SECULAR ART in Russia came of age in the early nineteenth century. An enterprise that had heretofore embraced only a limited number of artists now involved hundreds working in many fields. Pushing output upward were thousands of reasonably sophisticated consumers, where earlier there had been only isolated individuals and institutions. And as demand for contemporary art increased, the number of Russian artists producing high quality work grew; the best of them for the first time attracted the attention of cognoscenti abroad. By mid-century educated Russians understood that their culture had just experienced an extraordinarily fertile era and already were referring to it as their “Golden Age.” To this day scholars are asking why it occurred, and under what circumstances.

How does one account for the appearance of a Briullov, Pushkin, or Glinka, or, more modestly, how should the world in which they worked be characterized? Various theories are readily at hand, ranging from the supposedly inspiring climate created by the victory over Napoleon in 1812 to the more recondite conception of a politically repressed nation of Hamlets, charged with noble ideals but doomed to art as a surrogate for public action. Propping up such theories is a framework of analysis that imposes clarity on the confusion of the era by seeing the welter of forces in terms of simple dualities. Academic art is juxtaposed with free art, the tsarist “state” with a supposedly autonomous “society,” metropolis with province, classicism with romanticism, cosmopolitanism with nationalism.

In defense of such notions, it must be admitted that many of the artists and writers on art in Russia at the time conceived the art world in such terms. This is not surprising, of course, since the tendency to seek a Manichean dualism in all reality was a common feature of Russian and European thought of the age. Yet each of these polarities confuses as much as it explains. On the one hand, each admits of too many exceptions to be useful. On the other hand, they all fail to take into account the manner in which seemingly opposed tendencies in art and society became so deeply bound up with one another as to make trivial any effort to separate them neatly for purposes of analysis.

RUSSIA’S MANY EUROPES

The reality of Russian artistic life in the early nineteenth century is far too complex to be encompassed by such formulae. Even the title “Russian Art, 1800-1850” suggests a coherence that the reality belies. For example, by what traits can one identify a given work as “Russian” in a period in which art in Russia continued, as it had in the eighteenth century, to be remarkably subject to West European influences? Indeed, no current in the fine arts, music, or decorative arts of Russia in the years 1800-50 is without close analogues elsewhere in Europe. The specific foreign countries or cities from which the Russians drew inspiration at any given time can usually be identified.

The eighteenth century ended with the earlier Gallomania in eclipse, thanks to the French Revolution and the unbending Francophobia of Paul I. Jacques-Louis David was scorned in St. Petersburg for having supported the radicals—and later for having “sold out” to Napoleon. Meanwhile, France was all but closed to visitation by “pensioners” from the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.¹ French influence bloomed again during the early years of Alexander I’s reign, thanks both to the Parisian orientation of the young tsar and several of his circle of advisors and to the presence in St. Petersburg of great numbers of highly cultured political emigres from Paris. The appointment of the Frenchman Boieldieu to a high musical post long held by Italians symbolized this brief episode. The turn to Italy that occurred in the new century, however, was not abrupt and was not occasioned by the Napoleonic invasion. Italian music (Paisaello, Galluppi, Manfredini, etc.) had long been à la mode in both St. Petersburg and Moscow; such architects as Rastrelli, Rinaldi, and Quarenghi had all been well established at the tsar’s court; and the sculptor Canova had already won a broad Russian following through the patronage of the Russian ambassador in Vienna, Count Andrei Razumovsky. The parade of Russian painters to Italy (discussed by Joshua Taylor in chapter 7) was well advanced when Alexander Egorov and Vladimir Shebuev arrived in Rome in 1804 and was to continue unabated to mid-century.²

For all its popularity among Russians, Italy did not monopolize the West European influences upon Russian art in the early nineteenth century. Germany in particular made its presence strongly felt in Russian artistic life. Thanks to the patronage of Nicholas I, the great Berlin architect Schinkel undertook several court commissions in St. Petersburg, while the architect of the Pinotek in Munich, Leo Klentze, was selected to design the new Hermitage.³ Nicholas I, whose artistic interests will concern us later, gave encouragement to the German painter Franz Krueger in the same years when Alexander Ivanov in Rome was consorting with Johann Friedrich Overbeck and the German Nazarenes.

If one is to speak of the rise of Germany and Italy as factors in Russian artistic life and the eclipse of France, the point must be qualified by noting the tendency of different arts to draw selectively upon different West European sources. Architecture, for example, remained solidly under French influence down to the rise of eclectism in the 1830s. Alexander I personally sponsored the publication of Claude-Nicholas Ledoux’s epochal experiments,⁴ prompted the emigration of Ledoux’s student, Thomas de Thomon, and appointed Auguste Montferrand as chief architect for St. Isaac’s, the national cathedral in St. Petersburg. Graphics meanwhile felt the impact of England more strongly, partly because of the early development there of modern techniques of reproduction.

Did the considerable West European impact of Russian art call forth so strong a reaction as to justify today the use of the polarity of Slavophiles and Westernizers? Not really. To acknowledge the Italianness of Silvestr Shchedrin’s landscapes is not to deny their Russianness, the less so since Shchedrin’s introduction to Italian painting was the deliberate work of his Russian teachers and the result of policies of the national-minded tsarist government. Nor were Western influences in the visual arts countered by a school calling for the return of an “indigenous” language, as occurred in literature when A. S. Shishkov’s thoroughly reactionary “Group of Lovers of the Russian Word” campaigned for the reintroduction into Russian of terms with purely Slavonic roots. Shishkov’s wife, incidentally, was of Dutch Protestant descent, and saw to it that their son had a French tutor.⁵

TEMPORAL DIMENSIONS

If the term “Russian Art” suggests a distinctness from the rest of Europe that was rarely sought and never achieved, the periodization 1800-50 suggests a defined phase in the history of Russian art that did not, in fact, exist. Except for the supplementary statutes added in 1802 to the character of the Academy of Arts,⁶ not one major development in Russian artistic life corresponds even roughly to the turn of the eighteenth century. The rise of national and historical themes in Russian painting, literature, and music antedates the 1812 campaign by at least a generation; sentimentalism was no longer new in 1800; and the classicism to which the more national currents are sometimes seen as a response continued to thrive with renewed vigor for another two decades, albeit in a more Latinized form than before.

This less dramatic chronology suggests that Russian art responded less deeply to diplomatic shifts than is often supposed. And in fact, the major turning points in the formal development of Russian art in the early nineteenth century correlate poorly, if at all, with events in the political realm. The very important shift toward Christian pietism in the first three decades and the related growth of sentimental portraiture and “spiritual” music occurred at first without government patronage;⁷ the abortive Decembrist revolt of 1825 left little imprint on the visual arts, though more on letters. Most important, perhaps, the supposedly repressive regime of Nicholas I did little to alter the fundamental directions that Russian artistic values were taking anyway, as we shall see later in this discussion. Indeed, the only political event that left a clear stamp on Russian art was the Revolution of 1848,⁸ which unleashed much of the dissatisfaction that had long existed under the surface of “Biedermeier” Russia. But since these revolutionary events occurred outside Russia, one is compelled to suggest the proposition that political events in France and elsewhere had a greater impact on Russian art than did political events in Russia itself. Yet even this overstates the case for politics as a preoccupation of Russian cultural figures. In this respect it is revealing that Nikolai Karamzin, the sentimentalist writer and spokesman for the nationalism that was eventually to make itself felt in Russian art, visited France at the height of the Revolution but failed in his travel memoirs so much as to mention the events boiling around him!⁹

A further complexity that must be borne in mind when considering the chronology of Russian artistic developments is the relatively late appearance in Russia of a defined classical movement and the relatively early emergence there of sentimentalism and romanticism. Suffice it to note that practically the entire corpus of classical literature was translated into Russian only in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, only a few years before sentimentalism made itself felt during the 17 90s. This peculiarity of timing caused the two movements to commingle with one another in diverse arts, even while maintaining a thematic distinctness from each other. Thus, the effort of I. Vitalii and others during the 1810s and 1820s to imbue classical sculpture with a more “romantic” emotionalism parallels the effort by students in the academy’s genre classes to achieve a folkish exterior simply by clothing classical sketches with peasant garb. Such a technique was most successfully applied by the sculptor I. P. Martos in his archly classical monument to the seventeenth-century peasant liberators of Moscow, Minin and Pozharsky (1818; cf. Kennedy, fig. 10.9).¹⁰ This curious compound of styles and techniques did not long survive, however, and was denounced by the critic Nikolai Nadezhdin in 1833,¹¹ after which a merger of more diversified approaches occurred with the rise of eclecticism.

THE WORLD OF ART

If the reality of Russian artistic life in the early nineteenth century is not to be grasped by simple dualisms or by the myth of an artistic identity distinct from Europe as a whole, let alone by the application of some chronology derived from the realm of politics, how can it be approached? One useful step is to identify the broader environment of patronage and consumption in which artists of all types functioned— what the Moscow critic Sternin refers to as the “artistic culture” of Russia under Alexander I and Nicholas I.

The contours of this world are suggested by demographic data from the era. One is struck, first, by the very small educated population toward which high culture was directed. Given the fact that Russia’s “nobility” or gentry was a service class, comprising practically everyone holding any position of responsibility, its numbers approximate the scale of this elite. In the 1830s the nobility numbered only 720,000, or about 1½ percent of the population.¹² Discounting children and elders, one can speak of only a few hundred thousand men and women with any strong likelihood of access to the fine arts. Keeping in mind, also, that three-quarters of the gentry owned fewer than the one hundred serfs required to maintain a noble family year-round in a typical province like Smolensk,¹³ the numbers of persons with the time and resources to indulge in high culture dwindles further. On top of this, the noble population was so deeply mortgaged to the state that its opportunities for lavish expenditure on art shrank yet further. Though it is significant that few gentry complained of a “crisis of serfdom,”¹⁴ approximately two-thirds of their serfs were in hock by mid-century, when Pavel Fedotov painted his satirical An Aristocrat’s Breakfast. The Demidovs, Shuvalovs, Panins, Samoilovs, Lopukhins, and Gagarins painted by Karl Briullov were exceptions to the general rule, a minute class within a class. All were among the 3,500 magnates (male and female) who owned 40 percent of Russia’s serfs.¹⁵

Before turning to the possibility of merchant patronage in the arts, we should take note of the concentration of consumers of high culture in a very few urban centers. The total urban population of Russia doubled in the period under study, but in 1850 was still under 10 percent of the population. Most “cities” were really large villages and filled with peasants and petit bourgeois (meshchane). Only St. Petersburg, with a population of 470,000 in 1840, and Moscow, with 349,000 were really metropolises, their closest rival being Odessa, with 60,000.¹⁶

THE THINNESS OF PROVINCIAL CULTURAL LIFE

Such figures as these suggest the unlikelihood of there existing a strong and independent provincial artistic milieu in Russia at the time. We shall return later to the tenuous status of the various provincial art schools. But for now it should be noted that the overwhelming majority of provincial artists in Russia in the early nineteenth century were icon painters, and that all but the most successful secular painters had to devote considerable amounts of time to ecclesiastical commissions.¹⁷ These, along with the growing number of orders for merchants’ portraits, constituted the daily fare for nearly all provincial artists. Against this background, the refusal of the master of the serf painter Grigori Soroka to give him his freedom may have had the effect of shielding Soroka from the pathetic and uninspiring world of the small-town commercial dauber.

In the absence of provincial centers, the chief emporia for art and decorative objects were the fairs that dominated rural trade in Russia down to mid-century. Several thousands of these exchanges were held throughout Russia, the greatest of them, at Nizhni Novgorod, being the largest such fair in Europe. Though the most avant-garde art was to be flaunted at the Nizhni fair by the end of the century, in the period under study the fairs were, for the most part, dominated by peasant crafts, cheap Western-style goods, and products designed to meet the traditionalist tastes of the local populace.¹⁸ Not until the establishment of the so-called Wanderers movement in the 1860s did artists with big-city tastes look to the fairs as outlets for their work.

MERCHANT WEALTH LOOKS TO RUSSIAN ART

In contrast to the plight of the gentry, the beginnings of merchant wealth were becoming evident by the 1850s, particularly in Moscow. For various reasons, however, these fortunes were yet to have the impact on the arts that they were to exert in the age of the Mamontovs, Morozovs, Shchukins, and Riabushinskys. For one thing, these commercial factories were still quite young: Savva Morozov had bought his freedom from serfdom only in 1820 and the Mamontovs’ railroad fortune was yet to be built. Moreover, merchants were still effectively excluded from public life at the highest levels, both by government policy and by their own peculiar psychology. Those manufacturers and merchants who were accumulating vast fortunes in the early nineteenth century and whose sons were to champion nationalistic art a generation later for the most part still inhabited the closed and traditionalistic world of Muscovite commerce. Many were puritanic Old Believers and haughtily wrapped their kaftans about themselves as they spurned the gentry’s alien cultural affectations.¹⁹

There were exceptions, however, and their emergence helps account for the decline of the cult of classical antiquity in art. The Moscow industrialist Fedor Chizhov was among those who traveled to Italy in the 1840s but scarcely paused to inspect the classical antiquities before sweeping up his friend Alexander Ivanov and making a tour of the seats of Byzantine Slavic culture in Istria, Dalmatia, and Montenegro. K. T. Soldatenkov also linked up with Alexander Ivanov, who assisted him in building up his formidable collection of Russian and Western art. P. M. Tretiakov began his collection of paintings in the same years, in imitation of the tsars’ Hermitage collection, but soon shifted his attention from Flemish masters to works by Russian artists.²⁰ Finally, in St. Petersburg the banker Stieglitz was in a position by the 1840s to hire the very expensive Academy of Arts master Fedor Bruni to do a series of panels on Russian themes for his new palace on the English Embankment.²¹

THE RISE OF THE DECORATIVE ARTS

If the commercial world of Moscow and other cities did not yet exert the overwhelming influence on Russian art and patronage that it would later, it nonetheless proved decisive in certain areas of the decorative arts. Indeed, Russia’s emerging middle-class milieu helped shape both the demand and supply for applied arts. On the demand side, the doubling of Russia’s urban population between 1800 and 1850 called for an enormous expansion in the production of furniture, glassware, and other objects of domestic use (see chapter 11 by Paul Schaffer). In the same period, thousands of peasants, many of them serfs, entered commerce and won modest fortunes that could be used to acquire esthetic symbols of their worldly success. At the lowest level, this created a market for the printed cotton fabrics and cheap lithographs that quickly drove handweaving and the more traditional woodcuts (lubki) from the homes of the Russian peasant or petit-bourgeois. At slightly higher levels, this enrichment generated an enormous demand for products that had heretofore been confined to use by the more wealthy merchants and gentry.

Foreign suppliers were unable to meet this burgeoning demand for decorative arts for two reasons. First, the cost of transportation to Russia was so high as to be prohibitive for all but the fanciest luxury goods. Second, Russia’s financial position after the Napoleonic Wars became so shaky that the government imposed a heavy tariff on all imported goods.²² Tariff levels remained high throughout the period, rising to peak levels in the wake of the poor harvests in the early 1840s. The resulting protection was an unexpected boon for Russia’s domestic manufacturers of decorative objects.

THE RUSSIFICATION OF THE DECORATIVE ARTS

At first the demand for applied arts was met largely through foreign craftsmen and entrepreneurs who settled in Russia. Thus, in the field of gilt bronze, names such as Chopin, Schreiber, Strange, Nichols and Plincke, and Krumbuegl dominated the field.²³ Gradually, though, Russians moved into this lucrative area, with the result that in the manufacture of porcelain china the new firms in the post-Napoleonic era were owned by such persons as A. G. Popov (f. 1806), M. S. Kornilov (f. 1835), and N. S. Khrapunov (f. 1812). Equally important, the foreign masters who introduced the various crafts were soon assimilated or replaced by Russians, much the way German brewmasters in Mexico have been supplanted by Mexicans. By 1840, nearly all of the 350 workers at the Francis Gardner porcelain factory in Moscow were Russians, and the Gardner family itself had become thoroughly Russified.²⁴

In nearly all the decorative arts it was the North Germans who dominated the field at first and set taste in Russia. Among the leading furniture makers were such figures as David Roentgen, Charles Meier, Heinrich Hambs, and A. K. Piek. Such makers set styles that were emulated by Russians, and particularly by serf craftsmen, whose activity was increasingly prominent down to the emancipation in 1861. By the 1830s, though, the shift to native craftsmen was advanced to the point that the Moscow merchantry felt sufficiently confident to mount their own “Exposition of Russian Manufactures.”²⁵ Repeated in 1843 and in 1845, these exhibitions surprised even as knowledgeable an observer as the Westphalian Baron von Haxthausen with the extent and quality of Russian-made decorative arts.

POPULARIZING THE FINE ARTS

During the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century, Russians did more than ever before to disseminate information on the fine arts to the educated populace. As a result, an enterprise that had heretofore been known only to small numbers of patrons now entered the consciousness of large parts of the educated public. A variety of factors combined to bring about this result.

First, Russia’s university system expanded rapidly with the foundation of St. Petersburg University (1817), the University of Kazan (1804), Kharkov University (1805), and St. Vladimir’s in Kiev (1834). While this did not in itself create art lovers, it did develop a reading audience that was eager for enlightenment in the humanities and social sciences. Such journals as the Telescope (Teleskop), the Moscow Telegraph (Moskovskii Telegraf), or the Library for Reading (Biblioteka dlia chteniia) regularly included essays on art, which did much to force the world of art upon the consciousness of thousands of educated Russians. The establishment in 1838 of provincial newspapers by the Ministry of Internal Affairs had much the same effect, and on a national scale, although for the first years the gubernskie vedemosti ventured no further from official topics than occasional pieces of local history.

Much could be said about the shortcomings of Russian art criticism down to the decade of the 1840s, when the confrontation of romantic currents with the emerging “Natural School” thrust the field to the center of debate at the universities and in the “fat journals” generally. Suffice it to observe that Winkelmann was never translated in full, and the heated arguments over Schiller, Schelling, and the Schlegels were often conducted on the basis of the most imperfect knowledge of their works. Yet to dwell on such facts would be to undervalue the importance of what was achieved. During the half century before 1840, the Russian language was enriched with a vocabulary of art terms that for the first time permitted discussion of the most abstruse notions of contemporary Western criticism. Through the rapidly growing publishing industry this new language of esthetics was disseminated to a large audience and made available for public discourse.²⁶ The analogous efforts of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his fellow Bostonians in the same area seem crude by comparison.

The dissemination of information on the arts and the spread of art appreciation still had definite limits in the decades under study, though these are hard to establish precisely. If precise records exist as to the number of persons who attended exhibitions and cultural events in Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century, they have yet to be made available for study. In the absence of such precise documentation, we must resort to the voluminous impressions recorded by contemporaries. To be sure, there are numerous references to enthusiastic crowds at public exhibitions. Thus, an anonymous critic visiting the annual show at the Academy of Arts in 1820 complained about the “throng gasping from the closeness,” at the same time noting that the hall was packed with “sailors, carters, lackeys, and women.”²⁷ Since most of the critic’s readers also lived in Petersburg and could readily verify his report for themselves, it is unlikely that he would have dared to exaggerate greatly. Yet in the same period Russia’s first journal devoted exclusively to the arts, the Journal of Fine Arts (Zkurnal iziashchnykh iskusstv) died within a few years of its foundation in 1807, notwithstanding the substantial disguised subsidy it received through being published on state-owned presses.

The establishment of concert halls and public galleries cannot necessarily be taken as evidence of popular interest in the spectacles offered by such institutions. The old building of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow was outfitted at great public expense on the very eve of 1812. Noting the great cost of the work, the mayor of Moscow, Count Rostopchin, observed ironically that still more funds were needed in order to purchase some 2,000 serfs who could be assigned to the theater to play the role of audience. Nor was the public so much more zealous in St. Petersburg. Notwithstanding the crowds observed at the academy in 1820, the arts there were far from commanding the mass audience that was considered normal in those western and central European capitals with a large middle class. J. G. Kohl, a German visitor to the imperial capital in the early 1840s, had this to say about the crowds at the recently opened Hermitage:

The Hermitage is not greatly frequented, as foreigners as well as natives must procure tickets. These are given indeed without difficulty, yet even this little obstacle is sufficient to keep numbers away. Love of ease is, after vanity, the great impulse in all our actions, or at least to all our omissions. There are in St. Petersburg a number of families of the educated classes who have never visited the Hermitage; and how little is gained compared with what might be, even by those who do? When we look at the listless faces of the sight-satiated public, lounging past the pictures, we cannot help asking ourselves how so many painters could ever attain such extraordinary renown. Where is the enthusiasm for their works, the rapture they inspire? For four thousand paintings reflecting half the natural world and mankind, a two hours’ saunter; for thirty thousand engravings, a few minutes; for three rooms full of statues, as many passing looks. . . . The most admired objects here are beyond all doubt the crown jewels, and other valuables arranged in a separate cabinet with them.²⁸

In this context it is perhaps interesting to note that the Hermitage was generally listed in Russian guidebooks under imperial palaces rather than under learned institutions.²⁹

Such impressionistic evidence is no substitute for the close sociological analysis that the Russian art public of the early nineteenth century requires and deserves. It does suggest, however, that the fine arts in Russia in this period were the property of the limited group of sophisticated and well-placed persons who were in a position to patronize them without regard for whether their initiative would immediately be seized upon by a broader public. As one would expect, Western-style esthetic culture penetrated Russian society from the top down through a process that was only beginning in the early nineteenth century.

THE NORTHERN PALMYRA

Against the background of the social and geographical concentration of artistic literacy, it is scarcely surprising that St. Petersburg should have been the magnetic pole of the Russian art world throughout the reigns of Alexander and Nicholas. The relative standing of St. Petersburg was enhanced by the state of decline into which Moscow fell during the first decades after the 1812 fire. Though reconstruction was fast and complete,³⁰ “society” never fully came back to Moscow and turned instead toward St. Petersburg. In 1834-40 lordly Moscow claimed only 15,700 noblemen of all ages, male and female, slightly less than the number of merchants listed in the census.³¹ Pushkin poignantly observed the decline of many of the great aristocratic houses of the old capital, mourning the abandoned palaces choked by weeds, or their transfer to the hands of merchants.³² In spite of Moscow’s claims to moral leadership—claims that parallel those of Boston against New York in the same period—Moscow was falling hopelessly behind St. Petersburg in all those fields that depended upon the patronage of a wealthy elite. Karl Briullov could therefore easily afford to avoid Moscow entirely until his thirty-sixth year; few artists in any field chose to reside in Moscow if they had the possibility of access to the more glamorous society of the “Northern Palmyra.”

It is hard to appreciate today how young a city St. Petersburg was in 1800. Founded a scant century earlier, the capital had possessed few of the amenities of a major European center for more than fifty years. Most of the major palaces had been constructed by 1800, but such landmarks as the enlarged Admiralty, the Stock Exchange, the General Staff, the Senate and Synod, the Alexander Theater, the Public Library, St. Isaac’s, or the Kazan Cathedral were yet to be constructed. Construction undertaken during the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I outshone all other architectural work in Russia in terms of both scale and grandeur. To be sure, massive construction was under way in Moscow after the 1812 fire, and such provincial towns as Odessa, Kazan, Kostroma, and Kaluga were largely built or reconstructed during these same years. But one need only compare the majestic ensembles of Rossi or Giliardi with the Biedermeier intimacy of Moscow’s rebuilt quarters to appreciate the extent to which Petersburg claimed the government’s attention and resources.

To the extent that other cities boasted major public works during the period, they were carried out in accordance with models drafted and approved in the capital. As with Catherine II’s ambitious effort to regularize the planning of Russia’s provincial centers, the thrust of architectural activity outside St. Petersburg in the early nineteenth century was to create little St. Petersburgs. Thus, architecture became a major vehicle for the dissemination of specific cultural ideals to the provinces.³³

THE ROLE OF THE STATE

St. Petersburg set standards of taste that were slavishly emulated elsewhere in Russia, just as the artistic predilections of Paris were accepted as law for the rest of France. True, the merchants of Moscow exhibited greater independence in this sphere than the other urban classes, but until mid-century they did so more by withdrawal than by assertion. Only the peasantry seemed immune to the dictates of St. Petersburg and, in remote regions, at least, produced artistic forms that reflected local traditions and circumstances.

The analogy of St. Petersburg to Paris as a tastemaker in a highly centralized system is appropriate, but within specific limits only. In Paris, after all, there existed a large, independent, politically active, and culturally assertive bourgeoisie. In Moscow by 1830 the merchants slightly outnumbered the gentry, but in St. Petersburg there were 42,900 nobles and only 6,800 merchants, many of them of modest means. The rest of the population was made up of a large group of petit bourgeois, a still larger group of recently urbanized peasants, and some 13,000 foreigners (2.9 percent of the population).³⁴ Since most of the nobility of St. Petersburg were living from state salaries received through either the army or the mushrooming civil service, one can say that with the exception of the handful of genuine grandees, most of St. Petersburg’s culture makers were on the state’s payroll.

The implications of this fact for the social history of art are not insignificant. Russian artists in all fields were, as a group, far closer to their government than was the case in any West European nation. Faculty at the Academy of Arts received civil service rank, and their students’ stipends were viewed virtually as state wages. Both academy and university students were accordingly expected to wear civil service uniforms. The composer Glinka was the tsar’s Kapellmeister, the poets Griboedov and Tiutchev were both diplomats, and many other artists followed careers in the military. Art was by no means a lucrative calling, so the best that most artists hoped to achieve was a secure niche within a government-sponsored cultural institution, a government-sponsored sojourn abroad, or a favorable marriage.

The absence of a well-funded “private sector” in the arts explains why many claims about the supposed independence of cultural institutions from governmental tutelage must be discounted. Ivan Pnin, founder of Russia’s first art journal, was a full-time employee of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, and both his arts journal and his St. Petersburg Journal (Sanktpeterburgskii zhurnal) were personally subsidized by the tsar.³⁵ When the Philharmonic Society was founded in St. Petersburg in 1802, it, too, received direct and indirect court subvention.³⁶ To be sure, there existed various independent groups, such as the Masonic lodges (to 1818), certain successful private publishing houses, or Count N. P. Rumiantsev’s circle of scholars and artists who explored Russian antiquities at their meetings at the count’s great Moscow library (which he later gave to the Ministry of Public Enlightenment). But the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, which sent Ivanov and so many of his peers to Rome, was certainly not among them. True, it received funds from various grandees, but most of them were also closely connected with the court. It also claimed the support of the tsar and was subject, in all its actual decisions, to the complete control of the Academy of Arts.³⁷

TSARS AS PATRONS

To refer to the Russian “state” is to make abstract something that, in the early nineteenth century, was still a concrete phenomenon embodied in the person of the tsar. Notwithstanding the sixfold increase in the size of the bureaucracy under Nicholas I,³⁸ the tsar remained, at least to the 1840s, the personal and highly visible master of his patrimony. Because of this, it is the more important to enquire into Nicholas’s tastes in art and to examine the manner in which he exercised his paternal authority in that field.

It need scarcely be said that Nicholas “The Stick” has a bad image. It is true that he volunteered to serve personally as Pushkin’s censor, that he tossed out categorical judgments in many areas of the arts of which he had scant knowledge, and that he used the full might of his office to bring about artistic conformity to the national ideals that he espoused. We will have to examine those ideals more closely, of course, but for now it must be emphasized that whatever damage Nicholas is purported to have inflicted on the artistic enterprise, he took the arts more seriously than did any other Russian tsar with the exception of Catherine II, and that in certain areas he demonstrated considerable knowledge and up-to-date judgment.

Since these points were made a half century ago by the Russian scholar M. Polievktov, it is unnecessary to do more than remind the reader of Polievktov’s argument:

The personal tastes of the Emperor Nicholas in the sphere of literature are of little interest, and the government’s attitude towards literature during his reign was expressed exclusively in prohibitions. But things stood differently in the visual arts. Nicholas unquestionably understood art and in one field, namely architecture, he was himself a competent specialist. His love for art was crowned with a series of positive governmental measures and undertakings directed towards the support of artistic and architectural activity. Nicholas was the last autocrat in the full sense of the word, and his reign was the last epoch in which there existed an official art.³⁹

Several aspects of Nicholas’s patronage of art and architecture have already been mentioned: his support for the grand architectural projects carried out by Rossi in St. Petersburg; his personal selection of the Berlin architect Schinkel to construct a chapel at the royal estate of Peterhof near Petersburg; his decision to establish the Hermitage as a public museum after the same proposal had been shelved by his predecessor for eight years; his selection of Leo von Klentze as architect for the new Hermitage. Other examples could be added. Thanks to Nicholas’s intervention, new collections were added to the Hermitage in 1829, 1831, 1836, 1845, and 1850 through purchases in France, Italy, and Germany.⁴⁰ In an effort to return the Academy of Arts to its former status as a responsibility of the crown, Nicholas brought it under the Ministry of the Imperial Court in 1829 and increased support for it. In 1845 he undertook a trip to Italy, where his itinerary was largely determined by his desire to visit the principal artistic and archeological centers and to assess in situ the work of Russian artists there.⁴¹ That his judgments sometimes raised eyebrows is not surprising; it should not be forgotten that many who met him were astonished by the apparent genuineness of the tsar’s interest in the arts.

Nicholas’s insistence that the architect K. A. Ton design the great Cathedral of the Savior in Moscow in the Russo-Byzantine style has often been cited as evidence of his narrow devotion to chauvinism in art. But if Ton’s cathedral marked a high point of the nationalist revival, other projects patronized by the tsar indicated that his tastes were more diverse. Thus, Benois’s stable in Peterhof is in the English Norman style, Rossi’s Petersburg ensembles are severely classical, Stackenschneider’s new palaces in Petersburg are in the Renaissance style, and Nicholas’s own suburban dacha near St. Petersburg is in the modest Italian villa style that the tsar did so much to popularize in Russia. In architecture as well as in painting, Nicholas’s taste was cosmopolitan and eclectic, a fact that was implicitly criticized by his contemporary the novelist Gogol when he penned an attack on eclecticism in all its forms.⁴²

There is little doubt that Nicholas’s support for the visual arts stemmed from his conviction that the autocratic tsar should be a tastemaker in all things. But in appointing his daughter, the Grand Duchess Mariia, as head of the Academy of Arts in 1852, in expanding the government’s support for artists studying and working in Italy, and in instituting numerous other measures, the tsar went far beyond what was required simply to extend his political program into the area of culture.

THE PERVASIVE ACADEMY

The ideal of an autocracy exercising leadership in all areas of national life was most clearly manifest in art through the activities of the Academy of Arts. Drawing analogies with England and France, Soviet and Western scholars have tended to conceive the academy under Alexander and Nicholas as a haven for all the most retrograde forces in Russian art, an institution that all true artists were bound to oppose. There is some basis for this view if the argument is confined to the 1840s, when Alexander Ivanov denounced the academy as “a survival of the last century.”⁴³ Under the directorship of the Duke of Leuchtenberg, the academy lost much of the dynamism that it had possessed during the long decades of A. Olenin’s stewardship (1817-43) and, before that, under A. S. Stroganov (1800-11). But to an extent that has no parallel in the West, the Imperial Academy of Arts exercised leadership in all aspects of Russian art and architecture.

A glance at any listing of Russian painters in the first half of the nineteenth century will reveal that, with few exceptions, they were all the products of the academy’s training programs, whether in St. Petersburg or Italy. Even such “dissidents” as Fedotov and Taras Shevchenko were products of the academy’s studios, just as their successors among the “Wanderers” were to be. One reason for the absolute dominance of the academy as a training institution was the absence in the early nineteenth century of independent alternatives. Indeed, every one of the “independent” studios that are generally cited as nests of latent or actual opposition to the academy were in fact closely linked with the school on the Neva. Thus, Venetsianov’s classes in St. Petersburg, where Soroka, Krendovsky, and others received training, were intended to be a supplement to the academy’s efforts and were coordinated in all important respects with the academy’s teaching program.⁴⁴ That these classes produced some excellent genre painters but no painters of national epics or scenes of classical heroism simply reflects Venetsianov’s emphasis on one of the chief divisions of the academy at the expense of the others.

Much the same can be said of the provincial schools of art. The first private art school in Russia was that of A. V. Stupin at Arzamas.⁴⁵ It is tempting to depict this as a rural island of esthetic independence in the sea of autocratic taste, but the image does not fit. Stupin, a former icon painter, spent two years at the academy in St. Petersburg and returned to Arzamas loaded with gifts of paintings and drawings by his former professors and colleagues. Within seven years after establishing his “independent” school, Stupin had submitted a detailed report on his efforts to disseminate art to the provinces, for which he was rewarded with the title of “Academician” and the honor of having his school placed under the protection of the academy, which was soon translated into free text books, more academic paintings from the St. Petersburg professors, and monetary gifts from the academy and from the tsar. In gratitude Stupin returned regularly to show off his students’ work in the halls of the academy.

The academy took seriously its responsibility to guide the development of painting throughout the country. When Stupin’s initiative was copied in Voronezh, Kozlov, and Saransk — in each case by graduates of the academy—the Academy of Arts was quick to bring the new schools under its protection and, where useful, to provide recognition, advice and monetary support.⁴⁶ The only school that achieved any strong independent identity was the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, founded in 1843. But in this case, too, there was no intention of “liberating” Russian art from the sinister control of the academy. On the contrary, the founders of the Moscow school saw themselves as carrying out much the same program in the old capital that the academy was implementing in the new.⁴⁷ Along with every other provincial art school, the Moscow School’s entire program was closely regulated by the academy according to principles set down in the academy’s charter of 1802. Hence, to impose on the 1840s the contrast between the two institutions that was to become so evident by the end of the century would be an anachronism.

The national scope of the academy’s responsibility, authority, and influence can be gauged with particular accuracy in the field of architecture. From the time of its foundation down to the middle of the nineteenth century, the Academy of Arts exercised direct control over the process of design and execution of every major state-sponsored architectural project in Russia. Special commissions staffed by its professors monitored the planning of new ensembles in the capital and approved standard building designs for provincial centers. The academy, in short, was the only union, and the Russian state a closed shop. Hence its professors could virtually dictate the design and execution of the Kazan Cathedral and St. Isaac’s, down to the last icon. To be sure, its control did not extend to private construction, but until mid-century there was so little free capital for major private construction projects that this limitation meant very little in practice. Also, by virtue of the high visibility of governmental projects, the style in which they were executed was naturally adopted by architects engaged in private practice. In the period under study, the peasantry alone showed itself immune to the influence of the academy’s esthetic ideals.

THE SOCIAL STATUS OF ARCHITECTS AND PAINTERS

From the foregoing, one might surmise that Russia’s painters and architects were remarkably subservient to official dictates. While this is certainly true, the reasons in each field were very different. Architecture in early nineteenth-century Russia was an aristocratic art. Many leading architects were foreigners, and nearly all of Russia’s better architects were either born noblemen or had been ennobled in recognition of their distinguished service to the throne. While few owned serfs, nearly all kept large domestic establishments with five or more servants.⁴⁸ Their wealth did not render them independent, however, all being to varying degrees dependent upon state patronage for their livelihood. This meant that for all practical purposes the principal architects of St. Petersburg were as closely tied to the state as a serf might be to his lord.

Painters came from the opposite end of the social scale, and for the most part owed their social advancement to the academy. Venetsianov was the son of a poor Moscow merchant, Borovikovsky and Chernetsov the sons of icon painters, Khrutsky the son of a poor priest, Platshov and Matveev the sons of soldiers, and Fedotov the son of a low bureaucrat. Ivanov and Shchedrin were the sons of artists, as was Briullov, but this did not liberate them from the dependence that was part of the culture of painting in Russia. Recent research has shown how even amidst the agitation of the 186os students at the Academy of Arts were far more quiescent than their contemporaries at Petersburg University or even at the more democratic Medical-Surgical Academy.⁴⁹ Lacking any tradition of middle-class independence from the state, Russian painters were the less inclined to view autonomy as a prerequisite for an artist. If Aivazovsky considered his post as painter to the Naval Ministry as somehow demeaning to him as an artist, he left no indication of it, notwithstanding his own background in a rather entrepreneurial Armenian merchant family.

ARTS, CRAFTS, AND THE ABSENT AVANT-GARDE

During the first half of the nineteenth century, painting in Russia was only beginning to establish itself as a profession, as opposed to a craft. The raising of the age of matriculation in the academy’s preparatory program from nine to twelve in 1819 and the eventual closing of the preparatory program in 1843 can be seen as efforts to elevate the professional level. Against this background, the refusal of the academy’s director, Olenin, to permit lords to send serfs for training can be seen as another part of a general campaign to transform painting from a craft to a profession.

That this process of professionalization remained incomplete for all but a handful of renowned painters, notably Briullov, helps explain why the concept of an avant-garde had no place in the Russian visual arts in the period under consideration. The French utopian, St. Simon, placed artists at the very forefront of his world of intellect, along with scientists and industrialists. No analogous claims were made for artists in Russia, the nearest exception being Ivanov, and then only in the 1840s. Architecture attracted far more visionary thinkers than did painting. Vitberg’s monument to the 1812 campaign to be built on Moscow’s Sparrow Hills, Ulybishev’s “Dream” of a liberal metropolis, Ivanov’s visionary temples, and the young engineer Dostoevsky’s conception of an idealized urban world all exceed in utopian boldness anything conceived by Russia’s painters and sculptors.⁵⁰

Neither painters nor sculptors nor architects in Russia inhabited the sort of bohemian demi-monde that in Paris was so fertile a ground for the nurturing of grandiose self-images and political opposition. Private salons were dominated by concern for the written world and music, while coffeehouses were all but nonexistent.⁵¹ Russian art produced no Goya or Delacroix during the first half of the nineteenth century, and even the satire of the 1840s was as often as not issued with the imprimatur of an autocracy eager to keep its own bureaucracy in check.

To what extent does the quiescence of Russian painters reflect the influence of Nicholas’s censorship? During the period of the so-called Cast Iron Statute of 1826 and the Censorship Terror after 1848, the risk of repression for satirical or oppositionist art was doubtless enormous. But by 1828 the Cast Iron Statute had been replaced with a more mildly paternalistic law administered by a former university rector, Prince A. K. Lieven, whom a recent specialist on the period has described as a kind of “foster father of the arts and sciences.”⁵² Lieven seemed little concerned over the problem of content in the visual arts, and the absence of evidence for the existence of any repressed stratum of socially engagé art down to 1848 suggests that his inattention to the field was justified.

OFFICIAL NATIONALISM AND THE ARTS

Approaching the problem from the other side, let us ask whether Russian artists were impelled by any positive vision fostered by the autocracy during the reigns of Alexander and Nicholas. As any perusal of representative collections of paintings of the period will indicate, most artists devoted themselves to the same range of themes and sought to employ the same formal methods that held sway elsewhere in Europe. Yet this occurred within a definite framework in which civic virtue was stressed and rewarded above all other qualities. The charter of the Academy of Arts stressed civic virtue and rewarded it through a precise system of remuneration for artists. Only historical painters could receive the title of Rector or Professor, while portraitists could not advance beyond the level of Academician or Councellor. Differentials in pay for the two genres were at a ratio of 5:3.⁵³ Especially after 1809, genre painting began to acquire new prestige as its folkish and nationalistic significance came more fully to be appreciated. And in truth, was there anything less civic about a painting depicting “A Russian Peasant Lad Rising in the Morning” or “A Recruit Parting From his Family” than a theme from Russian history? Both of the former subjects were required of academy students between 1812 and 1818.⁵⁴

The official ideology that was to inspire the work of Russia’s artists was systematized during the reign of Nicholas I under the triple rubric of “Autocracy, Nationality, and Orthodoxy.” Each element of this trinity corresponded to a specific artistic medium and genre. Thus, the idea of autocracy was to be set forth in historical canvases and monumental sculpture, generally in classical idiom. A full generation before Count Sergei Uvarov systematized the theory of Russian autocracy and over a decade before Nikolai Karamzin published his monumental History of the Russian State, the Academy of Arts in 1802 was setting before its students such themes as “The Baptism of Vladimir,” “The Arrival of Riurik,” “Breaking the Tatar Yoke,” or “Peter the Great’s Love of the Fatherland as Shown at the River Pruth.”⁵⁵ In part because of its associations with the Roman empire, the sculptural style of late antiquity was considered especially appropriate for depicting themes relating to autocracy and was successfully applied to the monument of Dmitri Donskoi erected in Moscow in 1818 or the statues of Russian military heroes of 1812 placed before the Kazan Cathedral. Classicism in architecture — actually the romantic classicism of contemporary France—was also mobilized for edifices relating to autocracy. But, as we have seen, this linkage gradually broke down and was replaced by the ideologically more appropriate association of Russian autocracy with Byzantine imperial architecture, an association that was explored through the rise of Byzantine studies in the 1820s and first manifest in Ton’s Church of St. Catherine in St. Petersburg.⁵⁶

“Nationality” as conceived by Uvarov’s official ideology was to be expressed in art through genre painting and the patronage of native arts, and in music through folkish lieder, symphonic works à la von Weber, and “Russian” opera. The rise of genre painting lagged behind the burst of sentimentalism in literature in the 1790s but was an accomplished fact by 1812.⁵⁷ Pnin expressed his desire to extend the ideal of nationality to the stage through the establishment of a national theater in Russia.⁵⁸ This actually occurred during the reign of Nicholas, when folkish ideals penetrated every aspect of Russian art that had previously been untouched.

At its best, this element of Official Nationality inspired works of the highest calibre, Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar being a conspicuous example. Also, the myth of nationality that found expression in art was supported by what grew to be a formidable body of scholarship, beginning with Polevoi’s History of the Russian People (1833), continuing with the publication of the Digest of Laws (Svod zakonov), and extending to the rise of ethnographic study by the end of Nicholas’s reign. As in other parts of Europe, however, the spirit of nationality in Russia also gave rise to a staggering volume of kitsch, particularly in the decorative arts, and to an emphasis upon programmatic, as opposed to formal, elements in all the arts.

Orthodox Christianity, the third element in Nicholas’s trinity, was to be extolled through the work of Russia’s thousands of icon painters, who updated their techniques during the period and created a style that was immensely popular in its time, though scorned by critics today. Ecclesiastical architecture and the music of the liturgy also felt the strong support that only an established church can provide. Indeed, art inspired by Christian themes flourished to an extraordinary degree in Russia during the early nineteenth century. A substantial body of critical writings paralleled and supported this activity, with the essays of Kamensky, Shevyrev, and the Slavophiles being only the most conspicuous examples. As a result, one is not surprised to find such otherwise diverse artists as Ivanov, Vorobiev, Bruni, and Briullov all devoting major works and years of their creative lives to the exposition of biblical themes.⁵⁹

THE POPULARITY OF OFFICIAL NATIONALITY

This, then, is the ideological tripod upon which the doctrine of Official Nationality was erected. It is superfluous to point out that Russian artists demonstrated their interest in each of these principles long before the Minister of Public Enlightenment, Count Uvarov, organized “Official Nationality” into a coherent set of principles. That the government did not create ex nihilo the ideals that were to suffuse Russian art in no way diminishes the importance of its official doctrine, however. On the contrary, it explains why so many artists found themselves able to work within that doctrine. Unpopular as the notion may be to those who conceive of art largely in terms of romantic individualism, the overwhelming majority of Russian artists found themselves quite able to work productively within the framework of Official Nationality, at least to the 1840s. As one recent authority on the reign of Nicholas I has written, Uvarov’s formula “expressed sentiments which appealed to the majority of Russians and which, in fact, formed an integral part of their lives and outlook.”⁶⁰ It was comforting to be able to view one’s own society as a secure island, while, as Briullov, Odoevsky, Gogol, and other artists and writers implied, the rest of Europe was dying.

THE COLLAPSE OF OFFICIAL NATIONALITY IN ART

Why, then, did the officially sponsored effort to impart coherence to the entire artistic enterprise in Russia ultimately fail? This can be explained in part through the spread of atrophy and opportunism, developments that eventually beset any successful intellectual movement. Stated differently, Official Nationality in the arts ceased to be new by the 1840s, leaving, as the novelist Turgenev later recalled, “... a whole phalanx of people, talented to be sure, but on whose talent lay the general stamp of rhetoric and superficiality corresponding to that great but largely external strength [e.g., the state] of which they served as an echo. Such people appeared in poetry, painting, journalism and even on the stage.”⁶¹

The process by which the enthusiastic civic impulse of the first decade of Alexander’s reign was transformed into the crass boosterism of the 1840s can be more readily described than explained. One factor that cannot be ignored is the way in which the national ideology as it applied to the arts came to exclude as much as it embraced and hence narrowed the range of symbolic language available to officially accepted artists. This affected all three elements in Uvarov’s trinity.

Russian autocracy embraced romantic classicism in architecture, painting, and sculpture during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Until the late 1820s, though, Russian artists proceeded on the assumption that classicism was an ideologically neutral language of forms that could be used to express diverse ideals, Russian autocracy being only one among them. The classical heritage could be invoked for other purposes as well, as Pushkin implied when he wrote that “At heart I am a Roman; the spirit of freedom boils in my breast.”⁶² Nor did this necessarily conflict with accepting the leadership of an enlightened monarch. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, then, the classical ideal was used by artists and writers simultaneously to express a wide range of affirmations, which were for the time seen as compatible with one another. By the early 1830s this had changed, and classicism was viewed increasingly as the mode of art appropriate to a cosmopolitan monarchy but not to a specifically Russian autocracy or a folkish nation-state. When Briullov criticized the historian Karamzin for presenting “all tsars and no people,”⁶³ he was voicing a critique that had long been advanced both by democratic opponents of autocracy and by those wishing to ground autocracy on a more ethnic ideal. Both currents were hostile to classicism in any form.

Nationalism and the artistic movements that reflected it were far stronger by 1850 than the ideal of autocracy and classicism. But the link forged between nationalism and sentimentalism was rapidly eroding under the impact of the “Natural School” that made itself felt in both painting and literature. No longer preoccupied with the mystic union between tsar and people, artists began treating the people in a less mystic, more ethnographic and “realistic” fashion, after the latest West European taste. Thanks to this, sentimental folkishness in art, with its implied political conservatism, had all but vanished by mid-century.

Like the idea of nationality, Orthodox Christianity certainly did not cease to inform the work of Russian artists by mid-century, but the character of its influence was altered with the decline of Official Nationality. A burst of millenarian sectarian activity in the early 1840s⁶⁴ accompanied the growth of critical intellectual enquiry at the seminaries of St. Petersburg, Kazan, and elsewhere. While all this may in fact have greatly strengthened Christian piety in Russia, it caused alarm among those who had enlisted the church in the government’s campaign to stabilize Russian society amidst the turmoil of European events. The result was to polarize Christian impulses in art between those who accepted the autocracy’s Caesaro-Papism and those who did not. Thus, the contrast in the late nineteenth century between the painter Repin and the composer Tchaikovsky embodies a split that was all but nonexistent as late as 1830 but that rapidly widened thereafter.

The two aspects of Russian art of the first half of the nineteenth century that were to endure over the following generations were, first, the rhetoric of civic spirit and, second, the reality of deep engagement with the major currents of West European art. Russian art came of age in the early nineteenth century in a period of intensive artistic interaction with Europe as a whole. Like European artists elsewhere, however, Russia’s artists sought to define some element in the content of their work that was uniquely their own. To some extent they succeeded, though more often than not through the use of forms that were the common property of artists throughout Europe. As we have seen, this tension between form and content, between art and society, was little evident in the work of the first decades of Alexander I’s reign. Thanks in good measure to the failure of Nicholas I to create and sustain a unified, “organic,” and official art in Russia, the split had opened by 1835 and was to broaden steadily thereafter. In the last analysis, this rising tension between form and content, between art and society, was one of the principal legacies of the 1800-50 era to Russian art of a later age.

NOTES

1. N. Kovalenskaia treats this issue in Russkii klassitsizm: zhtvopis’, skulptura, grafika (Moscow, 1964), pp. 272 ff.

2. See their report of 1804 in Severnyi vestnik, 1804, No. 3, pp. 359 ff; partially quoted in Kovalenskaia, pp. 272-73.

3. Iu. M. Denisov, ed., Ermitazh: istoriia i arkhitektura zdanii (Leningrad, I97l).

4. Claude-Nicholas Ledoux, L’Architecture considerée sans le rapport de l’art des moeurs et de la législation (Paris, 1804).

5. Peter K. Christoff, The Third Heart: Some Intellectual-Ideological Currents and Cross Currents in Russia 1800-1830 (The Hague, Paris, 1970), p. 28.

6. The 1802 additions to the charter are reproduced in “Privilegiia, ustavy, i shtaty Imp. Akademii khudozhestv, 1764-1912 gg.,” in S. Kondakov, lubileinyi spravochnik Imp. Akademii khudozhestv (St. Petersburg, 1914), vol. I, pp. 1766 ff.

7. See A. N. Pypin, Religioznye dvizheniia pri Aleksandra I (Petrograd, 1916).

8. The impact of 1848 in Russia is considered in A. S. Nifontov, Rossiia v 1848 godu (Moscow, 1952). This is not to deny, of course, that blatantly political themes were treated by Russian graphic artists. See T. V. Cherkesova, “Politicheskaia grafika epokha Otechestvennoi voiny 1812 goda i ego sozdateli,” in Russkoe iskusstvo XVIII—pervoi poloviny XIX veka; materialy i issledovaniia, ed. T. V. Alekseev (Moscow, 1971), pp. 11-47.

9. V. Sipovskii explains Karamzin’s neglect of the Revolution in terms of his other preoccupations at the time rather than his politics: Karamzin kak avtor pisem russkogo puteshestvennika (St. Petersburg, 1899).

10. On I. P. Martos, see M. Alpatov, Ivan Petrovich Martos, 2752-1835 (Moscow, Leningrad, 1947); on I. P. Vitali, see T. Iakirina and N. Odnoralov, Vitali 1794-1855 (Moscow, Leningrad, 1960).

11. N. I. Nadezhdin, 0 sovremennom napravlenii iziashchnykh iskusstv, (Moscow, 1833); see also N. Kozmin, Nikolai Ivanovich Nadezhdin (St. Petersburg, 1912), pp. 231 ff.

12. Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1961), pp. 375.

13. I. I. Ignatovich, Pomeshchichie krestiane nakanune ikh osvohozhdeniia, 3d ed. (Leningrad, 1925), p. 93.

14. For a thorough summary of this issue, see Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom, Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855-1861 (Cambridge, London, 1976), pp. 22-35.

15. A. G. Troinitskii, Krepostnoe naselenie v Rossii po 10-oi narodnoi perepisi: Statisticheskoe issledovanie (St. Petersburg, 1861), pp. 65 ff.

16. See A. G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za sto let (Moscow, 1956), pp. 89-91.

17. See G. G. Pospelov, “Provintsialnaia zhivopis’ pervoi poloviny XIX veka,” in Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, vol. VIII, book 2 (Moscow, 1964), p. 345.

18. William M. Blackwell, The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization (Princeton, 1968), pp. 73-76.

19. On the process of secularization among traditionalist merchants, see Blackwell, pp. 151 ff.

20. See Alfred M. Rieber, “The Moscow Entrepreneurial Group: The Emergence of a New Form in Autocratic Politics,” Jahrbücher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, 1977, no. 1, pp. 12 ff.

21. Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, vol. VIII, book 2 (Moscow, 1964), p. 119.

22. Walter McKenzie Pintner, Russian Economic Policy Under Nicholas I (Ithaca, 1967), p. 244.

23. These works are addressed in N. Levinson and L. Goncharova, “Russkaia khudozhestvennaia bronza; dekorativno-prikladnaia skulptura XIX v.,” Trudy Gos. istoricheskogo muzeia, XXIX (Moscow, 1958).

24. For a catalogue and brief description of the principal manufacturers see Marvin C. Ross, Russian Porcelains (Norman, 1968), and A. Saltykov, Russkaia keramika, posobie po opredeleniiu pamiatnikov materialnoi kultury XVIII-nachala XX vekov (Moscow, 1952).

25. See particularly the exhaustive catalogue of the third of these exhibitions, Ukazatel’ tretei v Moskve vystavki rossiiskikh manufakturnykh izdelii 1843 goda (Moscow, 1843).

26. The appearance in Russian of such works as P. P. Chekalevskii’s Rassuzhdenie 0 svobodnykh iskusstv, St. Petersburg, 1792, and A. A. Pisarev’s Predmety dlia khudozhnikov, St. Petersburg, 1807, did much to foster this development. For an excellent overview of such publications, see Baron N. Wrangel, “Russkie knigi aleksandrovskoi epokhi po iskusstvu,” Starye gody, July-September 1908, pp. 559-65.

27. Kovalenskaia, p. 255.

28. J. G. Kohl, Russia, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkoff, Riga, Odessa (London, 1844), p. 110.

29. See, for example, Opisanie Sankt. Petersburgai uezdnykh gorodov SanktPeterburgskoi gubernii (St. Petersburg, 1839).

30. The process of reconstruction is detailed in A. A. Fedorov-Davydov, Arkhitektura Moskvy posle otechestvennoi voiny 1812 goda (Moscow, 1953).

31. Rashin, pp. 119-26.

32. A. S. Pushkin, “Puteshestvie iz Moskvy v Peterburg,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1949, vol. II, p. 246.

33. G. K. Lukomskii, Arkhitektura russkoi provintsii (Moscow, 1916). On the patterning of provincial cities after the capital, see E. A. Beletskaia, ‘Obraztsovye’ proekty v zhiloi zastroike russkikh gorodov XVIII-XIV vv (Moscow, 1961).

34. Rashin, p. 126.

35. I. Pnin, Socbineniia, ed. V. Orlov (Moscow, 1934), pp. 256-57.

36. V. F. Odoevskii, Muzikalnoi literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow, 1956), p. 105.

37. On Nicholas’s subsidy to the society, see M. Polievktov, Nikolai I, biografila i o r tsarstvovaniia (Moscow, 1918), p. 250. The society also raised funds through lotteries and the sale of prints. T. V. Alekseeva, Introduction to Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, ed. I. E. Grabar, vol. VIII, book 1 (Moscow 1963), p. 41.

38. S. Frederick Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830-1870 (Princeton, 1972), pp. 9-25.

39. Polievktov, Nikolai I, p. 248.

40. Ibid., p. 251.

41. While planned with reference to Italian art, Nicholas’s Italian trip was occasioned by concern over the empress’s health, rather than by his artistic interests per se. (Polievktov, pp. 196-97).

42. Iu. Kliucharev, “Statia Gogolia ob arkhitekture nyneshnego vremeni,” Arkhitektura SSSR, 1952, no. 2, p. 21.

43. L. Réau, “Un Peintre romantique russe: Alexandre Ivanov,” Revue des études slaves XXVII (1951): 229.

44. M. Urenius, in A. G. Venetsianov i ego shkola (Moscow, 1925), stresses Venetsianov’s academic links, while more recent Soviet critics have attempted to separate his interest in genre painting from the academy’s own involvement in that field. Cf. T. Alekseeva, Khudozhniki shkoly Venetsianova (Moscow, 1958).

45. On A. V. Stupin, see N. Vrangel, “A. V. Stupin i ego ucheniki (Arzamasskaia shkola zhivopisi),’’ Russkii arkhiv, 1906, pp. 432-48; and P. Kornilov, Arzamasskaia shkola zhivopisi pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow, 1947).

46. The academy’s ties with these schools is detailed in N. Iavorskii, “Akademiia Khudozhestv i khudozhestvennoe obrazovanie Rossii v XIX veke,” in Akademiia khukozhestv SSSR, 200 let. Desiataia sessiia (Moscow, 1959).

47. N. Dmitrieva, Moskovskoe uchilische zhivopisi, vaianiia i zodchestva (Moscow, 1951), especially ch. 1.

48. V. Ia., “Arkhitektory v professionalnoi statistike,” Stroitel, 1897, no. 1-2, pp. 23-34.

49. Elizabeth K. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ann Arbor, 1977), pp. 17 ff.

50. On A. L. Vitberg’s project, see “Zapiski Akademika Vitberga, stroitelia khrama Khrista Spasitelia v Moskve,” Russkaia starina, 1872, bk. 1, pp. 16-32; bk. 2, pp. 159-92; on A. D. Ulybishev’s “Dream,” see M. V. Nechkina, Dvizhenie dekabristov, 2 vols. (Moscow 1955), I, p. 203; on A. Ivanov’s temples see James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe; An Interpretative History of Russian Culture (New York, 1970), pp. 343-44; Dostoevsky’s architectural fantasies are considered by Adele Lindenmeyr, “Raskolnikov’s City and the Napoleonic Plan,” Slavic Review, March, 1976 pp. 37-47.

51. Kohl observed that Petersburg coffeehouses were unfrequented except by tourists, and that Beranger’s was “small and lifeless,” Russia, St. Petersburg, p. 210. See also M. A. Aronson, Literaturyne sdony i kruzhki (Moscow, 1929).

52. W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (London, 1978), p. 238. See also Baron N. Wrangel, S. Makovskii, A. Trubnikov, “Arakcheev i iskusstvo,” Starye gody, July-September 1908, pp. 439-47.

53. For full details on this hierarchy of genres, see P. N. Petrov, Sbornik materialov dlia istorii Sankt-Peterburgskoi imp. Akademii khudozhestv za sto let ee suschestvovaniia (St. Petersburg, 1864), pp. 67 ff.

54. Kovalenskaia, pp. 277-79.

55. “Minin and Pozharskii,” “The Summoning of Prince Pozharskii,” “The Coronation of Tsar Michael Fedorovich,” “Russian Maidens Were Heroines,” and “The Varangian Prince” were among the more common themes through which artists celebrated Russian nationality, both before and after the doctrine of “Official Nationality” was promulgated.

56. Konstantin Ton, Proekty tserkvei, Sochinennye arkhitektorom E.I.V. professorom arkhitektury imp. Akademii khudozhestv Konstantinom Tonom (St. Petersburg, 1838). Ton’s Byzantinisms rapidly gave way to a more selfconsciously Russian idiom, especially after Nicholas I published I. M. Snegyrev’s Pamiatniki Moskovskikh drevnostei (Moscow, 1845).

57. The false notion that genre painting is somehow democratic in politics is subjected to just criticism by G. Iu. Sternin in Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, ed. I. E. Grabar (Moscow, 1964), vol. VIII, book 2, p. 23.

58. Ivan Petrovich Pnin, “An Essay on Enlightenment with Reference to Russia,” in Russian Intellectual History, an Anthology, ed. Marc Raeff (New York, 1966), pp. 157-58.

59. See, for example, M. G. Nekludova, “Bibleiskie eskizy A. A. Ivanova,” in Russkoe iskusstvo XVIII—pervoi poloviny XIX veka, pp. 48-155. For rich documentation on the strength of Orthodox Christianity during the reign of Nicholas, see N. F. Dubrovin, “Materialy dlia istorii pravoslavnoi tserkvi v tsarstvovanii imperatora Nikolaia,” Sbornik imperatorskogo russkago istoricheskago obshchestva, CXIII (St. Petersburg, 1912).

60. Lincoln, Nicholas I, pp. 238 ff. This should be contrasted to Nicholas Riasanovsky’s less positive view in Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855 (Berkeley, 1967), pp. 269 ff.

61. I. S. Turgenev, Literaturnye i zhiteiskie vospomininiia (Leningrad, 1934), p. 88.

62. S. S. Volk, Istoricheskie vzglaidy dekabristov (Moscow, 1958), p. 160.

63. Quoted by F. Solntsev, “Moia zhizn i khudozhestvenno-arkheologichiskie trudy,” Russkaia starina, 1876, no. 3, p. 628.

64. A. I. Klibanov, “K kharakteristike ideinykh dvizhenii v srede gosudarstvennykh i udelnykh krestian v pervoi treti XIX v.,” in Iz istorii ekonomicheskoi i obshchestvennoi zhizni Rossii, ed. L. V. Cherepnin (Moscow, 1976), pp. 155 ff.