The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under the Tsars and Bolsheviks by Jeffrey Brooks

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under the Tsars and Bolsheviks by Jeffrey Brooks Svetlana Yefimenko The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under the Tsars and Bolsheviks. By Jeffrey Brooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2019. vii+330 pp. £29.99. ISBN 978–1–108–48446–6. The fraught century between 1850 and 1950 was driven in Russia by radical transformations in politics, social structure, economic activity, and religious practice. How these upheavals manifested in the cultural production of the time—namely, literature, art, music, and dance—is the subject of Jeffrey Brooks's The Firebird and the Fox. By helpfully arranging what he terms the 'creative century' into three periods, Brooks focuses his socio-politically and economically informed lens on the culture of each epoch. First, on how the arts responded to emancipation and reform between 1850 and 1889; next, dialogue between revolutionary politics and art from 1890 to 1916; and, finally, artistic expression under the Soviet regime from 1917 to 1950. Each section subscribes to Brooks's overarching theme: the opposition of firebird and fox, both ubiquitous folkloric figures in Russian nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture. With a nod to Isaiah Berlin's archetypal hedgehog and fox (The Hedgehog and the Fox (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953)), Brooks's dyad is introduced here as a poetic, rather than strictly rigorous, organizing principle. The dazzling firebird and the sly vixen invoke, respectively, the soaring imagination and practical wisdom that characterized Russian cultural production in this rapidly evolving, and often violent, political landscape. The first section of Brooks's monograph describes with lyricism and humour the raffish bandits, rebels, Holy Fools, and ordinary folk represented in the lubki (woodcuts), adventure novels, and print magazines that circulated widely between 1850 and 1889, reassuring the reader that the boundary between anarchy and order was always re-established in the end: '[F]ree spaces proved uninhabitable over the longer period. People must return to the realm of society and the law, where rebels may face punishment and death or win redemption' (p. 43). This formulation explains why popular fiction of the day embraced Christian kenoticism, why Gogolʹ and Turgenev extolled freedom, and why Dostoevskii and Tolstoi were preoccupied with spiritual salvation. It does not, however, explain Chekhov, who is shown to remain ambivalent to the last, and who, along with Tolstoi, helped inaugurate a tradition of civic obligation and activism among Russia's cultural producers that continues to this day. Brooks turns in the second section to the last days of empire and the new art forms emerging in an expanding market economy. As the tsarist regime struggled to maintain power through rhetoric and, when that failed, summary executions, Modernism, neo-Realism, and celebrity culture flourished, with experimental artists such as Mikhail Vrubelʹ and Natalia Goncharova on the ascendant. Realist writers such as Maksim Gorʹkii gradually fell out of vogue, replaced by Symbolism and satire. Brooks recounts how the innovations of Sergei [End Page 521] Diaghilev, Igorʹ Stravinskii, and the legendary Ballets Russes repositioned artists as beneficiaries, rather than critics, of autocracy. As art and empire collaborated to legitimize themselves by exporting Russia's artistic achievements, many avantgarde artists distanced themselves from the sense of collective responsibility that Chekhov, Tolstoi, and Gorʹkii had embraced: '[T]he best young artists of the early twentieth century [. . .] rejected the obligation to enlighten' (p. 148). Adopting the ambivalence of his vulpine hero, Brooks remains refreshingly free from judgement, neither condemning nor praising his subjects. Brooks's tolerance informs his survey of post-1917 cultural production, which studies how the economic and political realities of the New Economic Policy, Stalin's Five-Year Plan, and the Great Terror, along with tightening ideological control over the arts, contributed to one of the most dazzling periods in Russian intellectual history. This seeming paradox justifies Brooks's optimistic analysis of what cultural figures such as Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Maiakovskii saw as 'a new art for the Soviet people' (p. 168). Even in those hard times, poets, writers, artists, composers, film-makers, and cartoonists rallied to find unique avenues for subversion, self-expression, and even joy. Brooks describes how artists such as Vladimir Tatlin...