The Moscow Arts' production of The Cherry Orchard, which became the standard view, has taken us away from the real conception of the play - and from the real Chekhov, too. For everything suggests that, by temperament and background, he identified himself with the outsider crashing through the barriers of society. Like Lopakhin,

Chekhov's father was a merchant who had risen from the enserfed peasantry. He taught himself to play the violin, sang in the church choir, and became the choir master in the Taganrog cathedral in 1864. Chekhov shared his father's industry. He understood that common people could be artists, too. Far from lamenting the old gentry world, his last play embraces the cultural forces that emerged in Moscow on the eve of the twentieth century.

9

On a trip to the city in the 1900s Diaghilev remarked that in the visual arts Moscow produced everything worth looking at. Moscow was the centre of the avant-garde; Petersburg was 'a city of artistic gossiping, academic professors and Friday watercolour classes'.¹²² Coming as it did from an arch-patriot of Petrine culture, this was a remarkable acknowledgement. But Moscow really was the place to be in 1900, when the Russian avant-garde first burst on to the scene. Along with Paris, Berlin and Milan, it became a major centre in the world of art, and its extraordinary collection of avant-garde artists were as much influenced by trends in Europe as they were by Moscow's heritage. Its progressive politics, its relaxed atmosphere, its noisy modern ways and new technologies - there was so much in Moscow's cultural milieu to inspire artists in experimental forms. The poet Mikhail Kuzmin, another patriot of Petersburg, noted on a trip to Moscow at this time:

… the loud Moscow accent, the peculiar words, the way they clicked their heels as they walked along, the Tatar cheekbones and eyes, the moustaches twirled upwards, the shocking neckties, brightly coloured waistcoats and jackets, the sheer bravado and implacability of their ideas and judgements -all this made me think: new people have come forward.¹²³

Moscow's younger generation of merchant patrons embraced and collected modern art. They saw it as an ally of their own campaign to transform the old Russia along modern lines. As young playboys and decadents, these rich merchants' sons moved in the same bohemian circles, the cafes, clubs and parties, as the young artists of the Moscow

avant-garde. The poet Andrei Bely recalled sardonically that the Society of Free Aesthetics, the most fashionable of the artists' clubs in Moscow, had been forced to close in 1917 because of an 'excess of lady millionaires'. The merchant couples were everywhere, Bely noted.

The husbands would give subsidies to societies that tried to obtain something from us with the persistence of goats. The wives were languorous and, like Venuses, they would appear from a beautiful gossamer of muslin and diamond constellations.¹²⁴

The most colourful of these younger merchant patrons was Nikolai Riabushinsky, who was famous for his decadent lifestyle - 'I love beauty and I love a lot of women' - and for his outrageous parties at his Moscow mansion, the Black Swan. Riabushinsky promoted avant-garde artists in the journal Golden Fleece and its exhibitions between 1908 and 1910. From his patronage stemmed the Blue Rose group of Moscow Symbolist painters who, together with their literary confreres and composers like Alexander Scriabin, sought a synthesis of art with poetry, music, religion and philosophy. Riabushinky also funded the famous 'Jack of Diamonds' exhibitions (1910-14), at which more than forty of the city's youngest and most brilliant artists (Kandinsky, Malevich, Goncharova, Larionov, Lentulov, Rodchenko and Tatlin) declared war on the realist tradition and shocked the public with their art. Exhibits were assembled from a broken table leg, a sheet of iron and bits of a glass jug. Painters decorated their own naked bodies and walked as works of art through Moscow's streets.

The critics fumed with rage. Sergei Yablonovsky said that none of it was art - whereupon Lentulov squeezed out some ochre paint on to a piece of cardboard and hung it in the exhibition he had criticized, with the caption 'Sergei Yablonovsky's Brain'.¹²⁵ In other art forms, too, Moscow led the way in experimentation. Meyerhold branched out from the naturalism of the Moscow Arts to experiment with Symbolist drama, establishing his Theatre Studio, with its highly stylized acting, in 1905. Scriabin was the first Russian composer to experiment with what was later known as 'serial music' (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were doing the same thing). Scriabin was an inspiration to the avant-garde. The young Stravinsky was greatly influenced by Scria-