Imagining Russian: Vladimir Stasov in the Construction of the National Style of the Russian Empire

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of the “Russian Revival Style” in the architecture of the late Russian Empire, which opens vast opportunities for interpretation. Since the late twentieth century, the most widespread approach to this phenomenon has been a romanticised point of view, where the Russian style is described as a realisation of the people’s objective need for national selfidentification. A significant role in the formation of this perspective was played by the journalism of the post-reform decades of the nineteenth century, by Vladimir Stasov in particular, whose views were regarded as canonical in the Soviet era as those of an expert and interpreter of the Russian artistic process of the 1860s–1880s. The experience of Soviet art studies shows that in case of a biased reading, Stasov’s texts could provide a more radical version of the origin of the Russian Revival Style interpreted as an expression of the sympathies and aspirations of the revolutionary-minded intelligentsia. This study identifies the contradiction between Stasov’s “democratic” rhetoric and the realities of class society. This inner conflict allows Stasov’s judgments to be attributed to the realm of cultural imagination and not to the description of an ongoing process, to the category of presumptions, not statements. Analysing the interpretation of the Russian Revival Style given by Stasov as one of the manifestations of progress, of which he was an unconditional and ardent supporter, the author of the article proposes to consider this phenomenon in the context of the purposeful construction of the imperial nation, carried out by the Russian autocracy throughout the nineteenth century. The title and arguments of his review essay Twenty-Five Years of Russian Art (1883), which summarises the artistic results of the quarter-century reign of Emperor Alexander II (1856–1881), testifies to the quite state-centred character of Stasov’s optics. The practice of the authorities in building a national identity through architecture met the needs of various social groups – from representatives of the aristocracy who sympathised with modernisation to industrialists interested in selling their goods on the foreign market. The opposition-minded intellectual, who clearly understood the socio-political background of the Russian Revival Style, was the last in the line of sympathisers with this enterprise. Sceptical of pre-reform institutions and the slanted tastes of high society, the nobleman Stasov was at the same time not one of the “Carbonari of art” and his apologia of the “Russian” was entirely in line with official imperial nationalism.