Pub Date : 2019-09-30DOI: 10.1163/2211730x-12341333
John Nelson
It was political turmoil in Russia that brought Savva Mamontov and his Abramtsevo circle together with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The composer questioned whether the “Official Nationality” decree of Tsar Nicholas I, with its emphasis on autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality—which together asserted despotic rule—truly represented the values of a changing Russian society. In addition, his operas found little favor within the Imperial theater directorate. This changed, however, when the Imperial theater monopoly was abolished, allowing private theaters to operate freely. Mamontov opened his Private Opera in 1885 at Abramtsevo and in 1895 in Moscow. His aim was to demonstrate that a private opera house could compete with the Imperial theaters, in addition to giving Moscow the opportunity to see Russian-themed operas. It was Mamontov’s new approach to stage direction, including the incorporation of fine artists in the creative process, that attracted the composer. Harassment by the Tsar, the bureaucracy of the Imperial theaters, and the western-orientated repertoire committee, had all alienated the composer. Mamontov’s dedication to filling a gap in the Russian music world, as well as his challenge to the Imperial theaters, caught Rimsky-Korsakov’s attention. Through their collaboration they questioned the bureaucracy and publicly registered their protest against Nicholas II. Together, they challenged the foundations of the “Official Nationality” doctrine propounded by the tsars since the rule of Nicholas I, which in a changing Russian society had acquired a new meaning.
{"title":"Opposing Official Nationality","authors":"John Nelson","doi":"10.1163/2211730x-12341333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2211730x-12341333","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000It was political turmoil in Russia that brought Savva Mamontov and his Abramtsevo circle together with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The composer questioned whether the “Official Nationality” decree of Tsar Nicholas I, with its emphasis on autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality—which together asserted despotic rule—truly represented the values of a changing Russian society. In addition, his operas found little favor within the Imperial theater directorate. This changed, however, when the Imperial theater monopoly was abolished, allowing private theaters to operate freely. Mamontov opened his Private Opera in 1885 at Abramtsevo and in 1895 in Moscow. His aim was to demonstrate that a private opera house could compete with the Imperial theaters, in addition to giving Moscow the opportunity to see Russian-themed operas. It was Mamontov’s new approach to stage direction, including the incorporation of fine artists in the creative process, that attracted the composer.\u0000Harassment by the Tsar, the bureaucracy of the Imperial theaters, and the western-orientated repertoire committee, had all alienated the composer. Mamontov’s dedication to filling a gap in the Russian music world, as well as his challenge to the Imperial theaters, caught Rimsky-Korsakov’s attention. Through their collaboration they questioned the bureaucracy and publicly registered their protest against Nicholas II. Together, they challenged the foundations of the “Official Nationality” doctrine propounded by the tsars since the rule of Nicholas I, which in a changing Russian society had acquired a new meaning.","PeriodicalId":41469,"journal":{"name":"Experiment-A Journal of Russian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/2211730x-12341333","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47899637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-30DOI: 10.1163/2211730x-12341331
Inge Wierda
This article examines the historical and spiritual significance of Radonezh soil and its impact on the artistic practice of the Abramtsevo circle. Through a close reading of three paintings—Viktor Vasnetsov’s Saint Sergius of Radonezh (1881) and Alenushka (1881), and Elena Polenova’s Pokrov Mother of God (1883)—it analyzes how the Abramtsevo artists negotiated Saint Sergius’s legacy alongside their own experiences of the sacred sites in this area and especially the Pokrovskii churches. These artworks demonstrate how, in line with the prevalent nineteenth-century Slavophile interests, Radonezh soil provided a fertile ground for articulating a distinct Russian Orthodox identity in the visual arts of the 1880s and continues to inspire artists to this day.
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Pub Date : 2019-09-30DOI: 10.1163/2211730x-12341334
W. Salmond
This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.
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Pub Date : 2019-09-30DOI: 10.1163/2211730x-12341340
H. Goscilo
The matreshka designed by Sergei Maliutin and turned by Vasilii Zvezdochkin has fulfilled a precisely defined function from its inception in the late 1890s until today. Conceived as a material embodiment of national identity amid Abramtsevo’s revival of endemic Russian traditions, the stacking doll symbolized robust national fecundity. Produced and sold in the workshop Detskoe vospitanie [Children’s Upbringing] established by the Mamontov family, it promoted Russianness in a range of stacked dolls garbed in the ethnic dress of the country’s various regions. During the Soviet era the matreshka became standardized and promoted as the quintessential emblem of a vital Russia, above all to foreigners. The demise of the Soviet Union witnessed the spectacular rise of the author’s matreshka, one indelibly stamped with the creative imagination of its individual creator under new economic and cultural conditions. Political figures, American sports heroes, British rock groups, TV characters, and Hollywood stars all appeared as increasingly decorative stacked dolls. In short, the fate and the appearance of the matreshka accurately reflect Russia’s ideological biases and shifts. If early twentieth-century exploration of diverse national images yielded to a monochromatic defensiveness materialized as the unyielding, stoic child-bearer of Cold War Sovietism, then the post-Soviet matreshka conveys the chameleon-like, cosmetic veneers adopted and discarded by the consumerist society of the 1990s and subsequent decades. My article analyzes the vagaries of the matreshka’s legacy under Soviet and post-Soviet rule, during which the stacked doll has never lost its status as a unique symbol of national identity, though the terms of that symbolism have evolved.
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Pub Date : 2019-09-30DOI: 10.1163/2211730x-12341344
L. Hardiman
Maria Vasilievna Iakunchikova designed three works of applied art and craft in a Neo-Russian style for the Russian section of the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900—a wooden dresser, a toy village in carved wood, and a large embroidered panel. Yet, so far as the official record is concerned, Iakunchikova’s participation in the exhibition is occluded. Her name does not appear in the catalogue, for it was the producers, rather than the designers, who were credited for her works. Indeed, her presence might have been entirely unknown, were it not for several reports of the Russian display in the periodical press by her friend Netta Peacock, a British writer living in Paris. The invisibility of the designer in this instance was not a matter of gender, but it had consequences for women artists. In general, women were marginalized in the mainstream of the nineteenth-century Russian art world—whether at the Academy of Arts or in prominent groups such as the Peredvizhniki—and, as a result, enjoyed fewer opportunities at the Exposition. But the Neo-national movement, linked closely with the revival of applied art and the promotion of kustar industries, was one in which women’s art had space to flourish. And, in the so-called village russe at the Exposition, which featured a display of kustar art, by far the larger contribution was made by women, both as promoters and as artists. In this article, I examine Iakunchikova’s contribution to the Exposition within a broader context of female artistic activity, and the significance of the Russian kustar pavilion for a gendered history of nineteenth-century art.
Maria Vasilievna Iakunchikova为1900年巴黎“世界博览会”的俄罗斯部分设计了三件新俄罗斯风格的应用艺术和工艺作品——一个木制梳妆台、一个雕刻木玩具村和一块大刺绣板。然而，就官方记录而言，亚孔奇科娃参加展览的活动被屏蔽了。她的名字没有出现在目录中，因为她的作品归功于制作人，而不是设计师。事实上，如果不是她的朋友、居住在巴黎的英国作家内塔·皮科克在期刊上多次报道俄罗斯的展览，她的出现可能是完全未知的。在这种情况下，设计师的隐形与性别无关，但它对女性艺术家产生了影响。总的来说，女性在19世纪俄罗斯艺术界的主流中被边缘化了——无论是在艺术学院还是在Peredvizhniki等知名团体中——因此，在博览会上的机会更少。但与应用艺术的复兴和库斯塔工业的发展密切相关的新民族运动，是一场女性艺术有蓬勃发展空间的运动。而且，在所谓的博览会上的乡村russe，展出了库斯塔艺术，到目前为止，女性做出了更大的贡献，无论是作为推动者还是艺术家。在这篇文章中，我从女性艺术活动的更广泛背景下审视了伊昆奇科娃对博览会的贡献，以及俄罗斯库斯塔展馆对19世纪艺术性别史的意义。
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Pub Date : 2019-09-30DOI: 10.1163/2211730x-12341325
S. Mamontov, - -
This text is an extract from the “Chronicle of the Abramtsevo Estate,” a collective diary that details the daily functioning of the estate, as well as the special events, projects, and artistic activities that were held there by Savva Mamontov and his associates from 1870 until 1893. It thus provides a unique glimpse into both the personal and professional lives of one of Russia’s most important and influential artistic colonies.
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Pub Date : 2019-09-30DOI: 10.1163/2211730x-12341330
A. Hilton
The strong national voice at Abramtsevo, based on a sense of harmony among native landscapes, religious and folk life, and estate culture was intrinsic to Slavic revival movements of the late nineteenth century. The estate and its surroundings were settings for Russian-themed paintings and inspired artists to seek and express a Russian “spirit of nature.” The search for a national landscape was connected with literary and intellectual culture fostered at Abramtsevo and neighboring estates, and with the presence of religious centers in the area. Local topography and collaboration among the Abramtsevo artists in the 1880s led to new ideas about a national landscape as artists ranged further afield in the next decade. Landscapes of mood and decorative works based on natural forms shifted the role of landscape from concrete subject to a source for formal experimentation.
{"title":"The Abramtsevo Artistic Circle and the Search for a National Landscape","authors":"A. Hilton","doi":"10.1163/2211730x-12341330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2211730x-12341330","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The strong national voice at Abramtsevo, based on a sense of harmony among native landscapes, religious and folk life, and estate culture was intrinsic to Slavic revival movements of the late nineteenth century. The estate and its surroundings were settings for Russian-themed paintings and inspired artists to seek and express a Russian “spirit of nature.” The search for a national landscape was connected with literary and intellectual culture fostered at Abramtsevo and neighboring estates, and with the presence of religious centers in the area. Local topography and collaboration among the Abramtsevo artists in the 1880s led to new ideas about a national landscape as artists ranged further afield in the next decade. Landscapes of mood and decorative works based on natural forms shifted the role of landscape from concrete subject to a source for formal experimentation.","PeriodicalId":41469,"journal":{"name":"Experiment-A Journal of Russian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/2211730x-12341330","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49559827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-30DOI: 10.1163/2211730x-12341342
L. Tonini
The presence of thirty-three Russian head-dresses, as well as other historical objects, in the collection of the American diplomat, George Wurts, and his wife, Henrietta Tower, is an uncommon example of collecting Russian folk objects abroad, and testifies to a universality of taste in international collecting during the late nineteenth century. The head-dress collection is part of a larger collection of around 4,000 pieces dating from antiquity to the early twentieth century, which was assembled at the Palazzo Antici Mattei and the Villa Sciarra in Rome between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Wurts and Tower had a particular interest in arts and crafts, which was enabled by Wurts’s career as a diplomat and secretary at the American mission in St. Petersburg for a period of ten years (1882-93). This article describes the key characteristics of the Wurts-Tower collection of folk objects, the circumstances of its formation, and its relation to the tendencies of taste during that time. It also testifies to the transformation of the kokoshnik in the eyes of collectors and viewers from a popular costume to a fashion accessory that was linked to a past world.
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Pub Date : 2019-09-30DOI: 10.1163/2211730x-12341328
Eleonora Paston
This article examines questions related to dilettantism, typically defined in negative terms as engagement in an activity without proper professional training. However, this concept can also prompt a positive association, connoting freedom from inertia, ossified techniques, and professional stereotypes and clichés. The present article contends that dilettantism is especially necessary in transitional periods of art history. At such moments, innovations may arise more readily in intimate and amateur circles, rather than in professional contexts. Such a circle developed in the 1870s-90s among the community of artists who gathered around the prominent industrialist and philanthropist Savva Mamontov, a man of diverse talents, who astutely intuited new trends in art. This group of artists came to be known as the Abramtsevo artistic circle, after the name of Mamontov’s country estate located just outside of Moscow, where the vast majority of their artistic activities took place. In Abramtsevo’s informal, creative atmosphere ideas for new aesthetic projects spontaneously materialized across a range of different artistic spheres—theater, architecture, decorative, and applied arts—in which members of the circle were essentially amateurs. But it is precisely in these areas that the artists would make their most significant contributions. Thus, the first seeds of a novel understanding of theatrical production as a single immersive entity were initially sown on the amateur stage of the Abramtsevo estate and subsequently fully blossomed in Mamontov’s Private Opera (1885-91; 1896-99), which played a foundational role in the development of Russian musical theater. The Church of the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands], built by members of the Abramtsevo circle (1881-82), became the first exemplar of the Neo-Russian style in the history of Russian architecture, an important constituent of stil modern or Russian Art Nouveau. The activities of the kustar workshops in Abramtsevo—the carpentry workshop (1885) and the Abramtsevo ceramic studio (1890)—made a significant contribution to the development of the applied arts and industrial design in Russia, leading to their “rebirth” on a national level.
{"title":"The “Dilettantism” of Savva Mamontov in Russian Art","authors":"Eleonora Paston","doi":"10.1163/2211730x-12341328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2211730x-12341328","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article examines questions related to dilettantism, typically defined in negative terms as engagement in an activity without proper professional training. However, this concept can also prompt a positive association, connoting freedom from inertia, ossified techniques, and professional stereotypes and clichés. The present article contends that dilettantism is especially necessary in transitional periods of art history. At such moments, innovations may arise more readily in intimate and amateur circles, rather than in professional contexts. Such a circle developed in the 1870s-90s among the community of artists who gathered around the prominent industrialist and philanthropist Savva Mamontov, a man of diverse talents, who astutely intuited new trends in art. This group of artists came to be known as the Abramtsevo artistic circle, after the name of Mamontov’s country estate located just outside of Moscow, where the vast majority of their artistic activities took place.\u0000In Abramtsevo’s informal, creative atmosphere ideas for new aesthetic projects spontaneously materialized across a range of different artistic spheres—theater, architecture, decorative, and applied arts—in which members of the circle were essentially amateurs. But it is precisely in these areas that the artists would make their most significant contributions. Thus, the first seeds of a novel understanding of theatrical production as a single immersive entity were initially sown on the amateur stage of the Abramtsevo estate and subsequently fully blossomed in Mamontov’s Private Opera (1885-91; 1896-99), which played a foundational role in the development of Russian musical theater. The Church of the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands], built by members of the Abramtsevo circle (1881-82), became the first exemplar of the Neo-Russian style in the history of Russian architecture, an important constituent of stil modern or Russian Art Nouveau. The activities of the kustar workshops in Abramtsevo—the carpentry workshop (1885) and the Abramtsevo ceramic studio (1890)—made a significant contribution to the development of the applied arts and industrial design in Russia, leading to their “rebirth” on a national level.","PeriodicalId":41469,"journal":{"name":"Experiment-A Journal of Russian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/2211730x-12341328","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48305008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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