This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Sep-Dec 2003 by Brumfield, William Craft

Christopher Ely. This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. xi, 278 pp. Bibliography. Figures. Notes. Index. $42.00, cloth.

Russia's evolving sense of national identity has received much attention in both Western and Russian scholarship in recent years. Stemming from the Westernizer-Slavophile polemics of the mid-nineteenth century, this topic encompasses not only Russians' view of themselves and their land, but also the perennial question of Russia's relation to the West. Christopher Ely's book represents another contribution to this discussion, in an area still relatively untouched by Western cultural historians. The basic premise of this ambitious study suggests that Russians assimilated and then modified Western perceptions of landscape in order to interpret and appreciate their own "meagre nature." The title, incidentally, comes from Fedor Tiutchev's well-known poem "Eti bednye seleniia, eta skudnaia priroda." Although Ely notes in the preface that he decided not to include the Russian originals of translated passages "in the interests of space and pacing" (p. xi), that decision seems questionable to this reviewer, especially in regard to the few significant poetry excerpts.

In the book's introduction the author gives frequent and helpful guides to his intentions, primary among them an examination of "the long process by which the image of Russian rural landscape was invented and reinvented until it achieved its standard aesthetic form and special emotional force within late Imperial Russian culture" (p.5). The reader subsequently discovers that for the purposes of this volume "late imperial Russian culture" extends only to the end of the nineteenth century-and not even to the very end. This is a defensible boundary, yet it should be noted that much happens within this theme during the final two decades of imperial Russian culture.

To define a system from which the Russian landscape could be comprehended and projected in nineteenth-century art, Ely offers a concise examination of Western perceptions of landscape as an aesthetic object, beginning with Renaissance Italy and focusing on Claude Lorrain, whose idealized landscapes, one might add, had a profound effect on Dostoevskii. (Courbet is conspicuous by his absence from Ely's introductory discussion.) Russian artists schooled themselves in Western modes of representation before reacting against them in order to address Russia's specificity. At the same time, perceptions of the Russian land as flat and uninspired (perceptions from Western visitors as well from Russians who had travelled in Europe) led artists, writers, critics in Russia to reinterpret ideas of the picturesque and the poetic in ways that would fathom the underlying beauty of the Russian land-a beauty linked, as it were, to authentic moral and spiritual values.

In tracing the development of an aesthetic vision of Russia's quiet landscape, Ely examines literary texts-from Pushkin, Lermontov, Kol'tsov and Tiutchev to Aksakov (the pastoral) and Turgenev. Although Ely mentions "The Hunt," from Tolstoi's Childhood, he avoids the better-known hunt scenes in War and Peace, with their projection of landscape and cultural idyll culminating in Natasha's dance, about which so much has been written recently. Chekhov is given cursory mention; Bunin is omitted altogether.

As the book proceeds, the work of painters such as Venetsianov, Savrasov, and Shishkin becomes the primary focus of attention. The illustrations are reproduced in black-and-white, and not all of the paintings discussed are illustrated. Such are the exigencies of academic publishing. Nonetheless, the visual material is sufficient for the text, which includes comments of art critics such as Vladimir Stasov in elucidating a Russian vision of place. Ely integrates this material with sensitivity and exegetical clarity.

There is, however, much that the book does not explore. A number of important artists do not "make the cut," even though visions of the Russian land continue to play an important role as Russian painting entered a period of remarkable innovation during the two decades before 1917. Even within the more traditional, vedutist style that Ely explores, the book ignores such important themes as the Russian north, which attracted Korovin, Bilibin, and other artists at the end of the nineteenth century. (See, for example, The Art of the Russian North, edited by Anne Odom [Washington: Hillwood Museum, 2001]). In this regard, the Pavilion of the Russian North at the Nizhnii Novgorod Exposition in 1896 was a signal event, sponsored by the railroad magnate Savva Mamontov. Russia, it seems, had its own "machine in the garden"-to borrow a phrase from Leo Marx. This intriguing topic awaits further investigation.

In the other direction, Ely might have stated more clearly-at least in the introduction-that Russian aesthetic perceptions of landscape antedate the importation of Western artistic values and painting techniques. Although he notes Dmitrii Likhachev's interpretation of monastic gardens in Muscovite Russia (p. 31) and provides interesting material from the writings of Pavel Svinin on the place of church architecture in the Russian landscape (p. 74), Ely neglects the connection between artefact and creativity. The exquisite beauty in the design and placement of Russian country churches is a product not of nature but of a careful consideration of nature as aesthetic setting, as landscape. We often assume that the inability to project values (specifically, the aesthetic understanding of landscape) in one mode of cultural discourse implies the lack of those values. I would argue that an acute visual sensitivity to the land had been a deeply rooted part of Russian culture long before academic, vedutist painting. This does not undercut the validity of Ely's premise within its own confines. Indeed, his seminal book suggests how much remains to be done in this area.