Educational Authority Ministry of Education Holy Synod
Other institutions
Number of Schools 60,000 38,000 2,700
Number of Pupils 4,200,000
1,800,000 200,000
Four years later, the Ministry of Education was responsible for 80,000 schools with 6,000,000 pupils (2,000,000 of whom were girls); mostly, however, in the towns.
Education in the rural areas had made little progress, despite the efforts of the zemstvos.
Secondary schools were attracting an increasing number of pupils but the total intake was still small. In 1912—3 they had less than 700,000 pupils (and this includes the seminaries). By the outbreak of the First World War the total number of school and university pupils had risen to about 9,000,000 in a total population of 175,000,000.
Russian Contributions to Science
Scientifically, Russia lagged behind other countries and was largely de-pendent on them. She nevertheless produced a few scientists and techno-logists who went abroad to find a more congenial atmosphere and better working conditions; such were the biologist Mechnikov (1845-1916), a Nobel prize-winner in 1908, and the physicist Yablochkov (1847-94), wno
invented a spark-plug. Inside Russia, the physiologist Pavlov (1849-1936) won fame by his work on digestion, founded a whole new school of thought in psychophysiology, and won a Nobel prize in 1904. But such successes were few; general education was still too undeveloped, and serious obstacles made it difficult for the universities' most brilliant pupils to enter research.
Pavlov's life is a case in point: one of the eleven children of a priest, he was educated at the seminary at Riazan and the University of St Petersburg, where he took his medical degree in 1883; led a poverty-stricken existence for a number of years; was obliged to accept the chair of pharmacology at the University of Tomsk; and was able only in 1895 to embark on his research at the University of St Petersburg, where he taught for thirty years.
Prominence of Women
At every level of Russian society, women occupied an important position and to some extent an independent one. This was due to a combination of factors: distance - the geographical scale of Russian life; and the fact that, in the rural areas, the men often had to be away for long periods at a time;
and the scarcity of women in the recently colonized regions. The role of women in both town and village was often a leading one; at the very least they worked in close partnership with their men; there was no room in life for the submissively feminine attitude implied by certain literary sources which are few in number though great in fame; penned at early periods (the Domostroi is an example), they are not above suspicion of partiality and moreover refer only to special cases.
Admittedly, the gloomy realism of Ostrovsky's plays about life in the mer-chant class depicts the abasement of women under the will of the tyrannical head of the family. But that was only one part of the truth, one which Moreover applied specially to the first half of the nineteenth century.
Among the 'merchants' (which means registered members of the merchant the industrialists, who were more advanced, constituted an elite, a
29° NATIONALISM AND THE SLAV PEOPLES RUSSIA AT THE CROSSROADS 291
special environment in which a wife often had a special position to fill: her husband's factory, with its multitude of workers, clerks and so on, gave her the chance and indeed the duty of entering a field of activity to which there was no parallel in commercial circles, at any rate on the same scale and with as much responsibility. It was the achievement of industrialists' wives not only to do the conventional thing by building churches in the villages near the factory, but also workers' housing, communal baths, schools, libraries and theatres. Sometimes their opportunities were even wider: it was not unknown, if the husband died while the children were minors, for the widow to take over the chairmanship of the firm.
Even in the background position assigned to them by the Church, wives, or rather mothers, exerted a significant influence in some cases on prominent figures in literary and religious life.
Women played an active part in literary movements, and still more in artistic ones. The list of contributors to Mir Iskusstva contains such names as Polenova, Yakuchikova, Ostrumova, Goncharova and Princess Tenisheva.
Women made a big contribution to the revolutionary movement; large numbers of them undertook the humbler tasks, a few participated directly in terrorist activities. The Land and Freedom party, founded in 1876, in-cluded Vera Figner and Sophia Perovskaya among its members; in 1879 the latter with her own hands placed a bomb on the railway line along which the Tsar was to travel. In 1878 another woman revolutionary, Vera Zasulich, shot down the chief of police, Trepov, with a revolver.
Woman's role in society had been suddenly enlarged by the application of the reforms of 1860; the zemstvos created and managed a number of institutions which offered them an immediate outlet for their energies.
Nor did the educational system debar them from culture. The propor-tion of women who had received schooling of some sort was, of course, smaller than that of the men: here again we can turn to the census of 1897, which tells us that 13 per cent of the female population of Russia had learnt to read and write, as against 32-2 per cent of the males. The proportion was higher: 26-8 per cent and 34-2 per cent respectively, in the Vistula territories (the former Polish kingdom); and lower in Siberia: 5-1 per cent and 19-2 per cent.
But a distinction must be drawn between the country districts, where ignorance was the general rule, and the towns, where a third of the female population had been to a school of some kind. A further distinction is that between classes: nearly 70 per cent of women in aristocratic and adminis-trative circles could read and write.
On the other hand it is to be noted that at secondary level the ratio of men to women was much higher: 528,232 women had received a second-ary education, as against 717,134 men (72,441 of whom had received it in military academies). And the universities (representing higher education and higher technical education) had trained no less than 7,000 women (as compared, admittedly, with a much larger number of men, namely almost
132,000). All these figures are small, but they point not so much to any inferiority in the position of women as to a low level of education among the population as a whole.
Although admission to the universities was denied to women under the University Act of 1863, a certain number of institutions were open to them, including the medical schools; towards 1865 there were some 200 women medical students in the capital. Secondary education being already available to girls (St Petersburg's four high schools for girls had approxi-mately a thousand pupils in 1862), a press campaign to broaden their opportunities was mounted in the liberal atmosphere of the Great Re-forms ; conducted by the Sovremennik (The Contemporary) and by the maga-zine Nedelia (The Week], a feminist organ, the campaign failed to get women admitted to the universities but did win for them (or at least for those who had gained diplomas as secondary teachers) the right to attend the extension lectures given voluntarily in the evenings and on Sundays by professors of St Petersburg University. In 1876 this right was extended to all universitity cities; by about 1880, women could take four-year courses whose intellectual level was in no way inferior to that of the regular courses.
Meanwhile women were being admitted to certain professions: they were becoming medical assistants, telegraph operators and, from 1871, accountants. They were excluded from service in government departments until 1914. But the first women doctors had made their appearance during the Russo-Turkish war of 1887-8; their numbers increased rapidly, and special institutes were set up for training them.
VI THE ARTS AND THE NATION Half a Century of Great Literature
IA great literature had been born in Russia in the years preceding the emancipation of the serfs. This literature reflected a society agitated by violent ideological conflicts and by the reforms of the 'sixties; it was caught in the crossfire of criticism from the Slavophils on the one hand and the Westernizers on the other, and subsequently from the conservatives and the liberal intelligentsia; it was under constant scrutiny from the stand-point of the existing political and social order, and was plagued for years by a vigilant and touchy censorship; it was nevertheless sufficiently free to expand and blossom magnificently. But along with this free creativeness, it Was always — though not all of it was 'engaged' in the narrow sense — strongly influenced by the moral and social problems posed by Russia's backwardness.
Turgenev (1818-83) is much more than the delightful writer who gave us A Sportsman's Sketches, a portrayal of the peasantry; he also wrote, for example, Fathers and Sons (1861), a novel which shows the clash between t^o generations and in which a new type, the 'nihilist', makes his first
aPpearance, a character the author perhaps based on Bakunin. Turgenev's
292 NATIONALISM AND THE SLAV PEOPLES
contemporary Goncharov (1812-91) delineated in Oblomov a landowner afflicted with chronic indecision, one of those provincial noblemen who 'began by forgetting how to pull on their stockings, and ended by forget-ting how to live'. Ten years later, when the aristocracy's very existence was in question, this vice of oblomovshchina had come to be regarded as an in-grained characteristic; generalizing inaccurately, the public attributed it to the nobility at large, whereas a good many nobles were in fact struggling hard against poverty and the stagnation of provincial life.
RUSSIA AT THE CROSSROADS 293
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FIGURE 29 Page from the MS of Xnna Karenina, by Tolstoy; the ninth version, in which the initial plan, involving Anna's divorce and her remarriage to Vronsky
(whence the deleted title, Dva braka [Two marriages] ), was abandone .
Dostoevsky (1821-81), who underwent four years of imprisonment with hard labour, followed by five years of exile, in Siberia, from which he returned in 1859, contemplated human suffering, both physical and moral, with sympathy and keen sensibility. His prison experiences provided the material for The House of the Dead (1861). His novels (The Insulted and the Injured, 1861; Crime and Punishment, 1866; The Idiot, 1868; The Possessed, 1871; The Brothers Karamazflv, 1879), show him to be a profound psycho-logist who is attracted by the lower depths of society and by the troubled, questing soul and the unbalanced mind. Deeply concerned with the Christian conception of life, the search for God, the necessity of defending the rights of the spirit, and the problem of moral freedom, he became in later life an adherent of the 'Slav idea', which in his case meant a naive, unrealistic Pan-Slavism and a religious nationalism which led him, in his reaction against materialism and the radical intelligentsia, into political conformism.
A very different temperament is evident in the works of Tolstoy (1828—
1910), whose appetite for life frequently overrides his moral and religious tendencies. He was full of fads and fantasies ('lubies'), as Legras remarks;
excited, for a while, by his educational experiments in his school at Yasnaya Polyana; 'an anarchistic prophet, excommunicated by the Church but tolerated by the government, surrounded by hangers-on and famous throughout the world; punctuating his long life with works of uneven value, some of which bear the stamp of genius; abandoning his family and dying shortly afterwards, alone, at a small country railway-station', Tolstoy, with his 'unquiet spirit and lack of balance', is the personification of nineteenth-century Russia (Legras). The whole of Russia becomes a living presence for the reader of Tolstoy's masterpieces War and Peace (1864-9), in which the campaign of 1812 provides the setting for a panoramic picture of Russian life, and Anna Karenina (1873-7), which unfolds the destinies of two noble families (figure 29). Abandoning the novel, he turned to the novella
^and the stage-play; in The Power of Darkness (1886), his intentions as a moral and religious propagandist are entangled in a lurid plot reminiscent of the old-fashioned spine-chilling melodrama.
A better exponent of the theatre was Ostrovsky (1823-86), whose char-acters are authentic Russians in their everyday environment, in most cases that of the Muscovite merchant class. From The Storm in 1859 to Wolves and Sheep in 1875, his plays allow us to follow the development of social life, in which the narrow, tradition-bound mentality of the mid-century bourgeoisie is overlaid by the broader and more unprincipled attitudes of the new-style business man.
The leading reviews, such as The Contemporary, and subsequently Annals
°J the Fatherland, published contributions in prose and verse from authors svho were of noble origin for the most part, and to whom Alexander n's elatively liberal attitude permitted a certain freedom of expression, though they had to be careful not to go too far.
N.A.Nekrassov (1821-77), who edited The Contemporary from 1846 to
**", and Annals of the Fatherland from, the latter year until his death, was a
294 NATIONALISM AND THE SLAV PEOPLES RUSSIA AT THE CROSSROADS 295 poet whose tenderness and compassion were excited by suffering His
'generous poetry' belongs to the democratic and liberal trend of the eighteen-seventies, a trend of which the title of his volume, Who In Russia Lives At Ease ?, is a characteristic example. His lyricism reached a con-siderable public, not so much by its quality as poetry as by the nature of the sentiments expressed.
A free heart which finds its salvation Even in slavery,
Has ever been called forth . ..
Russia does not stir, With no one to wake them, All advance
Though none entreat them;
Grain by grain
The wheat is heaped up, mountain-high!
An army arises
(from Who In Russia Lives at Ease?)
M.E.Saltykov (1826-89), writing under the pseudonym Shchedrin, con-tributed to The Contemporary and succeeded Nekrassov as editor of Annals of the Fatherland. He represents 'the literature of accusation'; his aggressive criticism is camouflaged by enigmatic wording and humorous allusion; his copious output (The History of a Town, Letters from the Provinces, Sketch of a Province, etc.) describes the follies and foibles of the upper classes, both nobles and bourgeois. This humorist, who simultaneously carried on a brilliant career as a provincial administrator, wielded considerable political influence in educated circles for something like forty years.
The same period was marked by the development of a type of literature which, though more conformist in tone, is none the less of interest by virtue of the picture of popular life which it offers to the historian. P.I.Melnikov (1818-83), a civil servant in Nijni Novgorod who wrote about the Old Believers as well as persecuting them, left two works, In the Forests (1868-74) and In The Mountains (1875-82), whose vigorous character-drawing conveys the life and outlook of the religious minorities along the middle Volga, a region which owed is activity and animation largely to them.
N.S.Leskov (1831-95), in his novel Church People (1872), takes the reader into ecclesiastical circles, described with sympathy and, indeed, a certain partiality.
The great period of poetic romanticism, the period of Pushkin and Lermontov, was over. But the lyrical tradition continued to be represented by aristocratic poets of high quality, though the audience to which they appealed was smaller: F.I.Tyuchev (1803-73), the quiet tones of whose verse are full of melancholy, vibrating with the sadness of the close of day and the evening of life; Alexis Tolstoy (1817-75), the novelist's cousin, who was not only a 'pleasing lyrical poet' (Legras) but also wrote a novel (Prince Serebriany, 1862) and a dramatic trilogy set in the time of Ivan the Terrible (The Death of Ivan the Terrible, 1868; Tsar Fedor Ivanovitch, 1868;
land Tsar Boris, 1870); and A.A.Fet (1820-92), who, in his poetry, dealt with the intimate atmosphere of the family circle, and, in his life, had the distinction of being one of the landowners who actively looked after their estates and not only maintained their material position but improved it.
The most characteristic representatives of Russian literature towards the end of the old regime are, however, Chekhov and Gorki.
A.P.Chekhov (1860-1904) belonged to the new generation which the Deforms of Alexander n had enabled to rise from the ranks of the under-privileged to a higher social position. Chekhov, who had become medical officer to a zemstvo, published humorous stories; in the eighteen-nineties he Applied himself to writing for the stage, providing the Moscow Art theatre, founded in 1898 by a businessman, A. Alexeyev (Stanislavsky), rth part of its repertory. His most interesting plays are not his farces, such
as The Bear (1888), but his dramas, whose characters are comic on the out-'e but are inwardly profoundly sad; indifferent to active life, and
patho-°gically self-concerned, they remain immured in their personal problems, by Stanislavsky's remarkable production, Chekhov's 'comedies'
296
NATIONALISM AND THE SLAV PEOPLES RUSSIA AT THE CROSSROADS 297 (Ivanov, 1887; The Seagull, 1896; Uncle Varya, 1897; Three Sisters, 1900;The Cherry Orchard, 1903) attracted a large urban public who adored the theatre and discovered in these moral and emotional problems (which were essentially a refuge from the real problems of life) innumerable fea-tures of the middle class and its fears - some members of the middle class, that is to say those who could not adapt themselves to new economic conditions and were in danger of going under.
M.Gorki (1868-1936), whose real name was M. Peshkov, was the orphaned son of a working-class family who earned his living in all manner of jobs and fed his mind with revolutionary writings; and it was with him that literary art in Russia took a leap forward into the Revolution. He be-came famous as a writer in the 'nineties. His literary achievement is in-separable from his political activity. He took part in revolutionary agitation among students and workers (and was arrested in 1901), early became a contributor to the newspapers Novqye Slovo (1899) and ^hizn (1899-1901), fought in the 1905 Revolution and was compelled to flee abroad in the following year, settling in Capri after a short stay in the United States and remaining outside Russia until 1913, when an amnesty enabled him to return; in his stories and novels (Foma Gordeyev, 1899;
The Three, 1900; The Mother, 1906), his plays (The Lower Middle Class, 1901; The Lower Depths, 1902; both of which were performed at the Art Theatre), his reminiscences (My Childhood, Earning My Bread, 1913-1916), he portrayed a society torn by the class struggle and the conflict between the generations, and bestowed a new dignity on the lowest grades, the most completely disinherited, in the social hierarchy, in-troducing the 'fourth estate' into literature (The Lower Depths] and insisting on the importance of the industrial proletariat (Foma Gordeyev).
The romanticism of his early style was gradually replaced by a socialistic realism which was strongly influenced by contemporary social and political events; at the time of Stolypin's reforms, his interest was aroused by the village scene and the struggles of the peasants (Among the People, 1909). But his broad fresco, of which his autobiography forms a part, is based above all on the lower strata of the city population: the outcast and destitute, the proletarian workers, and the reactionary lower middle class. During the years preceding the First World War, Gorki, who had
The romanticism of his early style was gradually replaced by a socialistic realism which was strongly influenced by contemporary social and political events; at the time of Stolypin's reforms, his interest was aroused by the village scene and the struggles of the peasants (Among the People, 1909). But his broad fresco, of which his autobiography forms a part, is based above all on the lower strata of the city population: the outcast and destitute, the proletarian workers, and the reactionary lower middle class. During the years preceding the First World War, Gorki, who had