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.

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.