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was sentenced to death, commuted to ten years of exile to Siberia. Later he was hailed as the forerunner of the Russian intelligentsia, but it is misleading to speak of an eighteenth-century ‘intelligentsia’ in the nineteenth-century sense of a body of privileged, radical opponents of the system. By and large, the small, literate, largely noble public shared the empress’s belief in a combination of autocracy ‘without despotism’ and serfdom ‘without cruelty’, adorned with Westernisation. It had no time for alternative systems or values, still less for revolution. Rather, in the spirit of German Enlightenment, it favoured rational improvement of the status quo. Opposition, when it occurred, tended to come from conservatives, who believed that Westernisation had gone too far. For example, in an unpublished work Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov (1733–90) lamented the corruption of morals among the Russian nobility, when ‘man’s natural voluptuousness and luxury’ (encouraged by the bad example of the imperial court) led to dissipation and the ruination of families.68

Conclusion

The ‘dilemma’ of eighteenth-century Russian culture was succinctly expressed by Karamzin. A fervent admirer of Peter I in his youth, later in life Karamzin was influenced by new thinking about national identity and spirit. In his view, without Peter, Russia would have needed 600 years to catch up with Western Europe, but accelerated ‘progress’, he believed, had been bought at a high price: ‘We became citizens of the world, but ceased in certain respects to be citizens of Russia.’69 In this, of course, Russia was not as an aberration, but only a late-comer, its cultural development conforming with the general pattern throughout eighteenth-century Europe and North America, where a small educated elite ‘kept up’ with international trends, and technical brilliance was more prized than brilliant originality. All the same, eighteenth-century Russian culture was more a follower than a leader and languished in the shadow of later national achievements. Almost the only eighteenth-century Russian play to remain in the repertoire is Fonvizin’s The Minor. Hardly any eighteenthcentury Russian novels are still read today. No eighteenth-century Russian painters, writers or composers are much known outside Russia.

The international character of eighteenth-century culture and Russia’s ‘junior’ status in the cultural pecking order created a particular headache

68M.M. Shcherbatov, On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, ed. and trans. Antony Lentin (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

69R. Pipes (ed.), Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia (New York: Atheneum,

1966), pp. 123–4.

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for Soviet scholars obliged to emphasise national originality (samobytnost’). Some took comfort in the discourse that Russians ‘selected only the best’ from Western culture, discarding anything alien to indigenous tastes. Foreign prototypes were ignored or glossed over.70 The lack of comparative perspectives was caused not only by ideological constraints, but also by restricted access to Western scholarship and texts, so that sometimes simple ignorance lay behind the exaggeration of Russian ‘originality’. Western histories of European culture, on the other hand, were apt to omit Russia from the picture altogether.

The limited social range of the eighteenth-century Russian public and the overarching influence of the court also seemed to distinguish Russia from more developed Western societies. Some writers observed that true culture was incompatible with despotic government and that the arts could never flourish if ‘enforced by the knout’.71 In the realm of high culture there were few opportunities for independent literary or cultural activity outside the provisions made by the state. If you were a writer, the only place you could publish was with state presses, apart from a brief period in the 1780s–90s. And the potential readership was tiny. For aspiring architects, painters and sculptors the only institution that offered rigorous training, including study trips abroad, was the Imperial Academy of Arts, which also oversaw commissions. This is not to say that the imperial establishment deliberately set out to restrict, censor and repress, rather that a significant private commercially oriented sector failed to develop much beyond the nobility. As has often been observed, the bourgeoisie was missing. And there were few dissenting voices. By and large, when Russian writers praised monarchs, painters and sculptors flattered them and architects provided grandiose backdrops for their ceremonies, it was because of a genuine commitment to the values they represented. From the 1760s the doctrines of Enlightened Absolutism provided a theoretical and philosophical underpinning to such support.

Such alarming events as the Pugachev revolt periodically reminded the consumers of high culture that their alien ways could provoke popular wrath, but such instances of the violent polarisation of the ‘two Russias’ were the exception rather than the rule. The binary models developed by the Tartu school of semioticians has proved exceptionally fruitful for exploring the

70For late Soviet examples, see B. I. Krasnobaev (ed.), Ocherki istorii russkoi kul’tury vosemnadtsatogo veka (Moscow: Izd. MGU, 1972) and Ocherki russkoi kul’tury XVIII veka (Moscow: Izd. MGU, 1985).

71See Gianluigi Goggi, ‘The Philosophes and the Debate over Russian Civilization’, in WOR, pp. 299–305.

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tension between ‘old’ and ‘new’, ‘west’ and ‘east’ in Russian culture,72 but the distinctness of elite and popular, urban and rural culture should not be exaggerated. Peasants as a social group were not confined to the countryside, as Peter I recognised when he imposed a fine of half a kopeck on bearded peasants entering towns, while Russian nobles raised by peasant servants and resident on their country estates in summer could hardly avoid contact with the ‘other Russia’.73 In towns, puppet theatres, peep-shows and fairgrounds attracted diverse audiences. Russian traditions of church singing provided common ground for all classes, while the scores of Russian comic operas were based on folk songs orchestrated in a classical idiom. All social classes had access to handwritten literature, often on topics or genres on which Westernisation had made little impact, such as lives of saints, popular tales, riddles, songs and devotional works. Noblewomen and merchants’ wives alike enjoyed books on fortune-telling and the interpretation of dreams.74 Although Western fashions remained de rigueur for everyday wear for the elite, Catherine II introduced a style of female court dress based on loose-fitting traditional Russian robes. Conversely, popular art absorbed motifs from high art. Ladies and gentlemen, even peasants in Western dress appear in popular wood prints; neoclassical ornaments mingle with traditional ones on carved and painted wooden objects.

As regards the impact of Westernisation, for every Karamzin who mourned his country’s loss of national identity, there were several foreigners ready with an Orientalist discourse. Many travellers perceived (or were programmed to expect) something non-European about Russia, even in St Petersburg. The Reverend William Coxe wrote in the 1780s: ‘The richness and splendour of the Russian court surpasses description. It retains many traces of its ancient Asiatic pomp, blended with European refinement.’75 Armies of serf retainers, people from the Russian East, the sheer lavishness of clothes and jewellery helped to create this impression, as did the continuing high profile of Orthodox art and ritual. Religious culture was one of the ‘blind spots’ of both Soviet and Western scholars, who generally underestimated the role of the Church

72 For a seminal work, see Iu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii, ‘Binary Models in the Dynamic of Russian Culture to the End of the Eighteenth Century’, in A. D. Nakhimovsky and A. S. Nakhimovsky (eds.), The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 30–66.

73This argument provides the thread of Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2002).

74See Faith Wigzell, Reading Russian Fortunes: Print Culture, Magic and Divination in Russia from 1 7 65 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

75W. Coxe, Travels in Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, 2 vols. (London: J. Nichols, 1784), vol. II, p. 84.

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and religious belief in eighteenth-century Russia, favouring ‘the story of the progressive emancipation of culture from the stiffening control of established religion’, beginning with Peter’s alleged ‘secularisation’ of Russian culture.76 But Russia’s eighteenth-century rulers and their supporters could not do without Orthodox ritual, churches and icons. Nearly all the leading artists started their careers painting icons and frescoes and continued to do so simultaneously with undertaking secular commissions. There was far more demand for icons than for portraits. Orthodox scruples about ‘graven images’ hampered the development of Russian sculpture. The equestrian statue to Peter I in St Petersburg (1782, Etienne Falconet and Marie Collot) was, amazingly, the first public monument to be erected in Russia.77 The interdependence of religious and secular art awaits a full investigation.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the cultural history of eighteenth-century Russia is still being written. Russian scholars have seized new opportunities to explore foreign influences and religious culture. The Marxist-Leninist ideological framework that prioritised the search for motifs of dissent and a ‘serf intelligentsia’ has largely been abandoned, while topics once off-limits or subject to ideological disapproval, such as imperial court ceremonial and noble estate culture, are being studied.78 Work has been published in both East and West on once taboo figures, such as Potemkin, and the first studies of Catherine II’s life for over a hundred years have appeared in Russian, giving due credit to her massive contribution to Russian culture. Even the once despised empresses Anna and Elizabeth are beginning to be acknowledged as patrons of the arts. Eighteenth-century Russian culture may never appeal to Western audiences as much as what preceded it and came after, but there is at least the prospect that we shall understand it better.

76G. Florovsky, ‘The Problem of Old Russian Culture’, SR 21 (1962): 3.

77See L. Hughes, ‘Restoring Religion to Russian Art’, in G. Hosking and R. Service (eds.), Reinterpreting Russia (London: Arnold, 1999), pp. 40–53; V. Zhivov, ‘Religious Reform and the Emergence of the Individual in Russian Seventeenth-Century Literature’, in S. Baron and N. S. Kollmann (eds.), Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine

(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), pp. 184–98, and ‘Kul’turnye reformy v sisteme preobrazovaniia Petra I’, in A. Koshelev (ed.), Iz istorii russkoi kul’tury. Tom III (XVII–nachalo XVIII veka) (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 1996), pp. 528–83.

78See, for example, O. Ageeva, Velichaishii i slavneishii bolee svekh gradov v svete: grad Sviatogo Petra (St Petersburg: Blits, 1999); E. Pogosian, Petr I – arkhitektor rossiiskoi istorii (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPb, 2001) (on court ceremonial).

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