Serfdom Society And The Arts In Imperial Russia

Serf-era and provincial Russia heralded the spectacular turn in cultural history that began in the 1860s. Examining the role of arts and artists in society’s value system, Richard Stites explores this shift in a groundbreaking history of visual and performing arts in the last decades of serfdom. Provincial town and manor house engaged the culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg while thousands of serfs and ex-serfs created or performed. Mikhail Glinka raised Russian music to new levels and Anton Rubinstein struggled to found a conservatory. Long before the itinerants, painters explored town and country in genre scenes of everyday life. Serf actors on loan from their masters brought naturalistic acting from provincial theaters to the imperial stages. Stites’s richly detailed book offers new perspectives on the origins of Russia’s nineteenth-century artistic prowess.

Andrey Shabanov's seminal reinterpretation of the Peredvizhniki is a comprehensive study that examines in-depth for the first time the organizational structure, self-representation, exhibitions, and critical reception of this 19th-century artistic partnership. Shabanov advances a more pragmatic reading of the Peredvizhniki, artists seeking professional and creative freedom in authoritarian Tsarist Russia. He likewise demonstrates and challenges how and why the group eventually came to be defined as a critically-minded Realist art movement. Unprecedentedly rich in new primary visual and textual sources, the book also connects afresh the Russian and Western art worlds of the period. A must-read for anyone interested in Russian art and culture, 19th-century European art, and also the history of art exhibitions, art movements, and the art market.

Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life explores the complex development of Russian musical life during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the heart of this cultural history lies the Russian Musical Society, as both a unique driving force behind the institutionalization of music and a representative of the growing importance of voluntary associations in public life. Sustained simultaneously by private initiative and cooperative relationships with the state, the Russian Musical Society played a key role in the creation of Russia's infrastructure for music and music education. Author Lynn M. Sargeant explores the fluid nature of Russian social identity through the broad scope of musical life, including not only the "leading lights" of the era but also rank-and-file musicians, teachers, and students. Although Russian musicians longed for a secure place within the new hierarchy of professions, their social status remained ambiguous throughout the nineteenth century. Traditional reliance on serf musicians and foreigners left lasting scars that motivated musicians' efforts to obtain legal rights and social respectability. And women's increasing visibility in the musical world provoked acrimonious debates that were, at heart, efforts by male musicians to strengthen their claims to professional status by denying the legitimacy of female participation. Sargeant demonstrates that the successful development of a Russian musical infrastructure salved persistent anxieties about Russia's place vis-à-vis its European cultural competitors. Remarkably, the institutions developed by the Russian Musical Society survived the upheavals of war and revolution to become the foundation for the Soviet musical system. A wealth of historical documentation makes Harmony and Discord required reading for musicologists, sociologists and historians interested in this period, and the abundance of amusing anecdotes and the author's lucid and lively literary style make it an enjoyable history for all readers.

The longest river in Europe, the Volga stretches over three and a half thousand km from the heart of Russia to the Caspian Sea, separating west from east. The river has played a crucial role in the history of the peoples who are now a part of the Russian Federation—and has united and divided the land through which it flows.Janet Hartley explores the history of Russia through the Volga from the seventh century to the present day. She looks at it as an artery for trade and as a testing ground for the Russian Empire’s control of the borderlands, at how it featured in Russian literature and art, and how it was crucial for the outcome of the Second World War at Stalingrad. This vibrant account unearths what life on the river was really like, telling the story of its diverse people and its vital place in Russian history.

Jewish Book Award Finalist: “Turns the fascinating life of Avrom Goldfaden into a multi-dimensional history of the Yiddish theater’s formative years.” —Jeffery Veidinger, author of Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire In this book, Alyssa Quint focuses on the early years of the modern Yiddish theater, from roughly 1876 to 1883, through the works of one of its best-known and most colorful figures, Avrom Goldfaden. Goldfaden (né Goldenfaden, 1840-1908) was one of the first playwrights to stage a commercially viable Yiddish-language theater, first in Romania and then in Russia. Goldfaden’s work was rapidly disseminated in print and his plays were performed frequently for Jewish audiences. Sholem Aleichem considered him as a forger of a new language that “breathed the European spirit into our old jargon.” Quint uses Goldfaden’s theatrical works as a way to understand the social life of Jewish theater in Imperial Russia. Through a study of his libretti, she looks at the experiences of Russian Jewish actors, male and female, to explore connections between culture as artistic production and culture in the sense of broader social structures. Quint explores how Jewish actors who played Goldfaden’s work on stage absorbed the theater into their everyday lives. Goldfaden’s theater gives a rich view into the conduct, ideology, religion, and politics of Jews during an important moment in the history of late Imperial Russia.

In the midst of the violent, revolutionary turmoil that accompanied the last decade of tsarist rule in the Russian Empire, many Jews came to reject what they regarded as the apocalyptic and utopian prophecies of political dreamers and religious fanatics, preferring instead to focus on the promotion of cultural development in the present. Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire examines the cultural identities that Jews were creating and disseminating through voluntary associations such as libraries, drama circles, literary clubs, historical societies, and even fire brigades. Jeffrey Veidlinger explores the venues in which prominent cultural figures -- including Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Moykher Sforim, and Simon Dubnov -- interacted with the general Jewish public, encouraging Jewish expression within Russia's multicultural society. By highlighting the cultural experiences shared by Jews of diverse social backgrounds -- from seamstresses to parliamentarians -- and in disparate geographic locales -- from Ukrainian shtetls to Polish metropolises -- the book revises traditional views of Jewish society in the late Russian Empire.

Offering a broad interpretive history of the Russian Empire from the time of serfdom's codification until its abolition following the Crimean War, Wirtschafter considers the institution of serfdom, official social categories, and Russia's development as a country of peasants ruled by nobles, military commanders and civil servants.

The peasantry accounted for the large majority of the Russian population during the Imperialist and Stalinist periods – it is, for the most part, how people lived. Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin provides a comprehensive, realistic examination of peasant life in Russia during both these eras and the legacy this left in the post-Soviet era. The book paints a full picture of peasant involvement in commerce and local political life and, through Boris Gorshkov's original ecology paradigm for understanding peasant life, offers new perspectives on the Russian peasantry under serfdom and the emancipation. Incorporating recent scholarship, including Russian and non-Russian texts, along with classic studies, Gorshkov explores the complex interrelationships between the physical environment, peasant economic and social practices, culture, state policies and lord-peasant relations. He goes on to analyze peasant economic activities, including agriculture and livestock, social activities and the functioning of peasant social and political institutions within the context of these interrelationships. Further reading lists, study questions, tables, maps, primary source extracts and images are also included to support and enhance the text wherever possible. Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin is the crucial survey of a key topic in modern Russian history for students and scholars alike.