mixed in the same cafes, theatres and private salons, and drew inspiration from each other's work. Poets discovered new techniques in painting; theatre directors looked to poets for new language; painters sought inspiration in the theatre. Informal venues accommodated a greater range of tastes than imperial institutions had. These included nightclubs such as the St Petersburg Stray Dog, the kapust- nik improvisational evenings at the Moscow Art Theatre, or the Wednesday evening literary salons in the 'Tower' apartment of poet Viacheslav Ivanov. The Symbolists organised journals such as The Golden Fleece, Scales or Apollo.[7]

Aleksandr Benois of the World of Art organised yearly art exhibits starting in 1899, which evolved into international exhibitions promoted by Sergei Diag- ilev. Diagilev's creation of the Ballets Russes in 1909 exported the choreography of Mikhail Fokin, the dancing of Vaslav Nijinsky, and later the music of Igor Stravinsky to Paris and beyond, in such productions as Firebird and Petrushka (see Plate 2).[8]

The visual arts were perhaps most fractured by competing artistic programmes. Pre-war years saw the Academy and the now influential World of Art challenged by a dizzying array of groups, including Rayonists led by Mikhail Larionov and Suprematists led by Kazimir Malevich. Other artists, including Vasilii Kandinsky, Pavel Filonov, Nataliia Goncharova and Vladimir Tatlin, seemed to defy group definition. The ultimate impact of Russian modernism was not in its organisations, but in the achievements of its brilliant artists, and their legacy to the next generation of artists, whose fate was to encounter the October Revolution at the moment of their maturity.[9]

Many modernists thought of their art as addressing social concerns. Yet it was apparent that the audience for modernist art did not go far beyond the educated classes, and that the lower classes, who did not possess much leisure time or spare income, were largely indifferent to their work. These lower classes were not, as many supposed, lacking in cultural stimulation. The invention of new technologies, such as the gramophone, cinema and mass typography exposed more consumers to cultural expression than ever before. Cheap printing spurred a boom market in paperback detective stories, robber tales, romantic love stories, sometimes even light pornography.[10] The gramophone, which could be purchased for the home or listened to in a public parlour, brought music to listeners who could not afford imperial theatres, music halls or beer gardens. Such luminaries of the imperial stage as opera singer Fedor Chaliapin became popular recording stars, as did cafes chantants and variety singers, such as Nadezhda Plevitskaia, Varia Panina, Anastasia Vial'tseva. The Russian film industry, dominated by foreign companies before the First

1

Beverly Whitney Kean, All the Empty Palaces: The Merchant Patrons of Modern Art in Pre- Revolutionary Russia (New York: Universe Books, 1983); Edith W Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow and James L. West (eds.), Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

2

Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (eds.), Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881 -1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

3

Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State, 1917 to the Present (London: Verso, 1988); Christopher Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism (New York: St Martin's Press, 1990).

4

Boris Gasparov Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno (eds.), Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman (eds.), Creating Life: the Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); Stephen C. Hutchings, RussianModernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

5

Avril Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979-80).

6

Konstantin Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theater, 1905-1932 (New York: Abrams, 1988); Robert Russell and Andrew Barratt (eds.), Russian Theatre in the Age of Modernism (New York: St Martin's Press, 1990); J. Douglas Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd: The Comme- dia dell'arte/Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama (Montreaclass="underline" McGill- Queen's University Press, 1993).

7

Ronald E. Peterson (ed.), The Russian Symbolists: An Anthology of Critical and Theoretical Writings (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1986); Michael Green (ed.), The Russian Symbolist Theatre: An Anthology of Plays and Critical Texts (Ann Arbor, Ardis, 1986).

8

The World of Art Movement in Early 20th-century Russia (Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1991); Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

9

John Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934 (New York: Viking Press, 1976); The Russian Avant-Garde in the 1920s-i 93 os: Paintings, Graphics, Sculpture, Decorative Arts from the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, ed. Evgeny Kovtun (St Petersburg: Aurora Art Publishers, 1996).

10

Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); also Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).