Cultural life

The Kievan period

Although many traces of the Slavic culture that existed in the territories of Kievan Rus survived beyond its Christianization (which occurred, according to The Russian Primary Chronicle, in 988), the cultural system that organized the lives of the early Slavs is far from being understood. From the 10th century, however, enough material has survived to provide a reasonably accurate portrait of Old Russian cultural life. High culture in Kievan Rus was primarily ecclesiastical. Literacy was not widespread, and artistic composition was undertaken almost exclusively by monks. The earliest circulated literary works were translations from Greek into Old Church Slavonic (a South Slavic dialect that was, in this period, close enough to Old Russian to be understandable). By the 11th century, however, monks were producing original works (on Byzantine models), primarily hagiographies, historical chronicles, and homilies. At least one great secular work was produced as well: the epic The Song of Igor’s Campaign, which dates from the late 12th century and describes a failed military expedition against the neighbouring Polovtsy. Evidence also exists (primarily in the form of church records of suppression) of a thriving popular culture based on pre-Christian traditions centring on harvest, marriage, birth, and death rituals. The most important aspects of Kievan culture for the development of modern Russian culture, however, were not literary or folkloric but rather artistic and architectural. The early Slavic rulers expressed their religious piety and displayed their wealth through the construction of stone churches, at first in Byzantine style (such as the 11th-century Cathedral of St. Sophia, which still stands in Kiev, Ukraine) and later in a distinctive Russian style (best preserved today in churches in and around the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow). The interiors of many of these churches were ornately decorated with frescoes and icons.

The Muscovite period

The Mongol (Tatar) invasions of the early 13th century decimated Kievan Rus. By the time Russian political and cultural life began to recover in the 14th century, a new centre had arisen: Muscovy (Moscow). Continuity with Kiev was provided by the Orthodox church, which had acted as a beacon of national life during the period of Tatar domination and continued to play the central role in Russian culture into the 17th century. As a result, Russian cultural development in the Muscovite period was quite different from that of western Europe, which at this time was experiencing the secularization of society and the rediscovery of the classical cultural heritage that characterized the Renaissance. At first the literary genres employed by Muscovite writers were the same as those that had dominated in Kiev. The most remarkable literary monuments of the Muscovite period, however, are unlike anything that came before. The correspondence between Tsar Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible) and Andrey Mikhaylovich, Prince Kurbsky during the 1560s and ’70s is particularly noteworthy. Kurbsky, a former general in Ivan’s army, defected to Poland, whence he sent a letter critical of the tsar’s regime. Ivan’s diatribes in response are both wonderful expressions of outraged pride and literary tours de force that combine the highest style of Muscovite hagiographic writing with pithy and vulgar attacks on his enemy. Similarly vigorous in style is the first full-scale autobiography in Russian literature, Avvakum Petrovich’s The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, by Himself (c. 1672–75).

As in the Kievan period, however, the most significant cultural achievements of Muscovy were in the visual arts and architecture rather than in literature. The Moscow school of icon painting produced great masters, among them Dionisy and Andrey Rublyov (whose Old Testament Trinity, now in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, is among the most revered icons ever painted). Russian architects continued to design and build impressive churches, including the celebrated Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed on Moscow’s Red Square. Built to commemorate the Russian capture of Kazar, the Tatar capital, St. Basil’s is a perfect example of the confluence of Byzantine and Asiatic cultural streams that characterizes Muscovite culture.

The emergence of modern Russian culture

The gradual turn of Russia toward western Europe that began in the 17th century led to an almost total reorientation of Russian interests during the reign of Peter I (1682–1725). Although Peter (known as Peter the Great) was not particularly interested in cultural questions, the influx of Western ideas (which accompanied the technology Peter found so attractive) and the weakening of the Orthodox church led to a cultural renaissance during the reigns of his successors. In the late 1730s poets Mikhail Lomonosov and Vasily Trediakovsky carried out reforms as far-reaching as those of Peter. Adapting German syllabotonic versification to Russian, they developed the system of “classical” metres that prevails in Russian poetry to this day. In the 1740s, in imitation of French Neoclassicism, Aleksandr Sumarokov wrote the first Russian stage tragedies. In the course of the century, Russian writers assimilated all the European genres; although much of their work was derivative, the comedies of Denis Fonvizin and the powerful, solemn odes of Gavrila Derzhavin were original and have remained part of the active Russian cultural heritage. Prose fiction made its appearance at the end of the century in the works of the sentimentalist Nikolay Karamzin. By the beginning of the 19th century, after a 75-year European cultural apprenticeship, Russia had developed a flexible secular literary language, had a command of modern Western literary forms, and was ready to produce fully original cultural work.