Canadian Slavonic Papers

Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia by Theofanis George StavrouReview by: Kathryn E. JonesCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 26, No. 4 (December 1984), pp.386-388Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40868364 .

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386 1 Canadian Slavonic Papers December 1984

A subsidiary aim of the book appears to be the correlation of architectural developments with the social history of the day. When Nickel is dealing with certain influences, such as the impact of Byzantine models, his case is easily defensible. His Marxist analysis, however, appears unrelated to the architectural discussion, and serves primarily to disrupt the organization of the material. The book contains several factual errors - the dating of the Croatian Sv. Donat and the conflation of the first two rulers of the Serbian Nemanjic dynasty, for instance. More trouble- some is the simplification of certain complex problems and the tentative nature of some conclusions. One recurrent problem of this sort concerns stone architectural sculpture. Whenever it appears, the author posits the presence and/ or influence of stonemasons from the Caucasus. In Serbia, however, Romanesque influence is at work; this could be true in other areas as well.

The major problem with the book, however, is one of mechanics. The transla- tion from the German has created several terms, such as "single-icon narthex," which have no meaning. Others, like "domes of flattened helms," are obscure. More distressing is the lack of reference numbers in the text to direct the reader to the appropriate illustrations. This makes the volume cumbersome to use. This dif- ficulty is aggravated by the lack of numbers distinguishing photographs grouped together on a single page, and by the wide separation between the discussion of a monument and its illustration (the worst case is the church of Iasi in Romania, il- lustrated on pp. 1 1 3- 1 5 but discussed on p. 204). The text refers to things which are not illustrated but should be, such as the intricate Moldavian scheme of vaulting. All these elements make an otherwise beautiful and useful volume difficult to handle.

Medieval Architecture in Eastern Europe will be of some use to the scholar, but is aimed chiefly at the informed general reader. Its socioeconomic orientation, while sometimes forced, helps to place the buildings in context; Nickel's descriptions along with the excellent illustrations make the subject most interesting and com- prehensible.

Ellen C. Schwartz, University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University

Theofanis George Stavrou (Ed.). Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. xix, 268 pp. $27.50.

This is a collection of lectures and papers given in 1978 at the University of Minnesota in connection with the exhibition "The Art of Russia 1 800- 1 850." Originally planned as a two-volume set, it consists of thirteen chapters in two parts. The first con- sists of four essays which build a sense of the Russian cultural environment in the nineteenth century through discussion of the intelligentsia, the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg as symbols and centres of culture, the native elements of music, and the "Russian" quality of literature. The second part comprises nine essays

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Vol. xxvi, No. 4 Book Reviews | 387

which deal with the visual arts: specifically painting, sculpture, architecture, and the graphic and decorative arts.

The essays in this collection do three things. First, John E. Bowlt, Janet Ken- nedy, and others describe in detail the evolution of painting, sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts. Second, Malcolm H. Brown, Joshua Taylor, and Donald Fänger demonstrate convincingly how European influences and native elements combined to form a uniquely Russian style in music, painting, and literature. Third, they show that by the 1880s a synthesis had taken place whereby Russian society had overcome the rift caused by the Petrine reforms and could accept Russia's cultural heritage with its many peculiarities. The pivotal essays in the volume are the latter which challenge the accepted views of the dynamics behind the major cultural advances during the century. Nicholas Riasanovsky and S. Frederick Starr shift analysis away from the standard interpretation of development in reaction to Nicholas I's politically repressive regime and instead focus on the "functional basis" of developments that led to the emergence of an educated and critical art-consum- ing public. Such analysis is more rewarding than the usual emphasis on an alleged polarity between Academic and free art, or art seen as an outlet for a politically re- pressed society.

One of the most persistent of opinions in Russian cultural history is challenged by Elizabeth K. Valkenier. She points out as "mistaken" the links normally made between intellectuals and artists, especially those of the realist school. Fedotov, Perov, Kramskoi, and Surikov did indeed produce work which "corresponded" to the intelligentsia's purpose to use art first to inform, and later transform, Russian society. The artists, however, tended to define their task in terms of a moral or at- titudinal transformation rather than a continuing active reforming role. In no way, says Valkenier, should the Wanderers' exhibitions be viewed as the visual equivalent of the "Going to the People" movement. Rather, the Wanderers exemplified the national cultural awakening and due to their success "the future course of Russian art turned from the predilections of the radicals to the much less politicized tastes of the general, literate public" (p. 164).

As a whole, this collection emphasizes the "remarkable" growth of high culture in the empire. Stavrou argues that Russian intellectuals and artists by and large suc- ceeded in creatively absorbing European influences and attempted to create "a comprehensive national cultural identity" (p. x). The essays show how comprehen- sive the development in the arts was and how successful the nationalization of art forms. Indeed, this volume is an achievement in itself. It represents a "first" in English-language literature in that it presents a vast amount of research on the major areas of nineteenth-century culture and opens up the field to scholarly en- quiry by raising stimulating and important questions. For example, to say as Stavrou and several of the contributors do that the government was central to the develop- ment of a national cultural identity is clear. However, can the government's role be viewed as uncritically as Starr tends to view it, at least in relation to the development of the visual arts, or was the bureaucracy which was established to administer the

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388 1 Revue Canadienne des Slavistes Décembre 1984

arts as detrimental to their development as Bowlt suggests? The questions raised in this work range from the personal impact of the tsars on the arts to the impact of European political affairs. The volume provides a solid basis of information with which to begin to answer them.

Kathryn E. Jones, University of Toronto

John Garrard (Ed.). The Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983. xii, 300 pp. $30.00.

If there were ever a book which is destined to become a classic of Western criticism of Russian literature, then it is surely the volume under review. A collection of essays which grew out of several symposia on the Russian novel organized by John Gar- rard, it groups several of the most authoritative voices in the field. The essays which make up the volume are arranged in roughly chronological order, but the book -

despite the embracing introduction by Garrard, and the chronological list of the Russian novels and other pertinent works placed at the end - is rather an anti-history than a history, since each author tackles a specific problem in the evolution of the Russian novel rather than trying to give an exhaustive sweep.

Garrard sets the tone in the introduction by tracing and attempting to explain the evolution of the nineteenth-century Russian novel. In doing so, he makes two important points: first, that "one cannot hope to gain a true understanding of the Russian novel, or indeed Russian literature as a whole, without taking into account its subtle relationship to the major literatures of Western Europe" (p. 2); and, second, the difficulty with which novelists developed the device of the "omniscient third- person narration with embedded first-person narrative where needed" (p. 21). In the first part of the book, Donald Fanger, in a sweeping essay "Influence and Tradi- tion in the Russian Novel," develops certain insights on the difficult transition from Pushkin through Gogol' to Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, a transition which is seen as "the aspiration to move from a negative and ironical to a positive concern with the question of how to live" (p. 42). The link between Gogol' and Tolstoi Fänger sees -

perceptively - in the common conception of the "total text as a symbolic autobio- graphy" (p. 43). The second essay, "Design in the Russian Novel" by Edward Wa- siolek, has as its thesis the notion that "the Russian vision, as it is embedded in the novel, oscillates between the conviction that reality is design-haunted and the fear that there is no design" (p. 54).

The promise of these opening essays is, by and large, maintained in the sub- sequent sections of the book. The second part, with the rather too associative title "High Noon," contains essays on Fathers and Sons by Kathryn Feuer, War and Peace by Patricia Carden, and the influence of the Gothic novel on Dostoevskii by Robin Feuer Miller. Feuer argues convincingly the centrality of the theme of the continuity of generations as "probably the most counter-revolutionary force in the

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