Utopia and Armageddon

For a long time Russia in the decades preceding the Bolshevik Revolution has been painted in the darkest colors of political repression and anti-Semitism. While those two charges are true, everyone knows that pre-Revolutionary Russia also produced Stravinsky, Nijinsky and Chagall. In recent years a fuller sense for Russia on the brink of upheaval has emerged from behind the shroud of Soviet apologetics. Art historians have called the period from the fin de siecle through World War I Russia's Silver Age; historians of philosophy speak of a "revolution of the spirit"; and detailed monographs have investigated the fallen empire's symbolist poetry, erotic experimentalism and visions of Utopia and Armageddon.

Splendidly illustrated, beautifully designed and mostly insightful, Moscow& St. Petersburg 1900-1920: Art, Life & Culture (Vendome) brings many themes together through a close examination of imperial Russia's dual capitals. The sumptuous book benefits from a wider scope than most of its predecessors in Silver Age studies by examining advertising, the aircraft industry and residential architecture along with painting, the performing arts and literature. Science flourished in this climate, although it has been largely overlooked by Western historians. Pavlov and his salivating dogs are familiar, but who knew that Russian scientists proposed space exploration through multi-stage rockets?

Author John E. Bowlt, a University of Southern California Slavic studies professor, identifies many tendencies within the culture of the Silver Age. Most of these played out against the backdrop of Russia's dominant religious tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy, in many respects a faith of the senses. Art, architecture and performance were integral to its tradition and not merely ornamental. That Eastern Orthodoxy saw itself as a rival to Western Christendom and a critic of Western civilization encouraged a transformative process in the flourishing cultural traffic with Western Europe. Art Nouveau was filtered through a distinctly Eurasian sensibility. Modernism bore exotic flowers in the rich Russian soil.

Bowlt thoroughly explores the cultural wealth of Russia's largest cities, investigating the largely lost worlds of interior decorating and filmmaking and uncovering fashion designers eager to trade corsets for a new style of erotically charged elegance. Much of the Silver Age was grounded however loosely in a sense of spiritual mission lost or submerged by Bolshevism. But there were continuities. Bowlt points to how the religious processions of Eastern Orthodoxy were turned into the May Day parades of the Soviets and the architect of Art Nouveau monasteries who designed Lenin's Tomb.

Although the Silver Age ended with Lenin, the many Russian artists who fled the Revolution carried seeds of the era abroad. One of Bowlt's many surprising insights concerns the influence of Russian émigrés on the lavish costume and set designs of Hollywood in the 1920s and '30s.