Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power

by Richard Stites

Serf-era and provincial Russia heralded the spectacular turn in cultural history that began in the 1860s. Examining the role of arts and artists in society’s value system, Richard Stites explores this shift in a groundbreaking history of visual and performing arts in the last decades of serfdom. Provincial town and manor house engaged the culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg while thousands of serfs and ex-serfs created or performed. Mikhail Glinka raised Russian music to new levels and Anton Rubinstein struggled to found a conservatory. Long before the itinerants, painters explored town and country in genre scenes of everyday life. Serf actors on loan from their masters brought naturalistic acting from provincial theaters to the imperial stages. Stites’s richly detailed book offers new perspectives on the origins of Russia’s nineteenth-century artistic prowess.

640 pages, Hardcover

First published December 14, 2005

About the author

Richard Thomas Stites (December 2, 1931 – March 7, 2010) was a historian of Russian culture and professor of history at Georgetown University.

Reviews

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stites seriously cares. He writes like he is writing poetry, except that he is writing about pleasure and power (so porno!) in bound Russia. He takes into account both gender and sexuality and makes postmodern arguments about the ways that these forces (bound labor, the arts) intersect and are inextricably linked. This is my favourite Russian social history book so far. Gorgeous.