Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power

Richard Stites. Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. 586 pp.Artistic brilliance has been counted as one of Russia's greatest contributions to the modern world. But how did such brilliance develop out of a society mired in autocracy, imitative culture and the dehumanizing brutality of serfdom? Richard Stites's monumental study of the arts in the period before the abolition of serfdom in 1861 goes a long way toward unravelling this conundrum.For Stites, the 1860s mark both an ending and a point of departure. He accepts the idea of the 1860s as a seminal moment in which a distinctively Russian artistic style came sharply into focus. But rather than concentrating, as others have done, on the artists who embodied this moment-the mighty handful in music, Alexander Ostrovsky in theatre, the itinerents in painting, to name a few-Stites turns to the preceding period and the milieu out of which this flowering emerged.Stites's vision of the arts is encyclopaedic in scope. But unlike other recent surveys he avoids rehashing familiar stories and goes back to the sources to construct a panorama of Russian cultural life from the ground up. After deftly setting the scene in the first chapter with a overview of cultural institutions in St. Petersburg, Moscow and the Russian provinces, Stites presents three intricately detailed investigations of individual branches of the arts-music, theatre and painting-each of which could potentially stand on its own as an autonomous monograph. Stites draws together these strains in his concluding chapter in which he elaborates but also complicates the notion of a new day dawning in the arts in the 1860s.Among the many virtues of this book is its precise title, which neatly encapsulates in three words the central themes. Serfdom, Stites shows, was enmeshed in all facets artistic production. By enabling the mobilization of vast resources for the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure, serfdom made possible the creation of knowledge, skills and institutions indispensable to the flourishing of the arts. But there is more to the story. Serfdom, Stites argues, lay at the heart of a rigid social hierarchy that formed the contours of Russian society and impeded the emergence of a national community of the arts. The costs of this social order extended far beyond the tragic sufferings of serf artists. Stites vividly recounts the artistic constraints imposed by convention on members of the higher social orders-noble virtuosos, for example, barred from performing in a public for fear of compromising the honour of their estate, or (my favourite story) aristocratic admirers of the great Franz Liszt attempting to lounge about on stage during one of his concerts so as to avoid the indignity of being part of the crowd.But the arts were not only constrained by the social hierarchy; they also provided a means to transcend it. For the lucky few, there was the possibility of upward mobility-talented serf musicians and actors winning their freedom and becoming honourable members of society. …

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