Russian Critics and Obshchestvennost’, 1840–1890: The Case of Vladimir Stasov

Abstract

The concepts of ‘public sphere’ and ‘public opinion’ originated in western civil society, therefore, some say, they are inapplicable to Russian society, which experienced a different historical course. Obshchestvennost’ is a Russian alternative concept that mostly relates to ‘public sphere’ and ‘public opinion’, and the recent monograph reveals how this concept developed in the late Imperial period: in the late nineteenth century the word obshchestvennost was a synonym for the word obshchestvo (society), and by the beginning of the twentieth century, obshchestvo came to connote a place wherein various people’s opinions were autonomously formed and debated.¹ Since this was the period when the Great Reforms under Alexander II prompted the formation of a middle class in the Russian society, historians analysing obshchestvennost’ tend to focus on social groups or activities which appeared after the Great Reforms. For example, two of the earliest attempts to examine obshchestvennost’, Between Tsar and People and Russia’s Missing Middle Class, feature the professions and entrepreneurs comprising the emerging middle class.² Joseph Bradley and Anastasia Tumanova focused on the role of middle-class in the emergence of ‘voluntary associations’ at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and their significance in the development of a civil society.³ Vladislav Grosul also underscored that newly-founded voluntary associations played a significant role in the formation of obshchestvennost’.⁴ Further, Louise McReynolds picked up on leisure activity because it gave people the opportunity for self-determination and fostered obshchestvennost’.⁵