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.

Imperial Russia’s most popular historical novel was not War and Peace but a story of folkloric origins that celebrated freedom and poked fun at authority. The Legend of How a Soldier Saved Peter the Great from Death appeared in multiple versions from 1843 onward and drew upon mythologies of the Fool – in sacred accounts, the Holy Fool (Iurodivyi); in secular tales, little Ivan the Fool (Ivanushka-Durachok). The hero of Russia’s first commercialized folktale, Tsarevich Ivan, the Firebird, and the Grey Wolf, tricks a tsar as the protagonist of the contemporaneous children’s classic, The Little Humpbacked Horse. The freedom of fools was attractive enough in traditional society; amidst multi-dimensional change after the Emancipation, the idea of release from traditional constraint was electrifying. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others created a dialogue between the familiar and the new by peopling their works with recognizable characters, foremost among which was the Fool. In so doing they illuminated ideas of self-fulfillment free from oppressive and unjust authority. But the era’s authors and readers also knew that when authority seemed most in shadow, it could return in force. The tension between freedom and order reflected ambivalence toward each that endured in Russian traditions and new works.