Russia's culture: a canon the state held back

Why Russian classics reached their readers years late

The pattern is sharpest in the twentieth century, and Britannica's account of Russian literature dates its onset. By the late 1920s the period of Soviet experimentation had ended, censorship had become much stricter, and many of the best writers had been silenced. In 1934 socialist realism was declared the only acceptable method for Soviet writers. Of the novels written to its rules, Britannica names three that keep some literary interest: Fyodor Gladkov's Cement (1925), Nikolay Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered (1932 to 1934) and Valentin Katayev's Time, Forward! (1932).

What the canon held back and when it appeared

The books now taught as the masterpieces of those decades did not fit the canons of socialist realism, and the record dates each of them by when it could finally be read.

The Wikipedia history of Soviet culture records the same arc from the other side. Many writers were imprisoned and killed under Stalin, and Bulgakov's work is one of the rare exceptions it names to the dominance of the government-imposed style.

How the thaw opened and closed again

Stalin died in 1953, and the thaw that followed brought new poets and a new prose. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in 1962 and set out the author's own years in the prison camps. By the late 1960s most of the new writers had been silenced again, and Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Vasily Aksyonov and Vladimir Voynovich had all been forced into exile by 1980.

What could be published at home in those years was mostly village prose, the realist fiction of Valentin Rasputin and Vasily Shukshin about rural life meeting the modern one. Britannica holds that the most important writing of those years, Varlam Shalamov's camp stories among it, was first published outside the Soviet Union. Underground literature typed and copied by hand, known as samizdat, developed in the same period. Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost in the second half of the 1980s widened what the press could print, and Requiem followed in 1989.

Russian writing had been split since 1917 into a Soviet part and an émigré one. Ivan Bunin left after the revolution and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933; Vladimir Nabokov and Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote in the émigré communities of Germany, France, Italy and the United States. Boris Pasternak received the prize in 1958 and Mikhail Sholokhov in 1965.

How the Orthodox church ruled early Russian art

The earlier rules were the church's. Kievan Rus was Christianised in 988, according to the Russian Primary Chronicle, and high culture became ecclesiastical. Literacy was not widespread and composition was done almost entirely by monks. The first texts in circulation were translations from Greek into Old Church Slavonic; by the 11th century monks were writing their own hagiographies, chronicles and homilies on Byzantine models. The Song of Igor's Campaign, an epic of the late 12th century about a failed campaign against the Polovtsy, is the secular exception. The popular culture of harvest, marriage, birth and death rituals that ran alongside it is known chiefly from the church records of its suppression.

Painting meant icons. The Moscow school produced Dionisy and Andrei Rublev, who worked in the early 15th century and whose Old Testament Trinity hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery. The iconostasis, the wall of icons separating the nave from the sanctuary, developed in Russia after the Mongol conquest cut the ties with Byzantium, and religious homes kept icons in the krasny ugol, the red or beautiful corner.

The church then split over its own rules. Patriarch Nikon changed the liturgy in the mid-seventeenth century, and the persecuted traditionalists, the Old Believers, went on painting icons in the older stylised manner while the state church took in Western European realism.

In the Moscow Kremlin, listed by UNESCO together with Red Square, the Italian architect Aristotele Fioravanti built the five-domed Cathedral of the Dormition between 1475 and 1479, and the present walls and towers went up between 1485 and 1516. The Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed on Red Square was raised between 1555 and 1560 to commemorate the capture of Kazan. The tent-roofed church and the onion dome both took shape in the 16th century.

What Peter's turn west did to Russian letters

Peter I, who reigned from 1682 to 1725, began building St Petersburg in 1703 on marshes at the mouth of the Neva, and UNESCO counts more than 400 bridges in the city that resulted. Foreign architects, Rastrelli, Rinaldi, Quarenghi, Cameron and Vallin de la Mothe among them, set its baroque and neoclassical ensembles, and an Academy of Sciences and then an Academy of Fine Arts were founded there. The Academy of Arts was founded in 1757 to train Russian painters in Western secular technique.

Literature was rebuilt by imitation. In the late 1730s Mikhail Lomonosov and Vasily Trediakovsky adapted German syllabotonic verse to Russian and produced the classical metres that Russian poetry still uses. Aleksandr Sumarokov wrote Russian stage tragedies in the 1740s on French neoclassical models, and Nikolay Karamzin brought prose fiction at the end of the century. Britannica calls the whole period a 75-year European cultural apprenticeship, after which Russia had a flexible secular literary language. The Imperial School of Ballet opened in St Petersburg in the 1740s to entertain the court.

How the novel became Russia's public argument

Aleksandr Pushkin, who died in 1837, came to be recognised as the national poet for work such as Boris Godunov in 1831, the novel in verse Yevgeny Onegin in 1833. In the 1830s the aristocratic salon gave way to the monthly "thick journals", whose editors and critics decided taste, and in the 1840s the critic Vissarion Belinsky pulled literature towards current social problems.

The realist novel that followed carried political weight. Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches of 1852 was credited with persuading Alexander II that the serfs had to be freed. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was arrested in 1849 for belonging to a socialist reading group and came back to letters in the late 1850s; Crime and Punishment followed in 1866 and The Brothers Karamazov in 1879 to 1880. Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace between 1865 and 1869 and Anna Karenina between 1875 and 1877. Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard was first performed in 1904.

How the Soviet state rewrote Russian folklore

The oldest byliny, the epic songs of the Kievan cycle, were written down in the Russian North, chiefly in Karelia. Folklorists call the 1920s the golden age of Soviet folklore study, when formalists analysed the structure of the tales and the Finnish school traced their migration between regions.

That ended with the first five-year plan in 1928. The state treated folklore as a relic of tsarist society, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers took fairy tales off the shelves, and children were steered towards books on nature and science. The association became the Union of Soviet Writers in 1932.

Maxim Gorky reversed the policy in a speech to the union in 1934, arguing that folklore showed community-minded heroes and could be used to teach Communist values. The union then collected tales, kept the ones that suited it and published approved versions. Authors also wrote new ones, called noviny, in the form of the old epics, with technology in place of magic and Stalin in place of the supernatural helper. Folklorists coached the performers in Marxist ideology, and some of those performers, illiterate, were elected to the Union of Soviet Writers.

The noviny were dropped quickly after Stalin died in March 1953, and his name was cut from the few that survive. Folklorists now class them as pseudo-folklore, written by individual authors and never carried by oral tradition.

Where Russian artists went after the revolution

The Russian avant-garde, the umbrella term for neo-primitivism, suprematism, constructivism, rayonism and futurism, ran from about 1890 to 1930 and peaked between 1917 and 1932, when it collided with socialist realism. Proletkult, the network set up just before the October Revolution to put the arts at the service of the proletariat, had declined by 1922 and was disbanded in 1932. Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall and Naum Gabo made their careers in Western Europe. De facto limits on what artists could paint lasted into the late 1980s.

Dance went abroad earlier. Sergey Diaghilev founded the Ballets Russes in 1909 with its headquarters in Paris, and his protégé George Balanchine founded New York City Ballet in 1948. At home, Soviet ballet kept the nineteenth-century technique intact and trained Maya Plisetskaya, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov; the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow and the Mariinsky in St Petersburg carry that tradition.

The new state encouraged film as a way to reach a largely illiterate society, and much of Sergei Eisenstein's best work dates from the first decade after the revolution. Eisenstein had studied under Lev Kuleshov, who developed montage theory at the All-Union Institute of Cinematography, and the same cinema produced Battleship Potemkin. Sergey Bondarchuk's War and Peace, shot between 1961 and 1968, won an Oscar. The Soyuzmultfilm studio produced most Soviet animation, including Cheburashka and the wolf and hare of Nu, Pogodi!

Soviet music had its own experimenters. Leon Theremin built his electronic instrument before 1928, and Evgeny Murzin's Moscow Experimental Electronic Music Studio, created in 1966 and opened in 1967, is where Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina and Edison Denisov worked. After the thaw jazz orchestras were permitted across the Soviet Union, among them the Melodiya Ensemble, and by the 1980s rock had become popular, with bands such as Kino, Aquarium and DDT.

How religion in Russia was closed down and reinstated

How many churches the Soviet state closed

In the empire the Russian Orthodox Church was the church of the monarchy and carried out state functions. A decree of 1918 made the Russian republic a secular state and forbade the teaching of religion wherever general subjects were taught. Further restrictions followed in 1929. Wikipedia's history of the Soviet Union reports that more than 85,000 Orthodox priests were shot in 1937 alone, that only a twelfth of the church's priests were still serving parishes by 1941, and that the number of Orthodox churches in Russia fell from 29,584 in 1927 to fewer than 500 in 1940.

Policy eased in the late 1930s and churches reopened during the war. A second campaign between 1958 and 1964 put atheism into the school curriculum, and from 1959 to 1965 the number of churches fell from 20,000 to 10,000 and the number of synagogues from 500 to 97.

What the law now calls traditional

Article 14 of the 1993 constitution makes the Russian Federation a secular state in which no religion may be established as a state or obligatory one. A law of 1997 names Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism as Russia's traditional religions and part of its historical heritage, and Russian law recognises the Orthodox Church for its "special role" in the formation of the country's spirituality and culture. In 2017 the Jehovah's Witnesses were banned as an "extremist" and "nontraditional" faith.

The detailed count in the record is the Arena Atlas, published in 2012 by the research organisation Sreda with the Ministry of Justice as an adjunct to the 2010 census.

Britannica's account of post-Soviet life says a majority of Russians are nonbelievers and that many of them take part in religious festivals anyway. Islam is the traditional faith of most peoples of the North Caucasus and of some Turkic peoples of the Volga and the Urals; Buddhists are concentrated in Kalmykia, Buryatia and Zabaykalsky Krai and are the large majority in Tuva.

Which languages Russia's peoples speak and write

The census of 2010 counted 137.5 million speakers of Russian, 3.1 million of Tatar and 1.1 million of Ukrainian, and somewhere between 100 and 150 minority languages are spoken across the country. Britannica counts more than 120 ethnic groups besides the Russians.

Language policy has also been set from the centre. Under Lenin, small language groups were given writing systems of their own. Russian worked de facto as the Soviet Union's language of interethnic communication and took de jure status as the official national language in 1990. Article 68 of the 1993 constitution makes Russian the state language across the whole federation, lets the republics establish their own state languages to be used alongside it, and guarantees every people the right to preserve its native language. Article 26 gives everyone the right to choose the language of education and creative work.

The literary language grew out of a split of its own. Old Church Slavonic arrived as the language of the liturgy and was used for writing, while the vernacular carried oral literature and the business of the chanceries. The vernacular displaced Church Slavonic in secular writing, and the modern literary language was standardised in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations and one of the two official languages aboard the International Space Station.

What the Russian calendar and table are built around

Which holidays the state added and kept

Russia has eight official holidays. The year opens with New Year's Day on 1 January and Orthodox Christmas on 7 January. Defender of the Fatherland Day on 23 February is kept for men and International Women's Day on 8 March for women; Britannica notes that the second was established by the Soviet authorities to mark what women had gained under communist rule. Spring and Labour Day on 1 May began as the Soviet workers' holiday.

Three of the eight are patriotic holidays. Victory Day on 9 May brings a parade on Red Square and the Immortal Regiment march. Russia Day on 12 June commemorates the declaration of sovereignty from the collapsing Soviet Union. Unity Day on 4 November commemorates the uprising of 1612 that ended the Polish occupation of Moscow. The state anthem uses the music of the Soviet anthem with new words, and many older Russians still sing the old ones.

Folk holidays suppressed in the Soviet years returned from the 1980s, when Gorbachev's reforms eased restrictions. Maslenitsa marks the end of winter with pancakes that stand for the sun, served with caviar, fish, nuts and honey pies and tea from the samovar. At Easter there is round sweet bread and paskha, a sweetened curd mixed with butter and raisins, with painted eggs. At Troitsa, Pentecost, homes are dressed with green branches and girls float birch garlands on water to tell fortunes, and in August three feasts called the Spas mark honey, apples and nuts.

What goes on the Russian table

The staples come from rye, wheat, barley and millet, and from cabbage, potatoes, carrots, sour cream and apples. Shchi, borsch, ukha and solyanka are the soups; kvass is brewed from stale black bread and, chilled, turns into the cold soup okroshka in summer. Blini and syrniki are native pancakes, and pelmeni and shashlyk are the common meat dishes.

Vodka has been made since the 14th century and is drunk straight, chased with salt herring, a pickled cucumber, a pickled mushroom or rye bread with butter. Britannica records that getting visibly drunk on it counts as bad manners. More than 200 kinds of edible mushroom grow in Russia, and picking them and berries in the forest is a skill handed down in families.