IV.

The Arts in Russia

A.

History of Russian Arts

In 988 Vladimir I (see Vladimir, Saint), ruler of Rus (the ancient state that was the ancestor of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus), married a Byzantine princess and converted from paganism to the Orthodox Christianity of the Byzantine Empire. The introduction of Christianity into Rus spurred the development of the country’s fine arts. For 600 years, imported Christian forms dominated Russian painting, music, architecture, and literature. Russian artists, however, applied their unique vision and dramatically altered the imported forms. Especially in painting, the blending of foreign influences with native genius produced some of the world’s most beautiful icons. In the early 15th century Andrey Rublyov, the greatest of Moscow’s artists, painted icons that surpassed those of his Byzantine collaborators in quality and brilliance.

Foreign invasions during the Time of Troubles (1598-1613) and the Westernizing policies of Peter the Great around the turn of the 18th century exposed Russia’s artists to new secular influences. As a result, the focus of the Russian artistic experience shifted to Western Europe. Art forms that had been forbidden by the medieval Russian Orthodox Church—such as portraiture, instrumental music, and dramatic productions—entered the mainstream of the nation's cultural life. By the mid-18th century Russians were producing ballets, operas, chamber music, baroque architecture, and novels.

As they had done with Byzantine influences in the Middle Ages (in Russia, 9th century to early 16th century), the Russians borrowed art forms from the West, assimilated them, and raised them to unique levels of brilliance and achievement. Saint Petersburg, the Russian capital founded by Peter the Great in the early 18th century, provided dramatic evidence of this process. The city became Russia’s 'window on the West.' Buildings that followed the style of 18th-century Saint Petersburg architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli and his 19th-century successor Carlo Rossi spread across the Russian Empire. By 1850 the art and architecture of Saint Petersburg had become the model that all of Russia tried to follow. The new vision blended all the artistic influences of Russia’s past and present with those of ancient Greece and Rome.

In the 19th century the Russian genius for blending foreign and native art forms produced the romantic poetry of Aleksandr Pushkin; the realist novels of Nikolay Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy; and the brilliant operas and ballets of Mikhail Glinka, Aleksandr Borodin, Peter Tchaikovsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and Modest Mussorgsky. Under the directorship of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, the Moscow Art Theater performed the bittersweet plays of Anton Chekhov and the realist works of Maksim Gorky, including his best-known play, The Lower Depths (1902; translated 1912).

The 20th century ushered in the beginnings of an avant-garde movement. From 1900 to 1917 Russia’s arts included the symbolist poetry of Aleksandr Blok, Andrey Bely, and Zinaida Gippius; the revolutionary musical scores of Aleksandr Scriabin and Igor Stravinsky; the height of the so-called neo-primitivism period in the paintings of Natalia Goncharova, Wassily Kandinsky, and Mikhail Larionov; and the stunning ballet productions of Sergey Diaghilev featuring dancers Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Ida Rubinstein.

The revolutionary creations of Russia’s avant-garde, especially the constructivist designs of Vladimir Tatlin and Konstantin Melnikov (see Constructivism), continued during the first years of the Soviet era. However, these soon withered under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s rigid dictates. For many years the Soviet government used the stale precepts of socialist realism to censor the arts, including the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Boris Pasternak; the novels and plays of Mikhail Bulgakov; and the musical compositions of Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergey Prokofiev.

From the 1930s to the 1970s various artists challenged the restraints of socialist realism, including such independent literary giants as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Boris Pasternak; composers Sergey Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich; poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Joseph Brodsky; theatrical director Yury Lyubimov; and filmmakers Sergey Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Andrey Tarkovsky. Others, such as novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, saw no other way but to make peace with the system that demanded conformity above all else. Some artists, including poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergey Yesenin, committed suicide.

In the 1980s émigré artists who had fled the Soviet Union and dissident artists who had remained in Russia began to influence what would become the cultural mainstream of post-Soviet Russia. The works of many artists became widely available in Russia only in the 1980s, including the émigré paintings of Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky; the novels of Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, and Mikhail Bulgakov; the nonconformist poetry of Anna Akhmatova; and the modernist sculpture of Ernst Neizvestny.

The Soviet leadership had considered the works of Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, Brodsky, and many others so subversive that people who read them could be sent to the labor camps, or Gulags. These and other works are now widely available in Russia. Solzhenitsyn, who was driven from the USSR in 1974, returned to live in Russia in 1994. Russian artists have struggled to blend their artistic heritage with the modern foreign influences to which they were denied access for so long.

B.

Russia’s Cultural Institutions

During the Soviet period it was institutions more than individuals that shaped the arts in Russia. Consequently, museums, libraries, and theaters played a major part in the country’s artistic life. They continue to be important in post-Soviet Russia. The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow rank among the greatest museums in the world. Other institutions, such as the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, also have important collections.

Russia’s major theaters date from imperial times and continue to thrive. The most important theaters are in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Moscow is the home of the Bolshoi Theater, which is the home of the Bolshoi Ballet, and the Moscow Art Theater. The Mariinsky Opera and Ballet Theater, home of the Kirov-Mariinsky Ballet, and the Pushkin Dramatic Theater are in Saint Petersburg.

Of the thousands of libraries in Russia, the largest is the Russian State Library (formerly the Lenin Library). It contains more than 30 million volumes in more than 250 languages, one of the largest collections in the world. Nearly as large is the collection of the Russian National Library (formerly the M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin Library) in Saint Petersburg.

W. Bruce Lincoln contributed the Arts in Russia section of this article.