Natasha's Dance (20 page)

    And a summer morning in July! Has anyone save a hunter ever experienced the delight of wandering through bushes at dawn? Your feet leave green imprints in grass that is heavy and white with dew. You push aside wet bushes - the warm scent accumulated in the night almost smothers you; the air is impregnated with the fresh bitter-sweet fragrance of wormwood, the honeyed scent of buckwheat and clover; far off an oak forest rises like a wall, shining purple in the sunshine; the air is still fresh, but the coming heat can already be felt. Your head becomes slightly dizzy from such an excess of sweet scents. And there’s no end to the bushes. Away in the distance ripening rye glows yellow and there are narrow strips of rust-red buckwheat. Then there’s the sound of a cart; a peasant drives by at walking pace, leaving his horse in the shade before the sun gets hot. You greet him, pass on, and after a while the metallic rasping of a scythe can be heard behind you. The sun is rising higher and higher, and the grass quickly dries out. It’s already hot. First one hour, then another passes. The sky darkens at the edges and the motionless air is aflame with the prickly heat.
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    Russian forms of dress became the height of fashion after 1812. At balls and receptions in St Petersburg, and from the 1830s at the court as well, society ladies began to appear in national costume, complete with the
sarafan
tunic and
kokoshnik
head-dress of old Muscovy. The Russian peasant shawl was hugely popular with noblewomen in the 1810s. There had been a fashion for oriental shawls in Europe during the last decades of the eighteenth century which the Russians had copied by importing their own shawls from India. But after 1812 it was Russian peasant shawls that became the rage, and serf workshops emerged as major centres of the fashion industry.
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The Russian gown
(kapot),
traditionally worn by peasant and provincial merchant wives, entered
haute couture
slightly earlier, in the 1780s, when Catherine the Great took to wearing one, but it too was widely worn from about 1812. The
kaftan
and
khalat
(a splendid sort of housecoat or dressing gown in which one could lounge about at home and receive guests) came back into fashion among noblemen. The
podyovka,
a
short
kaftan
traditionally worn by the peasantry, was added to the wardrobe of the nobleman as well. To wear such clothes was not just to relax and be oneself at home; it was, in the words of one memoirist, ‘to make a conscious statement of one’s Russianness’.
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When, in 1827,

    Tropinin painted Pushkin wearing a
khalat
(plate 22), he was portraying him as a gentleman who was perfectly at ease with the customs of his land.

    A fashion for the ‘natural’ look took hold of noblewomen in the 1820s. The new ideal of beauty focused on a vision of the purity of the female figures of antiquity and the Russian peasantry. Fidel Bruni’s portrait of Zinaida Volkonsky (1810) illustrates this style. Indeed, according to society rumour, it was precisely her simplicity of dress that had attracted the amorous attentions of the Emperor,
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who was himself susceptible to all of Nature’s charms. * Women took to wearing cotton clothes. They dressed their hair in a simple style and rejected heavy make-up for the pale complexion favoured by this cult of unadorned Nature.
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The turn toward Nature and simplicity was widespread throughout Europe from the final decades of the eighteenth century. Women had been throwing out their powdered wigs and renouncing heavy scents like musk for light rose waters that allowed the natural fragrance of clean flesh to filter through. There it had developed under the influence of Rousseau and Romantic ideas about the virtues of Nature. But in Russia the fashion for the natural had an extra, national dimension. It was linked to the idea that one had to strip away the external layers of cultural convention to reveal the Russian personality. Pushkin’s Tatiana in
Eugene Onegin
was the literary incarnation of this natural Russianness - so much so that the simple style of dress worn by noblewomen became known as the ‘Onegin’.
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Readers saw Tatiana as a ‘Russian heroine’ whose true self was revealed in the memories of her simple childhood in the countryside:

    ’To me, Onegin, all these splendours, This weary tinselled life of mine,

    * The Emperor Alexander began taking a daily promenade along the Palace Embankment and the Nevsky Prospekt as far as the Anichkov bridge. It was, in the words of the memoirist Vigel, a ‘conscious striving by the Tsar for simplicity in daily life’ (F. F. Vigel’,
Zapiski,
chast’ 2 (Moscow, 1892.), p. 32.). Before 1800, no self-respecting nobleman would go anywhere in Petersburg except by carriage, and (as Kniazhnin’s comic opera testified) vast personal fortunes would be spent on the largest carriages imported from Europe. But, under Alexander’s influence, it became the fashion in St Petersburg to ‘
faire le
tour imperial
‘.

    This homage that the great world tenders,

    My stylish house where princes dine -

    Are empty… I’d as soon be trading

    This tattered life of masquerading,

    This world of glitter, fumes, and noise,

    For just my books, the simple joys

    Of our old home, its walks and flowers,

    For all those haunts that I once knew…

    Where first, Onegin, I saw you;

    For that small churchyard’s shaded bowers,

    Where over my poor nanny now

    There stands a cross beneath a bough.’
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    Pushkin’s masterpiece is, among many other things, a subtle exploration of the complex Russian-European consciousness that typified the aristocracy in the age of 1812. The literary critic Vissarion Belinsky said that
Eugene Onegin
was an encyclopaedia of Russian life, and Pushkin himself, in its final stanzas, developed the idea of the novel as life’s book. In no other work can one see so clearly the visceral influence of cultural convention on the Russian sense of self. In many ways, indeed, the novel’s central subject is the complex interplay between life and art. The syncretic nature of Tatiana’s character is an emblem of the cultural world in which she lives. At one moment she is reading a romantic novel; at another listening to her nanny’s superstitions and folk tales. She is torn between the gravitational fields of Europe and Russia. Her very name, Tatiana, as Pushkin underlines in a footnote, comes from the ancient Greek, yet in Russia it is ‘used only among the common people’.
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In the affairs of the heart, as well, Tatiana is subject to the different cultural norms of European Russia and the peasant countryside. As a rather young and impressionable girl from the provinces, she inhabits the imaginary world of the romantic novel and understands her feelings in these terms. She duly falls in love with the Byronic figure of Eugene and, like one of her fictional heroines, she writes to declare her love to him. Yet when the lovesick Tatiana asks her nanny if she has ever been in love, she becomes exposed to the influence of a very different culture where romantic love is a foreign luxury and obedience is a woman’s main virtue. The peasant nurse

    tells Tatiana how she was married off at the age of just thirteen to an even younger boy whom she had never seen before:

    I got so scared… my tears kept falling; And weeping, they undid my plait, Then sang me to the churchyard gate.
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    This encounter between the two cultures represents Tatiana’s own predicament: whether to pursue her own romantic dreams or sacrifice herself in the traditional ‘Russian’ way (the way chosen by Maria Volkonsky when she gave up everything to follow her Decembrist husband to Siberia). Onegin rejects Tatiana - he sees her as a naive country girl - and then, after killing his friend Lensky in a duel, he disappears for several years. Meanwhile Tatiana is married to a man she does not really love, as far as one can tell, a military hero from the wars of 1812 who is ‘well received’ at court. Tatiana rises to become a celebrated hostess in St Petersburg. Onegin now returns and falls in love with her. Years of wandering through his native land have somehow changed the former dandy of St Petersburg, and finally he sees her natural beauty, her ‘lack of mannerisms or any borrowed tricks’. But Tatiana remains faithful to her marriage vows. She has come, it seems, to embrace her ‘Russian principles’ - to see through the illusions of romantic love. Looking through the books in Onegin’s library, she understands at last the fictive dimension of his personality:

    A Muscovite in Harold’s cloak, Compendium of affectation, A lexicon of words in vogue… Mere parody and just a rogue?
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    Yet even here, when Tatiana tells Onegin,

    I love you (why should I dissemble?); But I am now another’s wife, And I’ll be faithful all my life
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    we see in her the dense weave of cultural influences. These lines are adapted from a song well known among the Russian folk. Thought in Pushkin’s time to have been written by Peter the Great, it was translated into French by Pushkin’s own uncle. Tatiana could have read it in an old issue of
Mercure de France.
But she could also have heard it from her peasant nurse.
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It is a perfect illustration of the complex intersections between European and native Russian culture during Pushkin’s age.

    Pushkin himself was a connoisseur of Russian songs and tales. Chulkov’s
ABC of Russian Superstitions
(1780-83) and Levshin’s
Russian Tales
(1788) were well-thumbed texts on Pushkin’s shelves. He had been brought up on the peasant tales and superstitions of his beloved nanny, Arina Rodionova, who became the model for Tatiana’s nurse. ‘Mama’ Rodionova was a talented narrator, elaborating and enriching many standard tales, judging by the transcripts of her stories that Pushkin later made.
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During his years of exile in the south in 1820-24 he became a serious explorer of the folk traditions, those of the Cossacks in particular, and then, when exiled to his family estate at Mikhailovskoe in 1824-6, he carried on collecting songs and tales. Pushkin used these as the basis of
Ruslan and Liudmila
(1820), his first major poem, which some critics panned as mere ‘peasant verse’, and for his stylized ‘fairy tales’ like
Tsar Sultan
which he composed in his final years. Yet he had no hesitation in mixing Russian stories with European sources, such as the fables of La Fontaine or the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. For
The Golden Cockerel
(1834) he even borrowed from the
Legend of the Arabian Astrologer
which he had come across in the 1832 French translation of
The Legends of the Alhambra
by Washington Irving. As far as Pushkin was concerned, Russia was a part of Western and world culture, and it did not make his ‘folk tales’ any less authentic if he combined all these sources in literary re-creations of the Russian style. How ironic, then, that Soviet nationalists regarded Pushkin’s stories as direct expressions of the Russian folk.*

    * Akhmatova was denounced by the Soviet literary authorities for suggesting, quite correctly, that some of Pushkin’s sources for his ‘Russian tales’ were taken from
The Thousand and One Nights.

    By Pushkin’s death, in 1837, the literary use of folk tales had become commonplace, almost a condition of literary success. More than any other Western canon, Russian literature was rooted in the oral narrative traditions, to which it owed much of its extraordinary strength and originality. Pushkin, Lermontov, Ostrovsky, Nekrasov, Tolstoy, Leskov and Saltykov-Shchedrin - all to some degree could be thought of as folklorists, all certainly used folklore in many of their works. But none captured the essential spirit of the folk tale better than Nikolai Gogol.

    Gogol was in fact a Ukrainian, and, were it not for Pushkin, who was his mentor and gave him the true plots of his major works,
The Government Inspector
(1836) and
Dead Souls
(1835-52), he might have written in the peasant dialect of his native Mirgorod, where Gogol’s father was well known (though unpublishable under Tsarist laws) as a writer in Ukrainian. During his childhood Gogol fell in love with the earthy idiom of the local peasantry. He loved their songs and dances, their terrifying tales and comic stories, from which his own fantastic tales of Petersburg would later take their cue. He first rose to fame as ‘Rudy [i.e. redhead] Panko, Beekeeper’, the pseudonymous author of a bestselling collection of stories,
Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka
(1831-2), which fed the growing craze for Ukrainian folk tales. Aladin’s
Kochubei,
Somov’s
Haidamaki
and Kulzhinsky’s
Cossack Hat
had all been great successes in the Russian capital. But Gogol was nothing if not ambitious and, in 1828, when barely out of school, he came to Petersburg in the hope of making his own literary name. Working during the day as a humble clerk (of the sort that filled his stories), he wrote at night in his lonely attic room. He badgered his mother and sister to send him details of Ukrainian songs and proverbs, and even bits of costume which he wanted them to buy from the local peasants and send to him in a trunk. Readers were delighted with the ‘authenticity’ of
Evenings on a Farm.
Some critics thought that the stories had been spoilt by a ‘coarse’ and ‘improper’ folk language. But the language of the stories was their principal success. It echoed perfectly the musical sonorities of peasant speech - one of the reasons why the stories were adapted by Musorgsky for the unfinished
Soroch-intsy Fair
(1874-) and for
St John’s Night on Bald Mountain
(1867), and by Rimsky-Korsakov for
May Night
(1879) - and it could be

    understood by Everyman. During the proof stage of
Evenings on a Farm
Gogol paid a visit to the typesetters. ‘The strangest thing occurred’, he explained to Pushkin. ‘As soon as I opened the door and the printers noticed me, they began to laugh and turned away from me. I was somewhat taken aback and asked for an explanation. The printer explained: “The items that you sent are very amusing and they have greatly amused the typesetters.”’
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