art, nationhood, and display: zinaida volkonskaia and russia's quest for a national museum of...

Art, Nationhood, and Display: Zinaida Volkonskaia and Russia's Quest for a National Museumof ArtAuthor(s): Rosalind P. BlakesleySource: Slavic Review, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Winter, 2008), pp. 912-933Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27653031 .

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Art, Nationhood, and Display: Zinaida Volkonskaia and Russia's Quest for a National Museum of Art

Rosalind P. Blakesley

In the early 1830s, Princess Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia (1789 1862) launched a campaign to establish a museum of fine arts in Mos cow. Volkonskaia's proposal for the museum, which was published in the

journal Teleskop in 1831, has been largely neglected by scholars, but it is both unique in its time and illuminating of various wider trends. In its detail, ambition, and publication, the proposal was unprecedented. Indeed, its appearance in an influential new journal arguably marks the

point at which the question of establishing a national art museum in Rus sia moved from the relatively private discussions within an elite circle of cultural commentators into a wider public domain. The model Volkon skaia proposed for her museum was traditional, even anachronistic, and her unequivocal promotion of a canon of art enshrined in pan-European academic practice feeds into broader debates on the role of the Academy and its educational and exhibition strategies. Yet the princess was progres sive in agitating for a national art museum when Russia had none. This

campaigning zeal, coupled with the specificities of Volkonskaia's artistic

knowledge, give an insight into the role of Russian women as patrons and facilitators of the arts. Volkonskaia's museum project therefore marks an

important juncture in Russia's cultural history at which aristocratic female

patronage and the institutionalization of academic procedure intersect. In a more international context, the exhibits Volkonskaia proposed,

and the manner in which they were to be displayed, offer an unusual?and

qualifying?perspective on the museological practice then fashionable in

Europe. Particularly remarkable is Volkonskaia's paradoxical decision to exclude Russian art entirely from her museum, despite her close associa tion with and fervent support of many modern Russian artists. Instead, she chose to privilege classical and more recent western European art,

underlining the extent to which deference to western practice contin ued to influence cultural politics even as Russia moved toward a stron

ger national sense of self. Volkonskaia's multilingual background and her

lengthy residence abroad further complicate the picture, her cosmopoli tan patriotism adding a significant dimension to the rich history of ?migr? involvement in Russian cultural life. In short, Volkonskaia's project, and

I would like to thank Alessandra Tosi, Gitta Hammarberg, Michelle Lamarche Marrese, and other participants in the panel "Russian Women and European Culture in the Early

Nineteenth Century" at the National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Boston, 2004, for providing

a stimulating forum in which

to test my ideas. My attendance at that conference was funded by the British Academy, to whom I am

deeply grateful. I am also indebted to Patrick Blakesley and Mark D. Steinberg for their excellent observations and enthusiastic support. Finally, my sincere thanks to two

anonymous readers for their highly thoughtful and constructive critique of earlier ver sions of this text. Theirs was an

example of anonymous reviewing at its very best.

Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (Winter 2008)



Art, Nationhood, and Display 913

the specific works she thought appropriate to a pantheon of art, pro vide an important platform from which to consider Russia's cultural self

image vis-?-vis Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic campaigns. By

tracing an intricate dialogue during which questions of national pride

developed alongside continuing admiration for neoclassical ideals, this

article considers how such concerns might influence a "national" space of

artistic display. In doing so, it addresses some of the paradoxes and limita

tions of Volkonskaia's project, as well as the difficulties of conceptualizing

"nationality" within the structure of an art museum. As Brandon Taylor

acknowledges, "art institutions termed 'national' are highly complex ob

jects, whose histories can be told in many ways."1 The aim here is to use

Volkonskaia's unparalleled initiative and the perceived need for a public art museum in Russia to untangle some of that complexity.

Volkonskaia's project poses significant interpretative problems involv

ing the construction of Russian identity through the institutional acquisi tion and display of art. It questions the role of difference in art's relation

to national self, as well as the broader issue of how museums function

within a culture and a society. Particularly telling is the cultural signifi cance of copying and the copy, which Volkonskaia accepted as axiomatic, and which serves as a touchstone in the complex process of navigation that national and cultural self-definition entail. By uncritically accepting the value of copying as a pedagogic activity, as well as the validity of popu

lating a museum with copies of great works of art, Volkonskaia was out

of tune with several notable cultural commentators within Russia. Her

views and her ?migr? status therefore encourage us to consider anew the

significance of the insider/outsider perspective in cultural debate. The

importance of these many issues is far from time-specific, not least as

Volkonskaia's exclusion of Russian art from her proposal prefigures the

segregation of Russian and western art that prevails in Russian museums

today and that has worked to marginalize Russian art even within Rus

sia itself. Volkonskaia's project thus resonates beyond the parameters of

nineteenth-century Russia, for the question of whether and how muse

ums encapsulate national cultural identities remains an issue of broad

intellectual concern.2

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the desirability of establishing public

art museums was a topic

of some urgency among

1. Brandon Taylor, Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public, 1747-2001

(Manchester, Eng., 1999), xiii.

2. The last twenty years has seen an explosion of scholarly interest in the way muse

ums have contributed to nation building by acknowledging and fostering the growth of

national identity and state power. A useful starting point from which to approach the vast

literature that has resulted would include: Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, eds., Grasp

ing the World: The Idea of the Museum (Aldershot, Eng., 2004) ; Bettina Messias Carboneil, ed.,

Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (Oxford, 2004) ; Sharon Macdonald and Gordon

Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums: Respecting Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford,

1996); Janet Marstine, ed., New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction (Oxford, 2006);

and Gail Anderson, Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the

Paradigm Shift (Walnut Creek, Calif., 2004).



914 Slavic Review

Europe's cultural elite. Not only was the study of Old Master paintings and

classical artefacts deemed essential to the education of modern artists and

to the elevation of public taste, but the intelligent selection and display of

great art in one central venue was seen as the indispensable attribute of

any civilized and self-respecting European state. Accordingly, the French

Republic declared the Louvre a public institution in 1793;3 the Royal (later

National) Museum in Stockholm was founded in 1794; the National Art

Gallery was established in The Hague in 1800;4 and the Museo del Prado

opened in Madrid in 1819. Britain lagged behind, its National Gallery dat

ing from 1824, though the Dulwich Picture Gallery had at least provided the country with a public art collection by this time.5

Throughout this period, extending roughly from the French Revolu

tion to the death of Tsar Alexander I, Russia is remarkable for the absence

of any comparable state initiatives to establish public museums of art.6

The Winter Palace and its Hermitage were, of course, the repository of

world-famous works by this time, following the rapacious acquisition poli cies of Catherine II (r. 1762-96). Indeed, Catherine had sealed the fate

3. The first public art exhibition in the Louvre opened in the Grande Gallerie as

early as 1699 and led to further exhibitions that became known as "Salons," after the

Grande Salon in which they were regularly held from 1725. For the tensions and changes

in the Salons in the years surrounding the opening of the Louvre Museum, see Patricia

Mainardi, The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic (Cambridge, Eng., 1993) ,9-35. For the history of the Louvre, see Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art,

Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Eng., 1994). For the rise of public art museums in France more

generally, see Daniel J. Sher

man, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France

(Cambridge, Mass., 1989). 4. The National Art Gallery, sited in the Huis ten Bosch, was followed in 1808 by the

Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Housed initially in the Royal Palace on Dam Square, the

Rijksmuseum later moved to the Trippenhuis on

Kloveniersburgwal before settling in its

present home, designed by Pierre Cuypers, in 1885.

5. The National Gallery was founded when the British government purchased the

picture collection of John Julius Angerstein for ?57,000 and opened it on 10 May 1824 in

Angerstein's former London residence at 100 Pall Mall. For a brief account of Angerstein and his paintings in the National Gallery, see Kate Cook, "Two Gentlemen from St. Peters

burg in the National Gallery," Pinakoteka 18-19, nos. 1-2 (2004): 225-27. For the prehis tory of the gallery and the role of the Royal Academy in particular, see Holger Hoock, "Old

Masters and the English School: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Notion of a National

Gallery at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century, "Journal of the History of Collections 16, no. 1

(2004): 1-18; and Holger Hoock, The King s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics

of British Culture, 1760-1840 (Oxford, 2005). For its wider history, see Jonathan Conlin, "The Origins and History of the National Gallery" (PhD diss., University of Cambridge,

2002) and, for the more general audience, Jonathan Conlin, The Nation's Mantelpiece: A His

tory of the National Gallery (London, 2006). For the effects of new museological debate on

the National Gallery from 1850-1880, see Christopher Whitehead, The Public Art Museum

in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Development of the National Gallery (Aldershot, Eng., 2005). The Dulwich Picture Gallery was based on the collection of Noel Joseph Desenfans, the

consul-general of Poland in Britain, and housed in a special gallery designed by Sir John

Soane from 1811-14. For the contents of the collection, see Richard Beresford, Dulwich Picture Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue (London, 1998).

6. For the beginnings of a museum culture in Russia in the eighteenth century, see

"Protomuzeinyi period v istorii kul'tury: Vozniknovenie muzeev v Rossii (XVIII v.)," in

M. E. Kaulen et al., Muzeinoe d?lo Rossii (Moscow, 2003), 35-62.




of an earlier attempt to found a national gallery in Britain when she ac

quired the collection of Robert Walpole in 1779. (Two years previously the

Member of Parliament John Wilkes had petitioned unsuccessfully for the

British government to purchase the Walpole pictures to form the nucleus

of a public gallery.)7 Yet the Hermitage was an imperial collection that

opened to the public as late as 1852 (with free entry only from 1865), and even then access was initially restricted, among other stipulations, to

those in possession of a black frock coat or a uniform.8 In the words of

Germain Bazin, "The [Hermitage] museum was completely integrated with the palace, being used for evening receptions and after-theatre

suppers. . . . The czar permitted the public but on conditions recalling

those of the Ancien R?gime. One visited the emperor, not the museum;

full dress was de rigueur and visitors were announced."9 Half a mile down

the Neva River, the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts was in possession of a

growing collection of works by its students as well as originals and copies of western European paintings and antique casts, but at the time in ques tion these were intended primarily

as study tools. Thus St. Petersburg, for all its artistic riches, had no comprehensive collection on permanent

public display. In Moscow, the Princes Dmitrii Mikhailovich Golitsyn and Aleksandr

Mikhailovich Golitsyn had bequeathed their estates to fund a hospital and

adjacent art gallery, the latter opening in May 1810 and gaining the half

brothers the distinction of founding Russia's first public art museum. But

the Golitsyn gallery failed to inspire a similar move on the part of the

state, and in 1816 the gallery was closed in order to concentrate finan

cial resources on the Golitsyn hospital.10 While the reasons behind the

absence of a public art museum in Russia at this time are multifarious

and have yet to be analyzed in depth, one of them possibly corresponds to the situation in Britain where, as Carol Duncan has argued: "Absorbed

in a closed circle of power, patronage, and display, the ruling oligarchy had no compelling

reason to form a national collection. . . . Their exist

ing practices of collection and display already marked out boundaries of

7. Much has been written on Catherine's acquisition of the best of Walpole's paint

ings. For more recent accounts in English, see Andrew W. Moore, ed., Houghton Hall: The

Prime Minister, the Empress and the Heritage (London, 1996); and Larissa Dukelskaya and

Andrew Moore, eds., A Capital Collection: Houghton Hall and the Hermitage (New Haven,

2002). 8. The Hermitage only opened to the public without restrictions after the 1917 revo

lution. For its gradual transformation from private collection to public museum, see Katia

Dianina, "The Museum and the Nation: The Imperial Hermitage in Russian Society," in

James Christen Steward, ed., The Collections of the Romanovs: European Art from the State Her

mitage, St. Petersburg (London, 2003), 37-43. The most comprehensive history of its picture

galleries remains V. F. Levinson-Lessing, Istoriia kartinnoi galerei Ermitazha (1764-1917)

(Leningrad, 1985). For a more recent account in English, see G?raldine Norman, The

Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum (London, 1997).

9. Germain Bazin, The Museum Age, trans. Jane van Nuis Cahill (Brussels,

1968), 215. 10. For the Golitsyn collection, see Rosalind P. Gray, "The Golitsyn and Kushelev

Bezborodko Collections and Their Role in the Evolution of Public Art Galleries in Russia,"

Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s. 31 (1998): 51-67.



916 Slavic Review

viable power and reinforced the authority of state offices."11 There are, of

course, notable differences between the sociopolitical contexts of Britain

and Russia. Nevertheless, it may be that in Russia, where power resided in

autocratic structures of government, certain factions among the higher echelons of society similarly feared that a centralized public collection

would run counter to the interests of a minority ruling elite.

In the decades that followed, several eminent figures in Russia spoke

up for the need to establish permanent public spaces for the display of

art.12 Prominent among them was the writer and diplomat Pavel Petrovich

Svin'in.13 But most passionate of all was Zinaida Volkonskaia, the daughter of Prince Aleksandr Mikhailovich Beloserskii-Belozerskii, who was based

in Dresden as Catherine the Great's ambassador to the Saxon court at

the time of Zinaida's birth. Far better educated than most of her peers (Volkonskaia's languages included Latin, Greek, Italian, and French), she became one of the dazzling society women of her generation, her

prominence in Russia's haut monde guaranteed by her role as a maid of

honor to the Dowager Empress Mariia Fedorovna and as the mistress and

confidante of Alexander I. Such was her intimacy with the tsar that she

traveled with the imperial suite when Alexander advanced on Paris in the

aftermath of Napoleon's retreat from Russian soil. As welcome at the most

sophisticated salons of the aristocracy as she was at court, Volkonskaia

acquired renown for her accomplishments as a singer, actress, and writer and established salons of her own in Moscow and, later, Rome.14 Those

fortunate enough to secure an invitation would find themselves mingling with musicians and literati as celebrated as Mikhail Glinka, Aleksandr

Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol', Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Madame de Sta?l, and Walter Scott, many of whom dedicated works to their salonni?re. Such

was the ?clat of these gatherings that when Volkonskaia invited Stepan Petrovich Shevyrev to accompany her to Italy as her son's tutor, his friends

11. Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London, 1995), 38-40.

12 Some of the earliest proposals were for a national museum that would incorpo

rate natural history and ethnographic and historical material as well as literature and art.

See Kevin Tyner Thomas, "Collecting the Fatherland: Early Nineteenth-Century Proposals for a Russian National Museum," in Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel, eds., Imperial Rus

sia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington, 1998), 91-107.

13. For Svin'in's collection, which featured works by such artists as Dmitrii Levitskii, Orest Kiprenskii, and Aleksei Venetsianov, see la. V Bruk, "Iz istorii khudozhestvennogo sobiratel'stva v

Peterburge i Moskve v XIX veka," in la. V. Bruk, ed., Gosudarstvennaia Tret'iakovskaia galereia: Ocherki istorii 1856-1917 (Leningrad, 1981), 17-19.

14. On Russian salons of the period, see William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 55-72;

Lina Bernstein, "Women on the Verge of a New Language: Russian Salon Hostesses in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," in Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren, eds.,

Russia-Women-Culture (Bloomington, 1996), 209-24; M. Aronson and S. Reiser, Liter

aturnye kruzhki i salony (St. Petersburg, 2001); and I. B. Chizhova, Khoziaiki literaturnykh salonov Peterburga pervoi poloviny XIX v. (St. Petersburg, 1993). For Volkonskaia's salon in

Moscow, see V B. Murav'ev, ed., Vtsarstve muz: Moskovskii literaturnyi salon Zinaidy Volkonskoi 1824-1829 gg. (Moscow, 1987); and Maria Fairweather, Pilgrim Princess: A Life of Princess

Zinaida Volkonsky (London, 1999), 194-215.




urged him to go: "Life in Italy, in a house which served as the focus of all

that was great and brilliant in the field of science and the arts, seemed

to us a great fortune for Shevyrev, who could finish his own education

there."15

Although artists had on occasion attended her salons in Moscow, it was

in Rome that Volkonskaia concentrated her energies on the patronage of

the visual arts. She regularly invited to her stylish villa young painters and

sculptors who were working abroad on stipends from the Russian Acad

emy of Arts.16 There, they were encouraged to dispense with ceremony and participate in the proffered entertainment to the full, as a letter of

1821 from the young sculptor Samuil Gal'berg attests:

When we students of the Russian Academy became acquainted with [Vol

konskaia] , she began to invite us to her musical evenings, which here, in

Rome, is called being invited to the academy. Little by little these musical

evenings transformed into operas, and little by little we ourselves were

transformed from spectators into actors. It is fair to say that our roles are

neither great nor difficult: it is simply a case of standing on the stage and

not making a noise. But even this is beyond us, despite several dry

runs

Her husband, the prince, and Count Osterman-Tolstoi both guffaw with

laughter whenever we march in our own distinct way onto the stage.17

For young men in their twenties, the majority of them living and working abroad for the first time, such gatherings offered invaluable opportunities to meet prospective patrons, socialize with fellow artists, and relax in their

mother tongue. Guests included the French artist Horace Vernet, the Rus

sian landscapist SilVestr Shchedrin, and the troubled history painter Alek

sandr Ivanov.18 The celebrated history and portrait painters Karl Briullov

and Fedor Bruni even stayed as houseguests, and both artists portrayed Volkonskaia in their work.19 As a society woman supporting the visual arts,

15. M. Pogodin, "Vbspominanie o S. P. Shevyreve," quoted

in N. Belozerskaia, "Kniag

inia Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia," Istoricheskii vestnik 68 (April 1897): 138. Shevyrev

was a critic and minor poet who was appointed professor of Russian literature at Moscow

University in 1834. He was also a founding member and inspector of the Moscow School

of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, established in 1843, perhaps inspired by his in

volvement in Volkonskaia's visual arts project over a decade before.

16. For an early appreciation of the Villa Volkonsky, which later became the official

residence of the British ambassador in Rome, see O. I. Buslaev, "Rimskaia villa kn. Z. A.

Volkonskoi," VestnikEvropy 1 (January 1896): 5-32.

17. Letter from S. I. Gal'berg to his brothers, 30 May 1821: in S. I. Gal'berg, "Skul'ptor

Samuil Ivanovich Gal'berg v ego zagranichnykh pis'makh i zapiskakh, 1818-28," Vestnik

iziashchnykh iskusstv2, no. 5 (1884): 124-25.

18. Vernet's standing among Russian commentators increased after his tour of Rus

sia in 1836. See V. Turchin, "Russko-frantsuzskie khudozhestvennye otnosheniia: Pervaia

polovina XIX veka," Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie 24 (1988): 163. For Shchedrin's awkward and

much mocked debut on the Volkonskaia stage, see Gal'berg, "Skul'ptor Samuil Ivanovich

Gal'berg," 125. The relaxed manner in which Shchedrin mentions Volkonskaia in corre

spondence nevertheless attests to his comfortable inclusion in her circle. See, for example,

his letters of 22 November 1820, 14 October 1822, 23 January 1830, and 19 February 1830

in E. I. Atsarkina, ed., Sil'vestr Shchedrin: Pis'ma (Moscow, 1978), 80, 96, 191, and 197.

19. Examples include Bruni's portrait of c. 1826 (Houghton Library, Harvard Uni

versity) in which Volkonskaia appears in the title role of the opera Giovanna d Arco, for



918 Slavic Review

Volkonskaia was far from unusual and may have been inspired by her

previous employer, the Dowager Empress Mariia Fedorovna, who was a

patron and tastemaker of great vision and panache.20 Yet Volkonskaia's attitude toward those artists who came within her orbit went beyond that of a patron concerned primarily with securing the best of their new work.

Indeed, so heartfelt was her friendship with Briullov that when they met

again years later, in 1850, it was "with such an explosion of joy, such a re union of common interests, that all present felt they were set apart, that

they were merely chance, outside witnesses of another life."21 The prin cess, it seems, found great reward in nurturing young artists at the dawn of their careers and followed their later successes with keen delight.

Perhaps her association with Russian artists abroad inspired Volkons kaia to turn her attention to the creation of a public art museum in Russia.

A witness to the artists' excitement at seeing artistic masterpieces in Italy, and to the professional benefit this encounter brought them, she cannot fail to have been struck by the dearth of similar opportunities in Russia.

Volkonskaia thus conceived the idea of a museum of fine arts, elaborating her plans in the Teleskop article, which was written in the first person, ran to fifteen pages, and appeared under Volkonskaia's name. (According to

Volkonskaia, the museum proposal was actually drafted by Shevyrev, but as contemporary commentators attributed both the conception and the substance of the plan to Volkonskaia, it would seem that Shevyrev was more an amanuensis than the creative author of the work.) Such a museum, Vol konskaia wrote, would assist in the training of Russian artists, educate the

public in artistic developments, and further what the princess termed "a taste for the beautiful" that was "already rapidly developing in Russia."22

Her emphasis on the ability of art to impart artistic skill and raise standards of taste positions Volkonskaia as a clear heir to those critics and thinkers of the eighteenth century who began to ascribe to works of art transformative

which she had written the libretto and music in 1821; and Briullov's watercolor of c. 1830 (State Tret'iakov Gallery, Moscow), in which Volkonskaia, Bertel Thorvaldsen, Bruni, and the artist himself watch a theatrical performance in the Gagarin residence in Rome. See

E. Atsarkina, Karl Pavlovich Briullov: Zhizn' i tvorchestvo (Moscow, 1963), 318. 20. For other women artists and patrons in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth

century Russia, see L. I. Iovleva, ed., Iskusstvo zhenskogo roda: Zhenshchiny-khudozhnitsy

v Rossii XV-XX vekov (Moscow, 2002), 54-85; and R. P. Blakesley, "A Century of Women

Painters, Sculptors, and Patrons from the Time of Catherine the Great," in Jordana Pome

roy, Rosalind P. Blakesley, et al, eds., An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State

Hermitage Museum (London, 2003), 51-75. On Maria Fedorovna, see Rosalind P. Blakesley, "Sculpting in Tiaras: Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the

Arts," in Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, eds., Women and Material Culture (London, 2007), 71-85.

21. S. M. Volkonskii, Vospominanie o Dekabristakh po semeinim vospominaniam (Moscow, 1994), quoted in Fairweather, Pilgrim Princess, 230.

22. Z. A. Volkonskaia, "Proekt Esteticheskogo muzeia pri imperatorskom Mos kovskom universit? ta," Teleskop 3 (1831): 385-86. While these were Volkonskaia's prime reasons for founding a museum, she also hoped that it would be used to good purpose

by those teaching at Moscow University, provide stage and costume designers with suit

able models, and inspire the artists of the theatrical world in their quest for style and

"grace" (386).




powers in the aesthetic, spiritual, and moral realms?a development that

has been identified as foundational to the art museum per se.23

In settling on a location for the museum, Volkonskaia wrote that St.

Petersburg did at least have extensive art collections in the Hermitage, the Academy, and private palaces. In contrast, she noted that the only

decent collections in Moscow?primarily those of the Sheremetev family at Ostankino and the Iusupov family at Arkhangelskoe?were far from

the city center and were highly restricted in access. Volkonskaia therefore

envisaged a museum attached to Moscow University, which would contain

five different sorts of objects: casts of works from antiquity, the Middle

Ages, and the Renaissance; copies of Old Master paintings; models of ar

chitectural monuments; genuine classical artefacts; and, finally, notable

modern works. Volkonskaia devoted the bulk of her article?some ten

pages, or two-thirds of the total text?to an explication of these various

categories and mentioned the seminal works that each section should

contain. Furthermore, she stipulated that the different sections should

follow a chronological arrangement, so that the viewer would gain some

understanding of the development of the arts from classical antiquity to

the present day. Volkonskaia's system of classification accords with what has been

termed the "universal survey museum," in which a specific narrative of

art history is constructed to communicate the classical ideal.24 Her pro

posed arrangement adopts those canonical taxonomies that reified the

idea of art history as a torch of genius passed from the Greeks and Ro

mans, via the Old Masters, to the most talented artists of the present day. Such an approach was firmly grounded in museological theories concern

ing the study and presentation of art that were enjoying wide currency at the time, following the cartography established by the Louvre some

forty years before. For Germain Bazin, such theories became normative

to such an extent that art and history museums had "no other objec tive than to affirm this longed-for identity with the classical world despite the immense difference in time."25 The overarching organizational struc

ture of Volkonskaia's museum therefore reveals no great surprises. It

would sustain a cultural master narrative that unashamedly asserted the

hegemony of classical art.

As far as more specific taxonomies were concerned, Volkonskaia pro

posed to divide the museum into nine different sections, which further

enforce her prioritization of classical antiquity, for the first five sections

were to contain examples of ancient Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, and Ro

man art.26 These would be followed by "Christian" art, including the work

23. See, for example, Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 14, in which the author argues that

"the rise of the art museum is a corollary to the philosophical invention of the aesthetic

and moral power of art objects." 24. Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, "The Universal Survey Museum," Art History 3,

no. 4 (December 1980): 448-69.

25. Bazin, Museum Age, 6.

26. Specifically, these first sections were to contain Egyptian and Etruscan art; works

illustrating the transition from Egyptian to Greek sculpture; statues of classical gods, god



920 Slavic Review

of Michelangelo; the sculpture of Bernini and his followers (a categoriza tion others might have labeled "Baroque," though Volkonskaia did not

use the term); modern works by Antonio Canova and the Danish sculp tor Bertel Thorvaldsen; and, finally, models of famous buildings, from

the Pantheon in Athens and one of the temples at Agrigento in Sicily, to

the Colosseum and St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome. Volkonskaia devoted

at least one paragraph to each section. In particular, she listed not only the key works that should be included, but also where the originals were

to be found, demonstrating her familiarity with many of Europe's most

illustrious collections and galleries. The classical displays, for example, were to include copies of specific works from the Villa Albani, the Villa

Barberini, the Vatican, and the Palazzo Pitti, to name just a few collec

tions; the exhibit of Bernini's work was to feature his Apollo and Daphne from the Villa Borghese; and the Christian section would display copies of

five of Michelangelo's works, from the Piet? in St. Peter's to his statues of

Night and Day in the Medici Chapel in Florence.27 The emphasis on col

lections in Italy is unsurprising considering Volkonskaia's residence there

and would have given readers of Teleskop a rich picture of their holdings. On occasion the princess referred to works in other countries as well, not

ing, for example, that copies of the Parthenon sculptures in London (the

Elgin marbles) were available in the Vatican, revealing her knowledge of

the importance attached across Europe to certain works of art.28 In pub lished form alone, Volkonskaia's proposal was therefore significant for

the value she accorded to particular objects. A Russian reader unfamiliar

with the collections and exhibits she singled out would have learned from

her text of modes of cultural construction predicated on the idea of the

"masterpiece," which was thought to trigger unspecified but universally acclaimed associations or ideas.

Volkonskaia's wish list of exhibits includes copies of many works that

had become the staple diet of cultural visitors to Italy, not least since the

publication of Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The history of ancient

art, 1764) by Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Famed for his promotion of

the ideal male form as expressed in classical Greek sculpture, Winckel mann had been one of the first scholars to locate artistic enterprise firmly

in its social and cultural context, and his book had become the oracular

companion of countless Europeans undertaking a Grand Tour to Rome.29 Volkonskaia fully acknowledged her debt to the German art historian: she wrote of "the immortal Winckelmann," and often noted where certain

sculptures she hoped to include in her museum featured in his texts.30

desses, and heroes (a section Volkonskaia termed "Olympus"); group statues focusing on

human emotion; and portrait statues and busts.

27. Volkonskaia, "Proekt Esteticheskogo muzeia," 387-96.

28. Ibid., 389.

29. See Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New

Haven, 1994), 11-46. For the Grand Tour, see Andrew Wilton and Ilaria Bignamini, Grand

Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996); and Jeremy Black, Italy and

the Grand Tour (New Haven, 2003). 30. Volkonskaia, "Proekt Esteticheskogo muzeia," 385-87.




The Egyptian section, for example, was to include a copy of the bronze

sphinx that appeared in book one of the edition of Geschichte der Kunst

des Alterthums published in France in 1801.31 The entrance to this section

was even to be flanked by a bust of Winckelmann, "the first interpreter of art."32 Volkonskaia may have first encountered Winckelmann's notion

of the ideal as exemplified in Greek sculpture in her parental home. Her

father, a collector of paintings, bronzes, and marble sculpture and himself

an engraver of portraits of Russian historical and literary figures, had cor

responded with many of Europe's cultural leaders (Voltaire among them), and Volkonskaia had inherited and expanded his collections.33 In a letter

of 1829, Volkonskaia claimed that she had developed an interest in Greek,

Egyptian, and Italian art in her father's house, and it was there that "my

young eyes were trained to ideal forms."34 Whatever the circumstances of

her introduction, by 1831 she clearly felt that the canon of classical art

as codified by Winckelmann offered an appropriate model for a Russian

museum.

At this point the cultural and geographical orientation of Volkons

kaia's project begins to emerge. There was to be nothing self-reflective in

Russia's new museum, nothing that acknowledged or explored the coun

try's Slavic or Byzantine heritage, let alone the achievements of its mod

ern artists. Rather, the discourses that had emanated from Winckelmann's

Hellenistic bias were to be appropriated in order to promote neoclassical

values on Russian soil. Significantly the only two modern artists with a

section of their own, namely Thorvaldsen and Canova, were renowned

neoclassical sculptors whose work was strongly influenced by that of the

ancient Greeks. (Thorvaldsen, whose reputation has not survived as well

as that of Canova, may seem an odd choice today, but at the time he

enjoyed considerable international standing and was well known to the

Russian ?migr? community, having been recruited by the Russian govern ment in 1830 to supervise its art students in Rome. Volkonskaia's partial

ity is thus less unexpected than it might at first appear. Indeed, she may have hoped to garner official support by championing an artist already in the employ of the Russian state.)35 Moreover, the princess wanted the

31. Ibid., 388.

32. Ibid., 387.

33. According to a contemporary, Volkonskaia "decorated her house with originals and copies of the most famous works of painting and sculpture. She painted the walls of

her house, a real museum, with frescoes in the style of various periods." Murav'ev, ed.,

V tsarstve muz, 11. For details of Volkonskaia's collection, see N. Polunina and A. Frolov,

Kollektsionery staroi Moskvy: Illiustrirovannyi biograficheskii slovar' (Moscow, 1997), 108-9.

The fortunes and eventual dispersal of Volkonskaia's collection after her death are dis

cussed on p. 110.

34. Z. Volkonskaia, letter published in Galateia 5 (1829): 21-31, quoted in Belozer

skaia, "Kniaginia Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia," 139.

35. Thorvaldsen carried out commissions for members of the Russian aristocracy,

including busts of Alexander I and Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. For his involvement

with the Russian artistic community in Rome, see R. Giuliani, "Thorvaldsen e la colonia

romana degli artisti russi," in P. Kragelund and M. Nykjaer, eds., Thorvaldsen: L'ambiente,

Vinflusso, il mito (Rome, 1991), 131-43.



922 Slavic Review

museum's library to include the work of John Flaxman, the English neo

classical sculptor famed for his outline illustrations to books by authors

such as Homer and Dante.

It is interesting that Volkonskaia disseminated these views in Teleskop, a

biweekly publication launched in 1831 that proclaimed itself a "journal of

contemporary enlightenment" and aimed to publish articles and reviews

reflecting current thinking in philosophy, education, science, and the

arts. In 1836, the journal was famously closed down after the writer Petr

Chaadaev published the first of his "Lettres philosophiques," in which

he lambasted the retarded development of his country in comparison to

the more sophisticated civilizations of both east and west (there was little

in Chaadaev's letter to recommend it to Nicholas I's zealous censors).36 Chaadaev and Volkonskaia shared common ground. Chaadaev claimed

that Russia had no past of its own that was worth studying or considering as a springboard for future developments. Volkonskaia, albeit less contro

versially, similarly dismissed Russia's cultural history by excluding Russian art of any description from her museum project. Nikolai Nadezhdin, the

publicist, literary critic, and founder and editor of Teleskop, was clearly not averse to publishing such views. Indeed, Nadezhdin would have been

particularly interested in Volkonskaia's proposal, for from 1831 to 1835

he was a professor in the sub-department of fine arts and archaeology at

Moscow University, to which Volkonskaia's museum was to be attached. In

the very year he launched his journal, he was certainly happy to publicize Volkonskaia's proposed museum?set up, we should remember, with the

explicit aim of inspiring Russian artists?whose paragons were the prod ucts of the pagan or Christian societies of classical and modern Europe.

Such an attitude places Volkonskaia's sympathies within the emerging corpus of "Westernizer" thought: but to draw this conclusion would be to

misrepresent her wider interests and beliefs. Volkonskaia spent her child hood abroad and spoke French as a native tongue, reflecting the Franco

phile atmosphere of pre-Napoleonic Russia.37 Yet unlike many of her con

temporaries, she took pains to learn Russian, and her lack of proficiency in written Russian was a source of personal regret. Keen to unlock Russia's artistic potential and to promote a cultural rapprochement between east

and west, she was anxious to redress foreign misapprehensions of Russia, as Alessandra Tosi has explored in her work on Volkonskaia's writing as a

forum for cross-cultural exchange. Thus in Laure, one of the Quatre Nou

velles Volkonskaia wrote in French and first published in Moscow in 1819, the stereotypical and derogatory misperceptions of the Russian gentry

36. For the text of Chaadaev's letter, see P. la. Chaadaev, Stat'i i pis'ma (Moscow,

1989), 38-56. The full text in English is available in Marc Raeff, ed., Russian Intellectual

History: An Anthology (New York, 1966; reprint, Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1978), 160-73.

For a commentary on the invective it contained, see Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian

Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford, 1980), 81-91.

37. According to some sources, Volkonskaia first came to Russia as late as 1805. See

N. M. Polunina, Kto est' kto v kollektsionirovanii staroi Rossii: Novyi biograficheskii slovar' (Mos cow, 2003), 99.




that obtained in Europe at the time are exposed through the character of

Vladimir, a Russian expatriate who is repeatedly pigeonholed as "exotic" and "uncivilised."38 The Quatre Nouvelles were followed by Tableau Slave du

cinqui?me si?cle, published in Paris in 1824, in which Volkonskaia aimed to

familiarize western readers with Russian history. Any overt cultural segre

gation was clearly far from Volkonskaia's mind.

In addition to her creative writing, Volkonskaia attempted to improve cultural links between east and west by proposing a society known as the

"Patrioticheskaia beseda" (Patriotic conversation) to promote Russia's cul

tural, intellectual, and scientific achievements abroad, not least by fund

ing scholarly research into Russian history, archaeology, geography, and

philology; and by launching a French-language journal to disseminate the

results of these inquiries.39 Her hope was that "Patrioticheskaia beseda"

could become affiliated with Moscow University's Society of Russian His

tory and Antiquities (which had elected her its first female honorary member on the nomination of Svin'in in 1825), but, although the univer

sity approved the project, nothing came of it. Following her later conver

sion to Catholicism (which sources date variously to 1833 or to 1835-36), Volkonskaia also agitated for a rapprochement between Russian Ortho

doxy and the Catholic Church, allegedly urging the future Alexander II to

consider such a move when he visited her in Rome in 1839.40 (Chaadaev too had inveighed against Russia's isolation from the culture of western

Christianity, arguing that this denied his country a role in the inexorable

progress toward universal Christianity.) The full scope of "Patrioticheskaia

beseda," as well as Volkonskaia's position on the internationalism of the

Roman Church, lie outside the parameters of this article. Yet it is impor tant to note that Volkonskaia's vision of cultural influence was not mono

directional and that her museum project formed part of a much wider

desire for cultural and spiritual syncretism between Russia and the west.

It is thus all the more striking that the museum excluded Russian works

of art, and this omission speaks volumes, both about Volkonskaia and her

cultural milieu, and about contemporary attitudes concerning Russian

art. As Duncan states: "what we see and do not see in art museums?and

on what terms and by whose authority we do or do not see it?is closely

38. See Alessandra Tosi, "The Russian Reception of European Literature in the

Early Nineteenth Century: Zinaida Volkonskaia's 'Laure' as a Literary Bridge between

Russia and the West" (paper presented at the annual conference of the Study Group on

Eighteenth-Century Russia, Hoddesdon, 6-8 January 2003) ; and Alessandra Tosi, Waiting

for Pushkin: Russian Fiction in the Reign of Alexander I (1801-1825) (Amsterdam, 2006).

39. Volkonskaia outlined these aims in a letter to the Society of Russian History and

Antiquities on 28 April 1827. See Belozerskaia, "Kniaginia Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkon

skaia," 133.

40. On Volkonskaia's conversion to Catholicism, see Nadejda Gorodetzky, "Zi

naida Volkonsky as a Catholic," Slavonic and East European Review 39 (December 1960):

31-43; and A. Mazon, "Z?n?ide Volkonskaja la Catholique," in W. Steinitz, P. N. Berkov,

B. Suchodolski, and J. Dolansky eds., Ost und West in der Geschichte des Denkens und der kul

turellen Beziehungen: Festschrift f?r Eduard Winter zum 70 Geburtstag (Berlin, 1966), 579-90.

On the rapprochement, see Bayara Aroutunova, Lives in Letters: Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya and Her Correspondence (Columbus, Ohio, 1994), 32.



924 Slavic Review

linked to larger questions about who constitutes the community and who

defines its identity."41 The potential reasons for and interpretation of Vol

konskaia's position therefore require careful thought. In the introduction to her proposal, the princess had in fact praised

the current state of the fine arts in Russia. She credited this development to the Russian government, possibly having in mind the foundation of the

Academy of Arts in 1757 and the consequent improvement in the educa

tion, patronage, and display of Russian artists. Volkonskaia even went so

far as to place Russian art on a par with that of other European coun

tries, not least as its practitioners were now winning notable awards.42 Her

failure to include Russian art in her projected museum thus points to a

contradiction in her appraisal of her compatriots' work: Russian art may now be capable of holding its own in a European context, but it was still

not good enough to merit inclusion in a public institution designed to

educate artists and elevate standards of taste. The cultural interface be

tween east and west that Volkonskaia advocated was therefore not always as permeable in both directions as some of her other activities would sug

gest. As far as the museum was concerned, cultural influence was to be a

decidedly one-way affair.

In some respects, these views reflect the cultural mentality of the time, as Russian patrons in the early decades of the nineteenth century contin

ued to favor foreign over Russian artists. As elsewhere in Europe, art col

lections betokened gentlemanly attainments, and in Russia gentlemanly behavior still took its cue from the west.43 Eager to establish a cultural

presence and to manifest feelings of identification with a wider civiliza

tion, Russian patrons invested foreign works of art with greater prestige and authority than those produced by their fellow countrymen.44 Volkon skaia's views are also in tune with those expressed in the periodical press:

while mentioning native art from the 1820s, Russian publications still di rected their gaze firmly toward the west. It was not until the late 1830s that local artists merited the same level of critical analysis accorded to their

foreign counterparts, and only in the middle of the century did coverage of Russian developments begin to match and, later, exceed that devoted to western European art.45 Furthermore, Teleskop was known for its rela

tively enlightened and forward-thinking coverage: it has the distinction of

being the first journal to publish the work of Vissarion Belinskii, and other contributors included Aleksandr Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, and Nikolai

Ogarev. Its editor Nadezhdin clearly saw no conflict between Volkons kaia's views and the journal's moderately progressive aims.

Yet from other perspectives, Volkonskaia's neoclassical focus was un

doubtedly conservative and even regressive. Winckelmann's view of an

41. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 8-9.

42. Volkonskaia, "Proekt Esteticheskogo muzeia," 385.

43. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 38.

44. For recent thinking on Russian artistic patronage, see Vincent Boele, Catherine

Phillips, and John Rudge, eds., Collectors in St. Petersburg (Aldershot, Eng., 2007). 45. For this shift of emphasis in Russian artistic journalism, see Rosalind P. Gray, Rus

sian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), 45-68.




tique art as the pinnacle of artistic achievement had been challenged

many years previously by Konstantin Nikolaevich Batiushkov in his famous

review of an Academy exhibition published in Syn otechestva in 1814. In

the review, the narrator lets fall the volume by Winckelmann he has been

reading in order to appreciate the beauty of the St. Petersburg landscape

stretching out before him. The narrator's neglect of Winckelmann thus

becomes a rhetorical device through which the writer can disavow the

classicist orientation of the Academy of Arts in favor of a contemporary, Russian iconography. As one of the interlocutors in Batiushkov's account

laments, "how many subjects there are here for an artist's brush! . . . What

a pity it is that my companions make so little of such riches."46 More re

cently, the Russian government had also acknowledged the worth of mod

ern Russian subjects when it purchased Aleksei Venetsianov's celebrated

image Gumno (The threshing floor, 1822-23, State Russian Museum, St.

Petersburg) for the Hermitage in 1824. That such a contemporary and

identifiably "Russian" image was considered a suitable adornment for the

Hermitage casts Volkonskaia's preferences in a decidedly retrogressive

light. Nor was Volkonskaia's unquestioning belief in the value of copying

great art without its detractors by this time. The practice of developing and refining artistic skill by copying acknowledged masterpieces was

firmly inscribed in academic practice.47 As Sir Joshua Reynolds, inaugural

president of the Royal Academy in London, had insisted in the first of the

Discourses he delivered to that institution's student body on 2 January 1769: "By studying these authentick models, that idea of excellence which

is the result of the accumulated experience of past ages, may be at once

acquired; and the tardy and obstructed progress of our predecessors may teach us a shorter and easier way."48 (It is worth noting that Catherine the

Great, patron of one of the greatest of Reynolds' history paintings?The

Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents?had owned a copy of the Discourses, and they enjoyed wide circulation across western Europe by Volkonskaia's

time.) The notion that copying Old Masters could galvanize the develop ment of a national school of painting was also widespread. In Britain, for

example, the lack of a central collection of Old Masters was believed to

hinder the development of a national school of history painting, and the

British Institution, among others, was convinced that good Old Master

paintings should be accessible to artists and public alike.49 Jordana Pome

roy even argues that copying works by canonical artists was considered so

sure a route to artistic excellence that this, rather than the burning issues

46. Konstantin Batiushkov, "Progulka v Akademiiu khudozhestv: Pis'mo starogo mos

kovskogo zhitelia k priiateliu v derevniu ego N.," in K. N Batiushkov: Sochineniia (Mos

cow, 1955), 330. Translation courtesy of Carol Adlam, "The Russian Visual Art Project" at

http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/rva/texts/batiushkov/bat01/bat01.html (last consulted

29 August 2008). 47. For the copying of works in the Hermitage, see O. V. Mikats, Kopirovanie

v Ermita

zhe kak shkola masterstva russkikh khudozhnikov XVIII?XIX vv. (St. Petersburg, 1996).

48. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. R. R. Wark (New Haven, 1988), 15.

49. Hoock, "Old Masters and the English School," 1.



926 Slavic Review

of national development at the time, lay behind the drive for a public art

museum in Britain.50 Yet the idea that engaged contemplation of specific objects improves

taste or artistic prowess is far from straightforward. Liudmilla Jordan ova

has questioned the implicit belief that looking at objects "unleashes mem

ory and produces historical knowledge," maintaining that artefacts in mu

seums "have the same status as other historical documents: they are texts

requiring interpretation, and they need to be set in their proper historical

context."51 Similarly, just as seeing does not lead to common understand

ing, so copying does not lead to uniform learning. Moreover, the fact that

Volkonskaia's museum was to be populated largely by copies or casts of great art makes the issue of copying even more problematic. Lacking in "aura," to use Walter Benjamin's description of the unique effect produced by an

original work of art, such copies become questionable models for aspiring artists.52 One wonders just how copies of iconic examples of classical and

Renaissance art were capable of presenting sets of desirable practices in

material form?a belief to which Volkonskaia clearly subscribed.53 As early as the mid eighteenth century, Russian critics had begun to

question the point of copying, as Carol Adlam has ascertained.54 In an

important essay of 1766 entitled "On the Usefulness and Glory of the

Arts," Prince Dmitrii Alekseevich Golitsyn (Russia's ambassador to France at the time) wrote that "lengthy continuous drawing from a cast or antique

makes an artist hard, exceptional, clear-sighted, pure, great, but cold."55

Golitsyn's text was not published until the nineteenth century, but it was

circulated within the Academy of Arts and is significant both for the high social standing of its author and for the vehemence of its sentiment. In

1792 the Academy's own conference secretary, Petr Petrovich Chekalevskii

(a man so loyal to the institution that he was promoted to vice president in 1799), recommended that students engage in "the depiction of the

activity of nature" (izobrazhenie deistvii estestva) rather than copying from

50. Jordana Pomeroy, "Creating a National Collection: The National Gallery's Ori

gins in the British Institution," Apollo, n.s. 148, no. 437 (August 1998): 48-49.

51. Liudmilla Jordan ova, "Objects of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective on Muse

ums," in Peter Vergo, ed., The New Museology (London, 2006), 27 and 29.

52. See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology ofChang

ingldeas (Oxford, 1992), 512-20.

53. For consideration of similar issues with reference to France, see Paul Duro, "The

Lure of Rome: The Academic Copy and the Acad?mie de France in the Nineteenth Century," in Rafael Cardoso Denis and Colin Trodd, eds., Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester, Eng., 2000), 133-49.

54. See Carol Adlam, "Realist Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Russian Art Writing," Slavonic and East European Review83, no. 4 (October 2005): 638-63. This paragraph of my text is indebted to Carol Adlam's research.

55. D. Golitsyn, "O pol'ze, slave i pr. khudozhestv," in V. P. Shestakov, ed., Istoriia

estetiki: Pamiatniki mirovoi esteticheskoi mysli, vol. 2, Esteticheskie ucheniia XVII?XVIII vekov

(Moscow, 1964), 767, quoted in Adlam, "Realist Aesthetics," 647. For further discussion of

Golitsyn's writing on art, see E. B. Mozgovaia, "Sochineniia D. A. Golitsyna po voprosam

izobrazitel'nogo iskusstva," in N. S. Kuteinikova, ed., Znatochestvo, kollektsionirovanie, mets

enatstvo (St. Petersburg, 1992), 11-19.




statues, despite the high esteem in which Chekalevskii continued to hold

antique art.56 By the 1830s, even conservative organs of the periodical press were advocating the practice of drawing from nature. Thus in 1837 Nestor Vasil'evich Kukol'nik, dramatist, novelist, and editor of Khudozhest

vennaia gazeta, a staunch supporter of the Academy, spoke up for artists

"inspired by nature. And nature alone. . . . Give us lines from nature, give us a body from nature . . . and you will draw the truth, far removed from the bare truth of similitude."57

In light of such developments, Volkonskaia's advocacy of a neoclassi cal genealogy of "great" art that students were obliged to copy and that alone was worthy of museum display seems pass?, underlining the alien ation from her native culture brought about by her exile.58 (Volkonskaia's liberal sympathies, coupled with rumors about her imminent conversion to Catholicism, had persuaded Nicholas I to accept her request to leave

Russia in 1829.) Moreover, Volkonskaia was based in Rome, the site of

preference for academic institutions and artists: there she lived among stalwarts of the European artistic establishment (Thorvaldsen, Vernet,

Canova) and Russian artists who had excelled at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, as it was their success at home that enabled them to travel and study abroad. Thus Volkonskaia's knowledge of both the pedagogy of painting, and the artistic scene in Russia, was mediated by those who had been inculcated with academic values for several years. Her fetishiza tion of the structures of neoclassical learning in her museum project is, therefore, unsurprising, even if indicative that Volkonskaia was out of touch with what was happening in Russia at the time. A complex matrix

of personal, political, geographical, and intellectual factors caused her to invest greater cultural prestige and pedagogical potential in copies of

works from other cultures, periods, and nations, than in originals from her own. The museum project duly became not only a source of educa

tion, taste-formation, and display, as Volkonskaia openly desired, but also a site of power asserting the continuing hegemony of neoclassical ideals in the education of Russia's artists.

One might speculate how Volkonskaia's taxonomies and priorities might have differed had her proposal postdated Briullov's vast painting Poslednii deri Pompei (The last day of Pompeii, 1830-33, State Russian Mu seum, St. Petersburg), which won its artist academic honors and awards across Europe, was exhibited at the Hermitage as a gift to Nicholas I in

1834, and became the first modern Russian painting to acquire pan

56. P. Chekalevskii, "Rassuzhdenie o svobodnykh khudozhestvakh s

opisaniem nekotorykh proizvedenii Rossiiskikh Khudozhnikov, izdano v

pol'zu Vospitannikov im

peratorskoi Akademii khudozhestv Sovetnikom Posol'stva i onoi Akademii Konferents Sekretarem Petrom Chekalevskim," in Shestakov, ed., Istoriia estetiki, 2:768-70, quoted in

Adlam, "Realist Aesthetics," 647.

57. N. Kukol'nik, "Zamechaniia na stat'iu g. Struiiskago, pomeshchennuiu v nn. 7 i 8 literaturnykh pribavlenii k Russkomu Invalidu na 1837 god," Khudozhestvennaia gazeta (1837): 76, quoted in Adlam, "Realist Aesthetics," 653.

58. For Russians' more general alienation from their own cultural monuments in the

eighteenth century, see Lindsey Hughes, "Monuments and Identity," in Simon Franklin

and Emma Widdis, eds., National Identity in Russian Culture (Cambridge, Eng., 2004), 176.



928 Slavic Review

European renown. Perhaps the success of this painting by one of Volkons

kaia's favorite artists?moreover, an artist formed by and loyal to the aca

demic practices of copying the princess so embraced?would have caused

her to include the modern Russian school in her proposed museum. As it

was, Russian artistic achievement was definitely excluded from the type of

knowledge Volkonskaia wished to convey. Volkonskaia concluded her proposal on a practical note. The museum

would open to artists every day, and to the general public twice a week,

emulating arrangements in other European museums, which similarly set aside specific days for artists alone.59 As for assembling the exhibits, the princess declared that she planned to use her connections with lead

ing artists in Rome, including Thorvaldsen and the Italian neoclassical

painter Vincenzo Camuccini, to have the necessary copies made, boasting that her contacts enabled her to acquire these at prices usually reserved

for artists alone. (Camuccini, like Thorvaldsen, was an obvious choice, as he too was employed by the Russian government to assist and monitor

the progress of Russian art students in Rome.)60 The princess had even

looked into shipping arrangements, noting that she would be able to se

cure these too at a favorable price. She proposed to launch a subscription in both Moscow and St. Petersburg to raise funds for the museum, hoping, rather pointedly, that if Moscow University was not able to devote a specific

building to the museum, then perhaps some local dignitary might help.61 She was also optimistic about the fund-raising, commenting that if large sums of money were raised, they would not only purchase the sculpture and models she had listed but would commission further copies of Italian

paintings, from Michelangelo's Last Judgement to Domenichino's Death of

Agnes. Volkonskaia evidently hoped that the museum might function as a

conduit into Russia of both originals and copies of works by some of the

most notable painters and sculptors in the history of Italian art.

It remains to consider the fate of Volkonskaia's proposal. The prin cess sent it to illustrious acquaintances of hers in Moscow and St. Peters

burg, not least Prince Dmitrii Vladimirovich Golitsyn. This was a judicious

choice, as Golitsyn was both the Moscow governor-general and a member

of the family that had funded Russia's first public art museum at the be

ginning of the century. In her covering letter to Golitsyn, Volkonskaia

confirmed her deference to Winckelmann's authority, writing that the col

lections she envisaged "should, according to Winckelmann and his imita

tors, depict the entire history of art."62 The letter also reveals the extent

of Volkonskaia's canvassing on behalf of the museum, as she not only pep

pers her text with flattering references to Golitsyn s status and influence

but also notes that she had asked Anatolii Demidov if the museum could

59. The National Gallery in London admitted the general public from 10 a.m. to

5 p.m. from Monday to Thursday and was open by special arrangement to art students on

Fridays and Saturdays. See Pomeroy, "Creating a National Collection," 47.

60. Volkonskaia, "Proekt Esteticheskogo muzeia," 397.

61. Ibid., 397.

62. I. Tsvetaev, "Pamiati kniagini Z. A. Volkonskoi," Moskovskie vedomosti 84

(1898): 4.




not be housed initially in one of his or his brother's houses, as "it would be an honor for them."63 Demidov came from another aristocratic family with a distinguished reputation as art patrons, suggesting that Volkonskaia was choosing her target audience with care.64

Despite Golitsyn's and Demidov's pedigrees, Volkonskaia found her

greatest ally not among the culturally active aristocracy but in Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin, professor of history at Moscow University and some

time editor of Moskovskii vestnik and Moskvitianin. In a letter to Shevyrev of 10 April 1830, Pogodin could not contain his excitement. "I received the project for an aesthetic museum from you on the third, and am in

raptures. Long live the princess! She will write her name in diamond let ters in the annals of Moscow or in all of Russia!"65 Pogodin's enthusiasm

was not entirely altruistic for, sensing that the princess might not have time to oversee the formation of the collection, he glimpsed an advanta

geous opportunity for himself. "Perhaps it would be convenient for her to employ me (what a joyous thought) for half a year, from September to February, to liaise with artists under her direction, to advise on, pack, and send [the exhibits], even to help set them up in Moscow?" Pogodin even suggested the wording the princess might add to her proposal to

request such an assistant from Moscow University, adding that this would cost 3,000 rubles for six months.66 Though she did not mention Pogodin by name, Volkonskaia evidently accepted his advice, as these words appear in the proposal published in Teleskop. The ever-optimistic Pogodin, for his

part, started Italian lessons again, his anxiety to secure this opportunity to travel to Italy confirming that country's continuing allure among Russia's cultural and intellectual elite.

Unfortunately Pogodin's fervor proved the exception, rather than the rule, as Volkonskaia's project did not meet with unanimous support.

Among others, her husband, Prince Nikita Grigor'evich Volkonskii, voiced doubts as to its feasibility. It was, he wrote to Shevyrev on 2 April 1830, "a

noble, delightful and grand idea, but you have not specified your means for achieving this aim." To be fair, some thought had been given to fi nances: the proposal mentioned a budget of 25,000 rubles for essential statues and busts, and, in her letter to Golitsyn, Volkonskaia estimated the costs of making five representative casts, which ranged from 10 rubles for a copy of a statue of the young Augustus, to 175 rubles for one of

Minerva. (Volkonskaia insisted on good quality casts and criticized those commissioned by the Academy of Arts for being executed "with insuf ficient care," which again emphasizes the value she placed on copies of works of art.)67 Yet such cursory attention to figures failed to satisfy her

63. Ibid., 4.

64. For the celebrated collections of the Russian diplomat Anatolii Nikolaevich Demidov at his villa of San Donato near Florence, see Francis Haskell and Robert Wenley, Anatole Demidoff Prince of San Donato (1812-70) (London, 1994). It is unclear whether this was the Anatolii Demidov whom Volkonskaia approached.

65. Quoted in Belozerskaia, "Kniaginia Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia," 144. 66. Quoted ibid., 144-45.

67. Tsvetaev, "Pamiati kniagini Z. A. Volkonskoi," 4.



930 Slavic Review

husband, who reckoned that it would cost over 5,000 rubles for the first

stage of the project alone, though he did not specify exactly what this first

stage entailed.68

The prince's skepticism was well founded, as the Council of Moscow

University rejected Volkonskaia's plan, provoking Pogodin's splenetic con

tempt: "It is impossible to make any learned propositions to the university, for it is now a gathering of ignoramuses, swindlers, and egotists. I have

kept all the papers pertaining to the museum, as the governing body is no longer up to such a task."69 Russia had to wait another thirty years for a state art museum, the first of which was the Rumiantsev Museum,

which opened in Moscow on 12 May 1862.70 The most direct descen

dent of Volkonskaia's proposal was the Museum of Fine Arts (later the

A. S. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts), the major repository of non-Russian

art in Moscow, which opened in 1912 and includes casts of classical and

Renaissance sculpture as well as original works of art. In 1898 Ivan Vladi

mirovich Tsvetaev, father of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva and the guiding

light behind the Pushkin Museum, paid handsome tribute to the prin cess as the originator of the idea.71 Thus although Volkonskaia was disap

pointed in her aim of founding a museum of fine arts in Moscow, later

generations recognized the value of her proposal. By arguing that the

cultural enlightenment of her people lay in adopting a European model

on neoclassical lines, Volkonskaia nonetheless aligned herself with those

Russian scholars who still looked to the cultural values of the west. It would

take someone from a very different social and economic background? the shy textile merchant Pavel Mikhailovich Tret'iakov?to respond to the

aesthetic nationalism that became increasingly evident after the middle

of the nineteenth century and lay the foundations for a national museum

of Russian art.72

68. Quoted in Belozerskaia, "Kniaginia Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia," 143.

69. Quoted in Tsvetaev, "Pamiati kniagini Z. A. Volkonskoi," 4.

70. For early accounts of the Rumiantsev Museum and its move from St. Petersburg to Moscow, see N. M. Lisovskii, "Opisanie Rumian tsevskogo muzeia," Rossiiskaia bibliograf?a 86 (1881); and V V. Stasov, "Rumiantsevskii muzei: Istoriia ego perevoda iz Peterburga v

Moskvu," Russkaia starina 37 (1883): 87-116. For the rise of public galleries in Russia in

general, see

Gray, Russian Genre Painting, 24-41.

71. Tsvetaev believed the first practical outcome of Volkonskaia's project was the

sculpture department at Moscow University, which was established when Professor P. M.

Leont'ev bought various busts and plaster casts for the university in the mid-1850s. The

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, however, was the fullest realization of Volkonskaia's idea.

See Tsvetaev, "Pamiati kniagini Z. A. Volkonskoi," 4.

72. For the development of Tret'iakov's collection of Russian painting, which he be

gan in 1856 and donated to the city of Moscow in 1892, see S. N. Gol'dshtein, "P. M.

Tret'iakov i ego sobiratel'skaia deiatel'nost'," in Bruk, ed., Gosudarstvennaia Tret'iakovskaia

galereia, 57-122; A. Griaznov, Pochetnyi grazhdanin Moskvy: Stranitsy zhizni Pavla Mikhailovi

cha Tret'iakova (Moscow, 1982); I. S. Nenarokomova, Pavel Tret'iakov i ego galereia (Moscow,

1994) ; A. P. Botkina, Pavel Mikhailovich Tret'iakov v zhizni i iskusstve (Moscow, 1995) ; John O.

Norman, "Pavel Tretiakov (1832-98): Merchant Patronage and the Russian Realists" (PhD

diss., Indiana University, 1989); and John O. Norman, "Pavel Tretiakov and Merchant Art

Patronage, 1850-1900," in Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Rassow, and James L. West, eds.,

Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia

(Princeton, 1991), 93-107.




What wider conclusions might we draw from Volkonskaia's ill-fated museum plan? By interrogating her assumptions concerning the content

and objectives of a public art museum, we are reminded of how complex the process of national and cultural definition can be. Rather than provid

ing a disinterested cultural entity, the collections or museums founded or

envisioned by people like Volkonskaia are fully capable of exerting a valo

rizing power and of deploying institutional prestige to further the claims

of a particular constituency. Volkonskaia's project uncritically propagated the theoretical grounding of museological practice in neoclassical ideas

that reigned supreme in many of the most eminent institutions abroad? a point Volkonskaia drove home through her unstinting promotion of an

tique sculpture and of those modern artists (Thorvaldsen, Canova, Flax

man) who heeded Winckelmann's advocacy of the ancient Greek ideal.

What is most striking is that Volkonskaia proposed this arrangement for the first public art museum in a country that, as far as culture in general

was concerned, was becoming increasingly self-confident and self-aware.

Moreover, she was concerned in other ventures to promote Russia's cul

tural interests abroad. Why, then, did the princess consider the continu

ing prioritization of the material culture of the classical world appropri ate for a national museum of art? John Eisner and Roger Cardinal have

written that "the history of collecting is . . . the narrative of how human

beings have striven to accommodate, to appropriate and to extend the taxonomies and systems of knowledge they have inherited."73 This formu lation certainly holds true for Volkonskaia, who was following the practice codified by the Louvre, which many scholars consider the prototype of the state art museum. Yet a crucial difference between Volkonskaia's vision and that successfully realized in the Louvre is that the Louvre's first cura

tors devised (and its current curators still maintain) a sequence of displays that begins with the treasures of antiquity and culminates in the glories of French art. In other words, France is conceptualized as the true heir to

the great traditions of classical civilization and the Renaissance. Volkon

skaia, in contrast, was not concerned with presenting Russia in the same

light. Unlike the Louvre, which "embodies the state and the ideology of

the state," Volkonskaia's project steered clear of any visual representation of "Russianness" or national identity.74 More concerned with the accu

mulation of cultural capital than with promoting ideas of national cohe

sion, her project functioned as a standard-bearer for a cultural patrimony other than her own.

Such a bias does not seem to have condemned her project to the

margins of any nation-building project. None of her contemporaries criticized her for excluding Russian art from her museum, nor was this exclusion ever cited as a reason for the project's failure. On the contrary, to judge by Pogodin's reaction, her proposal was welcomed as an act of

patriotic fervor. Volkonskaia's approach therefore adds weight to those

73. John Eisner and Roger Cardinal, eds., The Cultures of Collecting (London,

1994), 2. 74. Duncan and Wallach, "The Universal Survey Museum," 64.



932 Slavic Review

theories propounded by Pomeroy and others that reasons other than na

tionalism inspired the development of national museums and galleries in the early nineteenth century and that, in the words of Katia Dianina, "national pride could be anchored in a world-class collection of non

Russian art."75 Such conclusions challenge the essentialist view that na

tion building should necessarily involve the promotion of one's own. This

continues to hold true in Russia, where the two public art museums that

enjoy the highest profiles abroad?the Hermitage Museum in St. Peters

burg, and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow?are not prime

repositories of Russian art.

Yet collections have been considered paradigms of culture since at

least the late eighteenth century, and culture plays a key role in defining a nation to nationals and foreigners alike.76 There is, therefore, an argu

ment that strategies such as those anticipated by Volkonskaia and realized

by later museum officials?namely, segregating the country's collections

of Russian and non-Russian art?have not served Russia well. Russia is,

of course, far from alone in centralizing its collections of native art in

distinct locations: witness, for instance, the division between the National

Gallery and T?te Britain in London. But Russia seems to have suffered

more than other nations as a result of this policy. The Hermitage Museum

and/or the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts feature on the majority of tourist

itineraries to Russia. Not so the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and the State Tret'iakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia's two national galleries of Russian art, where only a smaller number of foreign tour operators or

resourceful foreign visitors venture. As a result, many visitors with limited

time in Russia leave the country with the mistaken impression that Russia

made scant contribution to the visual arts. Foreign visitors to the Hermit

age in particular often fail to appreciate that it is not the country's central

repository of national art. The segregation of Russia's national art collec

tions has, as a result, emphasized the difference between Russian artistic

practice and that of the western European mainstream.

In seeking to understand the political implications of Volkonskaia's

position and of those who, consciously or otherwise, followed her lead, we must therefore conclude that Volkonskaia's project is significant for

more than the later museums it may have inspired. Any museum reflects

a range of factors, from the value judgments and personal prejudices of

those who determine its constitution, to the culture and society in which

its collections evolve. Moreover, the selection and display of individual

exhibits lead to very specific interpretations of history.77 But those given

75. Dianina, "The Museum and the Nation," 42.

76. See Oscar E. V?zquez, Inventing the Art Collection: Patrons, Markets, and the State in

Nineteenth-Century Spain (University Park, 2001), 6.

77. Here I am indebted to Peter Vergo's observations in The New Museology, in which

he writes: "Museums make certain choices determined by judgements as to value, signifi

cance or monetary worth, judgements which may derive in part from the system of values

peculiar to the institution itself, but which in a more profound sense are also rooted in our

education, our upbringing, our prejudices. . . .

Every acquisition . . ., every juxtaposition

or arrangement of an object or work of art. . . means placing a certain construction upon

history." See Vergo, "Introduction," in Vergo, ed., The New Museology, 2-3.




the task of museum building may not always appreciate the long-term implications of the histories they choose to tell. As for Volkonskaia, the

broad construction of cultural politics envisaged by her museum and still

conveyed by the major public art museums in Russia's two capital cities serves to underline Russia's "otherness"?an attitude the princess herself

would have deplored.



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