Serfdom, Society and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power by Richard s> Stites (review)
2007; Maney Publishing; Volume: 85; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/see.2007.0044
ISSN2222-4327
Autores Tópico(s)Soviet and Russian History
Resumo352 SEER, 85, 2, 2007 Rosicruciankingof Prussiain I791-92, when she might have had to face a war against him was not likely to make her look kindly on Novikov, the apostle of Rosicrucianism. That the empress was concerned with high foreign and dynastic policy and not primarily with a battle against ideas is confirmed by the lenity with which the other more high-ranking Rosicrucians, who had not been in communication with Paul, were treated. Soon after, moreover, Prussianintrigues with Paul ceased to alarm her, since Frederick William III had been bought off with his share of Poland. But it was not the end of Rosicrucianism in Russia, which survived in another form, and which Faggionatohas illuminatedin her workon the Bible Society in early nineteenth-centuryRussia. London ISABELDE MADARIAoJA Stites, Richard. Serfdom, SocietandtheArtsinImperial Russia:ThePleasure andthe Power. Yale University Press,New Haven, CT and London, 2005. xiii + 586 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. [35.00. HISTORIANS may have recourse to many models for dealing with the role of culture in society, but surelytwo of the most productive and influentialhave been those proposedby PierreBourdieuandJurgen Habermas. Both thinkers are alluded to (albeitfleetingly)in Richard Stites'slatest book, and although Stiteseschews any dominant theoreticalframeworkas such, their relevanceto his analysisis indisputable.It is instructivethat Stites firstmentions Bourdieu (PP.17and 63),whose sceptical,not to say cynical, account of 'culturalcapital' as a manifestationof power relationsin society seems wholly appropriatein a book devoted to the Russian arts in the years before emancipation. In the conclusion, however, Stites invokes the 'classic exemplar of Habermas's "public sphere",where culture and wide discussion of its qualities act as an inclusive force in society' (p. 423). By framing his account in this manner, Stites lays bare a tension than informs the entire book (and that is indeed foregrounded in its very title): 'Expressive culture generated pleasure as it deployed power [....]. In exploring the fluid and sometimes ineffableconnection between the light and the darksides of the picture, I have tried to strike a balance between two familiarnarratives:that of creativityand the sensual, esthetic, and enriching consumption of the arts; and that of the price some people had to pay for it' (p. 5). Tracing the developmentof Russianculture'fromvariouspoints in the late eighteenth century to a sharpterminaldate, i86i, the end of serfdom'(p. 2), Stites paints a vivid and welcome portraitof an era which is often, at least in the popular imagination, seen as a pale anticipationof the second half of the nineteenth century, the age of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii in literature, the moguchaia kuchka and Chaikovskiiin music, and the Peredvizhniki in the visual arts. Even the towering names of the period are set firmlyin context: Vigel', Shakhovskoi and Rubinshtein all receive as much attention as Pushkin, Gogol' and Glinka.In general, Stitesdoes not peer forward(otherthan in the final chapter) and give the teleological game away, other than to indicate the extent to which thatperiod continuesto influenceour own views (asin the REVIEWS 353 case of, say, Vladimir Stasov).Stitesfocuseson three particularmanifestations of the arts. Music is representedby two chapters, one sketchingthe contours of domestic music-making,the other chartingthe rise of concert life. Theatre is the focus of three particularlylively chapters, rich in the kind of anecdote that the stage engenders in both performers and audience. Two chapters devoted to the visual arts describe both academic institutions of Russia's capital and the representationof the country'sgeographicalinterior. Discussion of St Petersburgand Moscow dominates, yet Stites is nonetheless careful to survey urban life in the provinces, although there is no discussionof folk culture. One of the great strengthsof the book is its encyclopaedic evocation of little-knownworks of art- who, for instance, knows Catterino Cavos's opera IvanSusanin of i8i5? As Stites himself claims, 'in the fight for cultural memory, historians can recover what was once important to people without descending into antiquarianismby examining works that display the atmosphericsof the moment whey they were produced'(p.3).Naturally,Stites is alive to the way in which history affects art although not in terms of content, since that would be to reduce art to a mere mirrorof society but institutionallyand practically.Each of the fields he examines was subject to differentdevelopments...
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