In the decade and a half before the start of World War I, Russian writers, artists, musicians and cultural critics debated the place of nationality within a broader modernist aesthetic. In her well-crafted monograph, Irina Shevelenko guides the reader through these debates and sheds new light on the creative achievements of Russia’s Silver Age.
Shevelenko arranges her material both chronologically and thematically. Moving from the turn of the century into the WWI years, she explores a range of creative endeavors, from handicrafts production to painting, poetry, literary criticism, theatre, ballet, music, icon painting, and finally back to the visual arts. The book is primarily organized around texts: reviews, polemics, programs, and manifestos, often in dialogue with one another, through which prominent intellectuals debated the sources of a modernist aesthetic.
Broadly construed, Shevelenko traces a pendular swing from nationalism to cosmopolitanism and back again. She cautions, however, against too rigid a diachronic scheme. She notes a “range of tendencies synchronously present” (6) within Russian society at any given time. Yet the picture Shevelenko presents is not static. She shows a clear convergence by the eve of WWI around a modernist aesthetic rooted in the imagined antiquity of popular tradition.
Shevelenko illustrates the conceptual challenge of Russian identity in her discussion of the Russian pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, which starts the book. Visitors to the pavilion noted an odd absence: Russia itself. The empire was represented by Russia’s Asiatic territories, and by a separate display of peasant handicrafts. Russia’s authentic identity took the form of an ethnographic “other” defined by the absence of western influence. Educated Russia figured implicitly as the external observer tasked with incorporating native tradition into a national high culture.
In the years leading up to 1905, artists, writers, and critics, associated mainly with the World of Art group, pushed back against this “national turn.” Sergei Diaghilev, Aleksandr Benois, Igor Grabar, Ivan Bilibin, and others resisted the notion of an artificially formulated national style, defended the creative autonomy of the individual artist, and reaffirmed Russia’s western identity. Valerii Briusov even rejected nationalism itself, looking toward an imperial identity modelled after ancient Rome. The Russo-Japanese war and subsequent revolutionary upheavals undermined such imperial visions and directed attention back to the people and the nation.
Viacheslav Ivanov’s influential formulations, articulated in a series of articles and lectures written between 1904 and 1907, marked a sea change in the quest for a national aesthetic. Drawing on classical models, especially ancient Greek theatre, Ivanov called for synthesis, breaking down the boundaries between artist and audience and uniting both in collective rites embodying myths common to all the nation. Ivanov’s program of “myth-creation” and cultural fusion resonated broadly within Silver Age intellectual and artistic circles. Much of the literary and linguistic experimentation of the period, from the folkloristic explorations of Alexei Remizov to the pan-Slavic neologisms of Sergei Gorodetskii and Velimir Khlebnikov, built on the foundations set by Ivanov.
Trends in the performing arts followed a similar path. Composers faced particular challenges in integrating folk styles into formal classical works. Yet audiences to early Ballet Russe productions demanded works that captured the unbridled spirit of the archaic east. It fell to Igor Stravinsky to break with convention, move past the stylized motifs of the “mighty Five,” and evoke ancient tradition through the jarring harmonies and rhythms of folk polyphony. Critics wondered whether the results could even be called music, yet the score of Petrushka struck a nerve. For all the discord and clamor, Stravinsky, his admirers claimed, had tapped into “life itself,” expressing the “collective soul of the Russian people” (170).
The reconceptualization of icon painting as high art provides a fitting conclusion to Shevelenko’s narrative. With the legalization of Old Belief in 1905, pre-Petrine icons, which the Old Believers had hidden and protected, gradually came into view. Cleansed, restored, and exhibited in public for the first time, the pieces were a revelation. For the Russian avant-garde, icon painting demonstrated an indigenous tradition of artistic genius linking Russia with classical antiquity and intersecting with the most advanced strains of aesthetic modernism.
Shevelenko makes a strong case for the formation of a distinct modernist aesthetic rooted in an imagined archaic past. Embracing a broad range of genres within the overarching framework of nationality studies, Russian Archaism stands out for its thematic breadth. It will be of interest to specialists in a wide range of fields: not only intellectual historians and literary scholars, but also musicologists, art historians, specialists in museum studies, theatre, ballet, and more. One minor criticism might be the lack of acknowledgement of non-Russian nationalisms, implying the equation of the empire with Russianness. But this may reflect the discourse of the time as conveyed in the sources. At times, Shevelenko’s own line of argumentation feels somewhat obscured by the dense textual analysis, but for those willing to give the work a close and careful reading, the rewards are manifold.
