The novelists (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky...) and composers (Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky...) are well known. The painters are not. But the period saw a new realist school of art, the "Itinerants", which broke violently with the earlier academicism and, in the run up to the revolutionary twentieth century, ruthlessly depicted and criticised Tsarist Russia with all its flaws. Tony Brenton takes a tour through itinerant art and its interactions with the vast, repressed and unruly Russia that it both loved and detested.
Sir Tony Brenton is a distinguished British diplomat and commentator on public affairs issues. He served for over thirty years with the British Foreign Service, including postings in the Middle East, the European Union, Washington DC, and Russia. He was in charge of the British Embassy in Washington through the Iraq War, and was British Ambassador to Russia through a particularly tense time in UK/Russia relations. He has been a lead UK negotiator on such problems as global climate change and international energy and human rights issues. He has written a well-received book, The Greening of Machiavelli, on international environmental politics. On retirement from the Foreign Service he has settled in Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Wolfson College and a Senior Fellow at the International studies Department. His book Historically Inevitable? on the Russian revolution was published in June 2016. He is also a regular commentator on international affairs on the BBC and in the press.