The Firebird of the national imaginary: The myth of Russian culture and its discontents

Defining Russia culturally

Culture became central to the nation-building processes in an age of modernity. ‘In modern societies the necessity of complex communication elevates the importance of “culture”, the manner in which people communicate in the broadest sense’, write Eley and Suny (1996: 6, 21). In tsarist Russia, for the duration of the nineteenth century and arguably beyond, culture remained the only outlet for the expression of national sentiments. Institutions of culture, such as novels, theatres, journals and museums, turned into nation-forming instruments when they became part of the ‘discourse of the nation’, defined by Suny as the ‘cluster of ideas and understandings that have come to surround the signifier “nation” in modern times’ (Suny, 2001: 335). ³ If discourses on nationality had been in circulation among the members of Russian polite society since the previous century, in the second half of the nineteenth century, growing literacy among new sectors of the population made something approaching a nationwide discussion possible for the general public, including women, merchants, clerks, kustari, servants, literate workers and peasants.

As elsewhere in Europe, the birth of modern culture in Russia was closely connected with the urban experience. Institutions of culture that gave rise to reinvented traditions were centred in the capital cities, St Petersburg and Moscow. Nevertheless various public forums for the interface of society and art, such as museums, exhibitions, bookstores and theatrical performances, discursively reached across the nation in the form of commentary and debates; in such a way, the majority of the literate Russian-speaking population experienced common culture. Jeffrey Brooks explains:

Among the changes that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian cultural life was a shift in attitudes toward traditional symbols of Russian nationality, the tsar and the church. A new patriotism developed among the educated from the time of the critic Vissarion Belinsky, and allegiance was directed less toward church and state than to Russian culture, in particular the literature of the golden age, the Russian classics. (Brooks, 1981: 315) ⁴

Not only literature, but also music and architecture, painting and sculpture, as well as folk arts and crafts, came to symbolize identity for many Russians. This is when the term ‘national culture’ gained currency.

Several pivotal events in the middle of the nineteenth century highlighted the urgency of the national question in imperial society, including the Crimean War (1853–6), the Great Reforms (1860–74) and the intensified national movements in Europe and the Russian empire. The era of the Great Reforms, known for initiating radical changes in every aspect of the country’s life, also precipitated the rise of modern Russian culture. The Reforms gave Russia the foundation to become a modern civil society with a free peasantry, independent courts and an elected local administration (zemstvo). ⁵ At the beginning of his reign, Alexander II closed the Supreme Censorship Committee, lifted the ban on foreign travel and abolished high fees for passports. These liberal changes advanced the creation of a public space for the articulation and dissemination of national ideas.

Moreover, Russia was caught between being a nation and an empire for the duration of the imperial period, which rendered intense contemporary debates on national distinction always topical. It bears emphasizing that Russia was not a national state of Russians: politically, it had been and remained a multinational dynastic empire. Geoffrey Hosking posits that in Russia, ‘the building of an empire impeded the formation of a nation’. ⁶ The representation of the nation, however, was taking place on a daily basis in the press, where an imagined national community was fashioned and publicized. Contemporaries commented, for instance, on a certain ‘turn to nationality’ (povorot k natsional’nosti) that took place in the wake of the modernizing changes in society. In January 1862 the Slavophile historian Ivan Beliaev argued in the newspaper Day (Den’) that Russian national consciousness (soznanie narodnosti), in gestation since Catherine II’s coronation in 1762, had finally started to turn to conscious action (Beliaev, 1862). The question of the day was, to quote historian N. I. Kostomarov (1860), ‘What are we?’ (chto my takoe).

The whole complex of ongoing reforms on the one hand, and the intensified Polish and Ukrainian national movements on the other, with the defeat of the Crimean campaign in the background, stimulated public discourse on cultural identity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Not that Russian national identity was non-existent prior to this: Russianness was in fact omnipresent, but it was ‘invisible’. It was a ‘zero-value’ – a norm against which other people within the empire were defined. ⁷ Representations in different media and genres helped make this hidden norm visible.

More than any other forum, writing in the popular press was instrumental in rendering the abstract idea of a fatherland in concrete terms. During the era of the Great Reforms, the number of Russian-language newspapers increased almost fivefold. ⁸ The number of daily general-interest newspapers grew even faster. If prior to 1855 only three dailies were available anywhere in the empire, by 1870 Russia published 38 newspapers, more than half of which were concentrated in the capital cities of St Petersburg and Moscow (Berezina, 1965: 30–1). The pre-Reform period was ruled by the so-called ‘thick journals’ (tolstye zhurnaly) – monthly editions several hundred pages long, with sections given over to prose, poetry, reviews, social criticism and political news, as well as cultural events and everyday miscellanea. Popular dailies superseded the venerable thick journals during the following era, which M. K. Lemke described as the ‘glorious period of Russian civic consciousness’ (slavnyi period russkoi obshchestvennosti). ⁹ As the public discourse in its more egalitarian form shifted to the newspaper, the daily press came to serve as a barometer of civic awareness (Rubakin, 1895).

The contemporary newspaper provided what Benedict Anderson calls ‘a new grammar of representation’, essential for imagining a national community (Anderson, 1998: 117–33). Mass-circulation newspapers of the 1850s to the 1890s offer us a unique opportunity to glean insight into the wider process of culture-building via writing. In the pages of popular dailies, such as The Voice (Golos), The New Times (Novoe vremia), The St Petersburg Sheet (Peterburgskii listok), The Stock Market News (Birzhevye vedomosti), The Moscow News (Moskovskie vedomosti) and The St Petersburg News (Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti), among others, Russian cultural identity was co-authored by journalists, artists, critics and the reading public. While these sources may not provide comprehensive documentation or a conclusive resolution to the question of what that culture was, they do illuminate the process by which the Russian public imagined it and by which those imaginings were manufactured, disseminated and consumed. Accordingly, if it seems that every literate Russian in imperial society cared about literature and the fine arts, that is because the verbal and the visual arts were routinely inscribed into current public debates on national self-representation. Similarly, it was the topicality of these debates that imparted a distinctly Russian flavour to institutions and practices that were originally European.

The daily newspaper changed the profile of the general public; it also helped fashion that public in the first place. This readership was no longer predominantly polite society, which determined taste and opinion in the time of Pushkin and Gogol, and which William Mills Todd III has analysed brilliantly (Todd, 1986). Nor was it exclusively the intelligentsia that the famous critic Vissarion Belinsky had cultivated since the 1840s. The general public that appeared on the scene in the 1860s were, in the words of one journalist, ‘galvanized with a participatory zeal, eager to seek and find good results’ (Anon., 1862; cf. Boborykin, 1965: 400). Among other vectors of discourse, newspapers encouraged open discussions of cultural affairs; these were less suspected of subversive intent than many other contemporary issues. One author explained the prominent place that the arts came to occupy in society during those turbulent decades as follows:

Due to the circumstances, the question of art and polemics about it have been pushed to the forefront lately, or better put, recently the sphere of art has been almost the only one in which those who write could express their thoughts and opinions with greater freedom. (Kurochkin, 1865: iii)

Experts and novices, professionals and amateurs, Russians talked about culture because they could discuss it relatively freely. The amount of writing in the popular press devoted to cultural affairs of all kinds at this time is astonishing: alongside the familiar book reviews, there was an explosion of public discourse on art exhibitions, stage performances, the circus, libraries, monuments, cancan dancing and other novelties. Even though the number of theatre-goers, critical readers and visitors to museums grew exponentially in the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of literate Russians participated in contemporary discussions on culture and identity on the most basic level: by reading daily newspapers. Culture-inspired writing helped convert local events into building blocks of identity.

In a country where culture had thus far been described mostly in terms of its lack, and where the term itself barely existed in the age of Pushkin, the conspicuous eruption of public activity in the 1860s was an affirmative statement. The contemporary press also helped shape the aesthetic sensibility of often poorly educated general audiences, promoted national consciousness and fashioned a community out of the participating public in the process. In the words of one journalist, ‘Our general reading public (srednee chitaiushchee obshchestvo), its views and ideas, its weaknesses and contradictions, are reflected, as in a mirror, in the most widespread and popular daily editions’ (S., 1879b; see also S., 1879a). Culture thus reflected in the mirror of public opinion represented the culture of the nation.

There was little harmony in this image, however. Before many books on Russian literature and the arts became available, the key agents of this discourse were everyday critics of culture of every persuasion – all those who, regardless of their qualifications, circulated their opinions in the newly liberated popular press and weighed in on issues of aesthetics and politics. Thus the image of culture that we glean in the pages of popular periodical editions is that of an inherently incomplete and messy project, something that people actually disagreed about – not a solid monument, but a bricolage of contested opinions.

Ever since Russian culture was popularized in the West between 1885 and 1920 in the form of translations, international exhibitions and Ballets Russes performances, numerous attempts have been made to describe and understand Russia through its cultural expressions. Virginia Woolf’s short essay ‘The Russian point of view’ is one of the better-known efforts to capture the spirit of the profoundly alien literature that enjoyed unprecedented fame at the time. Subsequent surveys resulted in the collection of what I call the ‘big books’ of Russian culture – well-known and well-loved studies, which several generations of English-speaking students and scholars have relied upon: The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture by James Billington (1966), Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia by Suzanne Massie (1980), Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of a Thousand Years of Artistic Life in Russia by Bruce Lincoln (1998), Russia Under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum by Martin Malia (1999), and Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes (2002). Obvious differences in approaches and publication dates notwithstanding, the titles of all these volumes draw effectively on pairs of opposites, beautiful metaphors and memorable images. In one way or another, they all address underlying assumptions about Russian culture, summarized well by Figes (2002: xxxii): ‘We expect the Russians to be “Russian” – their art easily distinguished by its use of folk motifs, by onion domes, the sound of bells, and full of “Russian soul”.’ ¹⁰

Russian culture as an exotic Firebird, a beautiful peasant dance, a sanguine textbook or a coffee table gift edition – the attempts to comprehensively gather and represent culture invariably result in mythic constructs. Such images of one unified national experience are agreeable due to their finality, but they rely on inflexible assumptions: the overarching pair of binaries, ‘us v. them’, and the effacement of boundaries between groups within a nation. ¹¹ They represent an attempt to overcome the differences between ‘cultures’ in the plural within a society at large. By contrast, in the discussion that follows, I draw attention to the uneven process of culture-building and emphasize the fragmentary and the incomplete. The dialogue between the many stories and versions preserved in the contemporary periodical press offers a key to understanding how the public in the nineteenth century participated in fashioning Russian national culture. It can also help explain how today we too are not only consuming but making culture on a daily basis.

My working assumption is that Russian culture as we know it today is an invented tradition of the late nineteenth century. In much of Europe, the nineteenth century was a period of culture-gathering during which many collections of songs and tales, both real and imagined, appeared, and when the museum was firmly established as a public institution. The conscious culture-building that took place in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century was characterized by concerted intensity and velocity. To affirm its own uniqueness, Russian culture defined (and defended) itself explicitly against other traditions. Samobytnyi (original, native) became an attribute of the utmost distinction at the same time as a culture once oriented towards Western modernity turned towards a revival of native antiquity. Not that a unique native culture did not exist before this, as some extreme Westernizers argued at the time; what was invented was a ‘historic continuity’ of modern culture with the ancient past (Hobsbawm, 1983a: 2, 7–8). By the end of the century, Russian culture as a discursive modern tradition had become one of the main categories through which to measure and express identity. In Europe, traditions were ‘mass-produced’ during this same period, as ‘nationalism became a substitute for social cohesion through a national church, a royal family or other cohesive traditions, or collective group self-presentations’. Between 1870 and 1914, old rituals were reinvented to offset the erratic experience of modernity, and the new ‘idiom of public symbolic discourse’ – ceremonies and celebrations, parades, statues, monuments, exhibition pavilions, museums and stylized buildings – reached its peak in Europe (Hobsbawm, 1983b: 303–4).

Culture is part and parcel of the society which creates it; it is never ‘just culture’. No aspect of cultural production, including individual talent, institutional support and education can take place in abstraction from institutions of power. Art and politics have always been intertwined in Russia, and many Russian emperors were noteworthy collectors, starting with Peter the Great, who founded the first Russian museum, the Kunstkamera, and ending with Nicholas II, who temporarily sponsored the production of Diaghilev’s subversive World of Art journal. Richard Wortman explores this ‘top down’ paradigm of the Russian cultural tradition in depth in his Scenarios of Power (2000). Aside from this interaction between art and authority, other scenarios were available as well. The discussion below prioritizes agents of culture whose roles were less glorious and in fact often invisible: philosophers, editors, art experts, professional journalists and amateur critics of every persuasion. Through popular columns and letters to the editor, society was invited to participate in a process of culture-building. Between the lines of the casual feuilletons that survive on the crumbling yellowed pages of popular dailies, we glean insight into the components of a culture long since forgotten.

The whole idea of an uninterrupted national tradition is an abstraction and a convention, as many eminent critics have demonstrated – ‘a way of imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation’ (Hall, 1994: 394). Lotman and Uspensky, for instance, welcome this open-endedness of culture as the norm: ‘This kind of “incompleteness”, the incomplete regulatedness of culture as a unified semiotic system, is not a shortcoming, but a condition for its normal functioning’ (Lotman and Uspensky, 1978: 222; see also Lotman, 1994: 9). For Geertz, too, ‘Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete’, and museums and folklore can only offer a temporary escape from this cultural predicament (Geertz, 1973: 29). More often than not, multiple versions of culture that at certain times and in certain places encapsulated what ‘national’ meant to certain groups of people coexist. Orlando Figes points out, for instance, that Russia is ‘too complex, too socially divided, too politically diverse, too ill-defined geographically, and perhaps too big for a single culture to be passed off as the national heritage.’ ‘[T]here is no quintessential national culture, only mythic images of it’, like Natasha’s peasant dance in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Still, we wish to capture the whole and to reconcile differences. Figes, for instance, locates the national essence in the ‘Russian temperament, a set of native customs and beliefs, something visceral, emotional, instinctive, passed on down the generations, which has helped to shape the personality and bind together the community’ (Figes, 2002: xxviii–xxx). This elusive essence, however, may well be part of the same mythology.

Short of resorting to mythology, how can we accommodate and account for all these irreconcilable possibilities? I take the idea of national culture to be primarily a network of discursive positions. ¹² Along with layer upon layer of monuments and texts that make up a culture, we inherit a multitude of critical responses. What Bakhtin says about dialogue resonates well with the notion of culture as discourse:

There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) – they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. (Bakhtin, 1986: 170)

In sum, there is no such thing as ‘national culture’ in the singular; instead, there is a plurality of discourses on identity, formal and informal, professional and amateur, that are in a constant state of flux, even when they are styled as traditional and permanent. The predicament of Russian culture stems from its mutability: ongoing revisions and reversals compose a national cultural experience. This plurality frustrates our expectations and undermines familiar assumptions, for any effort to construct a well-ordered narrative results in inevitable simplification and further myth-making. Likewise, any neat classification of the numerous participants, many of whom wrote anonymously at the time, would be forced. The instability and the experimental usage of the term throughout the nineteenth century, which I discuss below, testifies to the experience of culture by contemporaries as largely a chaos of opinions and a ‘zone of contestation’ (Appadurai and Breckenridge, 1992: 38).

In the beginning was controversy: the evolution of culture as discourse

What did national culture mean in practical terms in imperial society? How did people experience culture? Russian national culture was a belaboured idea. Berdyaev defined the extreme fragmentation of the post-Petrine cultural tradition in the following terms: ‘There was no integrated form of culture in the imperial Russia of Peter. A highly composite and much-graduated state of affairs took shape; Russians lived, as it were, in different centuries’ (Berdyaev, 1948: 221). The thoroughly Westernized educated classes actually had to learn how to be Russian, which they did largely through literature and art (Figes, 2002: xxx–xxxi). This learning was complicated by the ongoing controversy that surrounded the idea of culture from the very beginning and which lasted until the end of the century, where this essay leaves off.

The history of the concept kul’tura in the Russian language is a fascinating story. The present discussion is not a history of the term: highlighted below are just several episodes when public debates flared up, as they did in 1876, 1888 and at the turn of the century. In the course of these debates, an important transformation took place as culture ceased to be the property of a narrow group of intellectuals and became a part of the public sphere.

Scholars disagree on the exact date when the word kul’tura, initially a German borrowing, entered the Russian language, but there is a general consensus that it was not widely used prior to the 1880s. ¹³ Although the word was recorded in a lexicon as early as 1837 – which may suggest a certain regularity in its usage – in practice, culture existed in the Russian public sphere not as a definition but as a topic of debate. ¹⁴ Accordingly, in one of its first appearances outside reference sources in 1853, the word was proclaimed superfluous, a ‘mistake’ and an ‘unjustified borrowing’. ¹⁵ Few Russian authors used the word, and those who did, like Dostoevsky and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, interpreted culture in a derisive and overwhelmingly negative sense. Such a provocative trend was not left uncontested, and many columns were subsequently given over to the Russian culture wars.

One of the strands in the debates on culture – the one that has attracted the most attention from scholars – is the distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’. This ‘conversation’ has been going on in society on and off since the late 1860s. The wide range of contradictory definitions that circulated at that time indicates the experimental nature of these debates and the novelty of the concepts the public was trying to master. ¹⁶ Contemporaries treated the term culture concurrently in the broadest of anthropological and the narrowest of artistic senses: it was understood as both a synonym and an antonym of civilization.

That the meaning of the word oscillated widely was not unusual. Raymond Williams, for instance, points to the alteration in meaning that took place in nineteenth-century Britain from ‘culture of something’ to ‘culture as such, a thing in itself’, culture as ‘an abstraction and an absolute’. The category of ‘art’ evolved in parallel with ‘culture’ after 1800, and the two have stayed intimately connected from that point on (Williams, 1983: xvi–xviii). In the Russian language, however, culture remained a neologism decades after it was first registered in dictionaries. In the late 1870s, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin still referred to it in the novel The Sanctuary of Mon Repos (Ubezhishche Monrepo, 1878–9) as one of the terms that is ‘not yet accepted, newly minted’ (Saltykov-Shchedrin, 1951: 124).

‘Culture’ became one of the main themes in Russian social thought in the following decades. As a perennial problem, however, culture had been in existence since the early nineteenth century. In 1827, the Romantic poet and philosopher Dmitrii Venevitinov, founder and leader of the Society of Wisdom Lovers (liubomudry), framed the predicament of Russian culture in terms of its distinct lack of originality. The term was not yet accepted, and its close synonyms, ‘enlightenment’ and ‘education’ (prosveshchenie and obrazovannost’), were commonly used in its stead:

The enlightenment of all independent peoples developed from their so-called native origins: their artistic creations, even when reaching a certain degree of perfection and consequently joining the world repository of intellectual achievements, did not lose their distinctive character. Russia has received everything from outside, thus this sense of imitativeness … and a total lack of any freedom or genuine activity (deiatel’nost’). (Venevitinov, 1934: 216–17)

The dilemma can be roughly summarized as follows: can a culture based on foreign models adequately express a unique national character? Venevitinov, for one, answered this question in the negative, arguing that a native culture cannot be built with borrowed forms. P. Ya. Chaadaev’s notorious ‘First Philosophical Letter’ outraged society in 1836 when it was published in Russian translation in The Telescope, because the author specifically denied Russia an independent cultural history. Chaadaev categorically declared that Russia lacked an original culture, for everything about it was imitative, derivative and imported. ¹⁷

Systematic engagement with this Russian dilemma began with polemics between Slavophiles and Westernizers. Early Slavophiles (Ivan Kireevskii, Alexei Khomiakov) were among the first to demand a national culture (‘samobytnaia russkaia obrazovannost’’, as Kireevskii referred to it in Russian) (Kireevskii, 1984: 277; Lavrin, 1961: 120). The Slavophiles’ cultural nationalism was part of the Romantic agenda, except that the only ‘culture’ Russia had known was that of Europe (Rabow-Edling, 2005: 100). If in Europe ‘culture and nationality are one, for the former developed out of the latter’, as Kireevskii observed in 1832, in the Russian scenario, native could only mean uneducated. The predicament of Russian culture was that ‘national’ and ‘culture’ were antithetical notions: if culture was about enlightenment and education, the national was associated with the vast majority of the population, who were illiterate (Kireevskii, 1984: 78). In a similar spirit, Khomiakov drew a sharp distinction between the ‘illiterate Rus’’ (neuchenaia Rus’) and the ‘learned Russia’ (uchenaia Rossiia), which resulted in conflict between national life and foreign culture, between originality and imitation (Khomiakov, 1900: 65–7). National culture, in other words, was a contradiction in terms: from the very beginning, the idea of culture in Russia was associated with foreign, not native, origins.

How to fashion a cultural identity when ‘national’ means distinctly uncultured? In the course of thе Romantic quest for lost national traditions, contemporaries alternately located it in the Orthodox church, the peasant commune, the folk ornament, the Russian style of architecture and realist painting. As often as not, these purposeful discoveries of the national self in culture were discursive constructs as much as they were material manifestations of the Russian vernacular. This discourse, launched early in the century, continued throughout the imperial period at a variable pace.

One loud eruption in the ongoing battle of opinions took place in 1876 when an extensive public dialogue on cultural identity unfolded in the press. Dostoevsky and the critic V. G. Avseenko were among those who took part in the exchange. Culture and its made-up derivatives (kul’turnyi, kul’turit’, okul’turivshiisia, dokul’turit’sia) form the main theme in the April 1876 issue of Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer. Culture is essentially a curse word here: Dostoevsky writes explicitly against educated society, which had been ‘depraved by culture’. More specifically, the culture under attack refers to the Westernized upbringing of the Russian educated elite – the so-called ‘cultured people’ (‘kul’turnye liudi’):

They tell us straight that the common people (narod) have no truth whatsoever and that the truth can only be found in culture, which the upper layer of the cultured people preserves. To be entirely conscientious, I will take this dear European culture of ours in the highest possible sense, and not merely in the sense of carriages and lackeys, precisely in the sense that we, compared to the common people, have developed spiritually and morally, we have been humanized and civilized and thus, to our credit, now differ from the common people entirely. Having made such an unbiased declaration, I will ask myself directly the following question: ‘Are we indeed so preciously good and so unmistakably cultured that we should toss the common people’s culture to the side and bow down to our own culture? And finally, what precisely did we bring to the common people from Europe?’

The shorter version of the same sentiment explicitly equates ‘us’ with Europe, education, and culture, and ‘them’ with the passive uneducated Russian majority (Dostoevsky, 1981: 109–10). As an alternative to this culture of appearance, which Dostoevsky spitefully likens to vaudeville, the writer puts forth the culture of the people (narodnaia kul’tura) and its proponents, the Slavophiles. They also benefited from European education, like the ‘cultured people’, but unlike the latter they did not disconnect themselves from their roots. ¹⁸ Dostoevsky’s entry in Diary of a Writer was part of the larger public debate on culture. Among those who contributed to it were the Notes of the Fatherland editor Nikolai Mikhailovskii, the popular author Petr Boborykin, the publicist Pavel Gaideburov and the journalists V. M. and P. Ch., who wrote for a variety of periodical editions, including the daily St Petersburg News and the weekly newspaper Rumour (Molva).

That same year, Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote a brilliant satire – an unfinished work called ‘The cultured people’ (Kul’turnye liudi), the first instalment of which was published in early 1876 in Notes of the Fatherland. At the centre of the published fragment is the cultured character Prokop – ‘one of the most impressive representatives of Russian cultured men, who only yesterday discovered that they have a culture’. This version of culture satirized by Saltykov-Shchedrin is about the general public; his ‘cultured’ people are the bureaucracy, the provincials and all those who are eager to receive ready-made opinions and fashionable statements, especially of a foreign origin. Prokop, for instance, defines his affiliation with cultured society as follows: ‘I am a man of culture because I served in the cavalry. And also because I currently order my clothes at Charmer’s. And also because on Saturdays, I dine at the English club’ (Saltykov-Shchedrin, 1934: 510, 497). Not unlike Dostoevsky’s allusion to vaudeville, culture is a sheer caricature here that results in the special kind of ennui (kul’turnaia toska) endured by Prokop and others like him.

These excerpts from debates in 1876 demonstrate that not only did culture mean different things for different contributors, but also that a negative take on the subject predominated. Nevertheless, the growing volume of texts critiquing the state of culture contributed positively to its growth, for even while they rejected it, the authors were writing about and building culture.

A major debate unfolded in 1888 in response to Nikolai Danilevsky’s Russia and Europe (Rossiia i Evropa), a remarkable contemporary effort to systematically outline a culture. Initially, Danilevsky’s treatise appeared in the journal Dawn (Zaria) in 1869, but it was barely noticed until almost 20 years later, when the book became entangled in an extended controversy. During the many conversations between thinkers, critics and journalists, talk about culture in general, and Danilevsky’s volume in particular, came to occupy a sizable place in the public sphere of imperial Russia. If it took over a dozen years for the 1200 copies of an earlier edition to sell out, the 1888 edition sold rapidly.

A flurry of discursive activity surrounding the reissue of Russia and Europe in 1888 – in which the philosophers Vladimir Solovyov, Konstantin Leontiev and Nikolai Strakhov, the professors of history at St Petersburg University Konstantin Bestuzhev-Riumin and Nikolai Kareev, as well as many anonymous journalists, participated – was as much about Danilevsky’s theory as about the conundrum of Russian culture in general. In the pages of the popular press, Danilevsky’s single sizable volume was refracted as so many often contradictory opinions, which were broadly and readily available to the general public. Depending on who was writing, when and where, Danilevsky’s ideas invited many interpretations (see, for instance, Bestuzhev-Riumin, 1995: 432–5).

Danilevsky’s theory of cultural–historical types hinges upon the premise that culture cannot be anything but national: ‘culture … does not even deserve to be called culture if it is not original’ (kul’tura … i imeni etogo ne zasluzhivaet, esli ne samobytna) (Danilevsky, 1995: 429). Patriot that he was, Danilevsky nevertheless acknowledges that no such culture existed in Russia in 1869; overall, in comparison with the Greek and European ‘great cultural types’, the Slavs’ contribution to the sciences and the arts had been ‘rather unremarkable’ (ves’ma neznachitel’no). All that Russia did have at the time were the ‘modest rudiments’ of a new culture (skromnye zadatki novoi kul’tury, novoi tsivilizatsii). This was not due to the Slavs’ inherent inability to engage in ‘purely cultural affairs’, however: Danilevsky points to historical reasons that prevented the Slavs from excelling in the field of culture. Nevertheless, he forecasts a brilliant future. Since the rudiments of natural ability and talent, ‘which are necessary for the glamorous performance in the area of sciences and the arts’, are sufficiently present in the Slavic cultural type, there is no reason to be disconcerted by the lack of actual attainment of cultural significance; with more favourable conditions, rudimentary buds will develop into ‘luxurious flowers and fruit’ (Danilevsky, 1995: 424, 429). ¹⁹

To prove that Russian culture has brilliant potential, Danilevsky offers a modest canon comprising the Russian classics: Gogol, Pushkin, Tolstoy, the artist Ivanov, the sculptor Pimenov and the composer Glinka. The colossal success of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in particular, he argues, proves that ‘we are essentially better than we seem. Let them find a comparable work in any of European literatures!’ (Danilevsky, 1995: 426). That the Slavic civilization had not yet yielded any luscious fruit was due largely to what Danilevsky calls ‘mock-Europeanism’ (evropeinichanie). Mock-Europeanism is Russia’s disease, the onset of which Danilevsky dates to Peter the Great, whose reforms impeded ‘genuine cultural development’ and led to a radical transformation as ‘the Russian people split into two layers’. Danilevsky explains: ‘The lower layer remained Russian, while the upper became European – so European as to be indistinguishable from Europe.’ The epithet ‘Russian’ came to be associated exclusively with things that are good only for the common folk: for instance, ‘the Russian poor mare (loshadenka), the Russian sheep, the Russian chicken, the Russian cuisine, the Russian song, the Russian fairy-tale, Russian clothes’. Thus everything that is ‘particularly Russian national’ appeared to be deficient, ‘especially if one looks at it from a foreign point of view’, and there was no other perspective available to those who derived all their education from foreign sources (Danilevsky, 1995: 421, 232).

If Danilevsky and his supporters believed optimistically that, once cured of the disease of mock-Europeanism, Russian society would regain its national confidence, his opponents openly ridiculed such faith in ‘Russia’s great cultural originality’. One of the main provocateurs in the 1888 debates, which erupted after years of silence surrounding the first two editions of Danilevsky’s work, was the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. His article ‘Russia and Europe’ (Rossiia i Evropa) in The Messenger of Europe refutes both the modest rudiments and the expected luxurious fruit of Russian national culture: ‘Our contemporary reality does not offer any positive foundation for a new original culture.’ Solovyov denies not so much the existence of Russian tradition, as its radical difference and complete separation from the European experience, the point upon which Danilevsky’s position rested. Russian culture, far from being a separate and distinct historical type, is only a part of European culture for Solovyov, just as the Russian novel, despite its distinctiveness, is part of the tradition initiated by Balzac and Thackeray. Moreover, even if one were to grant Russia the rudiments of originality, its lack of progress in the arts only proves that Russian national culture is a figment of Danilevsky’s patriotic imagination. After all, the Russian golden era (from Eugene Onegin to Anna Karenina) was followed by a perceived decline, as Solovyov sees it, and the Russia of the second half of the nineteenth century had no masters to equal Danilevsky’s original canon of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Glinka and Ivanov. ²⁰ Solovyov concludes that, since culture is at the very core of the Slavic question and since the original religious, artistic, intellectual and political life in Russia did not evolve fast enough to compete with Europe, Russia should step aside and exercise national abdication (natsional’noe samootrechenie), which is how it got its state and culture in the first place. For as long as Russia insists on national egoism, ‘it will remain powerless to produce anything great or even simply important’ (Solovyov, 1911–14: 29–35, 144, 103).

Solovyov’s ‘Russia and Europe’ inevitably stirred the public: an extended debate ensued during which writing turned into a culture-making pursuit. One of the ideologists of the soil (pochvennik), the philosopher Nikolai Strakhov, defended the idea of Slavic distinction in his article ‘Our culture and world-wide unity’ in The Russian Messenger. Strakhov’s position was that of a ‘sermon on national self-conceit’ (propoved’ natsional’nogo samodovol’stva), as Solovyov summarized it sarcastically: ‘Let us be ourselves – this is ultimately all that we need in his opinion. “Let us be ourselves”: that is, let us not think about any kind of substantial, fundamental improvement of our life, about any high ideals, we are fine as we are.’ He went on to mock Strakhov’s rhetoric of humble beginnings and future opportunities: ‘All that we have is embryonic and rudimentary; all is in a preliminary, undefined form; all is pregnant with future promise, but is vague and chaotic in the present’ (Strakhov, 1888: 200–56; Solovyov, 1911–14: 304, 310).

As the exchange continued, the discourse for and against national culture grew denser. Ample cross-referencing, as well as direct and approximate quotations, allowed participants and readers to follow the dialogue closely. Without having read the whole discussion, not to mention Danilevsky’s volume, readers could tune in to an overview of the debate and follow its development. Thus writing for the popular nationalist daily The New Time, one anonymous author, who styled himself ‘an ordinary reader’ (obyknovennyi chitatel’), underscored the necessity to give space to national aspects of the Russian mind, a mind schooled by Western Europe for too long, and to encourage its ‘striving for independent national culture’ (stremlenie k samobytnoi kul’ture). While agreeing with Solovyov that ‘without “culture” and sciences it is hard to be a genuinely useful member of mankind’, he categorically objected to obtaining that culture at the cost of the ‘mental slavery of Russian society’ (Anon., 1888). Such broadly accessible writing served as a conduit of knowledge about the state of Russian culture for the reading majority. These anonymous authors fully share the credit for keeping the talk of culture topical with the experts on the question, such as Strakhov, Solovyov and Stasov.

The big debate on culture eventually petered out, only to return again at different times during the many cultural revolutions of the twentieth century. Danilevsky’s ideas certainly enjoyed an enthusiastic revival among members of the Eurasian movement. In the course of the nineteenth century, the idea of national culture made phenomenal progress from ‘no culture’ to experimental definitions, and to the mainstream popular press. But even as talk of Russian culture was everywhere, there was still no agreement as to what that culture was, or whether it was even necessary.

A crisis of culture

Towards the end of the imperial period, the discontent expressed by many nineteenth-century thinkers grew into an articulated crisis. The atmosphere of the early twentieth century was conducive to reflections on the routes of culture. Anton Chekhov dramatized his vision of culture’s decline brilliantly in The Seagull. The symbolist author Andrey Bely wrote an essay poignantly titled ‘The problem of culture’ (Belyi, 1994a: 18). Among other contributors to contemporary debates on cultural identity were such thinkers as Viacheslav Ivanov, Berdyaev, Mikhail Gershenzon and Lev Shestov (Asoian and Malafeev, 2000: 173). Turn-of-the-century debates oscillated between two extremes: the ‘end of culture’ and the ‘cult of culture’. Invariably, the ‘middle and middling forms’ (sredinnye i usrednennye formy) came under attack from both sides (Belyi, 1994b). National culture as an expression of collective identity lost currency at the end of the imperial period, when it was assailed on all fronts by such dissimilar thinkers as Berdyaev and Lenin.

Berdyaev, for instance, argued that in Russia, where national consciousness had been defined by apocalyptic and nihilistic trends, culture was rejected as an intermediate and moderate solution. For him, culture is an aristocratic construct opposed to bourgeois civilization. He writes, ‘The highest elevations of culture belong to the past, and not to our bourgeois democratic age, which is, more than anything, interested in the levelling process.’ ²¹ At exactly the opposite end of the spectrum, the leader of the Socialist Revolution V. I. Lenin inaugurated a campaign in 1913 against national culture, based on his theory of class struggle. National culture may have been a viable agenda 125 years ago, writes Lenin, but not in the present, when the nation is split into bourgeoisie and proletariat.

In every national culture there are, however undeveloped, elements of democratic and socialist culture, because in every culture, there is a mass of workers … But in every nation there is also a bourgeois culture … which exists, at that, not only as ‘parts’ (elementy), but as the dominant culture. This ‘national culture’ is on the whole a culture of landlords, priests, and bourgeoisie. ²²

From the perspective of Marxist theory, as much as from that of religious philosophy, the notions ‘national’ and ‘culture’ simply did not belong together.

Around the turn of the century, new sepulchral imagery began to dominate the discourse and the motif of a ‘rescue from culture’ resounded in contemporary debates. Contrary to previous efforts to collect and display artefacts, Russian thinkers now challenged culture to transcend the material world of institutions and to turn into a life-creating force. In the prose of Bely, who wrote extensively on the subject, culture is emphatically spiritual and individual. According to him, only a life of creativity can overcome the death of culture, which Bely represents as a mausoleum of museum relics where one can play the ‘grand piano of culture’: touch the keys and pleasant sounds emerge – Raphael, Leonardo, Wagner. ²³

More fundamentally, the utopian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov announced that ‘the goal of life must be the salvation from culture’ (cited in Asoian and Malafeev, 2000: 183). For Fedorov, culture, as well as institutions that gather, organize and display it, is antithetical to life. Hence he takes the museum – the quintessential such institution and a stronghold of identity – and deconstructs it as a false and mechanical manifestation of life. Fedorov’s ideal museum does not preserve fragments of the material heritage; rather, it functions as a laboratory for the resurrection of dead forefathers, recycling the past into a life-creating energy (Fedorov, 1982: 582–604). Perhaps the most explicit argument against modern secular culture belongs to the Russian Orthodox theologian Pavel Florensky, who frames it as only a poor substitute for God: ‘We got very used to believing in culture instead of God.’ He continues: ‘Modern man needs Christian culture; not theatrical props, but a serious culture, culture according to Christ, a genuine culture.’ ²⁴

The religious cult offered one of the turn-of-the-century solutions to the crisis of modern culture (see also Berdyaev, 1994). The recourse to traditional and reinvented Russian mythology, which enjoyed an enthusiastic revival near the end of the century, was another opportunity to resolve this perceived crisis. The rise of the Firebird as a cultural symbol and a reinvented tradition dates to that time. Among other colourful and memorable mythic images, representations of the Firebird proliferated in a variety of forms and genres at the fin de siècle, especially in versions of culture that went abroad, along with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The Firebird was not a novelty per se: there was no shortage of fantastic birds in Russian folklore – images of the mythic bird Alkonost, arguably a distant relative of Firebird, can be found in illuminated manuscripts, as well as numerous popular prints, while the Firebird proper has long been a staple of traditional fairy tales. But thanks to artists like Bilibin, Polenova, Vasnetsov and Bakst, a recognizable iconography of the Firebird developed, rendering it a distinct character and a symbol of national revival. Some of the canonical images of the Firebird appeared in the form of book illustrations, an art form that flourished at the turn of the century. Ivan Bilibin’s illustration for the ‘Fairy Tale about Ivan Tsarevich, the Firebird, and the Grey Wolf’ (1899) is among the earliest and best known of such images. Elena Polenova depicted the same episode in 1896 and 1900; her watercolour was published in the World of Art journal (Polenova, 1900). Konstantin Bal’mont’s collection of poems The Firebird: The Pipe of the Slav (Zhar-ptitsa: Svirel’ slavianina, 1907), uses the Firebird’s magical feathers as a metaphor for scattered Slavic folk beliefs. As if bringing these dispersed fragments together, Konstantin Somov’s illustration for the collection anthropomorphized the fantastic bird as a Russian beauty.

The glowing creature of Russian fairy tales turned into an international celebrity in Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird (1910). Stravinsky’s Firebird was an exceptionally successful ‘myth for export’, as the music historian Richard Taruskin demonstrated. Not only did this masterpiece advance the glory of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, but it effectively rendered the image of the magical bird as an icon of Russian national culture. The paradox of the phenomenon was that this Firebird version of cultural identity, so successfully received abroad as quintessentially Russian, was custom-made specifically for foreign publics. Taruskin describes the irony of The Firebird: ‘This very deliberately, in fact self-consciously “Russian” work had no antecedent in Russian art and was expressly created for a non-Russian audience’ (Taruskin, 1996: 647; Banes, 1999: 121). Thus it was in early twentieth-century Paris that the traditional identification of Russia with the ‘land of the Firebird’ was fashioned. To add to this paradoxical scenario, during the two decades that the Ballets Russes dazzled audiences in Europe and America, the company never performed in Russia (see also Holt, 2000; Garafola, 1998). The association of Russian national culture with the beautiful feathered creature echoed nostalgically in the literary–artistic journal The Firebird that Russian émigrés published in Berlin in the 1920s. In later decades, the same myth continued to live on in such acclaimed surveys as Suzanne Massie’s Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia (1980), while in the context of Soviet Russia, an entirely different mythology took root in the post-revolutionary era, with everyday heroism at ordinary factories replacing the glamour of fabulous Firebirds and Fabergé.

We can go on and on, as contemporaries did, with a quest for a lasting resolution to Russian debates on culture. The modernist turn in the arts and the avant-garde aesthetics, which aimed to toss the classics overboard ‘off the ship of modernity’, remain outside the scope of this article, as do many other subsequent developments. Time and again, each utterance in support of a national culture invited resistance, so when Fedorov appealed for salvation from culture, Nikolai Roerich declared that culture was the salvation (Rerikh, 1994: 41). The debates that flared up in the mid 1870s, the late 1880s and at the turn of the century have never been settled: the perpetual controversy has continued to pull culture in different directions, and this perceived crisis has kept cultural identity at the centre of public life. What is special about Russian culture is neither the Russian soul nor the Russian style; the uniqueness of both has been repeatedly contested. Culture is an invented tradition and a process of constantly revising that tradition, of losing and finding it, of writing and rewriting. National culture exists as discourse and counter-discourse. The Russian pride and paradox is that during the imperial period Culture (emphatically high with a capital ‘C’) came to serve as a popular marker of identity in a country with a barely literate population. Via open debates in the press, the Russian general public learned how to talk culture and made a national tradition of it.