Kshesinskaia's Mansion: High Culture and the Politics of Modernity In
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Kshesinskaia’s Mansion: High Culture and the Politics of Modernity in Revolutionary Russia A Dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in the Department of History of the College of Arts and Sciences 2009 by Krista Sigler M.A., University of Cincinnati 2001 H.A.B., Xavier University 1998 Committee chair: Dr. Willard Sunderland Abstract This dissertation is a biography of a house, utilizing a particular building as a prism through which to see Russian modernity. The Kshesinskaia mansion, a founding work of the Art Nouveau in Russia, was originally a St. Petersburg socialite’s salon. Through 1917, it became the center of one of the most famous lawsuits in the country and the headquarters of the Bolsheviks as well. In the aftermath of the Revolution, the house was dedicated to a number of social service causes and as of the 1930s became what it is today, a museum dedicated to the revolutionary past. This saga of this building, with its extraordinary links to the central players of the Russian Revolution, thus allows us a rare stage on which to see the revolutionary era unfold. This dissertation therefore speaks to the Russian Revolution and in particular, Russia’s experience with modernity. While historians have tended to trace Russia’s steps to 1917 through the eyes of particular groups, in this work, I show that “modern society” was a vision multiple groups embraced, although they understood that term differently. Through the figures of this dissertation (aristocrats, architects, writers, lawyers, and revolutionaries alike), we see that a number of visions existed of what “modern society” should be. In my work, I bring all of these visions together to suggest that all of them played a role in bringing about the Russian Revolution as it developed. I show how these small stories, played out on the stage of the Kshesinskaia mansion, reflected the fall of one culture and the rise of another, premised entirely on the idea of service to the people. The Petersburg nobles, although united by the idea of service, believed too much in ritual and expectation to allow them to spontaneously change, en masse, to befit the expedience of a new industrial order. The artists and intelligentsia (represented here by the architects) sought to keep one foot in the patronage system of the i imperial world and another in the new, international, professional vision of their field; because they were insistent on their role as servants to the people, they were not necessarily against the rise of a “People’s Government.” By looking at the courts of 1917, I demonstrate that the Provisional Government was inept and at points hypocritical in its application of the law, and ultimately undermined its own role as the guardian of civil rights. Meanwhile, just as the Provisional Government was contradicting its own values, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, created a truly accessible organization that offered the Russian people a solid vision of an organization, and later government, that desired to serve the people. Of all of these visions of modern society, it would be the Bolsheviks that would triumph, partly because they were able to create a credible argument, through their use of the spaces of the Kshesinskaia mansion, that they were indeed servants of the people. ii Table of Contents Introduction: The Visitors If These Walls Could Talk… p. 1 Chapter One: The Actors Noblesse Oblige: The Late Imperial Aristocracy’s Search for Relevance p. 28 Chapter Two: The Designers Building a Civil Society: The Architects of Imperial Russia p. 80 Chapter Three: The Imaginers Center Stage: The Media and the Relaxation of Censorship in Revolutionary Russia p. 100 Chapter Four: The Lawyers Barbarians at the Gates? Law and the Seizure of the Kshesinskaia Mansion, 1917 p. 121 Chapter Five: The Users The Hydra: Local Initiative in Public Space in 1917 p. 157 Chapter Six: The Founders Architects and Experts: Building the Modern Civil Society p. 191 Conclusion: The Constructors The Secret Garden: Politics, the Past, and the House of Participation p. 205 Bibliography p. 212 Introduction: The Visitors If These Walls Could Talk… Capstone In spring 2003, St. Peterburg was in the middle of an elaborate face-lift. For the tercentary of the former imperial capital, the majority of its historic landmarks had been cleaned and rebuilt. Nevsky Prospekt gleamed in pastel colors, and the famous wedding-cake façade of Smolny Cathedral still had the scaffolding of the reconstruction work wrapped around it. A walk around the city would, however, suggest the depth of change to be only a paint- chip deep. While the Winter Palace was outfitted with Wi-Fi, the stairs to the Stroganov were crumbling; newspapers worried about the costs of the outfitting, and the necessity to rent landmarks to foreigners who had the finances to refit them. The interior spaces of the city were cracking and falling apart, just as the exteriors were polished for the world’s view. For some cultural critics, this is the hallmark of modernity. According to the Belgian feminist Luce Irigaray, modernity is obsessed with boundaries and exteriors, not the spaces within them.1 While this argument may fit Irigaray’s discussion of gender and the body, what my work on physical environments has suggested is the opposite: modernity is intricately entwined with the use of space. Our reworking of the matter around us extends to all of the themes of modernity: defining the past versus the present, creating an illusive (and misnamed) private sphere, projecting a society’s control of nature, projecting a government’s control of society itself. All of this is done, meanwhile, in the icon of modernity itself, the city. Modernity and 1 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). 1 space, our arrangements of the physical structures around us, are deeply connected, and should be studied as such. My work here demonstrates that interconnection in the biography of a St. Petersburg house. The building, the Kshesinskaia mansion, had been both a stage for Russian history and, in its own way, an actor in it. This structure, a former imperial salon, had been seized by the Bolsheviks during 1917, cleared out and utilized as an operational center.2 It even formed the heart of a legal battle between the Bolsheviks and the Provisional Government in that year. Later, in the years after the Revolution, much of the interior had been removed in an effort to make the center of the 1917 Revolution fit for the needs of Soviet life. By looking at the house over time (between 1900 approximately through the 1920s), we see revolutionary tensions reflected in its history. Each group that held or was linked to the house utilized the building to present its own image of how modern society should be shaped; the only link between these visions would be the idea, which all groups shared, that a modern society was one in which groups owed service to their society. The Bolshevik option would eventually win out, but all of these meanings were part and parcel of imperial society’s confrontation with modernity, attempts to define society through the use of spaces. In this dissertation, I tell the story of this house, a biography of a building that can tell us about the competing visions of modernity urban Russians held before the Revolution. In turn, these bricks point out something much larger: part of the foundation of modern society is our use of space. 2 See Pavel Miliukov’s claim that the center of the Revolution was the “classic balcony” of the Kshesinskaia mansion, in which the Bolsheviks had their headquarters. Quoted in Leon Trotsky, A History of the Russian Revolution, translated by Max Eastman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932), vol. 2, 60. 2 A Concrete Mix: Methodology This dissertation is premised on the idea that buildings offer a unique contribution to our historical knowledge. They serve not just as artistic statements of their era, but also as lasting witnesses to the events around them, made and remade to fit the needs of the surrounding society. Where books and paintings capture a given moment in time, a building can record, through its alterations and uses, multiple moments over time—a text that is always being rewritten by the human beings using the structure. Moreover, the power of the building as subject offers more for study than simply multiple stories of a site: because a building, its content, and utility is the product of hundreds (from architect to owner, builder to servants), the study of a house, in all of its aspects, forces topics together that would not otherwise be compiled (to pardon the pun) under one roof. In this dissertation, I have scoured the blueprints of architects, the memoirs of aristocrats and revolutionaries alike, the files of a Provisional Government court case, the archival data of charity organizations, and the building in life today. Studying a house over time requires the historian to pursue the larger issue at hand, rather to satisfy oneself with a niche organization or individual’s story; the biography of a house is thus a powerful prism for the study of cultural history. Beauty and the Brick There are two chief characters in my dissertation. The first, significant for three chapters, is the figure of the first owner, Mathilde Kshesinskaia, prima ballerina of the Mariinsky Theater. The second is the house itself. 3 Without the lady, of course, the house would not have not been created.