Natasha's Dance (13 page)

    For Russia’s educated elites Europe was more than a tourist destination. It was a cultural ideal, the spiritual source of their civilization, and to travel to it was to make a pilgrimage. Peter the Great was the model of the Russian traveller to the West in search of self-improvement and enlightenment. For the next two hundred years Russians followed Peter’s journey to the West. The sons of the Petersburg nobility went to universities in Paris, Gottingen and Leipzig. The ‘Gottingen soul’ assigned by Pushkin to Lensky, the fashionable student in
Eugene Onegin,
became a sort of emblem of the European outlook shared by generations of Russian noblemen:

    Vladimir Lensky, just returning From Gottingen with soulful yearning, Was in his prime - a handsome youth And poet filled with Kantian truth. From misty Germany our squire Had carried back the fruits of art: A freedom-loving, noble heart, A spirit strange but full of fire, An always bold, impassioned speech, And raven locks of shoulder reach.
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    All the pioneers of Russia’s arts learned their crafts abroad: Tred-iakovsky, the country’s first real poet, was sent by Peter to study at the University of Paris; Andrei Matveev and Mikhail Avramov, its first secular painters, were sent to France and Holland; and, as we have

    seen, Berezovsky, Fomin and Bortnyansky learned their music in Italy. Mikhail Lomonosov, the nation’s first outstanding scholar and scientist, studied chemistry at Marburg, before returning to help found Moscow University, which today bears his name. Pushkin once quipped that the polymath
‘was
our first university’.
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    The Grand Tour was a vital rite of passage for the aristocracy. The emancipation of the nobles from obligatory state service in 1762 had unleashed Russia’s more ambitious and curious gentry on the world. Gaggles of Golitsyns and Gagarins went to Paris; Dashkovs and Demi-dovs arrived in droves in Vienna. But England was their favourite destination. It was the homeland of a prosperous and independent landed gentry, which the Russian nobles aspired to become. Their Anglomania was sometimes so extreme that it bordered on the denial of their own identity. ‘Why was I not born an Englishwoman?’ lamented Princess Dashkova, a frequent visitor to and admirer of England, who had sung its praises in her celebrated
Journey of a Russian Noblewoman
(177 5).
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Russians flocked to the sceptred isle to educate themselves in the latest fashions and the designs of its fine houses, to acquire new techniques of estate management and landscape gardening, and to buy
objets d’art,
carriages and wigs and all the other necessary accoutrements of a civilized lifestyle.

    The travel literature that accompanied this traffic played a vital role in shaping Russia’s self-perception
vis-a-vis
the West. Karamzin’s
Letters of a Russian Traveller
(1791-1801), the most influential of this genre, educated a whole generation in the values and ideas of European life. Karamzin left St Petersburg in May 1789. Then, travelling first through Poland, Germany and Switzerland, he entered revolutionary France in the following spring before returning via London to the Russian capital. Karamzin provided his readers with a panorama of the ideal European world. He described its monuments, its theatres and museums, celebrated writers and philosophers. His ‘Europe’ was a mythic realm which later travellers, whose first encounter with Europe had been through reading his work, would look for but never really find. The historian Mikhail Pogodin took the
Letters
with him when he went to Paris in 1839. Even the poet Mayakovsky responded to that city, in 1925, through the sentimental prism of Karamzin’s work.
¹³⁷
The
Letters
taught the Russians how to act and feel as culti-

    vated Europeans. In his letters Karamzin portrayed himself as perfectly at ease, and accepted as an equal, in Europe’s intellectual circles. He described relaxed conversations with Kant and Herder. He showed himself approaching Europe’s cultural monuments, not as some barbaric Scythian, but as an urbane and cultivated man who was already familiar with them from books and paintings. The overall effect was to present Europe as something close to Russia, a civilization of which it was a part.

    Yet Karamzin also managed to express the insecurity which all the Russians felt in their European self-identity. Everywhere he went he was constantly reminded of Russia’s backward image in the European mind. On the road to Konigsberg two Germans were ‘amazed to learn that a Russian could speak foreign languages’. In Leipzig the professors talked about the Russians as ‘barbarians’ and could not believe that they had any writers of their own. The French were even worse, combining a condescension towards the Russians as students of their culture with contempt for them as ‘monkeys who know only how to imitate’.
¹³⁸
At times such remarks provoked Karamzin
to
exaggerated claims for Russia’s achievements. As he travelled around Europe, however, he came to the conclusion that its people had a way of thinking that was different from his own. Even after a century of reform, it seemed to him that perhaps the Russians had been Euro-peanized in no more than a superficial way. They had adopted Western manners and conventions. But European values and sensibilities had yet to penetrate their mental world.
¹³⁹

    Karamzin’s doubts were shared by many educated Russians as they struggled to define their ‘Europeanness’. In 1836 the philosopher Chaadaev was declared a lunatic for writing in despair that, while the Russians might be able to imitate the West, they were unable to internalize its essential moral values and ideas. Yet, as Herzen pointed out, Chaadaev had only said what every thinking Russian had felt for many years. These complex feelings of insecurity, of envy and resentment, towards Europe, still define the Russian national consciousness.

    Five years before Karamzin set off on his travels, the writer and civil servant Denis Fonvizin had travelled with his wife through Germany and Italy. It was not their first trip to Europe. In 1777-8 they had

    toured the spas of Germany and France looking for a cure for Fonvi-zin’s migraines. On this occasion it was a stroke, which paralysed his arm and made him slur his speech, that compelled the writer to go abroad. Fonvizin took notes and wrote letters home with his observations on foreign life and the character of various nationalities. These
Travel Letters
were the first attempt by a Russian writer to define Russia’s spiritual traditions as different from, and indeed superior to, those of the West.

    Fonvizin did not set out as a nationalist. Fluent in several languages, he cut the figure of a St Petersburg cosmopolitan, with his fashionable dress and powdered wig. He was renowned for the sharpness of his tongue and his clever wit, which he put to good effect in his many satires against Gallomania. But if he was repelled by the trivialities and false conventions of high society, this had less to do with xenophobia than with his own feelings of social alienation and superiority. The truth was that Fonvizin was a bit of a misanthrope. Whether in Paris or St Petersburg, he nursed a contempt for the whole beau monde - a world in which he moved as a senior bureaucrat in the Foreign Ministry. In his early letters from abroad Fonvizin depicted all the nations as the same. ‘I have seen,’ he wrote from France in 1778, ‘that in any land there is much more bad than good, that people are people everywhere, that intelligence is rare and idiots abound in every country, and that, in a word, our country is no worse than any other.’ This stance of cultural relativism rested on the idea of enlightenment as the basis of an international community. ‘Worthwhile people,’ Fonvizin concluded, ‘form a single nation among themselves, regardless of the country they come from.’
¹⁴⁰
In the course of his second trip, however, Fonvizin developed a more jaundiced view of Europe. He denounced its achievements in no uncertain terms. France, the symbol of ‘the West’, was Fonvizin’s main target, perhaps in part because he was not received in the salons of its capital.
¹⁴¹
Paris was ‘a city of moral decadence’, of ‘lies and hypocrisy’, which could only corrupt the young Russian who came to it in search of that crucial
‘comme il faut’.
It was a city of material greed, where ‘money is the God’; a city of vanity and external appearances, where ‘superficial manners and conventions count for everything’ and ‘friendship, honesty and spiritual values have no significance’. The French made a great deal of their ‘liberty’

    but the actual condition of the ordinary Frenchman was one of slavery - for ‘a poor man cannot feed himself except by slave labour, so that “liberty” is just an empty name’. The French philosophers were fraudulent because they did not practise what they preached. In sum, he concluded, Europe was a long way from the ideal the Russians imagined it to be, and it was time to acknowledge that ‘life with us is better’:

    If any of my youthful countrymen with good sense should become indignant over the abuses and confusions prevalent in Russia and in his heart begin to feel estranged from her, then there is no better method of converting him to the love he should feel for his Fatherland than to send him to France as quickly as possible.
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    The terms Fonvizin used to characterize Europe appeared with extraordinary regularity in subsequent Russian travel writing. ‘Corrupt’ and ‘decadent’, ‘false’ and ‘superficial’, ‘materialist’ and ‘egotistical’ - such was the Russian lexicon for Europe right up to the time of Herzen’s
Letters from France and Italy
(1847-52) and Dostoevsky’s
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
(1862), a travel sketch which echoed Fonvizin’s. In this tradition the journey was merely an excuse for a philosophical discourse on the cultural relationship between Europe and Russia. The constant repetition of these epithets signalled the emergence of an ideology - a distinctive view of Russia in the mirror of the West. The idea that the West was morally corrupt was echoed by virtually every Russian writer from Pushkin to the Slavophiles. Herzen and Dostoevsky placed it at the heart of their messianic visions of Russia’s destiny to save the fallen West. The idea that the French were false and shallow became commonplace. For Karamzin, Paris was a capital of ‘superficial splendour and enchantment’; for Gogol it had ‘only a surface glitter that concealed an abyss of fraud and greed’.
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Viazemsky portrayed France as a ‘land of deception and falsity’. The censor and litterateur Alexander Nikitenko wrote of the French: ‘They seem to have been born with a love of theatre and a bent to create it - they were created for showmanship. Emotions, principles, honour, revolution are all treated as play, as games.’
¹⁴⁴
Dostoevsky agreed that the French had a unique talent for

    ’simulating emotions and feelings for nature’.
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Even Turgenev, an ardent Westernizer, described them in
A Nest of Gentlefolk
(1859) as civilized and charming yet without any spiritual depth or intellectual seriousness. The persistence of these cultural stereotypes illustrates the mythical proportions of ‘Europe’ in the Russian consciousness. This imaginary ‘Europe’ had more to do with the needs of defining ‘Russia’ than with the West itself. The idea of ‘Russia’ could not exist without ‘the West’ (just as ‘the West’ could not exist without ‘the Orient’). ‘We needed Europe as an ideal, a reproach, an example,’ Herzen wrote. ‘If she were not these things we would have to invent her.’
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    The Russians were uncertain about their place in Europe (they still are), and that ambivalence is a vital key to their cultural history and identity. Living on the margins of the continent, they have never been quite sure if their destiny is there. Are they of the West or of the East? Peter made his people face the West and imitate its ways. From that moment on the nation’s progress was meant to be measured by a foreign principle; all its moral and aesthetic norms, its tastes and social manners, were defined by it. The educated classes looked at Russia through European eyes, denouncing their own history as ‘barbarous’ and ‘dark’. They sought Europe’s approval and wanted to be recognized as equals by it. For this reason they took a certain pride in Peter’s achievements. His Imperial state, greater and more mighty than any other European empire, promised to lead Russia to modernity. But at the same time they were painfully aware that Russia was not ‘Europe’ - it constantly fell short of that mythical ideal - and perhaps could never become part of it. Within Europe, the Russians lived with an inferiority complex. ‘Our attitude to Europe and the Europeans,’ Herzen wrote in the 1850s, ‘is still that of provincials towards the dwellers in a capital: we are servile and apologetic, take every difference for a defect, blush for our peculiarities and try to hide them.’
¹⁴⁷
Yet rejection by the West could equally engender feelings of resentment and superiority to it. If Russia could not become a part of ‘Europe’, it should take more pride in being ‘different’. In this nationalist mythology the ‘Russian soul’ was awarded a higher moral value than the material achievements of the West. It had a Christian mission to save the world.

    Russia’s idealization of Europe was profoundly shaken by the French Revolution of 1789. The Jacobin reign of terror undermined Russia’s belief in Europe as a force of progress and enlightenment. ‘The “Age of Enlightenment”! I do not recognize you in blood and flames,’ Karamzin wrote with bitterness in 1795.
¹⁴⁸
It seemed to him, as to many of his outlook, that a wave of murder and destruction would ‘lay waste to Europe’, destroying the ‘centre of all art and science and the precious treasures of the human mind’.
¹⁴⁹
Perhaps history was a futile cycle, not a path of progress after all, in which ‘truth and error, virtue and vice, are constantly repeated’? Was it possible that ‘the human species had advanced so far, only to be compelled to fall back again into the depths of barbarism, like Sisyphus’ stone’?
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