5 - Russian culture: 1801–1917

Summary

Russian culture comes of age

To gain a sense of the achievements of Russian culture during this period, it is instructive to compare the comments made on the subject by Petr Chaadaev in a ‘Philosophical Letter’ he published in 1836 with the sentiments expressed by a critic reviewing an exhibition in 1909. Chaadaev felt that Russia under Nicholas I simply had no cultural achievements it could be proud of. In his opinion, Russia was neither part of the continuum of European or Asian civilisation, nor did it have any civilisation of its own – and he did not mince his words about his nation’s many defects, which, significantly, were written in French rather than Russian:

At first brutal barbarism, then crude superstition, then cruel and degrading foreign domination, the spirit of which was inherited by our national rulers – such is the sad history of our youth… Now I ask you, where are our sages, our thinkers? Who has ever done the thinking for us? Who thinks for us today? And yet, situated between the two great divisions of the world, between East and West, with one elbow resting on China and the other on Germany, we ought to have united in us the two principles of intellectual life, imagination and reason, and brought together in our civilization the history of the entire globe. But this was not the part Providence assigned to us. Far from it; she seems to have taken no interest in our destiny…. You would think, looking at us, that the general law of humanity has been revoked in our case. Alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, taught the world nothing; we have not added a single idea to the fund of human ideas; we have contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit, andwe have disfigured everything we have taken of that progress . . .We have never taken the trouble to invent anything ourselves,while from the inventions of otherswe have adopted only the deceptive appearances and useless luxuries.