Although the capital was thriving commercially, with more than 1,700 fruit-sellers, 2,000 butchers and 250 bookshops, its transport system lagged behind that of London or Paris. There were horse trams on Vasilevsky Island, squeakily moving loads from the wharves to the customs storehouse. Trams also ran along the Nevsky, hauling goods between ship and rail, but there were no omnibuses.2 Passengers without their own carriages travelled in one of the inumerable horse-drawn cabs – the drive through the centre of the city giving the impression of ‘slosh and mud and misery’.
The opening of the railways stimulated the dacha boom that had begun in the 1830s. While these country residences were once the preserve of the aristocracy, the writer and journalist Faddei Bulgarin now instructed his readers not to bother, during the brief weeks of summer, to go searching for ‘a merchant in his shop, an apothecary in his drugstore, a German tradesman in his workshop or a clerk in his office! All of them are at the dacha!’3 Poorer people would pack up bedding, furniture and crockery and go off to enjoy the freshness of the black firs, silver birch and hayfields of the countryside.4 As the city grew, people were forced to venture further than the increasingly urbanised and industrialised Petersburg and Vyborg areas to the north of the Neva.
Railways were busy, and activity in and around Petersburg stations was hectic. Travelling to the capital by rail at the height of the 1863 Polish insurrection – soldiers everywhere, fellow passengers armed with revolvers – Lord Redesdale recorded his arrival: ‘What a crowd it was at the station! Railway officials, Custom House officers, police, hotel touts, droshky drivers, inde-scribables of all sorts; swearing, chaffing, abusing, howling.’ A policeman ‘wielding a stout cudgel, with a few blows indiscriminately administered about the heads of the rabble, sent them all flying in various directions’. After this hectic first impression, Redesdale found Petersburg ‘deaf and blind to all tragedy. There could be no gayer city in the world; certainly none where the foreign diplomats were so hospitably treated; our lives were a round of festivities in the very home of joyous revelry.’5
St Petersburg was flourishing as an international, cultural capital. In 1859, the novelist Alexandre Dumas visited and, rather than adding to the often-repetitive impressions left by endless visitors, was content to write a long, colourful and energetic history of the Romanovs. That same year, Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg, primed by exile in Siberia to explore the underbelly of the city and to excoriate in prose those damp corners ‘where an entire family lives in one room, hungry and cold’. The Mariinsky Theatre opened in 1860. Named after Alexander II’s wife, Marie Alexandrovna, it was designed by Alberto Cavos and constructed on the site of the burnt-out circus.6 It was in the Mariinsky that Alexander and Marie Alexandrovna attended the premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s La forza del destino in November 1862. The opera had been munificently commissioned, and Verdi – who would substantially revise the work before its Milan premiere seven years later – was present.7
To stimulate taste and to educate, the Russian Musical Society was founded. It was sponsored by the forward-looking German-born grand duchess, Elena Pavlovna. The celebrated pianist Anton Rubinstein – who, as a child prodigy, had played before Chopin and Liszt – was appointed director. He exerted an enormous influence on music in the capital and on the young Tchaikovsky who, having graduated from St Petersburg’s School of Jurisprudence in 1859, was gravitating towards a musical career. Elena Pavlovna was also eager to found a St Petersburg Conservatoire. She had discussed the project with the Schumanns when they visited in 1844. Nearly twenty years later, in 1862, the Conservatoire opened its doors. The director was, once again, Anton Rubinstein.8
Although St Petersburg’s great era of palace-building was past, additions were made during the second half of the nineteenth century. The finishing touches were put on the elegant neoclassical Mikhailovsky Palace in the early 1860s, only decades before Alexander III converted it into a museum for Russian art. It was in this palace that the politically engaged Elena Pavlovna held her glittering salon, to which she welcomed thinkers, scientists and artists. She had shown sympathy for the Petrashevsky circle, liberated the serfs on her estate at Karlovka in 1856 and would advise Alexander on his 1861 emancipation plans.
The New Hermitage had opened its doors in 1852, but remained without a director until Stephan Gedeonov was appointed in 1863, after outmanoeuvring both the Louvre and the British Museum to acquire Giampietro Campana’s important collection of antiquities. This Marchese di Cavelli had assembled thousands of items by using money he embezzled from the Monte de Pietà Bank. When Campana was imprisoned, Gedeonov obtained them from the Vatican. His first act as director of the Hermitage was to shift the imperial book collection to the public library on the Nevsky Prospekt in order to make room for his prodigious acquisition. Under Gedeonov, the museum acquired Leonardo’s Madonna Litta along with three other paintings from the Milanese collector Count Litta. Gedeonov purchased Raphael’s Conestabile Madonna for the empress, and it passed into the Hermitage collection after her death. Numerous archaeological items were added, brought from far-flung parts of the Russian Empire that had been opened up by extensive railway and road construction.9
In 1863, as Gedeonov took charge of the Hermitage, the selection for the Paris Salon proved so conservative that artists petitioned for an alternative exhibition, and Napoleon III was obliged to sanction the celebrated Salon des Refusés in order to show progressive works such as Manet’s shocking Dejeuner sur l’herbe. In a similar rejection of stale academicism, St Petersburg students of history painting at the Academy of Arts refused to accept the title set for their examination, ‘The Entry of Wotan into Valhalla’.10 In some ways it was an ill-timed protest, as interest in the historical and mythological was gripping northern Europe – by 1863, Richard Wagner had composed half of his mighty Ring cycle, its plot provoked by the conniving of the doomed Wotan. But although the students may have misjudged the subject’s paradoxical topicality, they were justified in demanding a more contemporary Russian subject. Their peers in genre painting had been set the pertinent title ‘The Liberation of the Serfs’.
The rebellion of the history-painting students and their decision to set up a kind of cooperative, or artel, was merely symptomatic of wider academic unrest. At the outset of the 1860s, a significant number of students at St Petersburg University were badly fed and fell prey to diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis. Returning for the 1861 autumn term, students were greeted by a pamphlet printed by Alexander Herzen’s Free Press in London and co-authored by an academic contributor to The Contemporary, Nikolai Shelgunov, and by the women’s rights activist Mikhail Mikhailov. The pamphlet – To the Younger Generation – called for an end to tsarism, demanded elections and criticised the 1861 Emancipation of Serfs Edict as being too little too late.
The governmental reforms of the early 1860s that purported to be progressive were, in fact, ill conceived, badly managed and inadequate. Despite ameliorating the situation of the Jews and permitting Jewish merchants and craftsmen to live in Russia’s two largest cities, despite introducing trial by jury and a defence counsel, despite easing censorship of the press and despite creating the zemstvo – an elected, multi-class assembly that administered affairs at a local level – the tenor of Alexander II’s reign remained repressive.
Nicholas I had identified serfdom as the ‘indubitable evil of Russian life’. To prove the point, during his reign there had been more than 550 peasant uprisings, though nothing on the scale of the Pugachev revolt. Alexander II’s celebrated statement that it ‘is better to abolish serfdom from above rather than to wait for the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below’ resulted in the 1861 Emancipation Edict. Anxious that its publication might spark revolt, loaded cannon and troops on full alert surrounded the Winter Palace and patrolled the streets of the capital. It was a precautionary measure against those – such as the authors of To the Younger Generation – who regarded the badly drawn-up reform as ‘a bone you thro
w to an angry dog to save your calves. The emancipation is the last act of a dying despotism. The Romanovs have disappointed the people and must go.’
Enacted two years before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the Edict ‘freed’ 23,000,000 serfs owned by 100,000 landowners, but without granting them free land. Absurdly, peasants were left with less terrain to cultivate and with heavy redemption payments, which shackled them to their lords.
Fired by the call to arms in To the Younger Generation, a group of students occupied a lecture theatre and held a protest meeting. The following day – passionate and jubilant in the late-September sun – students swarmed across the city from the university on Vasilevsky Island and swept down the Nevsky. Although French barbers in festive mood emerged from their shops shouting, ‘Révolution! Révolution!’11 the sight of a chanting mass of long-haired men accompanied by women – their hair cropped short, in true revolutionary style – appeared to many passers-by just as degenerate as anti-Vietnam War protesters would on the streets of the West a century later.
Shouting slogans, the crowd surged towards the home of the university rector. He refused to meet them. In fact he did nothing. So, to increase the pressure for reform, undergraduates disrupted classes and boycotted lectures. Continued agitation resulted in student lockouts, the detention of ringleaders and the university being shut down for two years – all of which inspired sympathy for the student cause among those with any interest in the conditions of life in Alexander’s Russia. During benefits in aid of the radicals, Dostoevsky read from his novel The House of the Dead, and Rubinstein performed. When the leading agitators were jailed, Fyodor Dostoevsky and his elder brother Mikhail – co-editors of the progressive and populist periodical Time – sent them grilled meat, wine and cognac.12 Government censorship tightened. The Contemporary was closed in 1862, Time a year later.
Nikolai Yaroshenko’s A Student, 1881.
For the first time since the Decembrist revolt, mass dissension was on the streets of St Petersburg and pamphlets were scattered everywhere. Perhaps the most radical of these was Young Russia of May 1862, which called for ‘bloody and pitiless revolution’. Penned by a Moscow student, it was pushed through letter boxes across the capital and was even scattered in the chapel of the Winter Palace. Young Russia urged people to snatch their axes ‘and attack the imperial party with no more mercy than they show us’. With decidedly Churchillian rhetoric, the pamphlet claimed that ‘we will kill them in the squares, we will kill them in the houses, kill them in the narrow alleys of towns, in the broad avenues of capitals’ and ‘unfurl the great flag of the future, the red flag’.13 The violence of the text led people to suspect that those who produced it were also responsible for the arson attacks that devastated parts of Moscow and St Petersburg in mid-1862. Fires broke out in rapid succession in different quarters of the capital in May. Fanned by high winds, the blazes consumed wooden buildings at an alarming rate. Houses on the left bank of the Fontanka were destroyed, as was the Tolkuchy Market and the Apraksin Arcade. The arsonists were never identified, but their action was dramatic and eminently newsworthy in a country chronically fascinated by fire.14 In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Rashkolnikov – scouring the newspapers for reports of his own crime – finds only stories of ‘a fire in Peski . . . a fire in the Petersburg quarter . . . another fire in the Petersburg quarter . . . and another fire in the Petersburg quarter’.15 Nobody was interested in the axe-murder of a pawnbroker.
The man who became the mouthpiece of the 1860s generation was positively the worst significant novelist in Russian literature: Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Son of a provincial priest, Cherny-shevsky had an empathy with the humbler sections of society and, just like Herzen, believed that the habit of mutual responsibility which guided the peasant commune could be applied to society at large. The example of village communes and craftsmen’s cooperatives – functioning autonomously, taking decisions without any central authority – would point Russia’s progress towards socialism.16 More radical than most of his followers, Chernyshevsky believed that industrial and agricultural labour was entitled to what it produced. Before The Contemporary was shut down, Chernyshevsky and Nekrasov had edited the periodical, filling it with socialist propaganda disguised as literature. When the publication was permitted to restart, Nekrasov published Chernyshevsky’s tedious but tremendously influential fiction What Is to Be Done? which highlighted the radical difference between the pampered reformers of the 1840s and the revolutionaries of the 1860s. That divide was dramatised in Ivan Turgenev’s exquisite novel Fathers and Sons. The nihilist hero, Bazarov, is a raznochinets, one of the sons of impoverished smallholders, merchants, clergy or minor civil servants who were lucky enough to gain an education. Raznochintsy were members of a new social category in Russia, the intelligentsia, who took nothing for granted. It is perhaps a tribute to the accuracy of the book’s vision that when Turgenev – very much a ‘superfluous man’ of the 1840s – attempted to engage with radical students in 1860s Petersburg, they appeared bored or contemptuous.17
While repressive measures were taken against student revolutionaries, there were limited advances in the education of women. Secondary schools were established for girls of moderate means, offering pupils a wide curriculum, including Russian, religion, history, arithmetic, geometry, physics, geography, natural history, drawing, sewing, modern languages, music and dance. Russia’s first Pedagogical Institute for women opened in 1863. The following year, Dostoevsky’s future wife was in attendance, preparing herself for what would be her first position – Dostoevsky’s stenographer.18 As women started office jobs and aspired to the professions, the voice of feminism began to be heard, sparked by the late Mikhail Mikhailov’s desire to purge women of the scourge of ‘femininity’. Mikhailov wanted character traits to be ‘neither masculine, nor feminine, but purely human’. Some progressive or ‘crop-headed’ women – as a character in Crime and Punishment describes them19 – began to train for medicine at the St Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy. When the university prohibited female students, the more enterprising went off to Zurich to study. Among them was Nadezhda Suslova, daughter of one of Count Sheremetev’s serfs, who became Russia’s first female doctor. Another student was Mariya Bokova, prototype for Vera Pavlovna in Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?20
This novel, which inspired decades of Russian revolutionary disruption, nearly failed to make it into print. Chernyshevsky was arrested in July 1862 and it was during his two-year detention in the Peter and Paul Fortress while pending trial that the novel was written. The manuscript was confiscated by the prison authorities and covered with every sort of official stamp by each and every member of a Commission of Inquiry. By the time it arrived in the censor’s office, it was assumed that, after such an excess of scrutiny, it had been approved for publication. The manuscript was handed over to the editor of The Contemporary, Nikolai Nekrasov who – perhaps in an act of unconscious literary criticism – left it in a taxi. He only managed to recover the subversive text after advertising his loss in – of all places – The Police Gazette.21
As literature, What Is to Be Done? should have been lost. As a radical polemic, it clamoured to be read. Its socialist ideals and feminist vision are as attractive as the prose and plot are awkward and unwieldy. The heroine, Vera Pavlovna, sets up a sewing cooperative in decent premises. Her enterprise is not run for her profit, and she works – like those she employs – for a wage. She pays her seamstresses sick-pay, reads aloud to them, dresses them comfortably and feeds them well. She takes them on outings to Petersburg islands, where they picnic, play games and dance quadrilles. The love plot sees Vera move from man to man, offering a picture of an ambitious, advanced and empowering feminism. In Russia of the 1860s, this was trail-blazing.
Chernyshevsky was a diehard optimist who believed that man was capable of creating a socialist utopia.22 No such faith in unqualified good was shared by Dostoevsky, who reacted against the utopianism of What Is to Be Done?
In his novel of 1864, Notes From Underground, Dostoevsky’s anti-hero – ‘a sick man . . . an angry man’ – is a creature who spurns the scientific faith of Turgenev’s Bazarov or Chernyshevsky’s heroine. Heir to the ‘little men’ of Pushkin and Gogol, Dostoevsky’s anti-hero is the victim of the etiquette of Petersburg’s public spaces. The Underground Man – one of the countless scribes ingested by the megalosaurean Russian civil service – feels degraded by that street of splendour, the Nevsky Prospekt. He experiences the gulf between what he is and what he wishes to be. The Nevsky lies, and the Nevsky grades and degrades. The avenue – so generous to the wealthy or well known – makes the lowly squirm. When the Underground Man goes to the Nevsky in the afternoon to enjoy a walk in the sun, he confesses, ‘I didn’t actually enjoy my walk at all: I experienced an endless series of torments, crushing humiliations . . . I darted like a minnow through the passers-by in a most ungraceful fashion, constantly giving way to generals, officers of the Horse Guards and Hussars.’23
Joseph Brodsky contended that during the middle years of the nineteenth century, ‘Russian literature caught up with reality to the extent that today when you think of St Petersburg you can’t distinguish the fictional from the real.’24 While Chernyshevsky inhabited the abstracted world of the polemic, Dostoevsky moved among the down-and-outs in the broken and unhealthy parts of his challenging city. His narrator encountered the ‘rag pickers . . . crowding round the taverns in the dirty stinking courtyards of the Haymarket’ and suffered ‘the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks and dust . . . and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in the summer’. The protagonists of Crime and Punishment crowd in rooms or live in ‘practically a passage’, in houses crammed with ‘working people of all kinds – tailors, locksmiths, cooks . . . girls picking up a living as best they could’.25
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