6 - After Realism

Summary

By the end of the first tumultuous decade of the twentieth century, all sides of Russia’s cultural polygon would distance themselves from the tradition of Realism of prior decades. The center of gravity of Russian high culture would shift to Modernism – and Russia’s writers and artists would establish and defend a new claim to independent positions of authority within the country’s political and social hierarchy. In the immediate period of 1905 and its aftermath, left-leaning illustrators and authors, especially satirists, took aim at the old regime itself, enlisting ghouls, goblins, winged phantoms, and, most of all, the figure of death to mock the tsarist regime that had failed so miserably on several fronts. Other artists and writers, also seeking to rebel against the autocratic and the Orthodox, celebrated and adopted the occult and the Gothic as expressions of their own artistic and personal freedom. The lauded illustrator of Lermontov’s Demon, Mikhail Vrubel, turned the demon into an icon of artistic rebellion. The overt and open political rebellion of cultural figures coupled with the celebration of the Gothic represented a further step in the empowerment of a Russia defined by culture. The Russia of officialdom, in contrast, suffered successive defeats.