Introduction: An Age of Genius

Summary

Russians under the late tsars and Bolsheviks enjoyed a century of literary and artistic genius that lives on in world culture and in the Russian national identity. Along with the rightly celebrated works are millions of ephemeral creations of the age: postcards, illustrations, prints, serialized potboilers, posters, and cartoons. The creators of both the lasting and the forgotten worked in interconnected cultural communities. Each drew on shared traditions and contended with transformative social, economic, and political change. In so doing, they created an imaginative ecosystem within which three themes recurred: (1) the tension between freedom and order; (2) the shifting importance of boundaries demarcating the Self and the Other, the Russian and the foreigner, and the audience for art; and (3) the evolving roles, privileges, and responsibilities of writers and artists. The Firebird and the Fox takes its name from two motifs and recurrent characters. The flamboyant Firebird, often accompanied by her human foil, the Fool, transited from folklore into many works over this period and represents the incandescence and transcendent power of art. The wily fox or vixen of fable and folklore embodies the agency of the formerly dispossessed and the survival of genius against formidable odds.