Conference Agenda

Among Catherine II’s six operas, her five-act musical pageant The Early Reign of Oleg links theater with her vision of history and concrete political strategy. Embodying Catherine’s “Greek project,” the opera maps Old Russia geographically, from Moscow to Kyiv and along the river Dnepr to Byzantium, and temporarily, by extending eighteenth-century imperial lore back to ninth century Rus and further to the Euripides’ Greek antiquity (fifth century BCE). Featuring Russia's first tsar dynasty, the opera presents major stately events: the foundation of Moscow, the subjugation of Kyiv, a princely wedding, the unification of Slavic tribes, and the exhibition of military forces that leads the Byzantine emperor to open his city to Oleg. Catherine, forging herstory of antique Russian tsardom as a manifestation of eighteenth-century absolutism, employed diverse literary and theatrical models, including Shakespeare, Lomonosov, and Euripides and entrusted the music to an international trio of composers: Sarti, Canobbio, and Pashkevich. Completed first as a drama, Oleg became a prelude to Catherine’s second war with Ottomans; the staging of the opera four years later celebrated Russia’s operatic victory (a substitute for Catherine’s failed Greek project).

The libretto invokes tenth-century events recorded in the Primary Chronicle, which Catherine described in detail in both her Notes on History and Oleg. But the opera's final act introduces a new element. Welcoming Prince Oleg to the city, the Byzantine emperor stages “ancient Greek games: jousting, martial arts, wrestling, running, jumping, wrestling with and without arms, and other gymnastic and theatrical performances.” Not only did Catherine’s Oleg pave the path for Russian nationalistic heroic-historical operas; her theatrical devices still appear in state productions, including the highly theatrical Opening of the Olympic games in Sochi 2014.

This paper offers the first comparison of the contemporaneous Russian receptions of painter Karl Briullov (1799–1852) and composer Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857), focusing on critical responses to Briullov’s The Last Day of Pompeii (1833) and Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836). Juxtaposed, these receptions reveal strikingly similar rhetoric, narrative patterns, and themes. Critics celebrated both artists as European masters of universal genius while simultaneously proclaiming them quintessentially Russian figures whose works embodied a national identity. Each was cast as inaugurating an epoch—Briullov as founder of a Russian school of painting, Glinka as the creator who made Russian opera possible—while earlier artistic achievements were dismissed as obsolete, marking a dramatic rupture between an inadequate past and a triumphant cultural present. Their acclaim was magnified by unprecedented popular enthusiasm and reinforced through official recognition and state patronage.

Investigating why such narratives emerged at this particular juncture and why they resonated so strongly with contemporaries, I argue that these receptions formed a single cultural phenomenon, examined here through four interrelated lenses. 1) Art and the State: Under Nicholas I, public artistic presentation was staged to serve state interests; both the exhibition of Briullov’s painting and the state-backed premiere of Glinka’s opera functioned as instruments of cultural policy. 2) Emergence of Public Art: As part of that policy, painting and opera entered the public sphere as newly accessible forms of mass culture. 3) The Demand for National Art: Critics had long sought a distinctly Russian artistic identity, which these works appeared to fulfill (while neither the artists’ Italian training nor their reliance on Italian models was acknowledged). 4) The Artist as Public Figure: Both Briullov and Glinka were fashioned into cultural icons and civic servants, Romantic tropes refracted through the cultural politics of Nicholas I’s State–Nation–Empire building.

Russian Futurism was arguably one of the most interesting and most short-lived artistic movements of the early 20th century. It flourished within the avant-garde circles of major cities of the Russian Empire and loosely spanned from the early 1910s until the early 1930s (Markov 2006). Due to the large size of the Russian Empire and its many major artistic centers—including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, and Baku, among others—this artistic movement did not have a centralized city or leader. Instead, it developed as a collective of visual and performing artists, composers, and poets.

My paper discusses the work of two significant artists from that period—Arseny Avraamov (1886–1944) and Arthur Lourié (1886–1966)—who were ethnically the consequence of Russian imperialism (Avraamov was Cossack and Lourié was Jewish). Each of them used artistic means to navigate the changing guard of the empire in which they lived (from the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union). I focus on two works to illustrate their changing identity in the new empire—factory/artillery sounds in Avraamov’s Symphony of the Sirens [Simfoniia Gudkov] (1922) and Lourié’s reimagined musical rendition of Mayakovsky’s poem “Our March” [Nash Marsh] (1918) with an original art by artist Petr Miturich (1887–1956). Each of these works is a product of the newly forming political landscape, where each composer reinvented and redefined what music should sound like in the new Soviet Empire. In this process, Avraamov and Lourié also reinvented themselves—Avraamov used several pseudonyms including Krasnokutsky, Arslan Ibrahim ogli Adamov, and Ars (Rumiantsev 2007, 38–39), and Lourié had officially changed his birth name from Naum Izrailovich Lurya to Arthur Vincent Lourié and had converted to Catholicism (Bobrik 2014, 30–33).

While the Soviet Union was in the process of becoming, these two artists (along with their artistic contemporaries) experienced a renaissance in their creative thought, works, and performances that linked the old and the new empires.