Born at the twilight of imperial Russia, Igor Stravinsky inevitably partook of its cultural conventions and rituals, moving closely with particular individuals, associations and vogues in what Alexandre Benois called ‘that hysterical and spiritually tormented time’.1 Among Stravinsky’s many connections in St Petersburg, for example, was the group of artists, writers and musicians known as the World of Art (Mir iskusstva) which, undoubtedly, played a formative role in his musical career.2 True, some observers are hesitant to accept the proximity, finding that ‘there is no real evidence that [Stravinsky] paid attention to the journal [Mir iskusstva] at that time or hankered after any particular association with its authors’.3 On the other hand, Stravinsky’s long friendship and professional liaison with the leaders of the World of Art (Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, Sergei Diaghilev, Nicholas Roerich), his intense collaboration with Roerich on The Rite of Spring at Talashkino (the estate of Princess Maria Tenisheva, primary financier of the World of Art journal)4 and his close alliance with the Ballets Russes – which, in many ways, was the extension of the aesthetic platform of the World of Art – would seem to furnish evidence that Stravinsky did, indeed, appreciate the cultural consistency of the World of Art.

David J. Code explores the reception of Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’Apres-midi d’un faune, a 1912 choreographic reworking of Claude Debussy’s orchestral Prélude (1894). He peels off layers of historical reference, looking backwards to Debussy and Stéphane Mallarmé from Faune’s 1912 Nijinskian embodiment. In the process, he questions the ballet’s accepted relationship to cubism in favour of a Matisse-inspired framework for understanding the underlying modernity of the Faun. With attention to scene and character types, structure and style, diegesis, eroticism and Freudian psychological interiority, Code highlights ways in which music and dance might both embody and subvert typically modernist modes of dramatic expression.

During the reign of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II (1894-1917), the advocates of freedom clashed sharply and frequently with the forces of order. The standing of the authorities suffered greatly with the humiliating loss of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. As the war was fought, domestic political unrest was also coming to a head. On “Bloody Sunday” in January 1905 hundreds of workers who had gathered to petition for better conditions and modest political reforms were shot down outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, opening a year of revolutionary protest and strikes. The era’s passionate political life forced writers and artists to confront anew how their art related to politics at home. Some joined the fray with striking works of political satire; others retreated to rarified aesthetics. Young rebellious writers under Maxim Gorky’s lead captivated the public with neo-Realism. Visual artists embraced experimentation; they and a group of writers took up aesthetic Modernism under the twin banners of Symbolism and Decadence. Innovations in music and dance – notably the Ballets Russes – found admirers at home and abroad. Avant-garde artists embraced humor and publicity, in the process introducing Russia to a new melding of art and celebrity.

While artists and writers within the empire were asserting their freedom and power as artists, arts impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) and his associates were doing so abroad. Their innovative mix of music, art, and dance in Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911) changed ballet forever. In the glow of fame, Diaghilev and composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) went still further in The Rite of Spring (1913), the succès de scandale of which added to their glory and their impact. That many in their elite foreign audiences had political and economic stakes in tsarist Russia and were predisposed to welcome all things Russian does not diminish the artistic accomplishments of the Ballets Russes. Its creators advanced Russia’s national cultural identity, further repositioning art and artists in relation to the autocracy. Although the Ballets Russes affected indifference to the political content of their works, Diaghilev’s finances were highly politicized from the beginning. Furthermore, in Rite the creative team depicted a shocking denigration of women’s agency and a fantasy that appealed to Russia’s contemporary extreme right (although it was not performed in Russia); that of an ancestral Slavic culture at once patriarchal, ethnically pure, and notably free of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and other minorities.

By the end of the first tumultuous decade of the twentieth century, all sides of Russia’s cultural polygon would distance themselves from the tradition of Realism of prior decades. The center of gravity of Russian high culture would shift to Modernism – and Russia’s writers and artists would establish and defend a new claim to independent positions of authority within the country’s political and social hierarchy. In the immediate period of 1905 and its aftermath, left-leaning illustrators and authors, especially satirists, took aim at the old regime itself, enlisting ghouls, goblins, winged phantoms, and, most of all, the figure of death to mock the tsarist regime that had failed so miserably on several fronts. Other artists and writers, also seeking to rebel against the autocratic and the Orthodox, celebrated and adopted the occult and the Gothic as expressions of their own artistic and personal freedom. The lauded illustrator of Lermontov’s Demon, Mikhail Vrubel, turned the demon into an icon of artistic rebellion. The overt and open political rebellion of cultural figures coupled with the celebration of the Gothic represented a further step in the empowerment of a Russia defined by culture. The Russia of officialdom, in contrast, suffered successive defeats.