Already so well known for his work in Soviet popular culture, Richard Stites brings his massive erudition, sensitive ear for the good story, and the light touch of his narrative skills to this study of Russian culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. Framing his study between the westernization that came with the eighteenth century and the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Stites uses the pivotal importance of these events to explore their combined influences on the formative years of the Russian arts that would themselves be exported into in the second half of the century. He might have subtitled his book “the pleasure and the pain,” given his attention to the distresses, physical as well as mental and emotional, that those who aspired to produce culture suffered at the hands the repressive government and abusive serf owners. Yet these years included the “Golden Age” of Russian culture, and the story Stites tells is not a rehash of accomplishments despite oppression. The originality of Stites’s thesis is that he considers westernization, the autocracy, and serfdom as a complex of forces that shaped culture, without a qualification of “despite” that has been invoked against all of these influences at one time or another. Because of this, his work will be of interest to cultural historians in general. Russianists, though, will take special delight in the plethora of vivid vignettes.
Stites positions his stories around the argument that the history of Russian culture in first half of the century, with the exception of the canonical authors from the golden age, has been dismissed as uninspiring or static primarily because of how it compares with that which followed. In this, cultural history parallels political history, characterized most conveniently as a conservative lull before the revolutionary elan of the Great Reforms. Preferring to elucidate the “unrolling” of the story, telling of “the lives lived, the arts created and experienced” without a judgmental eye on its “denouement” (P. 426), Stites recreates Russian society through its cultural production and reception. Specifically, he focuses on the visual and performative arts as opposed to the literature; his choice is sound because not only these have received comparatively less attention, but also the paltry degree of literacy limited the reach of literature in ways that painting or performing did not. Moreover, he ranges his character from royal patrons to serf violinists, weaving them all together to portray the complex interactions of social groups that are usually treated as discrete from each other. If the master/serf is the dominant trope of oppression in pre-reform Russia, Stites reminds readers that all social categories found themselves enmeshed in nonegalitarian relationships. The West casts a shadow, but not one that obscures Russians’ cultural attempts to define themselves categorically in relationship to each other as well as to it.
The book is divided into five, self-explanatory parts: “Cultural and Social Terrains”; “Music of the Spheres;” “Empire of Performance;” “Pictures at an Exhibition;” and “Finale and Overture.” The first and last are significantly shorter than those in between, as appropriate for an introduction and conclusion. Although the most significant geographical focus is on life in the two capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Stites pays special attention to the provinces, which like the era itself remain culturally neglected. This is also noteworthy because of the importance of amateurs, given that society was not yet wealthy enough to support an extensive commercial performative culture, especially on the provincial estates. His source base is encyclopedic if not exhaustive; he has worked in numerous archives and mastered the secondary literature, and all within a framework that keeps Russian accomplishments within the comparative context of analogous developments in western countries.
What made Russia especially unique, however, was the persistence of serfdom. The Russian serf here receives the opportunity to play center stage. As fictional characters written for the stage, serfs were unidimensional foils whose function was to show off their masters, who, for sometimes better and at other times worse, remained the subject of the play. Serfs themselves come to life here, on the stages built for them by owner-magnates such as the Sheremetev family, whose interest in the theater crossed generations. Mikhail Shchepkin is already well known as a brilliant serf actor who gained freedom through the stage, and went on to influence acting styles and become a public persona; in these pages he mingles with others, less influential but all a part of the atmosphere of pre-reform Russia. Among the many stories recounted here is how director of the imperial theater, A. L. Naryshkin, from an old boyar family, sold his serf troupe to the state stage, and also rented out his chorus. But Russia’s undemocratic power relationships needed to be reconciled for more than just its most oppressed class. Pianist Anton Rubenstein chafed as the “musical furnace attendant” (P. 124) under the patronage of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. Censorship affected much, and topics were subject to the personal idiosyncracies of the tsars. Nicholas I (1825–1855) did not like to see “a nobleman on stage in comic form” (P. 213), for example, and Jews could not be presented “as people with decent moral principles” (P. 198).
What appeared both on and back stage reflected Russia’s search for a sense of itself appropriate to the new century. The sentimentalism of the eighteenth century was giving way to tragedy, and nationalism was developing into a political ideology which found articulate expression in the performing arts. If critics might cavil at my use of the adjective “articulate,” one advantage of Stites’s approach is to focus on the popular rather than what became the classical. Russian victories against Napoleon provided considerable inspiration to look back to the past for more subjects appropriate for the stage. Nestor Kukolnik’s “The Hand of the Almighty Has Saved the Fatherland” (1834) did for drama what Mikhail Glinka’s “Ivan Susanin (A Life for the Tsar)” (1836) did for opera. On canvas in the 1830s, in another departure from the academic styles that had predated them, Grigory Chernetsov and Vasily Raev, a serf, painted panoramas featuring thousands of soldiers, Russia in all its military glory.
The most interesting parts of this book, though, are about power, but rather about pleasure. More modest lithographs of street scenes depict the interactions of various social groups. As Stites reminds us, serfs could in fact enroll in the universities if they had the qualifications; and although so few of them did, the point here is that in the arts, one can witness Russians crossing social lines with greater alacrity than is generally found in the histories. Geographical mobility between the two capitals and the provinces, in both directions, was also considerable. The Volga River provided a circuit for actors, not just trading barges. Actress Anna Vysheslavtseva began her career as a serf in the Nizhni Novgorod troupe of the Shakhovskoi family, and the even more famous serf actress Lyubov Nikulina-Kositskaya spent years developing her craft working in a variety of roles in Volga towns. The reader can almost see the mulatto performer Julie from Broadway’s “Showboat” sailing down the Volga instead of the Mississippi where slaves, like serfs, could enjoy the semi-freedom of inhabiting another personality when performing. Although Stites laments the technological impossibility of a sound track, the reader can almost hear street sounds, backstage squabbling, and whispers of gossip. “Iron Tsar” Nicholas I could be reduced to laughter by child piano prodigy Anton Rubenstein’s imitations of Franz Liszt’s body language (P. 123). The noise becomes even more raucous in the vaudevilles and melodramas.
The section on visual arts also depends significantly upon imagination, because although the book includes thirty-six pages of illustrations, they are all small black-and-white plates. One photograph complements the particularly interesting discussion of the development of photography. As Stites points out, there were more serfs among the visual artists than any other kind of performers; and architecture as well depended upon serfs as draftsmen, not just builders. The two capitals dominated the provinces in terms of public art, that is, museums, although the Hermitage was not opened to common viewers until 1840. The provincial cities also rarely found themselves on canvases, in sharp distinction from Moscow and especially the extremely photogenic St. Petersburg. But the residents, the local nobility and merchants, sat eagerly for portrait painters, leaving behind a visual history. Stites argues that G. A. Krylov’s “Portrait of a Rzhevsk Merchant” (1830s) captured this group’s “increasingly ambivalent self-image” (P. 360), “mercantile” in beard and haircut, but with his elbow resting “beside two expensively bound books.” The search for a cultural identity in the years leading up to the debacle in the Crimea, when Russians finally felt themselves equal to other Europeans because of their defeat of Napoleon, was profound.
Like many of Stites’s previous monographs, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia promises to become a standard reference. Its stature as a reference book also has the unhappy attribute of being the volume’s biggest problem. The degree of detail is wonderful for the specialist, and even the highly interested casual reader, but it increases the number of pages and the price, restricting the book from classroom use. Nonetheless, the volume offers an incomparable source of material for lectures and term papers on “the pleasure and the power,” and also on the pain.