HISTORY: Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia's Silver AgeBy John E Bowlt Thames Hudson, 396pp. £24.95 A textual and visual evocation of the dynamism and intellectual energy that sparked off Russia's short-lived but explosive Silver Age writes Nicola Gordon Bowe.
JUST AS THE Victoria Albert Museum juxtaposes its landmark Cold War Modern: Design 1945-70 exhibition in London with Magnificence of the Tsars, a constrastingly sumptuous display of imperial costumes borrowed from the Kremlin, the Vendome Press produces and Thames Hudson publishes this authoritative feast of a book. Concentrated into a surprisingly compact format, it is bursting with images, many of them hitherto unpublished and illuminatingly juxtaposed. It is bound to appeal not only to those interested in Russian visual, literary and performing arts, in music, architecture, theatre and cinema, but also in the broader social, scientific and material culture of the two great cities of a huge nation (150 million people in 1900) on the brink of unimaginably radical change.
Prof Bowlt has long been concerned with the interconnections between language and literature in late 19th and early 20th century Russia, and interested in the relationship between Modernist poetry and the visual arts. He has published and exhibited in Europe, Russia and the US the results of his pioneering research on Russian stage design, Symbolism, Soviet painting, constructivism and socialist realism, the Russian avant-garde and Russia's short-lived Silver Age. This was the name given by contemporary poets and painters to the period between the late 1890s and the late 1910s, when there was an unprecedented explosion of "creative brilliance" in Moscow and St Petersburg, only curbed (not crushed) after 20 years by the ravages of the first World War, the 1917 October Revolution and the Bolshevik regime. It took its name from the similarly dazzling early 19th century Golden Age, when there was a comparable flowering of Romantic literature (notably Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol) and the visual arts in Russia.
HIS AIM IS to present the fullest possible picture, textually and visually, of the sheer dynamism and intellectual energy that sparked off such a range of inventive and creative endeavour, and whose repercussions would pave the way for radical scientific and cultural achievement over the next century. This was all the more remarkable in a nation that had until recently been a patriarchal, rural and feudal society. Its sudden, late 19th century exposure to capitalism and technological development led to various forms of engagement with western modernism, to individual philanthropic patronage and to a newly wealthy bourgeoisie eager for cultural enterprise (despite 25,000 St Petersburg homeless).
It also, paradoxically, resulted in a romantic nostalgia for the myths, crafts and rituals of Old Russia and a poetic awareness of the vast limitless plains and ethnic traditions of a land rich with cultural diversity, stretching from the Arctic wastes to the mountainous south, and from Europe to the Pacific Ocean. Bowlt even proposes that "the Russian Modernists' quest for innovation may have derived as much from territorial and meteorological elements . . . as from imported doctrines", as may their idiosyncratic syntheses of dynamic line, text, image and sound.
The author leads the reader on a complex journey, mainly grounded in the two sophisticated epicentres of intellectual and cultural debate, as he focuses on key figures and their fundamentally Symbolist ideas, related to "the denial of the world of appearances, the search for a more pristine artistic form, the transcending of established social and moral codes, the emphasis on the inner world".
With a superbly chosen (and reproduced) selection of poignant, evocative archive photographs of long-disappeared people, places, events, streetscapes and interiors, and a dazzling array of drawings, designs, and paintings, he brings to life the players in his dense narrative. Names, some unfamiliar except to specialists, come to life through their portraits and images of their work.
Images of a visionary Nobel biologist, a neurologist, a physiologist, rocket scientist, aircraft designer and a poet and aviator appear among those of the Romanovs, Rasputin, a cement baron's wife posed beside her upholstered automobile, Isadora Duncan, her Isadorables and the eurhythmic bosonozhki (barefooters) she inspired, decadent cabaret artistes, enlightened collectors, Orthodox priests, gnarled street traders, Mitrofan Piatnitsky recording peasant folksongs through a gleaming phonograph, a troika speeding through the Moscow snow beside a motorised streetcar, and a still of a train about to crush the suicidal Anna Karenina from Vladimir Gardin's 1914 eponymous film. The wonders of electric light, radiography, flight, the gramophone, the cinema and Vladimir Shukhov's iron and glass engineering miracles are seen as key avant-garde artistic components along with body-building, the circus, personal salons, costume extravaganzas, fairground shows, puppet theatres, and rediscovered medieval manuscripts and icons.
THE MOOD IS set by the book's striking dustjacket, featuring the dancer Nijinsky, star of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, scandalously interpreting Debussy's L'Après Midi d'un Faune, and the extravagantly posed, multifaceted theatrical producer Vsevolod Meierkhold, colleague of Stanislavsky, Gorky and Chekhov - each subsequently portrayed and discussed in the context of their liberated Moscow Art Theatre. Of the painters, the intensely imaginative yet depressive Mikhail Vrubel; the consistently original and versatile suprematist Kazimir Malevich; the ever-searching Vasilii Kandinsky, whose new aesthetic criteria were based on the intuitive, "the value of the primitive, the ethnographical, and the popular"; and his fellow composer and pianist Scriabin's esoteric "explorations into the similarities between the colour spectrum and the diatonic scale"; join the subversive Moscow Cubo-Futurists Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. These artists are given as much attention as the brilliant, better known doyens of the St Petersburg World of Art Society exhibitions and journals: Bakst (and his pupil, Chagall, from Vitebsk), Benois, Repin, Serov, Somov, Bilibin, Roerich, Golovin, Nesterov, Vasnetsov and Borisov-Musatov. Their Acmeist successors, featured in the influential critical and art historical journal Apollon, appear along with poets Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Maiakovsky, Valerii Briusov, the regally austere Anna Akhmatova and much-quoted Andrei Belyi. The ever-experimental Diaghilev promotes the revered opera bass Fedor Chaliapin and younger composers, Igor Stravinsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Serge Prokoviev, well-known for their avant-garde opera and ballet scores.
The enlightened patronage of the Moscow railway Maecenas, Savva Mamontov and singer Princess Mariia Tenisheva, in their respective turn-of-the-century Slavic-Revivalist artistic handcraft colonies at Abramtsevo (outside Moscow) and Talashkino (near Smolensk), was emulated by the more modernist Moscow patrons of the "proto-Constructivist" Style Moderne architect Fedor Shekhtel and others working in an eclectic art nouveau vein. The wealth of an ostentatious self-made merchant class embraced a catholic range of artistic experiment, as well as major collections of contemporary French and Russian painting. As Bowlt points out, the Silver Age has recently found a fresh resonance in the "cultural vibrancy, commercial drive, patriotic confidence and political momentum" of 21st-century Russia.
Nicola Gordon Bowe is an associate fellow at NCAD and an honorary research fellow at the University of Wales and is preparing a book on Irish artist Wilhelmina Geddes (1887-1955)