Abstract
Reviewed by: George Gilbert, University of Southampton, UK
In late imperial Russia, debates about art and culture played a central role in the creation of civil society and, indeed, shaping social life. The role of art in the creation of the public sphere is the central interest of Katia Dianina’s lucid and persuasive monograph, which claims that artistic debates were public events and, drawing on the work of Yuri Lotman and Mikhail Bakhtin, part of the process of ‘culture-building’ at this time. Examining a wide variety of printed sources, including a good selection of major newspapers and ‘thick journals’ of the period, the book follows two major arguments across a clearly structured narrative. The first of these chiefly concerns the creation of the public sphere in Russia between 1851 and 1900, showing that debate about art was a central discourse. Dianina argues ‘culture is a debate, a public one amongst society’ (14). This book is focused on the impact art had in the popular press; to support this thesis, Dianina contends that the Russian public in the second half of the nineteenth century constituted a ‘broad audience’ enjoying a ‘print-based’ experience (17). A secondary narrative throughout the work, so closely intertwined with the above that the two cannot be meaningfully separated, is that the process of culture-building and artistic creation ran conterminously with the creation of Russian ‘national character’. In assessing where this came from, Dianina claims that part of this answer can be found in debates over Russian identity apparent in the discourses surrounding the creation of national culture. To structure these diverse thoughts, Dianina builds the book’s narrative around important events such as national exhibitions and the opening of major museums and the positions adopted by significant figures in the art world. The forms of mass culture the book examines include permanent ones, such as monuments and museums, and also unfixed or transient aspects, like the popular press. Dianina argues that both reinforced one another: whilst newspapers were designed to be read quickly and thrown away, the variety of responses generated to the opening of museums and monuments left a lasting impression as the comment and images they created impacted upon the public imagination for years afterwards. Though there is a chapter assessing celebrations of the Millennium Monument in 1862, the Imperial Hermitage (first opened to the public in 1852) and the centennial of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1864, this work is not so much about institutions, but rather about ideas, and the creation of a space for the consumption of public culture (123). The debate over ‘Westernization’ in the artistic world was one example, and a focal point towards the end of the work is the fierce debate about Russia’s position as a leading artistic nation that unfolded between two dominant figures, Vladimir Stasov, who assumed a more nationalist stance, and Sergei Diaghilev of the World of Art group, who looked more towards the West for his inspiration. Following on from Hobsbawm and Ranger’s seminal work on the subject, Dianina contends that these public debates allowed for the invention (or reinvention) of traditions; examples include peasant culture, which can be seen from work done in the artists’ colonies established at Abramtsevo (229–33) and Talashkino (236–9). Though the passions evident in such ventures were real, the search for ‘Russian identity’ and ‘traditional’ Russian life was partially an invention of the artistic educated classes. This can be seen from the creation of ‘folk traditions’ during the nineteenth century; this confected ‘peasant culture’ was, among other things, a symbol of opposition to Western ideas of ‘progress’. Elsewhere, Dianina notes how the majestic Firebird was never performed by Diaghilev’s company in Russia. Yet, through the responses that this radical new ballet generated in the press, many Russians could share in the feelings of national pride it generated: ‘it was not the performance, inaccessible to the Russian general public, but the resonance that it caused in society that brought home a culture triumph’ (273).
Though lively and stimulating, the work is, of course, not without limitations: this reader would have liked a little more analysis of how the debates discussed in the book shaped consciousness amongst different social estates; though Dianina’s argument that many were affected by the artistic discourses appearing in the public sphere is persuasive, she herself notes that the visitor numbers to exhibitions and museums oscillated wildly, as in her discussion of the Tretyakov Gallery (176). Who was most affected by such debates? What were the limits to the empowerment of the general public? That said, this is an intriguing work, smoothly written and with plenty of necessary illustrative examples of the major artistic endeavours of the period. Dianina’s imaginative and persuasive discussion of the relationship between art and national identity will appeal to a wide readership: as well as historians of late Imperial Russia, those interested in the fields of cultural studies and museology should gain much from reading this important work.