Russians under the late tsars and Bolsheviks enjoyed a century of literary and artistic genius that lives on in world culture and in the Russian national identity. Along with the rightly celebrated works are millions of ephemeral creations of the age: postcards, illustrations, prints, serialized potboilers, posters, and cartoons. The creators of both the lasting and the forgotten worked in interconnected cultural communities. Each drew on shared traditions and contended with transformative social, economic, and political change. In so doing, they created an imaginative ecosystem within which three themes recurred: (1) the tension between freedom and order; (2) the shifting importance of boundaries demarcating the Self and the Other, the Russian and the foreigner, and the audience for art; and (3) the evolving roles, privileges, and responsibilities of writers and artists. The Firebird and the Fox takes its name from two motifs and recurrent characters. The flamboyant Firebird, often accompanied by her human foil, the Fool, transited from folklore into many works over this period and represents the incandescence and transcendent power of art. The wily fox or vixen of fable and folklore embodies the agency of the formerly dispossessed and the survival of genius against formidable odds.

The October Revolution in 1917 profoundly shocked the cultural ecosystem. The new authorities recast notions of freedom, of the arts, and of the public. Links between and among audiences at different levels that had thrived in the prerevolutionary cultural market were dismantled. Over time the government imposed strictures on culture requiring alignment with political directives. By 1934, the official policy of Socialist Realism was mandatory and compliance enforced by rewards and terror. The early years of revolutionary ferment yielded aesthetic innovation of the highest order, yet the mounting pressures took their toll on creativity. Writers, artists, and performers responded variously. Some took cover in works employing irony and in the (somewhat) safer terrain of children’s literature. By seeding children’s literature with values counter to those practiced by Soviet officialdom, selected writers and artists spread counter-values to a new generation. They worked with the guile of the fox, the flight of the firebird, and, perhaps, the recklessness of the Fool. By keeping alive Russian stories of wise Fools, sentient animals, and magical powers, their creators carried forward folkloric traditions barred from the reigning Socialist Realism. In doing so, they protected limited public space for artistic innovation.

The century of Russian genius presented in the pages above opened with the soldier who saved Peter the Great from death and closed with Daniil Kharms’s travelers spreading kindness and tolerance. In between, a panorama of extraordinary cultural richness unfolded, with layer upon layer of innovation in the arts. Throughout, the creativity of high culture drew on rich folk traditions, and the burgeoning popular culture took inspiration from above. Three themes – freedom and order; the boundaries of self and society; and the societal obligations of art and artists – played out in an enormous body of literature, music, and the visual arts. The firebird, caged or free, captured or in flight, is central, as is the fox, who (usually) succeeds in securing her objectives through wile and guile. The works of this age of genius were created over decades under conditions of recurrent social disruption and trauma. Despite formidable obstacles, brave and talented writers, artists, musicians and others remained committed to expression of naïve goodness to counter evil. That this message prevailed, even if restricted to a subset of works and a segment of audiences, is a dimension of moral genius comparable to the lauded artistic brilliance of the age.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) reached the widening public of his day. He captured the turn to a popular perspective, driving the transformation of Russian culture well into the twentieth century. His inclusive style lent dignity to nearly every character, though he could be ruthlessly ironic. He empathized with his readers and probed new views of identity, otherness, and the nation. In late works he emphasized beauty and the arts as superlative human values. He could engage with popular fiction well because he both read and wrote it. He honed skills that led to innovations in the short story and drama through his reading (and occasional writing) of serialized novels for the boulevard press of the 1880s. He read and corresponded about the best-known serialized bandit story of his day, N. I. Pastukhov’s The Bandit Churkin, which was serialized in The Moscow Sheet from 1882-1885. Chekhov turned the traditional Russian idea of the bandit’s spree or the binge into a deeper inquiry into the positive attributes of freedom. By the time of his death, he had arrived at his own understanding that freedom to create resides in a space coexistent with the world but beyond the encroachment of Church, state, and the market.

In the four decades following the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855, long-repressed cultural energies broke loose across imperial Russia. The Great Reforms of Alexander II, which began in 1861 with the Emancipation of Russia’s serfs, introduced transformative changes in law, politics, society, the economy, and the army. Creative endeavor also stirred. Freedom was in the air, and artists and writers imagined it for themselves and for the nation. They developed new content and forms of expression and assumed greater control over their creative lives. By the end of the century, literature and the arts had rejected the unitary model of state-sponsored patronage and transitioned to become free professions, although funding from state and Church remained important. Simultaneously, print culture extended outward to a growing public. Part I treats the meta-theme of freedom and order by examining the how the Fools and rebellious heroes of tradition were modernized and harnessed to the topics of the day. Issues of inclusion and boundaries surfaced as lines between and among the legal estates blurred and civic participation broadened. Publics and audiences for the arts transformed, and expectations about the roles of artists and the arts changed accordingly.

The Russian avant-garde arose in an age of advertising, publicity, and celebrity culture. Across the world, advances in photography, film, and print were feeding images and ideas to publics fascinated by wealth and consumption. In St. Petersburg and Moscow no less than in the other capitals of Europe, artists, writers, and performers catered to new appetites for fashion and display. The juxtaposition of publicity and art implied a radical departure from the traditionally passive role of the audience, since publicity requires the participation of the audience. Increasingly, Russian culture was commodified. Images of literary giants appeared on candy wrappers and cigarette boxes; in cheap lithographs; and then in photographs reproduced on postcards, some carrying advertising on the back. The women of Russia’s cultural circles pursued increased agency and rose to fame in the exaggerated empowerment that was part of celebrity culture. The avant-garde of both sexes courted celebrity and adopted a spirit of playfulness as they abandoned figurative forms for abstraction. They challenged conventional ideas and brought a new force – humor – to the interplay between artist and audience. In so doing, they drew on a vein of comedy that existed in both the sacred and secular traditions.

During the reign of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II (1894-1917), the advocates of freedom clashed sharply and frequently with the forces of order. The standing of the authorities suffered greatly with the humiliating loss of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. As the war was fought, domestic political unrest was also coming to a head. On “Bloody Sunday” in January 1905 hundreds of workers who had gathered to petition for better conditions and modest political reforms were shot down outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, opening a year of revolutionary protest and strikes. The era’s passionate political life forced writers and artists to confront anew how their art related to politics at home. Some joined the fray with striking works of political satire; others retreated to rarified aesthetics. Young rebellious writers under Maxim Gorky’s lead captivated the public with neo-Realism. Visual artists embraced experimentation; they and a group of writers took up aesthetic Modernism under the twin banners of Symbolism and Decadence. Innovations in music and dance – notably the Ballets Russes – found admirers at home and abroad. Avant-garde artists embraced humor and publicity, in the process introducing Russia to a new melding of art and celebrity.

While artists and writers within the empire were asserting their freedom and power as artists, arts impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) and his associates were doing so abroad. Their innovative mix of music, art, and dance in Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911) changed ballet forever. In the glow of fame, Diaghilev and composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) went still further in The Rite of Spring (1913), the succès de scandale of which added to their glory and their impact. That many in their elite foreign audiences had political and economic stakes in tsarist Russia and were predisposed to welcome all things Russian does not diminish the artistic accomplishments of the Ballets Russes. Its creators advanced Russia’s national cultural identity, further repositioning art and artists in relation to the autocracy. Although the Ballets Russes affected indifference to the political content of their works, Diaghilev’s finances were highly politicized from the beginning. Furthermore, in Rite the creative team depicted a shocking denigration of women’s agency and a fantasy that appealed to Russia’s contemporary extreme right (although it was not performed in Russia); that of an ancestral Slavic culture at once patriarchal, ethnically pure, and notably free of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and other minorities.

With literacy rising but still low, it was through the visual arts that millions of nineteenth-century Russians encountered new thinking about personhood, social relations, and national identity. Artists had been locked into an official hierarchy determined by training and awards, and they enthusiastically joined the emerging free professions. The market heated up as incomes rose and advances in printing made images affordable. Visual culture responded at every level of society. A group of artists who became known as the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) (because they traveled to exhibit their work) deviated from tradition and took as subjects Russia’s peasants. Illustrated magazines achieved great influence from the 1860s on and also departed from officially promoted traditions, although in ways that differed from those of the Wanderers. Cheap lubok prints brought contemporary themes to the villages and to the urban working poor. Social change irrevocably altered perceptions of the Self and the Other – the faces people saw in their mirrors and their neighbors, relatives, and random passers-by on the street - and innovations in visual culture validated those changing perceptions. The inclusion of the visual arts in the gathering cultural energy propelled further innovation and creative genius in the years ahead.

The October Revolution hit a Russia sapped by the casualties and widespread shortages of World War I. Civil war plunged the cities and the countryside into the horrors of violence and disorder mythologized in tradition. The new government raised expectations but could not deliver even basic necessities of daily life. In 1918, the Bolshevik leaders centralized publishing under the state agency Gosizdat, but their effort to create new languages of popular communication lost many readers in a maze of acronyms, foreign words, and Marxist jargon. Avant-garde artists who offered their talents willingly after 1917 were initially given an almost free hand to run artistic affairs. The premier visual innovations of the period, Suprematism and Constructivism, were consistent with the ideological commitment of Bolshevism to what was basic, simple, and within the material vocabulary of ordinary people. The agency of the artistic community fell toward the end of the 1920s, however, as a consolidated Party apparatus, itself administered through the nomenklatura system, exerted control. Innovations other than those mandated by the Party were curtailed. Artists and writers who had fought for decades for independence fell again under a system of restrictive state-sponsored patronage.

Irony refers to a use of language in which the actual import of words is different from their literal meaning, or in which a work carries multiple messages. The culture of reading and viewing on the eve of the Revolution and in the 1920s incorporated reading for multiple meanings due to the traditional practice of reading aloud in groups. Listeners who commented, questioned, and discussed among themselves automatically gave works layers of meaning. When the Bolsheviks shocked this universe with an onslaught of ideological works, readers sought and found irony. For example, from the outset, it was clear that the Bolsheviks espoused with great seriousness the “science” of “scientific socialism” and the routinely heroic “Soviet man.” Each of these received masterful ironic treatment by Ilf and Petrov, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov, and others. Works for children, too, took on layers of ironic interpretation. Not even music escaped. Shostakovich wrote his “film opera” of Marshak’s poem Silly Little Mouse in part as an ironic retort to Pravda’s earlier criticism of his work. Skill with irony gave creators and audiences channels of communication and outlets in parallel to those officially sanctioned; in short, a supply of fresh air to counter creative suffocation.

The fox or vixen, a trickster of fable and folklore, is a sly survivor of life’s vicissitudes and the natural alter-ego of the Fool. Within the Russian fox ménage, it is usually the female, or vixen, who stars. After a period of relative quietude during the last decades of the old regime, the fox came into her own in the Soviet era. The animals from Russia’s rich tradition of fables resurfaced as prominent voices in early Soviet literature. Works intended for children offered stories and pictures of foxes. Authors and illustrators exhibited wiles in their lives as well as their works. Alexei Tolstoy featured foxes in his work, but more to the point, managed to stay in Stalin’s good graces when many of his peers fell. Both Tolstoy and A. M. Volkov, the author of the strange 1939 Wizard of the Emerald City, cleverly adapted already well-established foreign works. And the fox was not just for children. Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov let loose a fox in the person of their Ostap Bender. Readers could celebrate his wit and guile, as Russian émigré Andrei Sinyavsky noted in 1989 when he added Bender the Anti-Hero to his roster of Soviet foxes.