Culture ‘in transition’

Modern historians have categorised Russia’s seventeenth century as a ‘transitional period’ (perekhodnyi vek), when tradition vied with innovation, indigenous culture with imported trends. The conceptual framework of binary oppositions has proved particularly fruitful. High culture in particular underwent changes that have been explained with reference to Westernisation, modernisation and secularisation. Some scholars have argued that developments in art, architecture and literature constituted a Muscovite version of the Baroque, others, adopting Dmitrii Likhachev’s formula, that they represented something ‘close to the significance of the Renaissance in the cultural history of Western Europe’. Such phenomena as the illusionistic use of light, shade and perspective in icons, portrait-painting from life, elements of a modified classical order system in architecture and new genres and subjects in literature are treated as curtain-raisers to the eighteenth century, when Russia would begin to fulfil its destiny by catching up with Western Europe with the assistance of Peter the Great.

If we accept the view that Russia had to ‘catch up’ with the West, with preconceptions about what Russia ought to have been, we may well conclude that, culturally speaking, here was a ‘blank sheet’ waiting to be filled. By the start of the seventeenth century the Renaissance had made little impact on Muscovy. In the figurative arts there was no free-standing portraiture, still life, landscapes or urban scenes, history painting or domestic genre. There were icons, wood prints and illuminated manuscripts, but no painting in oil on canvas. Sculpture deep chiselled in stone or cast in metal (bell-making excepted) was unknown. Printing (introduced in 1564) was in its infancy. Muscovy had no theatres or universities.