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 mirror image of the Fool who succeeds despite himself is the rebel doomed to fail. Centuries of institutionalized servitude had begotten both actual and dreamed-of rebellion, with songs, poems, and legends that immortalized the rebels and their acts. Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Nikolai Gogol all had explored themes of freedom and rebellion, and post-Emancipation writers took these themes into the nascent medium of popular commercial fiction in the form of the adventure novel. The novels delivered excitement while reinforcing the wisdom of generations; to wit, that Russia’s secular and religious order could not be violated with impunity. Tolstoy in Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov innovated within a traditional mythology of rebels that had long served at once to question and accentuate the oppressive authority of tsarist rulers. At the time they were writing, the conventions that had led larger-than-life heroes and heroines to fulfillment or destruction were already changing in the shared Russian imagination. The cult of doomed rebellion associated with rebels had begun to give way to a new and growing emphasis on the agency and power of ordinary people.