Introduction: An Age of Genius

Abstract

Russians under the late tsars and Bolsheviks created and enjoyed a century of literary and artistic genius. Evidence of its existence persists in the monumental achievements of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Igor Stravinsky, Marc Chagall, Vladimir Tatlin, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergey Eisenstein, and many others whose works live on in world culture and in the Russian national identity. But along with these are the millions of less well-known but equally vital ephemeral creations of the age: postcards, illustrations, broadsides, prints, cheap serialized novels of the popular press, posters, and works of satire. The creators of both the lasting and the ephemeral did not exist in isolation. They lived and worked in diverse but interconnected cultural communities. Each drew on immediate experience but also on deep Russian traditions. Each wrestled with transformative social, economic, and political change. In so doing, they created a flourishing imaginative ecosystem shared by low, middle, and high society alike. The interactions of people at multiple levels and the cross-fertilization of ideas within this connected and rapidly evolving cultural system spurred its movement away from older, established cultural boundaries to produce new horizons of creative vision and achievement. This book examines the shared themes and exemplary characters that recurred over roughly a century of this intense cultural interaction and traces their origins to core elements of Russian tradition. I do so to celebrate the existence of this unique epoch in Russian creativity and to reflect on the social, economic, and political conditions that came together to create such global treasures. Creative genius is rarely isolated geographically. Russia from the Emancipation of the serfs in 1861 through the 1930s and beyond had links with cultural developments abroad – initially largely in Europe but later with America as well. But Russia’s creative world was defined and bounded by its own traditions. Deeply Russian themes are shared up, down, and across the cultural spectrum, and through characters created,