Russian Arts #

Suffering: #

Alfred de MUSSET wrote An unhappy nation makes great artists.

Un peuple malheureux fait les grands artistes.

Ivan IV - the Terrible 1st Romanov 1533 - 1548

Suffering from violent, paranoid delusions, he earned a ghastly reputation for slaughtering his political opponents while suppressing free speech in Russia. Ivan’s armies once destroyed an entire town, simply because the Tsar had a misinformed hunch they were plotting against him. Oh, and he “accidentally” killed his own son with a giant walking stick in 1581.

While Peter and later Catherine the Great opened the window to the west, from 1801, Alexander I began an attempt to close the window to preserve the Monarchy in face of Napoleon’s drive towards liberation. Pushkin was exiled from St Petersberg to the eastern, but Nicholas I, recognising his talent and popularity brought Pushkin back from the cold under his confining censorship. No wonder he and other writers resorted to subtle satire and literature of the absurd.

The Decembrist revolt, 1830 revolts in France and the 1848 revolutions across Europe, threatened the status quo resulting in the arrest, death sentence of Dostoevsky. After his reprieve with ten years of hard labour in Siberia, Dostoevsky came back a stronger man obsessed with freedom, suffering, faith, and the darkest corners of the human psyche.

Russian writers and thinkers responded to their country’s experience, which, in its very extremity, did not invite euphemisms. Evil was evil, as no one in the Gulag could doubt; if ever there was goodness, it was amidst immense suffering.

Kissinger embarks on a disquisition about Russia’s “almost mystical” tolerance for suffering.

Turgenev’s entire body of work is about, the impossibility of separating love from suffering, devotion from delusion, choice from compulsion.

Dostoevsky wrote his best novels after his arrest in 1849, sentenced to death, but commuted to ten years in Siberian gulags.

Solzhenitsyn writes with the moral intensity of Dostoevsky and the clarity of someone who has lived through what he depicts. His prose is unhurried but relentless, probing like a scalpel, peeling away layers of pretense to expose the raw nerves beneath. He does not offer easy symbols or simplified villains. What he offers instead is a haunting moral inquiry, dressed in the quiet realism of everyday suffering.

Alienation #

The reason Russia feels so alien to most Westerners is that it has never been Latin (and was never disciplined by either the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation).

The reason it feels so threatening is that its alienness is less immediately apparent than that of the other “East” (Near, Middle, or Far), while looming much larger because of its size, proximity, and imperial expansion. And of course the less coherent and self-confident “the West” is, the more it needs an outside threat.

Russia has emerged as a major player in the Arts in the last 200 years with some of the world’s greatest artists in music, painting, literature and during the Soviet Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s. Lenin claimed, “If I keep listening to music, I will never finish the revolution.”

Classical musicians include iconic composers like Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Glinka, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, known for their powerful symphonies, ballets, and nationalistic styles.

During the Cold War, classical ballet companies such as the Kirov and the Bolshoi were among the most prominent cultural weapons of the Soviet Union.

It was Peter the Great who opened Russia’s window to the world by going on long tour to be educated in Western ways. He and his large entourage brought back new ideas in industry and ship building. Catherine the Great furthered the cause by encouraging the aristocracy to study abroad - mostly in Paris. French became the language of the court as in most European ones.

French thinkers, like , Michel de Montaigne, B: 1534, who questioned everything, urged people to be comfortable with uncertainty. In an age demanding dogmatic certainty about salvation, politics, morality, Montaigne recommended doubt. Deeply disturbed by the savage brutality of the religious wars, he kept neutral, but lost his faith in all religions.

Rousseau (1712 - 1778) argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality. His second, work, was The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. The central claim is that human beings are basically good by nature, but were corrupted by the complex historical events that resulted in present day civil society.

Rousseau’s praise of the natural state of man and his major work The Social Contract: published in 1762 caused great controversy in France and were immediately banned by Paris authorities. Rousseau fled France and settled in Switzerland.

The social base of Western liberalism, a commercial middle class, was almost entirely lacking in nineteenth-century Russia. Liberalism’s appeal there was not economic but intellectual, and its proponents were not businessmen or industrialists but enlightened noblemen, professionals, and academicians.

The first Russian authors began to appear after 1800, with Pushkin the most popular.

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, #

1799, - 1837, (aged 37)

Widely revered as the founder of Russian literature, in 1820, at the age of twenty, he was banished from St. Petersburg for writing anti-authoritarian verses (notably “Ode to Liberty,” which was later found among the possessions of the Decembrist rebels). Pushkin was banished from St. Petersburg in May 1820 to a remote southern province. Sent first to Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine), and later to Crimea.

The collapse of the rising had been a grievous experience for Pushkin, whose heart was wholly with the “guilty” Decembrists, five of whom had been executed, while others were exiled to forced labour in Siberia.

In 1826, because he was so popular with the people, the new Tsar Nicholas I, allowed him to return to Moscow— as his personal censor. He eventually went back to St. Petersburg, where he died, at the age of thirty-seven, after an eminently avoidable duel.

Boris Godunov dramatises the succession after the death of Ivan the Terrible, who is presented as the murderer of Ivan’s little son, Dmitri. The development of the action on two planes, one political and historical, the other psychological, is masterly and is set against a background of turbulent events and ruthless ambitions.

The play owes much to Pushkin’s reading of early Russian annals and chronicles, as well as to Shakespeare, who, as Pushkin said, was his master in bold, free treatment of character, simplicity, and truth to nature.

In May 1823 he started work on his central masterpiece, the novel in verse, Yevgeny Onegin (1833). It was published serially, often considered the first great Russian novel, starting in the eighteen-twenties, at a time when much of Russian aristocratic life was still conducted in French. In that way it represents a nation’s first writing in its vernacular - like Dante’s Divine Comedy in Italian, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in English, Charles Harpur’s Four Graves… Dante imitated Virgil, Chaucer - Boccaccio, and Harpur - Milton.

Pushkin reveals influences by Ovid, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Byron and Thomas Wyatt.

Eugene Onegin illustrates the corrosive effects of the hollow core of being an Aristocrat during the 19^(th) century. Like the quintessential gentleman of the English class system; a man not expected to do anything but live an indulged dissipate life, purposeless, non-productive, haughty, imperious, destructive and unaccountable. His lifestyle is ridiculed as irresponsible, wanton and decadent.

Like Wyatt’s They Flee From Me… Onegin is rejected by someone who used to dote on him. Bored with his jaded lifestyle in St. Petersburg, he inherits a country estate after his uncle’s death.

Eugene Onegin is a tragic story about a wealthy, bored dandy, Eugene Onegin, who rejects the love of a young, romantic woman named Tatyana. He then kills his best friend, Vladimir Lensky, in a duel after a series of misunderstandings and flirting with Olga, Lensky’s fiancée. Years later, after traveling, Onegin returns to St Peterburg and finds Tatyana married and no longer in love with him, leaving him with regret and despair.

Pushkin’s political writing is constrained by censorship, but his writing about love is given free rein. He demonstrates a respectful attitude to women revealing the pain of unrequited love in both genders. The women are treated with dignity luring men to higher aspirations. While the style imitates Byron, the attitudes are more like Keats.

Duels have been fought since Cain killed Abel because God preferred Abel’s sacrifice over his. Duels were deemed God’s justice as Trial by Combat in the 13th century. Shakespeare relies on them in most of his histories - Hamlet, Macbeth… The winner of a duel obviously indicates devine justice.

Pushkin took part in many duels and died, at the age of thirty-seven, after the last of a rash duels.

His lament:

I have outlasted all my desires, my dreams I have grown apart; my grief alone I am left entire; the gleaming of an empty heart.

Mikhail Iurevich Lermontov #

In the early 17th century, a Scottish lieutenant George Learmont, who took part in the Polish intervention in Russia, fell into Russian captivity. He took it as a chance for a new life, as he entered the service of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich. He married Maria Lermontova, an heiress to rich estates. When she died Mikhail was educated by his grandmother and entered a boarding school for noble sons at 14. He was also tutored by experts from France, Germany and England. His grandmother looked down on his father and Lermontove grew up without a father figure, except for Pushkin.

He developed his passion for poetry, along with a reputation for cruel and sardonic humour. In 1828 he was admitted to Moscow University, where he began writing poetry influenced by Lord Byron and the latter’s cult of personality.

After being expelled for disciplinary reasons he attended cadet school in St. Petersburg and in 1834 he was stationed in the city with the Hussar regiment of the Imperial Guards. By 1832 Lermontov had already written two hundred lyric poems, ten long poems and three plays. His passionate eulogy on Pushkin’s murder, “A Poet’s Death, which was published in 1837, was enthusiastically received in liberal circles but annoyed Tsar Nicholas I, with the result that Lermontov was exiled to the Caucasus.

He wrote:

The first experience of torture gives an understanding of the pleasure of torturing others.

Victims become perpetrators.

A Hero of our Times is an ironic title as most of the characters are anti-heroic. he does not attempt to romanticise Russian History. He peoples his books with ordinary peasants, Cossacks, brigands and other low life set in beautiful nature and majestic mountains.

A Male Manifesto:

Pechorin, like most of the men, deal with the problem of male masculinity.

You suffer for being a man, and you suffer for not being a man.

Men must prove themselves by being strong and conquering others including women.

Women are the prize of war used to incubate more warriors. Women are drawn to men who conquer them, not to ones who pursue them.

In the barbeque of life, women get to choose between CHOPs and SNAGs. They tend to chose the CHOP, but when it doesn’t work out, cry on the shoulders of the SNAG.

(Cauvinistic, Hedonistic, Opinionated Pricks) (Sensitive New Age Guy)

The chase is more exhilerating than the prize. You fight to entangle with a woman and then untangle. Men pursue many women out of the biological necessity of spreading their seed. Women look for males who will protect them.

The basic inner congenital contradictions in men are their peternatural impulsive drives and their apirations for noble deeds.

Beauty and The Beast, Leonard Cohen’s trysts.

Men are conflicted by passion and reason. Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, has rational qualms about his feelings for Elizabeth, but eventually his heart wins over his social misgivings.

Lermotov followed Pushkin’s philosophy that life is not about finding peace, but a struggle to find meaning in living dangerously.

In a late poem The Sail Lermontov writes:

As if in tempest there is peace.

The paradox remains that a soul finds true solace in struggle and upheaval.

Nicholai Vasilevich Gogol #

1809 - 1852

Born in the Ukraine to the lower nobility, Gogol showed early talent in writing biting comedic satire of the pompous.
After school in Moscow he attempted to be successful in St Petersburg with little success. Luckily he came under the influence of Pushkin. With money from his mother meant to pay a debt he travelled to Germany.

His great comedy, The Government Inspector mercilessly lampoons the corrupt bureaucracy under Nicholas I. Nicholas apparently found it entertaining.

But during the triumph, after the bogus inspector’s departure, the arrival of the real inspector is announced—to the horror of those concerned. It was only by a special order of the tsar that the first performance of this comedy of indictment and “laughter through tears” took place on April 19, 1836.

He mercilessly lampoons the dullness of the bureaucracy under Nicholas I.

All art attempts to reflect society, and when we don’t like what we see, we smash the mirror.

The hue and cry raised by the reactionary press and officialdom was such that Gogol left Russia for Rome, where he remained, with some interruptions, until 1842. It was in Rome he wrote his most famous “poetic novel”.

Dead Souls

Due to severe censorship and threats of exile, most writers have to write on two levels, the obvious one and a hidden one.

Satire originated with Aesop’s famous Book of Fables, which date back to the 5th Century BC. Of course Homer already used irony in The Iliad and could be mocking the brutality and futility of armed combat.

Most profound thinkers — including Horace, Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Shakespeare—were not free to write explicitly about their most controversial ideas but had to disguise the truth under a conventional veneer -dressed up as comedy.

In sharp contrast with our idealized fantasy of Merrie Olde England, writers back then were jailed, tortured, and maimed for offending those in power. Ben Jonson, , Thomas Kyd……

Giovanni Boccaccio, in his 1357 Life of Dante, said that great poets write on two levels, so that their work -

“simultaneously challenges the intellect of the wise while it gives comfort to the minds of the simple” (quoted in Melzer 460).

But pity and tolerance are rare in satire, even in clash with it, producing in the result a deep sense of tragic humour. It is this that makes of Dead Souls a unique work, peculiarly Gogolian, peculiarly Russian.

Gogol was closely associated and influenced by Pushkin, who in turn was influenced by Ovid, Dante, French writers, Lord Byron and Shakespeare.

Ovid and Dante had both also been exiled for their writing. Lord Byron inherited his title from an uncle, went into voluntary exile at 22, identified with freedom movements in Italy and Greece. Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies reveal a strong sense of true justice and abhorrence of all forms of tyranny.

Montaigne and Rousseau advocated for free thinking, equality and the consent of the governed.

Dead Souls, the great prose classic of Russia, a masterpiece , that practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it. Dostoieffsky goes so far as to bestow this tribute upon an earlier work, The Cloak; “We have all issued out of Gogol’s Cloak.”

Pushkin, said of Gogol that “behind his laughter you feel the unseen tears,”.

Gogol was also one of the earliest absurdists -

The human obsession with purpose is merely a distraction from the absurdity of existence.

He also claimed:

evil is ineradicable in the world.

Chichikov, the main character can be regarded as a universal character. We find an American professor, William Lyon Phelps 1, of Yale, holding the opinion that:

“no one can travel far in America without meeting scores of Chichikovs; indeed, he is an accurate portrait of the American promoter, of the successful commercial traveller whose success depends entirely not on the real value and usefulness of his stock-in-trade, but on his knowledge of human nature and of the persuasive power of his tongue.”

Due to his status as an urban man, travelling to a regional centre where pompous small fish look up to their superiors, Chichikov manages to impress all. Everyone plays homage to heirarchy.

In Russian society there exist clever folk who can speak in one manner to a landowner possessed of two hundred peasant souls, and in another to a landowner possessed of three hundred, and in another to a landowner possessed of five hundred Chap. 3