Влияние Великобритании на культуру России в 19 веке.

Исследовательская работа

группы учащихся 10 а класса

к 46–й ученической конференции

в МБОУ гимназии №2

города Георгиевска

Ставропольского края

ВЛИЯНИЕ ВЕЛИКОБРИТАНИИ НА КУЛЬТУРУ РОССИИ В 19 ВЕКЕ.

At the beginning of the 19th century much of Western Europe viewed Russia as hopelessly backward - even medieval. It was considered more a part of Asia than an outpost of European thought. During the first half of the century, indeed, peasants (called "serfs") were still treated as the property of their feudal masters and could be bought and sold, though they had a few more rights than slaves. Russian serfs gained their freedom only in 1861, two years before the American Emancipation Proclamation.

However, the nobility of Russia had looked to the West for ideals and fashions since the early 18th Century, when Peter the Great had instituted a series of reforms aimed at modernizing the country. Russian aristocrats traveled extensively in Western Europe and adopted French as the language of polite discourse. They read French and English literature and philosophy, followed Western fashions, and generally considered themselves a part of modern Europe. 

St. Petersburg was created as the new capital of Russia in 1721, and remained the most Westernized of Russian cities. Indeed, Dostoyevsky was to consider it an alien presence in the land, spiritually vacuous compared to the old Russian capital of Moscow.

The German-born czarina Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 to 1796, corresponded with Voltaire and fancied herself an Enlightenment monarch; but her plans for liberal reforms came to nothing, and she became better known as vainglorious autocrat. 

Despite the general backwardness of Russian society, its openness to the West (briefly interrupted by Napoleon's 1812 invasion) had profound influences on its literature throughout the 19th Century. The first great national author of Russia, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) - despite his celebration of Russian history and folklore - was profoundly influenced by such English writers as Shakespeare, Byron and Scott. Although he plays a role in Russian literature comparable to that of Goethe in Germany or even Shakespeare in England, his works were little known abroad during his lifetime. 

Just as the Bible and the works of Shakespeare have had a profound influence on English literature, the works of Pushkin (1799-1837) have shaped the literature of the Russian language. Before Pushkin's time Russian literature was hardly significant in any degree of originality or quality.  Even during Pushkin's lifetime, French was the paramount tongue of the Russian ruling classes. From a fragment of a letter of 1824 to his friend Kyuchelbecker we know that Pushkin, at the age of 25, devoured both Goethe and Shakespeare, probably then in translation.  This effort came to early fruition in Pushkin's poem Count Nulin.

"In 1825," Pushkin recorded, "I was in the country, and rereading  Lucrece, a rather weak poem by Shakespeare. I said to myself, now what would have happened if it had occurred to Lucrece to give Tarquinius a slap in the face? I thought of writing a parody on Shakespeare's theme. I was unable to resist the double temptation, and wrote my poem in two days".  In fact, he wrote Count Nulin on  December 12th and 13th, 1825.

Pushkin had been reading Shakespeare in 1825 in Le Tourneur's 18th century French translation when he wrote in a letter, "I cannot get over him. Compared with him, how poor a tragedian Byron is. This Byron who only ever conceived one single character". (Feinstein 102). At the same time Pushkin was reading Schlegel's lectures on dramatic art, which were in the vanguard of Shakespeare criticism. The rich fruition of this study, in November 1827, was the overtly Shakespearean play Boris Godunov, known to the west mainly through Mussorgsky's opera of that name. The great, poetic Monologue of Pimen the Monk is a jewel of the opera, as well as of the play. Of the play Pushkin wrote "From Shakespeare, I took the free, broad design of his characters, his bewildering multiplicity of types of scene, and his simplicity ….".        

Pushkin was so sensitive to the Shakespearean sonnet that he noticed the sonnet form of the love duet in Romeo and Juliet (Act I, scene V ll. 92-105). This is something that only the keenest student, reading in the original language, might then recognize, because at that time, none of the articles on Shakespeare had identified the exact occurrence of sonnets in Romeo and Juliet. As a result of this observation and inspired by Shakespeare, he placed the "Mniszek's sonnet" into the Polish scenes of Boris Godunov. (O'Neil p.31 and 34. - Sonnets excepted, O'Neil makes a fine comparative study of Pushkin and Shakespeare.).

In 1833 Pushkin began a translation into Russian of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, almost certainly from the English. However, he changed his mind part way through it, and, starting from a free adaptation of the play, composed a long poem on the same theme, interspersed with dialogue, entitled Angelo. It was, in effect, a paraphrase in alexandrines of the original Shakespeare play.

There can be no doubt that Pushkin owed a great debt of inspiration to Shakespeare. But it is instructive also to consider the case of Eugene Onegin7, which has claims to be Pushkin's greatest and most individual work and which he wrote between 1823 and 1830. The relationship between Shakespeare's Sonnets and Eugene Onegin has never before been considered in literary criticism. (In 2003 O'Neil omits it). We have seen that Shakespeare's Sonnets had become available, almost in full, in German translation in 1820, but there had been earlier translations into French of some of them. I have shown that Pushkin was certainly looking deeply into Shakespeare's poems together with Delvig as he started on Eugene Onegin in 1824 (and probably before that). Shakespeare's Sonnets and Eugene Onegin share certain very significant characteristics.

Bearing in mind the clear influence of Shakespeare upon Russia's greatest poet, demonstrated by Pushkin's own letters and in his other works, there is every reason to deduce that Shake-speare's Sonnets influenced Eugene Onegin. However, even where Pushkin makes his sources blatantly clear, the result is always strikingly individual, as in the cases of Count Nulin, Boris Godunov and Angelo.

It was Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) -who lived and wrote for many years in Europe and was profoundly Western in his outlook - that first brought Russian literature to the attention of European readers, but at the cost of often being considered an alien in his own land.

It was the twin giants Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky whose work exploded out of Russia in the 1870s to overwhelm Europeans with their imaginative and emotional power. Both were extremely  influenced both by European Romanticism and Realism, but their fiction offered characters more complex and impassioned than those Europeans were used to. 

Tolstoy is known chiefly for his two masterpieces, War and Peace (1865-1869) and Anna Karenina (1875-1877). These works which wrestle with life's most important questions earned Tolstoy the reputation of perhaps the world's greatest novelist. The first is a vast portrait of Russia during the period of the Napoleonic wars, and the second the story of a tormented adulterous woman treated far more seriously than Flaubert's Emma Bovary. Like the English Victorian novelists, Tolstoy sought to do more than entertain or even move his readers, taking the writing of fiction seriously as a moral enterprise. In the end Tolstoy became a Christian utopian, abandoning fiction altogether.

Dostoyevsky is famous for his complex analyses of the human mind. Unlike Turgenev or Tolstoy, he pays little attention to details of setting or the personal appearance of his characters, instead concentrating on their thoughts and emotions. His work and that of Tolstoy revealed to Europeans that modern fiction could serve ends far more sophisticated than it had in the hands of Zola or even Flaubert.

Dostoyevsky had a sensational life which is variously reflected in his fiction. He believed his father to have been murdered by his own serfs, a belief which led him to be obsessed with murder as a subject in many of his greatest works, such as Crime and Punishment (1866)and The Brothers Karamazov (1881). After being arrested for his involvement in a radical group (the model for The Possessed) he was sent to Siberia for ten years. He devoted another novel (The House of the Dead) to the story of his time in prison.

Of the other Russian writers of the 19th Century, the only other one to make much of an impression abroad was Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), whose short stories and plays used Realism in a much more understated way. His four great plays written just before and after the turn of the century - The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard  are seldom absent from the stage for long. 

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Russian art developed in tandem with all the leading movements in European culture. Russian artists travelled widely, read, observed and reflected. Their works developed fully in the context of European art. One of the major movements to develop in nineteenth-century art, Impressionism formed a natural part of the culture of both Russia and other nations. Like such other movements as Romanticism, Futurism and Expressionism, Russian Impressionism of course had its own special features.

Russian Impressionism is little studied in Russia and little known abroad. Like Classicism and Expressionism, the art of most Western nations passed though a period of Impressionism in the last third of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each country developed its own national version of the movement. A world-wide cultural phenomenon, Impressionism pervaded all forms of fine art, literature, music and the theatre, influencing people’s visions of the world and philosophies.

The Impressionists fought against academism, affirming the beauty and value of everyday reality, with its constantly changing states and rich colours. The artists rejected narrative, plot, and social criticism. Their refined and observant eyes captured all that was unique and characteristic in the uninterrupted flow of life. Working in the open air, they created their own system of painting, breaking complicated tones down into pure, bright and light colours, rich reflections and coloured shadows.

Impressionist painting dissolved the boundaries between the picture and the study. The study ceased to be a preparatory stage in the creation of a picture. Canvases were painted en plein air since then. The quick and energetic application of the paints and the resulting layers evoked the impression of the unfinished nature of the work, and the effect of the image’s formation before the very eyes of the viewer.

The Impressionists enriched the golden treasury of Russian culture with such masterpieces as Valentin Serov's Girl with Peaches and Girl Illuminated by the Sun, Konstantin Korovin's portraits, landscapes and still-lifes, Isaac Levitan's Birch Grove and March, Ilya Repin's studies for the group portrait Ceremonial Sitting of the State Council, Igor Grabar's February Azure and Mikhail Larionov's Rose Bush. Several generations of famous and not-so-famous artists extolled the beauty of their native land, contributing to the unique national character of Russian Impressionism.

The first spontaneous outbursts of an Impressionist view of the world were already perceptible in Russian art in the 1820s and 1830s, in a series of landscapes painted by Silvestr Schedrin, Mikhail Lebedev and Alexander Ivanov. In the 1850s and 1860s, Nikolai Ge, Valery Jacoby, Alexei Bogolyubov and Fyodor Vasilyev were also interested in the effects of an environment saturated with light and air. Alexei Bogolyubov, Alexander Beggrov, Ilya Repin, Vasily Polenov and Konstantin Makovsky all attended the early exhibitions of the French Impressionists in Paris in the 1870s.

Each artist perceived the discoveries of the French Impressionists in his own way. The various modifications of the 1870s, the first decade in the history of the movement in Russia, made Russian Impressionism seem multi-component. As in Scandinavia and Germany, Russian Impressionists did not attempt to overthrow or challenge existing traditions.

The principles and devices of Impressionism enriched the Realist painting of Ilya Repin, Vasily Polenov and Vasily Surikov. Combined with Vasily Polenov’s work as a teacher at the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, this helped to accelerate the changes taking place in Russian art. The works painted by Valentin Serov, Konstantin Korovin, Isaac Levitan, Ilya Ostroukhov and Jan Ciaglińskj in the second half of the 1880s were important for Russian Impressionism. Young artists rejected analysis and complicated psychological characteristics in their portraits and genre scenes, resolving them as studies full of life and spontaneity, in a cardinally new approach for the 1880s.

The Russian Impressionism of the 1880s reflects lyrical interpretations of life, based on intimate moments in the lives of contemporaries. Dynamic and fragmentary in terms of composition and painted in an energetic, study-like manner, such works reflected all that was typical of the young generation of artists – quests for a means of expression corresponding to the new disposition of the world, rejection of narrative and the aspiration towards a "gratifying" and positive ideal. Unlike the French Impressionists, the Russian artists of the 1880s mixed their paints on the palette. As in Scandinavia and Germany, the Russian Impressionists were indifferent to the spectrally pure paints and blue-violet shadows of the French.

The 1890s witnessed an exciting panorama of searches for a Russian national line, with particular interest in the Russian countryside and traditional ochre tones. In the mid-1890s, Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov enriched Russian painting with a series of works painted in silver tones. A broad manner of painting acquired popularity, reflecting the spread of Art Nouveau. Victor Borisov-Musatov was the first to employ the colourist discoveries of the French Impressionists.

The heyday of Russian Impressionism was the 1900s. The movement was represented at the exhibitions of all art groups and societies, particularly the Union of Russian Artists. The Impressionist portraits of Ilya Repin, Osip Braz, Boris Kustodiev, Sergei Malyutin, Leonid Pasternak and Mikhail Shemyakin recorded for posterity the outer appearances of the men and women of the day and age in all their spontaneity – government officials, artists, journalists and musicians.

Never before had there been so many images of childhood, so many poetical scenes of the everyday lives of mothers, and so many depictions of the happiness of a quiet family life. The Impressionists rediscovered the world of Russian nature, depicting the light and air of its bracing winters, frost sparkling in the sun, poetic springs, quiet birch groves, endless skies and boundless expanses. The Impressionists were the first to turn their attention to the provinces, the caretaker of Russian national traditions, with their ancient towns, churches, noisy bazaars and exotic local lifestyle.

 Existing from the 1880s to the 1910s, each new decade of Russian Impressionism brought with it specific new tones. Likewise, there were distinct differences between the Impressionist schools of the two Russian capitals – Moscow and St Petersburg.