Natasha's Dance (23 page)

    Because Fevronia Stepanovna had always spoiled me endlessly, I became a cry-baby, and a proper coward, which I came to regret later when I joined the army. My nanny’s influence paralysed the attempts of all my tutors to harden me and so I had to be sent away to boarding school. She found it difficult when I started to grow up and entered into the world of adult men. After cosseting me my whole childhood, she cried when I went swimming in the river with my elder brother and our tutor, or when I went riding, or when I first shot my father’s gun. When, years later, as a young officer, I returned home, she got ready two rooms in the house for my return, but they looked like a nursery. Every day she would place two apples by my bed. It hurt her feelings that I had brought my batman home, since she thought it was her duty to serve me. She was shocked to discover that I smoked, and I did not have the heart to tell her that I drank as well. But the greatest shock was when I went to war to fight the Serbs. She tried to dissuade me from going and then, one evening, she said that she would come with me. We would live together in a little cottage and while I went to war she would clean the house and prepare the supper for the evening. Then on holidays we would spend the day together baking pies, as we had always done, and when the war was over we

    would come back home with medals on my chest. I went to sleep peacefully that night, imagining that war was just as idyllic as she thought it was… Yet I needed nanny more than I had thought. When I was nine and our Swiss tutor first arrived, my father said that I had to share a room with my elder brother and this Mr Kaderli, moving out of the room I had shared with my nanny. It turned out that I was completely unable to undress or wash myself or even go to bed without my nanny’s help. I did not know how to go to sleep without calling out for her, at least six times, to check that she was there. Getting dressed was just as hard. I had never put my own socks on.
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    It was not at all unusual for grown men and women to remain in frequent contact with their former nannies; indeed, for them to provide for them in their old age. Pushkin remained close to his old nanny, and he put her image into many of his works. In some ways she was his muse - a fact recognized by many of his friends, so that Prince Viazemsky, for example, signed off his letters to the poet with ‘a deep bow of respect and gratitude to Rodionova!’
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Pushkin loved his nanny more than anyone. Estranged from his own parents, he always called her ‘Mama’ and when she died, his was the grief of a son:

    My friend in days devoid of good, My ageing and decrepit dove! Abandoned in a far-off wood, You still await me with your love. Beside the window in the hall, As if on watch, you sit and mourn, At times your knitting needles stall In hands now wrinkled and forlorn. Through long-deserted gates you peer Upon the dark and distant way: Forebodings, anguish, cares and fear Constrict your weary breast today.
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    Diaghilev, as well, was famously attached to his nanny. He had never known his mother, who had died when he was born. Nanny Dunia had been born a serf on the Yevreinov estate of his mother’s family. She had nursed Diaghilev’s mother before coming as part of

    the dowry to his father’s family in Perm. When Diaghilev moved as a student to St Petersburg, his nanny went with him and lived as a housekeeper in his flat. The famous Monday meetings of the ‘World of Art’
(Mir iskusstva)
- the circle formed around the journal of that name from which the ideas of the Ballets Russes emerged - were all held in Diaghilev’s apartment, where Nanny Dunia presided like a hostess near the
samovar.
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The painter Leon Bakst, a regular attender of these meetings, immortalized her image in his famous 1906 portrait of Diaghilev (plate 13).

    The nanny was an almost sacred figure in that cult of childhood which the Russian gentry made its own. No other culture has been so sentimental or quite so obsessed about childhood. Where else can one find so many memoirs where the first few years of the writer’s life were given so much space? Herzen’s, Nabokov’s and Prokofiev’s - all of them inclined to linger far too long in the nursery of their memory. The essence of this cult was a hypertrophied sense of loss - loss of the ancestral home, loss of the mother or the nanny’s tender care, loss of the peasant, child-like Russia contained in fairy tales. Little wonder, then, that the cultural elites became so fixated on folklore - for it took them back to their happy childhoods, to the days when they had listened to their nannies’ tales on woodland walks and the nights when they had been sung off to sleep with lullabies. Tolstoy’s
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
(1852-7), Aksakov’s
Childhood Years
(1856), Herzen’s
Past and Thoughts
(1852-68), Nabokov’s
Speak, Memory
(1947) - this is the canon of a literary cult that reinvented childhood as a blissful and enchanted realm:

    Happy, happy, irrecoverable days of childhood! How can one fail to love and cherish its memories? Those memories refresh and elevate my soul and are the source of my greatest delight.
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    The way these Russians wrote about their childhood was extraordi-nary, too. They all summoned up a legendary world (Aksakov’s memoirs were deliberately structured as a fairy tale), mixing myth and memory, as if they were not content to recollect their childhood, but felt a deeper need to retrieve it, even if that meant reinventing it. This same yearning to recover what Nabokov termed ‘the legendary Russia

    of my boyhood’ can be felt in Benois and Stravinsky’s
Petrusbka
(1911). This ballet expressed their shared nostalgia for the sounds and colours which they both recalled from the fairgrounds of their St Petersburg childhoods. And it can be felt in the musical childhood fantasies of Prokofiev, from
The Ugly Duckling
for voice and piano (1914) to the ‘symphonic fairy tale’
Peter and the Wolf
(1936), which were inspired by the bedtime tales he had heard as a small boy.

    ’Oh please, Nurse, tell me again how the French came to Moscow.’ Thus Herzen starts his sublime memoir
My Past and Thoughts,
one of the greatest works of Russian literature. Born in 1812, Herzen had a special fondness for his nanny’s stories of that year. His family had been forced to flee the flames that engulfed Moscow, the young Herzen carried out in his mother’s arms, and it was only through a safe conduct from Napoleon himself that they managed to escape to their Yaroslav estate. Herzen felt great ‘pride and pleasure at [having] taken part in the Great War’. The story of his childhood merged with the national drama he so loved to hear: ‘Tales of the fire of Moscow, of the battle of Borodino, of the Berezina, of the taking of Paris were my cradle songs, my nursery stories, my Iliad and my Odyssey.’
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For Herzen’s generation, the myths of 1812 were intimately linked with their childhood memories. Even in the 1850s children were still brought up on the legends of that year.
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History, myth and memory were intertwined. For the historian Nikolai Karamzin, 1812 was a tragic year. While his Moscow neighbours moved to their estates, he refused to ‘believe that the ancient holy city could be lost’ and, as he wrote on 20 August, he chose instead to ‘die on Moscow’s walls’.
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Karamzin’s house burned down in the fires and, since he had not thought to evacuate his library, he lost his precious books to the flames as well. But Karamzin saved one book - a bulging notebook that contained the draft of his celebrated
History of the Russian State
(1818-26). Karamzin’s masterpiece was the first truly national history - not just in the sense that it was the first by a Russian, but also in the sense that it rendered Russia’s past as a national narrative. Previous histories of Russia had

    been arcane chronicles of monasteries and saints, patriotic propaganda, or heavy tomes of documents compiled by German scholars, unread and unreadable. But Karamzin’s
History
had a literary quality that made its twelve large volumes a nationwide success. It combined careful scholarship with the narrative techniques of a novelist. Karamzin stressed the psychological motivations of his historical protagonists - even to the point of inventing them - so that his account became more compelling to a readership brought up on the literary conventions of Romantic texts. Medieval Tsars like Ivan the Terrible or Boris Godunov became tragic figures in Karamzin’s
History
- subjects for a modern psychological drama; and from its pages they walked on to the stage in operas by Musorgsky and Rimsky Korsakov.

    The first eight volumes of Karamzin’s
History
were published in 1818. ‘Three thousand copies were sold within a month - something unprecedented in our country. Everyone, even high-born ladies, began to read the history of their country,’ wrote Pushkin. ‘It was a revelation. You could say that Karamzin discovered ancient Russia as Columbus discovered America.’
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The victory of 1812 had encouraged a new interest and pride in Russia’s past. People who had been raised on the old conviction that there was no history before the reign of Peter the Great began to look back to the distant past for the sources of their country’s unexpected strengths. After 1812 history books appeared at a furious pace. Chairs were established in the universities (Gogol applied unsuccessfully for one at St Petersburg). Historical associations were set up, many in the provinces, and huge efforts were suddenly devoted to the rescuing of Russia’s past. History became the arena for all those troubling questions about Russia’s nature and its destiny. As Belinsky wrote in 1846, ‘we interrogate our past for an explanation of our present and a hint of our future.’
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This historical obsession was reinforced by the failure of the Decembrists. If Russia was no longer to pursue the Western path of history toward a modern constitutional stare, as the Decembrists and their supporters had hoped, what then was its proper destiny?

    This was the question posed by Pyotr Chaadaev, the Guards officer and foppish friend of Pushkin, in his sensational
First Philosophical Letter
(1856). Chaadaev was another ‘child of 1812’. He had fought

    at Borodino, before resigning from the army, at the height of his career in 1821, to spend the next five years in Europe. An extreme Westernist - to the extent that he converted to the Roman Church - he was thrown into despair by Russia’s failure to take the Western path in 1825. This was the context in which he wrote his
Letter
- ‘at a time of madness’ (by his own admission) when he tried to take his life. ‘What have we Russians ever invented or created?’ Chaadaev wrote in 1826. ‘The time has come to stop running after others; we must take a fresh and frank look at ourselves; we must understand ourselves as we really are; we must stop lying and find the truth.’
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The
First Letter
was an attempt to reveal this bleak and unpalatable truth. It was more a work of history than of philosophy. Russia, it concluded, stood ‘outside of time, without a past or a future’, having played no part in the history of the world. The Roman legacy, the civilization of the Western Church and the Renaissance - these had all passed Russia by - and now, after 1825, the country was reduced to a ‘cultural void’, an ‘orphan cut off from the human family’ which could imitate the nations of the West but never become one of them. The Russians were like nomads in their land, strangers to themselves, without a sense of their own national heritage or identity.
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    To the reader in the modern world - where self-lacerating national declarations are made in the media almost every month - the cataclysmic shock of the
First Letter
may be hard to understand. It took away the ground from under the feet of every person who had been brought up to believe in ‘European Russia’ as their native land. The outcry was immense. Patriots demanded the public prosecution of the ‘lunatic’ for ‘the cruellest insult to our national honour’, and, on the orders of the Tsar, Chaadaev was declared insane, placed under house arrest and visited by doctors every day.
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Yet what he wrote had been felt by every thinking Russian for many years: the overwhelming sense of living in a wasteland or ‘phantom country’, as Belinsky put it, a country which they feared they might never really know; and the acute fear that, contrary to the
raison d’etre
of their civilization, they might never in fact catch up with the West. There were many similar expressions of this cultural pessimism after 1825. The triumph of reaction had engendered a deep loathing of the ‘Russian way’. ‘Real patriotism’, wrote Prince Viazemsky in 1828, ‘should consist of hatred for Russia

    as she manifests herself at the present time.’
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The literary critic Nadezhdin (who published the
First Letter
in his journal
Telescope)
himself wrote in 1834: ‘We [the Russians] have created nothing. There is no branch of learning in which we can show something of our own. There is not a single person who could stand for Russia in the civilization of the world.’
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    The Slavophiles had an opposite response to the crisis posed by Chaadaev. They first emerged as a distinct grouping in the 1830s, when they launched their public disputes with the Westernists, but they too had their roots in 1812. The horrors of the French Revolution had led the Slavophiles to reject the universal culture of the Enlightenment and to emphasize instead those indigenous traditions that distinguished Russia from the West. This search for a more ‘Russian’ way of life was a common response to the debacle of 1825. Once it became clear that Russia would diverge from the Western path, European Russians, like Lavretsky in Turgenev’s
Nest of Gentlefolk
(1859), began to explore - and find virtue in - those parts of Russian culture that were different from the West: