This book focuses on the time period that inherited the fruits of both Reform-era nationalism and its permutations in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It treats the encounter and the interaction of experimental aesthetic agendas in Russian arts, literature, music, and performance with the discourse of the nation and other manifestations of national awareness in Russia in the early twentieth century. Employing as a conceptual framework studies by historians of nationalism and empire, I approach the proliferation of archaistic aesthetics in modernist artistic media as a fact of Russian cultural and intellectual history. “Archaism,” a term broadly used in critical discourse at that time, is understood in this study as a stylistic principle that takes pre-modern, marginalized, or exotic traditions as points of aesthetic reference. Using aesthetic phenomena as points of departure, I focus primarily on discursive strategies employed in criticism as well as in declarative and analytical statements by artists and writers that endeavored to construct “archaism” as a tool for expressing the national.
I argue that the cultural milieu in Russia, where the “new art” movement began as an extension of western trends at the end of the nineteenth century, was impacted from early on by the ongoing process of national(ist) indoctrination. The effect of the latter on the modernist aesthetic agenda increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Russian revolution of 1905, when aesthetic ideology and artistic practice began to complement one another in asserting Russia’s “national artistic independence” (to use David Burliuk’s statement from 1913) and turned to marginalized traditions of folk or pre-modern origin as points of reference. Even though archaism was a prolific trend in Western modernism, the role of local “indigenous” traditions as points of reference within it was both more limited and functionally dissimilar. What distinguished Russian modernism in this regard was the tendency to rhetorically set “indigenous” traditions not against “modern” ones but against “westernized” ones, i. e., those associated with western influence, whose formative impact on modern Russian culture became a source of tension in the “age of nationalism.” Thus, various versions of an archaistic aesthetic in a national key came to be regarded as a means of constructing an alternative modern aesthetic paradigm that would not appear dependent on an “alien” cultural heritage, i. e., on the Russian westernized tradition of the imperial period. These acts of cultural constructivism played a major role in shaping the artistic and the intellectual history of late imperial Russia. The scope of material analyzed in this book attests to the scale of the phenomenon, contributing to our understanding of the cultural dynamic of the period and to the role experimental art played in it.
In Chapter One I introduce two case studies that help contextualize the rest of the material analyzed in the book by offering a snapshot of the engagement of Russian elites with the project of national indoctrination at the turn of the twentieth century. In the first section of this chapter, the object of my case study is the representation of the Russian Empire at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. Existing sources that describe Russian pavilions at the Exposition allow me, on the one hand, to discuss the perspective of several groups in the elite (the Court, the government, and artists) on the Russian “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
