“imperial situation” and, on the other hand, to include in the picture alternative perspectives of the observers who wrote about the Exposition. I demonstrate the centrality of empire to the mode of Russia’s representation at the Exposition in general and, at the same time, the prominence given there to Russian popular/folk traditions as the only distinct representations of the national. Exclusion of the cultural traditions of the Russian westernized educated class from representation at the Exposition made all the more noticeable a remarkable symmetry: representation of the culture of imperial borderlands, once conquered or colonized, went side by side with that of the culture of the Russian popular masses. In relation to both, educated elites assumed the perspective of ethnographers, rather than members of the same cultural community. On the other hand, this perspective was complicated by the demonstration of professional artists’ skill in appropriating popular/folk traditions. The material analyzed in this section provides the opportunity to pose a question about the available means and strategies for constructing Russian nationhood in the late imperial period and the place of “aesthetic constructivism” among them. In the second section of this chapter, I analyze the retrospective narrative of a “national turn” in the empire (by which a transition from westernized to popular/indigenous traditions is implied) that was proposed in 1903 by Adrian Prakhov, an art historian and a prominent ideologue of the “nationalization” (Russification) of the empire. This narrative, which presented Alexander III and Nicholas II as principal agents in the revival of Russian “indigenous” aesthetic traditions, serves as an important background for the case studies presented in the following chapters.
Chapter Two is devoted to a detailed analysis of the discussions on nationalism in art among the members of the World of Art group in the first period of its existence (1898–1904). The significant role played by this group in the formation of the aesthetic platform of Russian modernist culture is well known; yet no systematic study has hitherto been done on the connection between competing aesthetic programs within this group and debates on the “choice of tradition,” on the comparative “rights” of the imperial (westernized) vs. pre-Petrine traditions to serve as a foundation for “national” tradition in Russia. Analyzing declarative and analytical statements by Alexander Benois, Igor Grabar, Sergei Diaghilev, Dmitrii Filosofov, and Ivan Bilibin, I suggest that the clash between aesthetic “cosmopolitism” and “populism” (narodnichanie), to use Benois’s terms, in the debates inside the World of Art reflected the moment of equilibrium between the two tendencies in early Russian modernism, which would soon give way to the dominance of the latter. Another aspect of the analysis in this chapter concerns the strategies of emancipating the modernist archaistic aesthetic in a nationalist key from associations with “statist tendencies” and “retrograde political stubbornness” (Bilibin), which turn out to be particularly instrumental in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution and during the subsequent decade.
Chapters Three and Four are devoted to the period from the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War (1904) through the middle of the 1910s. The first of these chapters focuses on literature and on aesthetic and ideological discussions in literary circles; the second is devoted to the formation and reception in Russian criticism of new aesthetic ideas and practices, associated with Sergei Diaghilev’s “Russian Seasons” in Europe. Both chapters together trace the transformation of “archaism” from an amorphous trend into an aesthetic and ideological concept, a tool of the “invention of tradition” and of establishing a new paradigm of the “national” in arts and literature.
In the first section of Chapter Three I make a digression to discuss an alternative vision of the early twentieth century as the age of the decline of nations and the rise of empires offered by Valery Briusov. The introduction of this perspective makes it possible to demonstrate, on the one hand, how aesthetic programs reflect ideological visions in the camp of “imperialists” as much as in that of the “nationalists” to which this book is largely devoted. On the other hand, it provides material that can be juxtoposed with other case studies in subsequent sections of this chapter to highlight the points of convergence between “imperialist” and “nationalist” visions of Russian modernist authors. At the center of the second section is the impact of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) in shaping the discourse of nationalism in modernist publications such as the journals Novyi put’, Voprosy zhizni, and Vesy. I demonstrate here how military defeats and the events of the first Russian revolution (1905) unfolding against the background of these defeats not only triggered the crisis of loyalty to Russian imperial statehood among modernist intellectuals but also undermined, in their own eyes, the value of their European, westernized identity. This prompted the turn to theorizing the “national” as divorced from modern statehood, with increased emphasis on its pre-modern, indigenous foundations. Hence the influence Viacheslav Ivanov’s ideas acquire in the second half of the 1900s, which is the subject of the third section. Against the background of the crisis of political institutions, Ivanov develops his vision of the role of an artist as an agent of social consolidation. On the one hand, Ivanov’s artist discovers and resurrects the national (indigenous) myth, which encapsulates the shared “national” past of all the estates; on the other, the artist seeks to transform the realm of aesthetic production itself by removing the divide between creators and spectators, i.e., by making them join forces in an artistic creation. The new aesthetic idiom that consciously evokes the “national archaic” and new forms of art’s institutionalization are both markers, in Ivanov’s terms, of the overcoming of modern “individualism” and of the approach of a new epoch of the vsenarodnoe (“all-people’s,” “universal”) art. Finally, setting the ideals of statehood and nationhood against one another, Ivanov, like other Russian thinkers of that time, theorizes religious confession (Orthodoxy) as an important vehicle of social (national) transformation, the declared goals of which make us recall Vladimir Solovyov’s concept of “free theocracy.” In the fourth section my attention shifts to adaptations of Ivanov’s ideas in the broader literary-critical discourse of the second half of the 1900s, and to the discussion of the twofold role of this discourse: on the one hand it boosts “archaistic” tendencies in literature of the time, while on the other it conceptually deforms them by imposing a singular interpretative frame on a variety of practices (with most examples coming from reviews of books by Alexei Remizov, Sergei Gorodetsky, and Ivanov himself). Finally, in the fifth section of this chapter I discuss the use of the Panslavic matrix in radicalizing the “national” aesthetic project of Russian modernism. Interpreting programmatic statements by
