INTRODUCTION

THE DISPOSITION to consider art not as an autonomous realm but as intertwined with “life”—as primarily expressing extrinsic moral, civic, or national values, not intrinsic esthetic qualities—is a pronounced Russian trait. That ethos, in turn, is attributable to the intelligentsia. But what is the intelligentsia? There is no single definition that can encompass the range of attitudes and the numerous roles that the group has played in the course of Russian culture.

Perhaps the aptest definition is one paraphrased from Pavel Annenkov: a dedicated order of knights without a written charter but nevertheless’ acting, by some tacit agreement, as the conscience of the nation.¹ It best conveys not only the spirit of passionate dedication to ideas but also the engagement in the national cause, no matter how that was perceived. The widespread tendency to restrict the intelligentsia to persons operating within the liberal-radical spectrum² is misleading because it creates the impression that the intelligentsia was mainly preoccupied with indicting the existing social and political order. Although that aspect of the intelligentsia’s involvement cannot be denied, it should be seen in a proper perspective, for it was only one of the manifestations of the overriding concern for the quality of national life, a preoccupation that manifested much more of an affirmative attitude toward things Russian than is generally recognized.

Accordingly, I propose to examine the intelligentsia’s attitudes toward art in a context that encompasses their search for a genuine expression of national spirit as well. This broader compass permits an examination of the 1840-90 period, when the place of Russian culture in Europe was under discussion. The emergence of the intelligentsia coincided with Russia’s becoming recognized as a major factor in European politics, following the Napoleonic wars. But the nonmilitary accomplishments entitling the country to such prominence were not as readily apparent either to Europeans or to the Russians themselves. Consciousness of that gap created gnawing doubts among Russians that persisted until about 1890. By the last decade of the century the level of education and modernization had risen sufficiently so as to lessen the urgency of this particular problem and to transform most of the intelligentsia into salaried professionals (including professional art critics).

The same fifty years cover a cohesive period in the history of art as well. They witnessed the birth and the development of a realist school dedicated to Russian issues and scenes. The more or less simultaneous emergence of the intelligentsia and of a national school of art perforce associated Russian visual expression with many preoccupations marking intellectual discourse and infused art with an intense sense of its own time.

Though the fifty-year period has a marked unity, it nevertheless lends itself to four distinct subdivisions. During the 1840s, the specificity of Russian life and culture was under discussion. During the 1860s, the nation’s institutions were subject to critical examination. In the 1870s, the relationship of Russian culture to its own people was explored. And in the 1880s, national peculiarities and accomplishments per se began to be cultivated. During each phase the work of one or two painters reflected the prevailing definition of “Russianness.” In the 1840s, it was Pavel Fedotov; next came Vasilii Perov, to be followed by Ivan Kramskoi and Ilia Repin in the 1870s and by Vasilii Surikov in the last years of the period.

Before we turn to an account of these stages, it is appropriate to remark upon Vissarion Belinsky’s thoughts on the role of art in national life. As the creator of social criticism, and in that sense father of the Russian intelligentsia, he set the tone and the bounds of discourse for the period. But more than that, his writings also exemplified the unresolved dilemma between the critical and the affirmative approaches to Russian reality that bedeviled so much of the perennial discussion.

Belinsky’s famous open letter to Gogol (1847) made abundantly clear that the function of Russian writers was to deliver their country from autocracy and obscurantism. It neatly encapsulated one aspect of the intelligentsia’s views about the aim of creative endeavor. Belinsky held that despite “Tatar censorship,” literature (and by extension the other arts) was the only forum for expressing progressive ideas. Hence, society expected writers to be, and revered them as, heralds of “civilization, enlightenment and humanitarianism” who would defend these principles against the “black night of autocracy, Orthodoxy and [official] nationalism.”³

But Belinsky’s criticism pursued other aims as well. He was also concerned about formulating the national character and content of Russian literature. He held that during his own lifetime literature had fully emerged from an “imitative” stage and achieved a mature, independent status. Until Pushkin, its development had “consisted of striving to become original, national, Russian.” It was Pushkin who, combining European influences with native elements, created a truly great and original national literature. Pushkin, of course, had been recognized as a writer of genius before Belinsky. But it was Belinsky who interpreted his genius as having specific Russian traits and attributes. And he judged other writers according to their ability to “depict Russian life.”

As a matter of course, Belinsky assumed that a genuine Russian literature should set forth “the strivings of Russian society toward selfawareness” and bring about “its awakening.” Yet on enough occasions he would forget about this aspect of literary endeavor and praise something merely on account of its ethnic quality; he would express his preference for one work over another not because it had a didactic intent but because it was simply a genuine Russian story. The sense of the ethnic locus, the characteristic Russian reality, was so central to the thinking of this leading Westernizer that he could admit siding with the Slavophiles against the cosmopolites, who ignored the issue of narodnost’. Belinsky was well aware of the ethnocentricity of his concerns, and he had no qualms in stating: “We ourselves, in ourselves and around ourselves—that is where we should seek both the problems and the solutions.”⁴

The dilemma of what constituted the essence of “the national”— whether it was to be affirmative or critical, self-sufficient or European-oriented—perplexed not only Belinsky but many another intelligent. The contradictory pull marked the writings of other prominent spokesmen in the arts and formed as well a dividing line between hostile groups claiming the service of art for their particular vision of Russia. Over the fifty-year span, however, the positive and autochthonous spirit came to prevail over the critical and cosmopolitan one. Russian art concurrently moved beyond its narrower concern with critically examining Russian society and institutions to a broader, more affirmative portrayal of the life of the nation. As a result of this change, realism became recognized as the national school.

THE 1840S

Self-examination dominated the 1840s. Reacting in part to Chaadaev’s disquisition on the lack of originality in Russian culture, in part to Custine’s critical account of autocractic policies and a moribund society, the educated public became concerned about the essence and the destiny of their country’s culture.

It was Belinsky’s opinion in 1834 that there was no Russian literature. Ten years later the same statement could still be made about the visual arts. It was a singularly barren period in the history of Russian painting. Karl Briullov, the recognized master whose Last Day of Pompeii created a sensation both in Europe and at home in 1836, was living out his last days. Aleksandr Ivanov, who was to provide the next high point in 1856, was still working in Italy on his great picture, The Appearance of Christ to the People. What passed for art were the routine works from the Imperial Academy painted in the pallid neoclassical style. This demonstrable lack of talent and originality was much apparent to the various camps that were arguing the accomplishments and future of Russian intellectual life. Painting certainly was not as central in their debates as was literature. Nevertheless, some of the discussion touched upon the prospects for a Russian school of art.

The official world tried to season the vacuous quality of the academic output with a dash of patriotic pride. In Kartiny russkoi zhivopisi (1846), Nestor Kukol’nik (1809-68) conceded that the Russians had not made a single contribution to European art, merely having absorbed the best European traditions. But although Russian art had not evolved any “ethnographic” idiom, it faced a grand future: the continuity of High Art, which had originated in Rome and thence had migrated to France, where it expired with Poussin, would be carried on in Russia.

This lack of “ethnographic” specificity was the very issue that concerned the Slavophiles, on which Aleksei Khomiakov (1804-60) was the principal commentor. Already in 1843, he expressed the hope that painters would take note of what Gogol was creating in literature and derive their “feelings, thoughts and forms exclusively from the depth of their souls, from the treasure-house of contemporary life.”⁵ As the decade progressed, he became more articulate about the rootlessness of Russian visual expression. “What is there in common between the Russian soul and Russian art?” he asked. “Nourished on alien thought, foreign examples, under foreign influence, does it show any signs of Russian life?”⁶ Eventually, in an essay on the prospects of a national school,⁷ he insisted even more assertively that painters reject imported accretions and create a genuine national art. But the meaning of “national” was defined in philosophical, not pictorial, terms. Painters were urged to jettison Western individualism and unite themselves with the Russian land and people—a union that would enable them to function as “living parts of a larger organism.”

To the Westernizers, the absence of a national spirit implied the lack of civic-mindedness, though not exclusively so. Painting, Belinsky argued, should be handmaiden to society: “To deny art the right of serving public interests means debasing it, . . . for that would mean depriving it of its most vital force, i.e., thought, [and] making it an object of sybaritic pleasure, the plaything of lazy idlers.”⁸

Yet the same review that sounded this activist call also urged that art depict the “seething life” of contemporary Russia. Another article praised Aleksandr Agin’s illustrations in an almanac for being saturated with the Russian spirit, for “smelling of Russia” the way Pushkin’s works did.⁹

What exactly constituted this “smell,” this spirit, was left undefined. Nevertheless, one cannot assume that Belinsky and the other Westernizers were solely interested in the political or social use of art. This becomes especially clear from reading Sovremennik’s comments on the Academic exhibits. Its reviews often maintained that, instead of perfecting their technique abroad, Russian painters should travel through their native land to study its multiracial cities and countless social groups. From a typical review that urged a painter to render more exactly the different types of fabrics worn by different classes,¹⁰ one can infer that the Westernizers expected painting to fulfill mimetic as well as didactic functions, to convey things in their specifically Russian character and not merely transmit messages. Like Herzen, they were Januslike creatures—on the one hand avid to reform their country on the European model; on the other, intensely involved with, almost mesmerized, by its idiosyncratic ways.

The efforts of Pavel Fedotov (1815-52) to elaborate a new pictorial language and to master new subject matter corresponded in many ways to the preoccupations of the intelligentsia. But his art cannot be pigeonholed as reflecting the views of any particular group. When Fedotov retired from the army in 1844, it seemed he would concentrate on painting military scenes, which offered an assured and lucrative career under Nicholas I. But he soon took the untrodden path of painting urban scenes. The small Dutch genre paintings Fedotov used to copy while on guard duty at the Winter Palace, as well as the works of Hogarth and Willkie, re-engraved for Russian journals, served as his models, but it was the “teeming life” of St. Petersburg that supplied the raw material. In 1849 he exhibited three satirical storytelling canvases: The Newly Decorated Knight, A Choosy Bride (fig. 8.1), and The Major’s Courtship. These meticulous dissections of social climbing and bureaucratic venality gained Fedotov instant public acclaim and an honorific title from the Imperial Academy of Arts.

Some jottings in Fedotov’s diary, his reading, and his friendships indicate that he shared the views of the left-of-center intelligentsia.¹¹ Nekrasov asked him to contribute to one of his illustrated almanacs, and the painter planned to publish a satirical weekly with Evstafii Bernadsky, who was briefly incarcerated in connection with the Petrashevsky affair. But what was uppermost for Fedotov was his metier and the creation of a new art form. He was obsessed with rendering persons and objects in full verisimilitude. “I shan’t amount to anything until I learn to paint mahogany,” he once confided to a close friend.¹² He was meticulously insistent that the figures who peopled his canvases properly represent their milieu. For that purpose, Fedotov would wine and dine some ordinary merchant for months to soak up the smallest detail about his home, habits, garments, and physiognomy. Equally painstaking research went into finding the right chandelier to adorn an interior or a fabric to clothe one of his characters.

This obsessive concern with depicting the specific and yet the typical was paralleled in the strivings of such budding realist writers as Dostoevsky, Goncharov, and Ostrovsky. And the intelligentsia’s response to Fedotov’s depiction of nouveaux riches merchants in search of gentry sons-in-law and other illustrations of the changing social scene matched its response to the new wave in literature.

For the Westernizers, literature’s discovery of the lower urban classes was a step toward the general democratization of society. Belinsky hailed Dostoevsky for having written Poor Folk: “Honor the young poet whose muse loves the people of the garret and the cellar. . . . After all, these are also people, your brothers.”¹³

The response to Fedotov’s canvases was similar. Writing in Sovremennik, Apollon Maikov coupled the three genre scenes displayed at the 1849 Academic exhibit with the new, “democratic” trend in literature. In both, “idealization was replaced by the representation of real phenomena in their entire fullness and truth.” Fedotov’s paintings were the equivalent of the new subject matter in literature, and Maikov defended their right to full citizenship in the visual arts as well. With reference to The Newly Decorated Knight, he argued that “the ire of a clerk at his cook is as worthy of attention in art as is the wrath of Achilles”; anticipating objections from the conservatives, he went on to say that in painting “the force of truth and expression” was so overriding as to permit the rendering of objects that might be entirely “lacking in beauty in the conventional sense.”¹⁴

The Slavophiles’ response also was positive. Fedotov was invited to Moscow to exhibit his works, and Mikhail Pogodin proposed to popularize them through lithographic reproduction. Slavophiles did not consider Fedotov’s subjects as beyond the pale of art; they welcomed painting on contemporary Russian themes and appraised this new talent very highly. There was, however, some discomfort with its excessively satirical thrust. One reviewer regretted that, unlike Hogarth, who “loved the English people as a whole and exposed only their individual transgressions,” Fedotov ridiculed prototypes that represented entire groups in Russian society.¹⁵

Still, this reservation was not meant as condemnation. In no way did it resemble the objections of the conservatives, such as Fedor Bulgarin, to the rude intrusion of Russian reality into literature and painting as a gross violation of the canons of pure art and good taste. The Slavophiles recognized and appreciated Fedotov’s innovations in the creation of a national art. And after his tragic, untimely death, Moskvitianin suggested that some “patriotically minded publisher” should perform a service to “our Russian art” by disseminating prints of all of Fedotov’s works.¹⁶

THE 1860S

The dominant notes sounded in Fedotov’s obituaries, whether of Slavophile or Westernizer provenance, were his dedication to his metier and the new turn he had taken in the development of Russian art, pointing in either the democratic social or the liberal nationalist direction. But already by the end of the 1850s his work and role were being interpreted anew. No longer was he seen as the observant or biting critic who informed the Russians about their foibles, but he was made a “thinking” painter bent on transforming society and its institutions.

Fedotov’s legacy was being reassessed in the light of the preoccupations of the 1860S, a period of reform and renovation that followed upon Nicholas I’s death and Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War. The abolition of serfdom was the basic institutional change that engrossed all the intelligentsia. Beyond that, the radicals sought to put an end to autocracy, while the liberals limited their aspirations to the eradication of other manifestations of serfdom—the tyrannical power of parents over children, of husbands over wives, of bureaucracy over social initiative.

Artists, too, were to be liberated from the all-pervading tutelage of the state—the overarching freedom on which all the intelligentsia were agreed. In mid-nineteenth-century Russia private patronage was still so uncommon and erratic that artistic life was almost entirely dependent on state support and promotion. In consequence, a painter had to pursue his career within the confines of the Imperial Academy of Arts, which provided him with his training, placed him in an elaborate hierarchy of bureaucratic ranks, and distributed the official commissions. Professional autonomy, the intelligentsia believed, would make painters more responsive to national needs and enable them to contribute to the reform movement.

The intellectuals’ changing views on the role of art in public life were best phrased by what Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-89) wrote in The Esthetic Relations of Art to Reality (1855). Probably more than any other critic, Chernyshevsky caught the spirit of the time when he argued that the mission of art was not merely to reflect reality but to pass judgment on it as well. And it should be noted that, unlike Belinsky, he did not posit an inseparable bond between the esthetic and the cognitive. According to one contemporary observer, the generation of the 1860s interpreted Chernyshevsky’s writings to mean that the sole “goal of art was to understand and explain reality and then to apply its findings for the use of humanity.”¹⁷

But there was a radical as well as a liberal interpretation of this materialist, utilitarian approach to art. Radicals, like Herzen and Ogarev in London and Dobroliubov or Pisarev in Russia, urged that works of art be enlisted directly in overthrowing the outmoded system. That view was first enunciated with pungent clarity by Ogarev in his obituary of Aleksandr Ivanov, in which he claimed that Ivanov had given up religious and moral concerns and looked to socialism for answers to humanity’s problems. And because of this new dedication in Ivanov, Ogarev called on young painters at home “to find the strength to curse” the evil institutions of the Russian Empire. It was not enough to paint some tranquil scenes from the life of the common people in the Dutch manner. Because of the accumulated injustices and the massive inertia of society, Russian painters had to produce “denunciatory” canvases.¹⁸ The young radicals in Russia took their cue from London and, with slight variations, urged that painting evoke “energetic protest and dissatisfaction” or “transmit ideas and decide problems.”¹⁹

The liberals held a much more moderate view of the artists’ contribution to national life. They wanted paintings to engender an initiative that would be directed not at toppling institutions but at transforming personal lives and public behavior. The liberals, too, were more interested in the “thought” than in the “technique” of a canvas; but under “thought,” in the Aesopian language of the day, they subsumed a moral attitude rather than action. The liberals saw painters as moralists or teachers, not as political activists. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s comment on Nikolai Ge’s Last Supper, shown at the 1863 Academic exhibit, best conveys the romantic notion of service held by the liberal intelligentsia. He interpreted the realistically painted confrontation between Christ and Judas as a statement about conflicting life styles: between those who embraced ideals and those who were preoccupied with petty personal ambitions. Ge was commended for reminding the viewer that there were nobler goals in life than its ordinary pursuits or time-worn traditions and for engendering critical perceptions so that the public, instead of accepting the system blindly, would question it and become concerned about its transformation.²⁰

While most of the intelligentsia in the 1860s assumed that what infused Russian art with a national spirit was subject matter that dissected contemporary problems, at least one prominent voice dissented. Fedor Buslaev (1818-97), a scholar of Russian literature and architecture, suggested that a style conveying a sense of the shared historical identity reaching back to the Middle Ages would make Russian art truly national and popular. He urged his contemporaries to study the nation’s artistic traditions. His advice to young painters was not to ape the newest trends abroad but to study Russia’s own legacy, especially the naive, patriarchal simplicity of presentation exemplified in the medieval epics, in icons, and in church ornamentation.²¹

These arguments were not a throwback to Slavophilism. Buslaev was not interested in probing those elements in Russian culture that were antithetical to the West. On the contrary, he devoted much effort to proving that the patterns of medieval Russian art came from a common European source, Byzantium, and not from the Orient as was argued by Violet le Duc and others. But he was eager to define the national spirit for a new art liberated from classical models. And he was critical of the budding realists for copying the style and composition of contemporary Western luminaries like Delaroche while ignoring the medieval Russian models when art was an integral part of the national spirit.

But the 1860s were an inhospitable time for devising a style expressing a communal ethos that would be intelligible as such to the entire nation. Russia was seen as an aggregate of classes and institutions much in need of analysis and transformation, not as an entity with an inherent, organic life of its own. However, one should note that not all members of the intelligentsia accepted such a definition of the nation or of national art. Moreoever, the foremost painter of the day found it difficult to dissociate his version of Russian reality from a deep involvement with the roots and ramifications of the community.

Vasilii Perov (1833-82) best exemplified the political inclinations of the 1860S. Born an illegitimate son of an impoverished aristocrat, Perov studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. Though under the jurisdiction of the Imperial Academy, the School led a semiautonomous existence, and its curriculum gave more attention to rendering real objects and local life than to copying antique plaster casts. It was here that Perov painted The Arrival of the Police Inspector (1857): a besotted official about to oversee the flogging of a peasant, with numerous details juxtaposing the innocence of the saintlike victim with the corruption of officialdom and its minions.

The picture marked a radical change in the representation of Russian life. It was a quantum jump from Fedotov’s satirical treatment of various classes and their foibles to an exposé of institutions that oppressed the people. This indictment of serfdom was followed by several very explicit pictures exposing the corruption and indifference of the Orthodox church, which the intelligentsia regarded as a principal mainstay of autocracy. A Village Sermon (1861) showed a smug priest preaching to a peacefully snoring landowner, his flirtatious wife, and a crowd of emaciated peasants in rags on the accessibility of the Kingdom of God to the downtrodden and the poor. In Easter Procession in the Country (1861 ; fig. 8.2), drunken priests and villagers are seen setting out to celebrate Easter. And in Tea at the Monastery (1862), a well-fed monk refused to give a famished peasant family succor from his overloaded table.

No personal archives have survived from Perov’s early life to document his views on the “burning questions of the day.” But the subjects he chose and the manner in which he rendered them indicate that he was caught up in the free-thinking, reformist spirit of the decade. Certainly, as references to his canvases by various reviewers show, Perov was regarded as standing in the ranks of those who confronted autocracy. For one, the radicals interpreted the removal of Easter Procession from a St. Petersburg exhibit as a sign that art was actively enlisted in political agitation.²² Likewise, liberals expected Perov to contribute his talents to civic life—even if on a more modest scale. Thus, when in 1868 Perov turned to a more personal vision of life’s problems and exhibited canvases of a drowned woman against a cityscape, of a humiliated art teacher, and, of all things, a bona fide Madonna, the journal Otechestvennye zapiski expressed shock at his desertion and the fervent hope that he would quickly resume the cause of “thinking art.”²³

What the liberals feared actually did happen. Perov’s brush lost its bite, and he began to paint scenes of domestic life in an increasingly “loyalist” vein, producing pictures on such themes as favorite national pastimes—fishing, hunting, or bird catching. The change cannot be wholly attributed to the turn toward reaction after 1864. In part, it was implicit in Perov’s conception of himself as a painter of Russian subjects, an attitude that revealed the preponderance of emotional ethnic, not political, commitment. After winning a Gold Medal in 1863, Perov was sent by the Academy of Arts for an additional three years’ training in Western Europe. But before two years were up, he reported to the Academy that “not knowing the character and moral life of the [French] people makes it impossible to finish any one of my works. . . .” Therefore, he petitioned to be allowed to return home earlier, for to stay abroad was “less useful than the opportunity to study and work on the countless subjects from the urban and rural life of our fatherland.”²⁴

Perov’s petition succinctly expressed an attitude prevalent among Russian realists, an attitude that could not envisage painting as divorced from the “life” of the nation. Whatever additional professional training Perov could have acquired abroad seemed meaningless without the ambience of Russian life to give his art real substance. Such an outlook, in turn, made Russian painting and painters easy prey to the manipulations of the intelligentsia, which was even more incapable of seeing art esthetically—as being autonomous from either politics, moral questions, or national destiny.

THE 1870S

The dichotomy between the radical and the liberal views on art persisted during the 1870s. The radical journal Delo, which counted Petr Tkachev and Petr Lavrov among its contributors, continued to badger artists to do their share in solving practical problems. On these grounds, the journal would dismiss landscape as “pointless” or state unabashedly that esthetic considerations should be altogether excluded from art criticism. Its reviews harped on whether a work of art enhanced the public’s understanding of “truth” and “life”—however these catchwords were interpreted by that particular section of the intelligentsia.²⁵

Liberals saw art as an auxiliary to the reform movement, expecting painters to help edify and improve Russia by reminding the public that the reforms, begun in the 1860s, needed to be extended and elaborated. This view was again best expressed by Saltykov-Shchedrin’s reading of Nikolai Ge’s Peter and Alexis (1871) as a confrontation between those who were determined to carry on with the transformation of Russia into an equitable society under the rule of law and those who sullenly opposed any renovation.²⁶

The populist movement, however, introduced some new elements into the intelligentsia’s discourse. The students’ trek to the countryside to awaken the peasantry and the subsequent turn to violence that culminated in the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 embodied the activist, political preoccupations of a minority. Cultural populism, however, was a much more widespread phenomenon, and it fostered interest in popular traditions and values and, by extension, in things uniquely Russian. The new appreciation ranged from the narodnik writings idealizing the virtues of the peasantry to Zabelin’s scholarly studies of national customs. In each case, the motive of the description or investigation was not a critical dissection of Russian society for the purpose of transforming it, but an acceptance of its national individuality. Among many liberals and moderates, this new outlook found expression in an altered attitude toward Russian art.

The writings of Adrian Prakhov (1846-1916), art historian and critic, summarized well the new attitude toward Russian art that derived from cultural populism. In his definition, the expression of the national spirit consisted not in the depiction of topical subjects or tendentious comments on social or economic conditions. To be genuine and national, a painter had to convey the spirit of the people as directly and simply as they conceived of it themselves. As one successful example, Prakhov cited Vasilii Maksimov’s The Arrival of a Sorcerer at the Peasant Wedding—a large canvas that gave the scene serious human dimensions and eschewed a melodramatic treatment in terms of poverty or degradation.²⁷

Developments in the world of art paralleled in their own way the dominant intellectual currents. During the 1870s Russian realism attained maturity with the appearance of talented painters who worked out its characteristic themes: the poetic but unassuming beauty of native landscape, the exemplary portraits of nationally prominent figures, and the documentation of the nation’s political tribulations, its social and economic change. The emergence of a full-fledged realist school coincided with the formation in 1871 of the autonomous Association of Traveling Art Exhibits (Tovarishchestvo peredvizhnykh Khudozhestvennykh Vystavok—hence the name “Peredvizhniki” for its members). Its annual shows of contemporary paintings, which circulated to major provincial towns after opening in the two capitals, marked the end to the official monopoly of patronage and its prescription of content and style. Because of these exhibits, Russian art at last became truly popular.

But it had become popular more in the cultural than in the political sense. This contradicts another mistaken notion about the links between Russian art and the intelligentsia. The popularization of art via traveling art exhibits is commonly described as a counterpart to the students’ trek to the countryside to bring either liberation or enlightenment to the peasantry. The Peredvizhnik exhibits, however, were not meant for the lower classes, which were much too diffident and repressed to appear at such events and much too poor to afford the price of admission. Actually, the Association’s shows exemplify the national cultural awakening of the decade: they performed a cultural service for educated society in the provinces where artistic life had hitherto been practically nonexistent. In large part because of the success of the Peredvizhnik exhibits, the future course of Russian art turned from the predilections of the radicals to the much less politicized tastes of the general, literate public.

Such were the results of the association’s activities. Even so, the intentions of the painters, it should be noted, did not altogether correspond to the views of the intelligentsia activists either. Ivan Kramskoi (1837-87), one of the association’s founders and often called the “philosopher” of the movement, carried on an extensive correspondence with colleagues and younger artists to remind them that Russian painters, unlike those in the West, were not “free as birds” but had the obligation to be involved in the affairs of their country.²⁸ That obligation, however, was seen by Kramskoi solely in moral terms, as stated, for example, in his explication of his canvas Christ in the Wilderness. It was meant to convey the importance of the moral decision each person had to make in his lifetime—whether to serve an ideal or to succumb to petty interests.²⁹ In keeping with art’s higher obligations Kramskoi considered the crudely political requirements of the radicals as “hostile” to art; painting, he insisted, deserved proper recognition of its autonomy, instead of being “punched in the nose” with importunate demands from journals like Delo.³⁰ (It is symptomatic that there is only one brief reference to Chernyshevsky in Kramskoi’s collected writings.)

Equally important in Kramskoi’s concerns was his promotion of landscape painting. He devoted as much time and effort to nurturing it as he did to his disquisitions on the moral role of art, for he regarded the poetic representation of the native scene as an essential mark of the Russian school, which was in no way incompatible with its uplifting mission. These two aspects of Kramskoi’s labors on behalf of Russian realism demonstrate that in the eyes of the painters themselves service to the nation included a large measure of the nondidactic.

One incident in the early career of Ilia Repin (1844-1930) illustrates nicely the complex interplay between liberal strivings, painterly concerns, and nationalistic stirrings that characterized the course of Russian realism during the 1870s. Without doubt the most talented painter of his generation, Repin astounded the public with his large Volga Boathaulers (1873; cf. Bowlt, fig. 6.9) soon after graduating from the Academy. It provoked diametrically opposed political interpretations. Fedor Dostoevsky claimed that the young painter did not wear the “uniform” of the critically disposed intelligentsia and, instead of painting a tendentious canvas on the fate of the masses, had created a picture of their docility and “humble innocence.”³¹ But Vladimir Stasov, the self-appointed spokesman for critical realism since the 1860s and an ardent promoter of Repin’s fortunes, saw just the opposite: namely, the germs of revolt against the “quiet submission” of the older boatmen in the stance of the one young hauler. And he praised Repin for being a “thinker,” which, since the late 1850s, was the same as saying that the painter was making a critical comment on the state of affairs in Russia.³²

Soon after having been thus characterized as the proponent of democratic Russian art, Repin left for a three-year Academic fellowship abroad. In Paris, he quickly discovered the delights of painting for the sheer pleasure of color and communicated this discovery to his teacher, Kramskoi: “I have now quite forgotten how to reflect and pass judgment, and I do not regret the loss of this faculty. . . . May God save Russian art from corrosive analysis.”³³ For both Kramskoi and Stasov, this confession was proof that Repin had been seduced in the West into the doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” Therefore, right after his return, they packed Repin off to the provinces in the hope that “somewhere inside Russia he will get over [the harmful exposure to Western esthetic standards] and regain his power of a realist, of a national artist . . . fully capable of creating and representing thoroughly Russian types and scenes.”³⁴ They were soon rewarded with the portrait of a clergyman in minor orders, The Protodiakon (fig. 8.3).

However, the way The Protodiakon was portrayed raises doubts about the effectiveness of the cure. Repin painted the archdeacon with such robust exuberance that the canvas could hardly serve to illustrate Belinsky’s denunciation of the Russian clergy (in his open letter to Gogol) as the “symbol of gluttony, avarice, sycophancy, bawdiness.” The dry accuracy and explicitness of Perov’s denunciatory pictures of the clergy was wholly absent. There is no doubt that Repin shared Belinsky’s revulsion for the Orthodox church as one of the pillars of autocracy. But his talent was too great, his personality too expansive, not to respond to the ethnographic colorfulness of the gargantuan character, and he could not give an exclusively negative portrayal. What’s more, both Kramskoi and Stasov shared Repin’s enthusiasm about this fine specimen of the clergy as the personification of a genuine Russian type.

It should be noted that for all his blustering about the democratic functions of art, Vladimir Stasov (1824-1906) did not look at painting through that prism alone. As early as 1862, he reacted to the dismissive reception of the Russian art at the III International Exhibit in London and began to advocate a distinctive Russian school with a “well-defined national” character that would differentiate it from other European schools and leave its mark in the world. Thereafter, this quintessential exponent of critical realism devoted his prodigious energies to promoting both the social, civic-minded (narodnyi) and the national (natsional’nyi) spirit in Russian art, never considering the two aspects as incompatible. At first, they were so closely intertwined in Stasov’s writings that it is impossible to isolate either one as being predominant. But with time the nationalistic, even chauvinist, element began to gain the upper hand in his thought, becoming quite pronounced by the late 1880S.

The appearance of gifted painters in the course of the 1870s reinforced an element of national pride among the critically disposed intelligentsia. Even more, the works of this talented group fed the appetites of the numerous moderate intelligenty, like Adrian Prakhov, who never expected Russian realism to concentrate on its ascribed critical or moral-social functions. Whatever the connections and influences, in the course of the 1870s the “Russianness” of Russian art increasingly meant appreciative attention to what was distinct or genuinely national about the Russian people and its traditions. Less and less did painting subject Russian reality to critical scrutiny.

THE 1880S

But the evolution toward a more positive view of things Russian did not stop at that point. During the 1880s, the land and people began to be depicted as a nation, an organic community with a common past and a common destiny, rather than as a society composed of various classes with separate identities and clashing interests.

Elements of Russophilia emerged in art and in the public’s response. The new phase can only in part be attributed to the reign of reaction that followed Alexander II’s assassination and the resulting decline in both revolutionary activities and the democratic movement in general. The shift in attitude toward the “Russianness” of Russian art had already been taking place in the preceding decade. When the new Tsar Alexander III chose to promote a Russian school of art, based on the themes elaborated in the 1870s but cleansed of their democratic skepticism, there was a widespread positive response to his patriotic initiative.

Sections of the intelligentsia were aware that a backing away from the former reformist attitudes was taking place among the painters and, despite severe censorship, managed to express their disappointment. The most leftist journal, Delo, argued that it was “a mistake to seek out some original, new Russian paths” that were divorced from the Westernizing commitments of the intelligentsia.³⁵ Liberals were not intransigently hostile to a lyric or positive expression of Russian themes but did insist that “poetry” should be combined with moral or social insights. What worried them, though, was the disappearance of “meaningful [social] genre,” a decline exemplified by such petty subjects as Vladimir Makovsky’s Dance Lesson, which one commentator found to be devoid of a “single ideological . . . statement.”³⁶ The “poverty of thought,” according to the liberals, had reached such proportions that there was no difference between the official academic and the unofficial, autonomous Peredvizhnik exhibits. At neither show in 1886 could one find a “single idea, . . . a single civil thought, . . . a single historically significant canvas.”³⁷

It is indicative that the critic mentioned historical painting, for this particular genre more than any other reflected the changing concept of what was nationally significant and useful. Kramskoi, representing the first-generation realists who by and large had retained their vision of art’s moral or social mission, urged a choice of edifying historical topics that would shed light on the present and give the viewers “food for thought.”³⁸ But the spirit in which Nikolai Ge had painted Peter and Alexis no longer obtained either among the moderate intelligentsia or among the younger painters.

A review in Istoricheskii vestnik of the historical paintings at the 15 th Traveling Exhibit indicates well the change that had taken place. The article was outspokenly critical of the “tendentious” depiction of the past in terms of present-day moods and preoccupations. Instead, it urged painters to convey faithfully the spirit of the past, the typical traits of the people and of their epoch, without any latter-day analogies.³⁹ No matter whether one classifies this statement as “moderate” or “conservative,” what is important is that it advocated a liberation of historical painting from politics as they had been hitherto understood.

The interests and oeuvre of Vasilii Surikov (1850-1921) were in perfect correspondence with this position. Born and brought up in Siberia, he was much attached to the patriarchal ways that had survived in those distant parts of the empire. After graduating from the Academy, he chose not to go to the West for further training, but moved to Moscow, whose very streets and walls spoke of old traditions. And it was this heritage, in conflict with the modernizing authority of the Petrine state, that supplied the subjects for Surikov’s first canvases. The Morning of the Streltsy Execution (1881) gave a sympathetic account of the sufferings inflicted on the defenders of autochthonous Russian ways; Boiarynia Morozova (1887; fig. 8.4) showed another champion of tradition in a moment of undaunted defiance (as well as the seductive beauty of seventeenth-century costumes); and the subject of Menshikov in Exile (1883) was the retribution suffered by one of Peter the Great’s henchmen.

Naturally, different sections of the intelligentsia saw their own particular aspirations mirrored in these canvases. The radical Vera Figner identified Morozova with the heroism of Sofia Perovskaya and other revolutionaries. The populist writer Vsevolod Garshin and the liberal journalist Vladimir Korolenko complained that Surikov had chosen a deranged fanatic for a positive hero. But the moderate Istoricheskii vestnik applauded Surikov for portraying a typical Russian woman faithful to the principles of her forebears (but, in keeping with the tenor of the decade, those principles were confined to their seventeenth-century milieu, leaving the ethos of the 1860s unmentioned).⁴⁰

What is significant is not the more or less predictable reaction of the various groups among the intelligentsia but the intentions of Surikov himself, or, rather, the extent to which they reflected the changing concept of the national. Although his own political convictions were not very articulate, there is no doubt that he was truly animated by a love of Russia’s pristine past and also deeply moved by the human drama that accompanied the process of Westernization.⁴¹ This fascination with pre-Petrine times, when Russian society had not been rent in two by the forceful introduction of European ways, postulated an organic concept of the nation as a people united by a common heritage. Such a reading of Russian history entailed more than turning one’s back on the obsession with Westernization that had agitated the intelligentsia since the 1840s. It signified coming to terms with Russia as a country with its idiosyncratic traditions and mores that could be enjoyed (as they were in The Storming of the Snow Town, 1891; fig. 8.5) or glorified (as they were in Yermak’s Conquest of Siberia, 1895) instead of being eternally subjected to critical analysis or unfavorable comparisons, with Western standards calling the tune.

Although Surikov contravened the precepts that had animated Russian realism at the start, his approach was just as firmly rooted in Russian reality, in the sense of dealing with national issues, as was the work of his predecessors. Surikov’s interpretation of Russian themes does not mark any sharp break with the methods of Russian realism. For, all along, beginning with Belinsky and appearing later in the writings of such diverse authors as Buslaev, Stasov, and Prakhov, there were strong nationalist undercurrents in the intelligentsia’s quest to define the appropriate concerns for Russian art. In varying degrees, these intelligenty, as well as much of the articulate public, expressed their love for and fascination with things Russian without scrutinizing them in terms of Western standards of progressiveness but simply accepting them as “ours.”

Thus, Nikolai Mikhailovsky’s judgment, expressed in 1890, that Russian painters “had turned away from life”⁴² has to be seen in perspective. It represents but one segment in the spectrum of opinion, namely, the positivist trend that ascribed a narrow didactic role to art. Other intellectuals conceived the cognitive function of art in a broader way. With time, as the realist school acquired momentum and growing popularity among the educated public, the positivist trend lost its sway. The earlier critical perceptions of Russian reality yielded to the acceptance, even the embrace, of the nation’s history and native traditions. As for the primarily esthetic conception of art—that only emerged briefly (and with eclat) in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

NOTES

1. P. V. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade: Literary Memoirs (Ann Arbor, 1968), p. 138.

2. See Richard Pipes, ed., The Russian Intelligentsia (New York, 1961).

3. “Letter to N. V. Gogol” (1847), in Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology, ed. Marc Raeff (New York, 1960), p. 238.

4. “A Survey of Russian Literature in 1846,” in Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1956), pp. 370-420.

5. “Pis’mo v Peterburg” (1843), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1900-1904), 3:86-97.

6. “Pis’mo v Peterburg” (1845), ibid., pp. 104-18.

7. “O vozmozhnosti russkoi natsional’noi shkoly,” ibid., 1:73-101.

8. “A Survey of Russian Literature in 1847,” in Selected Philosophical Works, P. 459.

9. “Peterburgskii sbornik” (1846), in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh (Moscow, 1948), 3:91.

10. “Godichnaya vystavka v Imperatorskoi Akademii Khudozhestv,” Sovremennik 6.1 (1847): 79-80.

11. Ya Leshchinskii’s Pavel Andreevich Fedotov. Khudozhnik i poet (Moscow-Leningrad, 1946), contains the fullest selection of Fedotov’s writings.

12. A. Druzhinin, “Vospominaniya o russkom khudozhnike P. A. Fedotove” (1853), in Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1865), 8:693.

13. “Peterburgskii sbornik” (1846), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1955), 9:554.

14. “Vystavka v Imperatorskoi Akademii Khudozhestv,” Sovremennik 11 (November 1849):82-83.

15. P. L., “Esteticheskoe koechto po povodu kartin i ekskizov G. Fedotova,” Moskvitianin 3.6 (1850): 27.

16. “Zhurnalistika,” Moskvitianin 2.5, pt. 5 (March 1854): 54.

17. N. V. Shelgunov et al., Vospominaniya (Moscow, 1967), 1:194.

18. “Pamiati khudozhnika,” Poliarnaya zvezda 5 (1859): 238-52.

19. I. Dmitriev, “Rassharkivayushcheesia iskusstvo,” Iskra 38 (October 4, 1863): 521-30.

20. “Kartina Ge” (1863), in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1968), 6:148-77.

21. “Pamiatnik tysiachiletiyu Rossii” (1862), in Moi Dosugi (Moscow, 1886), pp. 187-208. See also his “Zadachi sovremennoi esteticheskoi kritiki,” Russkii vestnik 77 (1868): 273-336.

22. I. Dmitriev, op. cit.

23. P. M. Kovalevskii, “O nashikh khudozhestvakh,” Otechestvennye zapiski 177.2 (1868): 29.

24. “V. G. Perov,” in Slovar’ russkikh khudozhnikov, ed. N. P. Sobko (Moscow, 1893-99), vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 104.

25. Khudozhnik liubitel’, “Na svoikh nogakh,” Delo 12 (1871):117; Vse tot zhe [pseudonym of Petr Tkachev], “Printsipy i zadachi real’noi kritiki,” Delo 8.2 (1878): 23-24.

26. “Pervaya russkaya peredvizhnaya khudozhestvennaya vystavka” (1871), in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1970), 10:225-33.

27. “Chetvertaya peredvizhnaya vystavka,” Pchela 1.10 (March 16, 1875): 121-26.

28. September 28, 1974, letter to I. Repin, in Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi. Pis’ma, stat’i v dvukh tomakh, ed. S. N. Gol’dshtein (Moscow, 1965), 1:269.

29. February 16, 1878, letter to V. Garshin, ibid., p. 446.

30. July 21, 1876, letter to V. Stasov, ibid., p. 355.

31. “A propos of the exhibition” (1875), in F. M. Dostoievsky. The Diary of a Writer, ed. B. Brasol (New York, 1954), pp. 74-85.

32. “Pis’mo k redaktoru” (1873), in Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1894), 1.2: 397-400.

33. October 16, 1874, letter, I. E. Repin, in Izbrannye pis’ma, ed. I. A. Brodskii (Moscow, 1969), 1:143.

34. Quoted in V. Stasov, Izbrannye socbineniya, ed. P. T. Shchipunov (Moscow, 1952), 1:710.

35. Delo, July 1884-April 1885, p. 98. Cited in V. N. Volkova, “Iz istorii russkoi khudozhestvennoi kritiki: 70-80-e gody XIX veka” (kandidat diss., University of Moscow, 1972), p. 98.

36. Bukva [pseudonym of I. F. Vasilevskii], “Peterburgskie nabroski,” Peterburgskie vedomosti (February 25, 1885).

37. Bukva, “Dve vystavki,” Russkie vedomosti (March 10, 1886).

38. January 21, 1885, letter to A. Suvorin, in Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi. Pis’ma, 2:167.

39. Pepo [pseudonym of P. N. Polevoi], “Istoricheskii zhanr na XV vystavke Tovarishchestva peredvizhnykh vystavok,” Istoricheskii vestnik 28.4 (1887):243-48.

40. Vera Figner, “Zapechatlennyi trud,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1928), 1:252-53; V. Garshin, “Zametki o khudozhestvennykh vystavkakh” (1887), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1910), pp. 428-40; V. Korolenko, “Dve kartiny,” Russkie vedomosti (April 16, 1887); “Istoricheskii zhanr na XV vystavke Tovarishchestva peredvizhnykh vystavok,” Istoricheskii vestnik 28.4 (1887): 244.

41. See S. Glagol, “V. I. Surikov. Iz vstrech s nim i besed,” Nasba starina 2 (1917): 58-78.

42. “Ob XVIII Peredvizhnoi vystavke” (1890), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersbrug, 1909), 6:748-61.