The Slavic Revival and the World of Art (Mir iskusstva)


 

In the latter part of the 19th century, Russian art was dominated by the antithetical concepts of nationalism and internationalism, that is, art that was uniquely Russian, or looked back to earlier Slavic and Russian sources, and art that was connected to larger European movements and trends.



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The Church (Khram) of Christ the Savior (Konstantin Ton, 1839-83, razed 1931, pictured is a reconstruction of the 1990s) was built to commemorate Russia's victories over Napoleon in 1812-1814. At the time Ton designed this church, scientific interest in the development of old Russian church architecture was still in its beginning stages. In imitation of the vertical outlines of early medieval churches, Ton segmented his church into bays; the cupolas were also meant to recall older church architecture. The result, however, is a strange amalgam of a search for a national style and a preoccupation with militaristic and bombastic forms. Ton's design suited perfectly the ideological function of this church: to express Tsar Nicholas I's concept of official Nationality: "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality."




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Under Alexander II, there was a more acute appreciation of old Russian architecture. Moscow, more so than St. Petersburg, witnessed a revival of pre-Petrine architectural styles in the 1870s. The Historical Museum (1874-83; Vladimir Sherwood/Shervud) reflected the cultural mission of the Slavic revival, as it borrows freely from 16th century structures. The museum was to express Russian historical consciousness, and its location on Red Square quite justifies the revival of older forms. Under pressure to create an emblem of national identity, Shervud incorporated as many historical references as possible (note the towers built in the style of a tent roof church, reflecting St. Basil's Cathedral, which sits at the opposite end of Red Square).





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Another building in deliberate imitation of St. Basil's is the so-called Church of the Savior on the Blood (actual name, Church of the Resurrection), designed by Alfred Parland and built 1883-1907. Parland's plan for the church was chosen in the second round of a design competition for a memorial church to Alexander II; at the conclusion of the first competition all the designs had been deemed "insufficiently Russian." Unlike the staid symmetry of the Historical Museum, which has an even distribution of tent roofs, kokoshniki, and octagonal towers on either side of a central axis, Parland's creation has clusters of domes around a central tower. The Church of the Resurrection is incongruous within the Petersburg ensemble, but it is appropriate as a monument to a tsar who had tolerated Pan-Slavism.

After the accession of Alexander III to the throne, ideological realism in art declined in official favor. Rather than working in the broad arena of history, idealists turned to the private worlds of lyric lament. Replacing broad historical operas such as Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov" we have Chaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin," which explores very un-ideological problems of personal relations. The fairy-tale beauty of Chaikovsky's ballets "Swan Lake", "Nutcracker" and "Sleeping Beauty" provided childlike interludes of graceful fancy for the Russian people. Similar trends can be seen in Russian painting.




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Viktor Vasnetsov's stylized neo-Russian canvas"Bogatyrs" (1898; shown here), like his "After Igor's Battle with the Polovsty" (1880; not shown) presents an interesting contrast to the historical paintings of the Peredvizhniki. Whereas they had chosen episodes from the political turmoil of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, such as Ivan IV with his son; Peter and the Strel'tsy; or Peter and his Son Aleksei, Vasnetsov went so far back into the history and legend of Kievan Rus' that there was really no political message that could be gleaned from his paintings. They fit neither the genre of the historical painting nor that of the battle painting.



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Mikhail Nesterov's religious paintings, when contrasted with those of Ge, show the gulf that separated the realists of the 1870s and 80s with the new generation of the 90s. The realist aesthetic fell out of favor when it became clear that as a social force it could not alleviate injustice and as an artistic program it hardly even led to true works of art. His "Vision to Bartholomew" (1889-90) includes a placid Russian landscape in the background of the two figures, placed in a row in the foreground.




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Mikhail Vrubel' demonstrates the transition from the mystical idealism of Nesterov's religious pictures to the evaluation of art as a symbol. In his "Demon Seated" (1890), Vrubel' expressed the crisis present in so much late 19th-century art. Disgusted with realism, it was searching to replace it with some truly artistic symbol.