Russian culture

Russia’s high culture was assuming some of the functions of those missing political institutions. Far‑ reaching, disruptive change was being introduced, to all appearances from outside, from a Europe to which Russia did not feel it fully belonged. The rule of law, capitalist economics, rationalism, technical progress, and the urban, bourgeois way of life all seemed alien to most non‑ Westernized Russians, especially to peasants and the church. In this respect, Russia was the first modern nation that reacted against Western‑ driven modernization to reaffirm the values of inherited communal and religious life.

Faced with these challenges, and with state and church censorship which obstructed open discussion of how to cope with them, prominent writers felt obliged to assume the role of oblique political commentators and even prophets. Nikolai Gogol first made his name in the 1830s with sketches of Ukrainian provincial life and folklore, but to advance his career he decided to move to St Petersburg. There, the frosty formality and pretentious hierarchy of imperial Russia repelled him, and he satirized it in a series of works. In his novel Dead Souls (1842), he manipulates the term ‘soul’, used officially to designate a poll‑ tax payer, and the administrative fiction that deceased taxpayers were considered alive till the next census. His main character creates fraudulent social status for himself by purchasing such ‘dead souls’ from impoverished landowners.

Dead Souls was intended to be merely the first part of a work in which Gogol would show how Russia could be redeemed by its innate virtues. He found the rest impossible to complete and secretly burnt the manuscript. Instead, he issued a series of epistles preaching repentance and submission to the will of God. His admirers were bitterly disappointed.

Fedor Dostoevsky was similarly obsessed with the loss of community and of moral consciousness in modern urban civilization. He reacted against the project of understanding human beings as wholly a product of scientifically ascertainable biological and psychological laws. His ‘Underground Man’ (1864) sticks out his tongue at the Crystal Palace and proclaims ‘I dislike the fact that two times two makes four’. The St Petersburg Dostoevsky describes in his novels is a hive of Western rationality, bureaucracy, and avarice, where a lonely, rootless individual like Raskolnikov can decide it is legitimate to murder an elderly moneylender because her life is useless and without her money he cannot finance his studies. Against this nightmare morality Dostoevsky counterposed that of the village community, bound by joint responsibility and Orthodox Christianity: Russian peasants might be drunken and blasphemous, but they had preserved the humble faith and spirit of community which the West had long ago lost. He believed that by asserting their unassuming and pious morality, Russia would save humanity. He issued a regular newspaper column, in which he preached war for the conquest of Constantinople from the Ottoman Empire and the rebirth of the Second Rome as a Russian capital city.

Like Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy was a Russian patriot, but an idiosyncratic one. In War and Peace (1869), he maintained that Russia managed to defeat Napoleon not because of its skilful generals, but because of the moral superiority of ordinary Russian peasants and soldiers, who in their villages and regiments had succeeded in preserving a primitive sense of community and morality which the sophisticated, atheist French had lost. He endeavoured himself to live a life close to that of the peasants, at one stage making his own boots and joining in the scything of hay. In later life, Tolstoy founded a religion based on the ethic of mutual cooperation and asserted that this was the central message of Jesus. He rejected both state and church, on the grounds that (whatever they preached) they practised materialism, domination, coercion, and latent violence. He advocated abstention from all war and the abolition of the death penalty, money, and private property.

In music, Modest Mussorgsky insisted that Russian opera should reflect the Russian way of life and that its melodies should derive from folksong, the liturgy, or the rhythms and intonation of Russian speech. In his operas Boris Godunov (1874) and Khovanshchina (1880), he put his ideas into practice. Both portray turning points in Russian history when Western and Russian culture clash, and when trust between rulers and ruled is at issue. At the end of Khovanshchina, Old Believers immolate themselves in their church, singing the native znamenny chant, while offstage Peter I’s army approaches playing Western military music.

By the early 20th century, Russia’s challenge to traditional forms and genres, especially in music and painting, was more radical than in any other European country, probably because the challenge to Russian society itself from urbanization and industrialization was more abrupt and testing than elsewhere. Russia led the way in formulating the techniques and aspirations of modernism, which usually claimed deeper insight into a spiritual or underlying reality not apparent to routine perception.

In The Rite of Spring (1913), Igor Stravinsky disclosed more primitive and pagan layers of peasant culture than any of the folklore revivalists of England, Hungary, or Romania. Drawing on ancient Russian folk dances, he portrayed fertility rites and human sacrifice through brutal rhythms and static, non‑ progressive harmonies, implying a cyclical view of time. The Rite ’s first performance by the Ballets Russes in Paris scandalized audiences and signalled that a new kind of modernism had arrived in European art.

Visual artists inherited the ambition to transform the world. Vasily Kandinsky began from a fascination with Russian folk art and produced highly coloured pastiches of familiar popular motifs. He moved on from there to equally highly coloured abstract paintings, believing that by renouncing any attempt to depict objects realistically, he was liberating art from its imprisonment in the material environment, and creating ‘moments of sudden illumination’ which ‘reveal with blinding clarity new perspectives, new truths’. In short, he held that abstract art enabled the viewer to penetrate the secrets of the spiritual world underlying perceived reality.

Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) was the shape of an icon, but placed in a void where the iconic image should have been. It substituted for church dogma a realm of pure potentiality, opening the way in his view to an ideal cosmos where creative possibilities were endless. He followed it up with a whole series of paintings consisting of simple geometrical forms pierced by lines, planes, or other simple shapes. He chose the term ‘Suprematism’ for his kind of art. ‘I have conquered the lining of the heavenly. . . . Sail forth! The white free chasm, infinity is before us! ’

Thus, before 1917, Russia’s art forms portended radical change even more all‑ embracing than was envisaged by modernists in other European countries.

8. The vacant icon: Malevich’s Black Square