Retrospective

Looking back 100 years in Russian history, it's striking how that period, too, was characterized by changes and apparent transformations. Yet the life of Russia at the transition from 19th to 20th century was very much more vibrant and full of challenge than it is now. In the second chapter of his An Essay in Autobiography (1959), the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak described that era like this:

The second decade of my life was very different from the first. Moscow in the 'nineties,in all the splendour of her "sixteen hundred belfries", still had the look of a remote, provincial town as picturesque as a fairytale, but with something of the legendary grandeur of the ancient capital and of the Third Rome. Ancient customs were still observed. In the autumn, horses were blessed in Yushkov Lane which ran between the College and the Church of St Florus and St Laurus, who were regarded as patrons of horse-breeders; the horses and the grooms and coachmen who brought them crowded the church precincts and the Lane as if it were a horse fair.

It seemed to me as a child that the advent of the new century changed everything as at the stroke of a magic wand. The city was gripped by the same financial frenzy as were the leading capitals of the world. Tall blocks of offices and flats sprang up overnight in an epidemic of speculative deals. All at once, brick giants reached into the sky from every street. And with them, Moscow, outstripping Petersburg, produced a new Russian art, the art of a big city, young, fresh and contemporary.

With the advent of twenty-first century Russia, where is that sense of freshness and innovation? Where are the Baksts, the Scriabins, the Bloks, Tsvetayevas, Mandelstams,Pasternaks and Akhmatovas of the present age? Where is the aura of internationalism and Europeanism that marked Russia's entrance to the twentieth century? The questions go on reverberating, for they don't have an answer.