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Private initiatives in high art remained weak. Local artists and architects fully trained in the Western manner were slow to appear, as was a whole range of subject matter in art, including free-standing landscapes, still life, history painting and domestic genre. These anomalies have been explained by the dearth of independent patrons with a taste for secular art, the limited opportunities for Russian artists to assimilate new subject matter, clients’ preference for prestigious foreign originals, even by the theory that certain genres were too ‘frivolous’ for war-focused Russia.40 There was as yet no academy or school for the arts, although the Academy of Sciences, whose charter Peter issued shortly before his death, sponsored artistic activities. Even nobles, harnessed to state service and absent from their homes for long periods, had few opportunities for collecting and connoisseurship.41 The typical country manor house was a glorified wooden cabin, perhaps topped with a rustic pediment and with a couple of family portraits in ‘parsuna’ style inside.42

Resistance or indifference undoubtedly slowed the reception of certain arts, for example sculpture and theatre. The men and women of Peter’s circle had little choice about Westernising, but further afield things were different. Grassroots protesters, both urban and rural, were liable to identify portraits of Peter with the goddess Minerva as the ‘icons of Antichrist’ and the tsar’s German boots as the Devil’s hooves. In 1713 the vice-governor of Archangel complained that local people were still wearing old-style clothes and refusing to shave. ‘Truly, lord’, he wrote to Peter, ‘such boorishness must be stopped and these heathen customs of dress rooted out.’43 Some observers predicted that once Peter’s iron hand was removed, there would be a general return to Muscovite beards and even to Moscow itself. That this proved not to be the case testifies to the foundations that Westernised culture had laid among Russia’s upper classes and to the dedication of Peter’s successors to his cultural programme.

From Catherine I to Peter III: 1725–1762

Historians once neglected the period between Peter I’s death and the accession to the throne of his self-styled ‘spiritual daughter’ Catherine II. Catherine I

40 See O. S. Evangulova, ‘Portret petrovskogo vremeni i problemy skhodstva’, Vestnik MGU. Seriia 8. Istoriia, no. 5 (1979): 69–82, and ‘K probleme stilia v iskusstve petrovskogo vremeni’, ibid., no. 4 (1974): 67–84.

41On a rare exception, see N. V. Kaliazina, and I. V. Saverkina, ‘Zhivopisnoe sobranie A. D. Menshikova’, in Russkaia kul’tura pervoi chetverti XVIII veka. Dvorets Menshikova (St Petersburg: Ermitazh, 1992).

42On parsuna portraits, see my chapter in volume I of the Cambridge History of Russia.

43Pis’ma i bumagi imperatora petra velikogo, vol. XIII (i) (repr. St Petersburg: Nauka, 1992), p. 374.

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(1725–7) and Peter III (1761–2) reigned too briefly and Peter II (1727–30) and Ivan VI (1740–1) died too young to make much personal impression on the cultural scene. At the same time, standard historiography castigated Anna (1730–40) for her over-reliance on German favourites and Elizabeth (1741–61) for her extravagance. Only recently has it been possible for Russian historians to acknowledge that German influence under Anna was not overwhelming and that Elizabeth’s extravagance served its purpose in the positive presentation of monarchy.44

While the nobles were still tied to obligatory state service (to 1762), the elite culture of the imperial court in St Petersburg remained disproportionately influential. For a time Peter II’s aristocratic entourage threatened to restore Moscow to pre-eminence, but his successor Anna preferred to consolidate her power in the setting of her uncle, Peter I’s, capital. In her reign a more or less regular royal household was established, where the luxury and outward display were said to emulate the court of France. Little of Anna’s architectural programme survives today, however. Indeed, visitors to St Petersburg during her reign spoke of a mixture of magnificence and squalor, with many buildings left unfinished.45

The 1730s saw the launch of the career of mid-eighteenth-century Russia’s most successful architect, Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli (1700–71). In 1732–5 Rastrelli constructed the wooden Winter Palace, the third on the site. He owed his lasting fame to his projects for Elizabeth, however, whose court required ever more generous architectural spaces, linked series of rooms for promenading and grand halls with high ceilings for balls and banquets. Her pageants, parades and festivals celebrated a monarch who served the good of her fortunate subjects. In particular, Elizabeth, who owned thousands of costly outfits, loved transvestite masquerades. To cater to such tastes, in the 1740s–50s Rastrelli built the grand Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, an amazing confection of vast length, its turquoise blue walls set off by white stone and gilded ornamentation and ornate plasterwork. Inside, guests progressed through a series of gilt-embellished rooms, full of rare furniture and porcelain, mirrors and chandeliers. The Winter Palace in St Petersburg, completed in 1762, was, in Rastrelli’s words, created ‘solely for the glory of Russia’. Its

44See E. V. Anisimov, ‘Anna Ivanovna’, and V. P. Naumov, ‘Elizaveta Petrovna’, in Russian Studies in History 32, 4 (1994): 37–72 and 8–38; E. V. Anisimov, Empress Elizabeth: Her Reign and Her Russia, ed. and trans. John T. Alexander (Gulf Breeze: Academic International Press, 1995).

45See Maria di Salvo, ‘What did Algarotti see in Moscow?’ in R. Bartlett and L. Hughes (eds.), Russian Society and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays in Honour of Anthony G. Cross (Munster: Litverlag, 2004), pp. 72–81.

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facade was formed of seemingly endlessly repeated units of white columns framing ornate window-surrounds, all with gilded details. The whole effect was like a grand theatrical backdrop. Rastrelli’s blue and white five-domed cathedral for Smolnii convent reflected Elizabeth’s preference for Orthodox conventions in church architecture, embellished with Italianate decoration.46

As palaces proliferated, pictures were required by the square metre. Foreign artists were aided, then succeeded by their Russian pupils, such as Ivan Vishniakov (1699–1761) and Aleksei Antropov (1716–95). Andrei Matveev (1701/4–39), who trained in Italy and the Netherlands, is credited with the first Russian easel painting on an allegorical subject, Allegory of Painting (1725). Another of Matveev’s works, generally identified as a self-portrait of the artist and his wife (1729), is the first known double portrait by a Russian artist. The assimilation of new subject matter was aided by the founding in 1757 of the St Petersburg Academy of the Three Fine Arts on the initiative of Elizabeth’s favourite, Ivan Shuvalov. Initially reliant on foreign teachers (the Frenchmen N. F. Gillet and J. L. De Velly were the first professors of sculpture and painting), it admitted Russians of any social class, occasionally even serfs. Few nobles, however, contemplated a career in architecture, painting or sculpture, which continued to be regarded as high-grade trades. Students followed a course that included the study of history and mythology and copying from engravings, classical sculpture and life models. Successful graduates were sent abroad for further training.

Music, singing and dancing were important at both Anna’s and Elizabeth’s courts. In the late 1730s the French ballet master Jean-Baptiste Lande´ opened the first ballet school in St Petersburg. The first opera performance in Russia (Ristori’s Calandro) was staged in Moscow in 1731. Five years later audiences in St Petersburg saw La Forza del’amor e del’odio by Francesco Araja (1700–67/70), who served as maestro di capella at the court from 1735 to 1759. He and his successor Hermann Raupach were the first in a long line of foreign maestri in the imperial household. Foreign masters wrote new works for the court orchestra, composed mainly of Italian and French musicians, and directed operatic and ballet spectacles involving lavish costumes and intricate scenery, sound and lighting effects.47 Theatricals and the staged life of the court intermingled.

In literature the 1730s–40s witnessed some of the first fruits of Westernisation, even though belles-lettres still occupied an insignificant place in

46 There is no major study of Rastrelli in English. See Iu. V. Artem’eva and S. A. Prokhvatikova (eds.), Zodchie Sankt-Peterburga. XVIII vek (St Petersburg: Lenizdab, 1997), pp. 217–90.

47See G. Seaman, A History of Russian Music, Vol. I. From its Origins to Dargomyzhsky (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967).

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publishing schedules.48 Writers subsequently included in the literary canon were unpublished in their lifetime. This was true of Antiokh Kantemir (1708– 44), whose satires in verse, written between 1729 and 1731, heaped scorn upon detractors of Peter’s reforms and opponents of science and learning. All his works were self-confessed exercises in classical and Western genres, the satires, for example, drawing on Horace, Juvenal and Nicholas Boileau. The writings of Vasilii Trediakovskii (1703–69), who studied for a time in The Hague and Paris, likewise consciously imitated and sometimes translated French and German writers. Both he and Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–65), who was famed as a scientist and co-founder of Moscow University (1755), wrote panegyric verses and speeches to celebrate imperial achievements.

It was individuals like Trediakovskii and Lomonosov who laid the groundwork for professional literary culture by absorbing and experimenting with Western literary genres and acquiring foreign languages. They were pioneers of literary theory and poetic metre, advocating and demonstrating the use of syllabo-tonic versification, which ousted syllabic verse.49 Trediakovskii’s A Method for Composing Russian Verse (1752) summarised the achievements of the reform. Lomonosov’s influential work On the Usefulness of the Church Books (1757) promoted the use of three styles or registers of literary language: the higher the style, the more Church Slavonic included, the lower, the more vernacular. Even so, a Russian literary language easily comprehensible to today’s readers took several more decades to evolve. The readership for new works expanded with the growth of educational institutions, such as the St Petersburg Cadet Corps for noblemen, founded in 1731. Literary circles developed along with literary journals, for example, Lomonosov’s Monthly Compositions (1755).

In the 1740s–50s Russians began to write seriously for the theatre, which was revived after the failures of earlier experiments. In 1747 ‘Russia’s Racine’, Aleksandr Sumarokov (1717–77), wrote Khorev, the first Russian classical tragedy, which warned against tyranny, excessive favouritism and succumbing to passions. It played alongside an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1748) in Sumarokov’s translation, which was followed by three more neoclassical tragedies based on Racine and Corneille. In 1750 the court repertoire featured eighteen French comedies, fourteen Russian tragedies and comedies, four Italian and German interludes. In 1756 Elizabeth appointed Sumarokov as the first director of the Imperial Theatre, which was based in a professional company of Russian actors under the direction of the actor-manager Fedor Volkov (1729–63).

48 See note 26 above.

49 Jones, ‘Literature’, p. 28.

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