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The proposed transfer of the St. Isaac’s Cathedral museum to the Russian Orthodox Church occasioned a major controversy in 2017. This essay considers the contestation between the museum and the Chu...

This article examines the uneven reception of the famous Russian artist Karl Briullov and problematizes the canonization of the classics in imperial society. Drawing on contemporary literary and artistic sources, broadly available at the time but largely forgotten in the years since, I argue that Briullov's status as a cultural icon grew out of the wide-ranging controversy that followed the artist throughout the decades. Now feted as the national genius, now dismissed as a fraud, Briullov became part of the popular imagination as a complicated character of sundry written texts, a literary figment more than a historical person. The discursive aspect of this cultural scenario was crucial in fashioning the image of the artist as national hero: Briullov's canonization was propelled by the written word more than pictorial imagery. Moreover, in a peculiar Russian twist, it was Briullov's association with the great poet Aleksandr Pushkin that advanced the artist's reputation decisively.

Revival is a key concept for post-Soviet cultural identity, and “Lost and Found” has become a familiar theme in contemporary culture. Following decades of ruthless destruction and neglect, the first post-Soviet decades have seen the most conscientious effort to regain those losses, with remarkable results. The current research in Museum Studies addresses the dispersal of the Russian cultural heritage that took place during the Soviet era.

This article considers the origins of the Russian obsession with culture. Focusing on the last third of the nineteenth century, when in the aftermath of the Great Reforms of the 1860s Russia experienced a conspicuous expansion of public sphere, I examine public debates in the contemporary press that tackled the question of national culture, deliberating on what it was and whether Russia needed it. Contemporary periodicals demonstrate that the Russian tradition of locating positive identity in culture was originally highly contested territory. Russian culture thrived on debate. What is more, even such prominent makers of the national tradition as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy assumed an explicit stance against culture. The article nevertheless contends that it was precisely this negative take that contributed to the glorious mythology that surrounds Russian tradition today. In the course of the many heated debates of the day, culture became a household word and a familiar marker of identity.

This article considers the Berendeevka tradition as one manifestation of Russian cultural identity that took hold of the national imagination near the turn of the twentieth century. The fairy-tale village Berendeevka emerged as the setting for A. Ostrovsky’s play in verse The Snow Maiden (1873). Initially a literary invention, the Berendeevka construct was cultivated by the creative intelligentsia in the artists’ colonies Abramtsevo and Talashkino and became part of public culture via theatrical performances, handicraft exhibitions and sales, world’s fairs, and concurrent critical commentary in the press. It has enjoyed ubiquitous success ever since. Yet this affirmative national ideal, Dianina argues, was born out of bitter criticism. Paradoxically, the negative publicity, which accompanied Ostrovsky’s play and later followed related artistic creations, did not undermine but, on the contrary, reinforced Berendeevka as a special site of the national imaginary.

At the turn of the twentieth century, European critics who were distressed about contemporary developments in the fine arts tended to use medical, psychopathological terms to diagnose the existing state of the field. In 1892-1893, an Austrian physician and writer, Max Nordau, publishedEntartung(Degeneration). Drawing on positivist psychology and anthropometry, Nordau expressed his pessimistic views on the mental and physical health of the leading figures of European fin-de-siécle culture: Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Verlaine, the impressionists, the symbolists, and many others. In Russia this book went into nine editions, in three different translations. The patriarch of Russian liberal-nationalist criticism, Vladimir Stasov applied Nordau's metaphors to Russian “decadent” artists in such reviews as “Podvorl'e prokazhennykh” (Lepers’ inn, 1899) or “Dve dekadentskie vystavki” (Two decadent exhibitions, 1903). He sarcastically remarked that, when viewing canvases by some contemporary painters, he felt as though he were “walking amidst a madhouse.”

The St. Petersburg Passage—a shopping arcade and recreation complex, comprising restaurants, exhibitions, amateur theater, and the Literary Fund—was a remarkable center of public life in imperial Russia. Contemporary journalists wrote incessantly about the Passage, celebrating the various forms of popular entertainment that it offered. In his strange unfinished story “The Crocodile,” which also takes place in the Russian arcade, Fedor Dostoevskii parodies this trivial discourse of the daily press. Urban spectacles and their refraction in the mass-circulation media are the main targets of his caricature of westernized popular culture in Russia. The writer's response to Russian modernity, as it was taking shape in the age of the Great Reforms, is expressly negative. Dostoevskii believed that in a decade defined by the rise of civic consciousness, the Russian press should address vital social concerns at home instead of celebrating ephemeral cultural imports, such as the arcade and the newspaper feuilleton.