ourselves”-notwithstanding the doom of external reality-was put forward with unprecedented strength. The Alexandrine age saw an extraordinary burst of creativity, especially in literature.
WESTERN INFLUENCES
Russian Romanticism was strongly influenced by cultural developments in the West. Vasily Zhukov-sky’s masterly translations and adaptations from German poetry are representative of the transitional 1800s and early 1810s. Later, British literary influence became dominant. “It seems that, in the present age, a poet cannot but echo Byron, as well as a novelist cannot but echo W. Scott, notwithstanding the magnitude and even originality of talent,” wrote the poet and critic Peter Vyazemsky in 1827. More philosophical authors such as Vladimir F. Odoyevsky persistently looked to German thought for inspiration; Schelling was particularly important. The evolution of French literature was also keenly followed: Victor Hugo (but hardly the dreamy Lamartine) aroused much sympathy in the Russian Romantics. A seminal event was the sojourn in St. Petersburg and Moscow of the exiled Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. However, the study of European models only convinced Russian authors and critics that Romanticism necessarily implied originality. “Conditioned by the desire to realize the creative originality of the human soul,” Romanticism owes its formation “not just to every individual nation, but, what is more, to every individual author,” wrote Nikolai Polevoy, a leading figure in the Russian Romantic movement. Characteristically, Pushkin struggled to dispel the image of Russian Byron, while Lermontov explicitly declared his non-Byronism.
CONTROVERSIES
The Russian Romantic movement consolidated. In the late 1810s, the Classic-Romantic controversy broke out, continuing throughout the 1820s and 1830s. Russian literary journals took sides. Academic circles, too, were engaged in the controversy: Nikolai Nadezhdin’s Latin dissertation on Romantic poetry is a case in point. The Classicists claimed that Romanticism sought anarchy in literature and in the fine arts, whereas “Art, generally, is obedience to rules.” Indeed, the Romantics, especially in their poetic declarations, blissfully proclaimed the lawlessness of artistic creation. In theoretical discussions, however, they did not simply reject the classical rigidities, but undertook to formulate alternative laws, loosely, those of nature, beauty, and truth. A more specific agreement was difficult to reach, not just on specific issues such as the principles of Romantic drama, but also on the very meaning of Romanticism. Vladimir Nabokov has identified at least eleven various interpretations of “Romantic” current in Pushkin’s time. As might be expected, the internal controversy emerged in the Romantic camp. The polemics, piercing other than purely theoretical issues, often involved angry exchanges. Literary alliances were vulnerable, as in the case of Pushkin and Nikolai Polevoy. Yet, the early nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable tendency, on the part of the authors, artists, and
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musicians, to form circles, attend salons, and group around enlightened patrons.
In this kind of atmosphere, crossing of borders between different arts was common. Vasily Zhukov-sky produced brilliant drawings; Lermontov nearly abandoned writing for the sake of painting; Vladimir Odoyevsky was a musicologist as well as a poet and novelist; the playwright Alexander Griboye-dov, a talented composer. As art historian Valery Turchin points out, it was the musician rather than the poet who was eventually promoted, in the view of the Romantics, to the role of the supreme type of artistic genius. This precisely reflected the Romantics’ quest for the spiritual, for music, of all the arts, was considered the least bound by materiality. Arguably, Romanticism was a later phenomenon in Russian music than in literature and art. Anyway, a contemporary of Pushkin, the composer Mikhail Glinka, renowned for his use of Russian folk tradition, was a major contributor to the Romantic movement. The painter Orestes Kipren-sky commenced his series of Romantic portraits during the very dawn of literary Romanticism. Somewhat later emerged the Romantic schools of landscape and historical painting. Even in architecture, the art most strongly bound by matter, new trends showed up against the neoclassical background: neogothicism, exotic orientalism, and, finally, the national current exemplified in Konstantin Ton’s churches. During the reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855) Romanticism began to be diffused in the more general quest for history and nationality.
SLAVOPHILISM
The important offshoot of this development was Slavophilism. Nicholas I typified the new epoch in the same way as Alexander I had typified the previous age. In his youth, Nicholas had received a largely Romantic education. He was an admirer of Walter Scott and was inclined to imitate the kings of Scott’s novels. Characteristically, Pushkin, during the reign of Nicholas, persistently returns to the twin themes of nobility and ancestry, lamenting (in a manner closely resembling Edmund Burke) the passing of the age of chivalry. The dominant mood of the period, however, was nationalistic and messianic, and here again the Romantics largely shared the inclinations of the tsar. Notably, it was Peter Vyazemsky who coined the word narodnost (the Russian equivalent of “nationality”), which became part of the official ideological formula (“Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality”). Odoevsky argued that because of their “poetic organization,” the Russian people would attain superiority over the West even in scientific matters. Pushkin welcomed the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1831, interpreting it in Panslavic terms. Nonetheless, there was an unbridgeable psychological rift between the tsar and the Romantic camp, which had its origin in the catastrophe of December 1825. Several of the Decembrists (most importantly, Kon-draty Ryleyev, one of the five executed) were men of letters and members of the Romantic movement. Throughout the reign, a creative personality faced fierce censorship and remained under the threat of persecution. Many could say with Polevoy (whose ambitious Romantic enterprise embraced, beside literature, history and even economics, but whose Moscow Telegraph, Russia’s most successful literary journal, was closed by the government): “My dreams remained unfulfilled, my ideals, unexpressed.” The split between ideal and reality was the central problem for Romanticism universally, but in Russia this problem acquired a specifically bleak character. See also: GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; LERMON-TOV, MIKHAIL YURIEVICH; ODOYEVSKY, VLADIMIR FY-ODOROVICH; PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER SERGEYEVICH; SLAVOPHILES; ZHUKOVSKY; VASILY ANDREYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McLaughlin, Sigrid (1972). “Russia: Romaniceskij-Romanticeskij-Romantizm.” In “Romantic” and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, ed. Hans Eichner. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Peer, Larry H. (1998). “Pushkin and Romantizm,” In Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity, ed. Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler. Columbia, SC: Camden House. Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. (1992). The Emergence of Romanticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Rydel, Christine, ed. (1984). The Ardis Anthology of Russian Romanticism. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.
(d. 1167), grand prince of Kiev and the progenitor of the Rostislavichi, the dynasty of Smolensk.
After Rostislav’s father Mstislav Vladimirovich gave him Smolensk around 1125, he freed it from
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its subordination to southern Pereyaslavl, fortified it with new defensive walls, founded churches, and patronized culture. Around 1150, despite opposition from Metropolitan Kliment (Klim) Smolyatich and the bishop of Pereyaslavl, he also freed the Church of Smolensk from its dependence on Pereyaslavl by making it an autonomous eparchy. Manuel, a Greek, was its first bishop, and the Church of the Assumption, built by Rostislav’s grandfather Vladimir Vsevolodovich “Mono-makh,” became his cathedral. Rostislav also issued a charter (gramota) enumerating the privileges of the bishop and the church in Smolensk. The document is valuable as a source of ecclesiastical, social, commercial, and geographic information.
Rostislav had political dealings with neighbouring Polotsk and Novgorod, but his most important involvement was in Kiev. After 1146 he helped his elder brother Izyaslav win control of the capital of Rus. Following the latter’s death in 1154, the citizens invited Rostislav to rule Kiev with his uncle Vyacheslav Vladimirovich, but his uncle Yury Vladimirovich “Dolgoruky” replaced him in the same year. Although Rostislav regained Kiev in 1159, his rule was not
