Natasha's Dance (3 page)

    Russia which reverberates in Natasha’s dancing scene. And it was surely not so fanciful for Tolstoy to imagine that there was a common sense which linked the young countess to every Russian woman and every Russian man. For, as this book will seek to demonstrate, there is a Russian temperament, a set of native customs and beliefs, something visceral, emotional, instinctive, passed on down the generations, which has helped to shape the personality and bind together the community. This elusive temperament has proved more lasting and more meaningful than any Russian state: it gave the people the spirit to survive the darkest moments of their history, and united those who fled from Soviet Russia after 1917. It is not my aim to deny this national consciousness, but rather to suggest that the apprehension of it was enshrined in myth. Forced to become Europeans, the educated classes had become so alienated from the old Russia, they had so long forgotten how to speak and act in a Russian way, that when, in Tolstoy’s age, they struggled to define themselves as ‘Russians’ once again, they were obliged to reinvent that nation through historical and artistic myths. They rediscovered their own ‘Russianness’ through literature and art, just as Natasha found her ‘Russianness’ through the rituals of the dance. Hence the purpose of this book is not simply to debunk these myths. It is rather to explore, and to set out to explain, the extraordinary power these myths had in shaping the Russian national consciousness.

    The major cultural movements of the nineteenth century were all organized around these fictive images of Russia’s nationhood: the Slavophiles, with their attendant myth of the ‘Russian soul’, of a natural Christianity among the peasantry, and their cult of Muscovy as the bearer of a truly ‘Russian’ way of life which they idealized and set out to promote as an alternative to the European culture adopted by the educated elites since the eighteenth century; the Westernizers, with their rival cult of St Petersburg, that ‘window on to the West’, with its classical ensembles built on marshland reclaimed from the sea - a symbol of their own progressive Enlightenment ambition to redraw Russia on a European grid; the Populists, who were not far from Tolstoy, with their notion of the peasant as a natural socialist whose village institutions would provide a model for the new society; and the

    Scythians, who saw Russia
as an ‘elemental’ culture from the Asiatic

    steppe which, in the revolution yet to come, would sweep away the dead weight of European civilization and establish a new culture where man and nature, art and life, were one. These myths were more than just ‘constructions’ of a national identity. They all played a crucial role in shaping the ideas and allegiances of Russia’s politics, as well as in developing the notion of the self, from the most elevated forms of personal and national identity to the most quotidian matters of dress or food, or the type of language one used. The Slavophiles illustrate the point. Their idea of ‘Russia’ as a patriarchal family of homegrown Christian principles was the organizing kernel of a new political community in the middle decades of the nineteenth century which drew its members from the old provincial gentry, the Moscow merchants and intelligentsia, the priesthood and certain sections of the state bureaucracy. The mythic notion of Russia’s nationhood which brought these groups together had a lasting hold on the political imagination. As a political movement, it influenced the government’s position on free trade and foreign policy, and gentry attitudes towards the state and peasantry. As a broad cultural movement the Slavophiles adopted a

    certain style of speech and dress, distinct codes of social interaction and behaviour, a style of architecture and interior design, their own approach to literature and art. It was all bast shoes and homespun

    coats and beards, cabbage soup and
kvas,
folk-like wooden houses and brightly coloured churches with onion domes.

    In the Western imagination these cultural forms have all too often

    been perceived as ‘authentically Russian’. Yet that perception is a myth

    as well: the myth of exotic Russia. It is an image first exported by the

    Ballets Russes, with their own exoticized versions of Natasha’s dance,

    and then shaped by foreign writers such as Rilke, Thomas Mann and

    Virginia Woolf, who held up Dostoevsky as the greatest novelist and

    peddled their own versions of the ‘Russian soul’. If there is one myth

    which needs to be dispelled, it is this view of Russia as exotic and

    eslewhere. Russians have long complained that the Western public

    does not understand their culture, that Westerners see Russia from

    afar and do not want to know its inner subtleties, as they do with the

    culture of their own domain. Though based partly on resentment and

    wounded national pride, the complaint is not unjustified. We are

    inclined to consign Russia’s artists, writers and composers to the

    cultural ghetto of a ‘national school’ and to judge them, not as individuals, but by how far they conform to this stereotype. We expect the Russians to be ‘Russian’ - their art easily distinguished by its use of folk motifs, by onion domes, the sound of bells, and full of ‘Russian soul’. Nothing has done more to obscure a proper understanding of Russia and its central place in European culture between 1812 and 1917. The great cultural figures of the Russian tradition (Karamzin, Pushkin, Glinka, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Repin, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Chagall and Kandinsky, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Nabokov, Pasternak, Meyerhold and Eisenstein) were not simply ‘Russians’, they were Europeans too, and the two identities were intertwined and mutually dependent in a variety of ways. However hard they might have tried, it was impossible for Russians such as these to suppress either part of their identity.

    For European Russians, there were two very different modes of personal behaviour. In the salons and the ballrooms of St Petersburg, at court or in the theatre, they were very ‘
comme il faut
‘:
they performed their European manners almost like actors on a public stage. Yet on another and perhaps unconscious plane and in the less formal spheres of private life, native Russian habits of behaviour prevailed. Natasha’s visit to her ‘Uncle’s‘ house describes one such switch: the way she is expected to behave at home, in the Rostov palace, or at the ball where she is presented to the Emperor, is a world apart from this village scene where her expressive nature is allowed free rein. It is evidently her gregarious enjoyment of such a relaxed social setting that communicates itself in her dance. This same sense of relaxation, of becoming ‘more oneself in a Russian milieu, was shared by many Russians of Natasha’s class, including her own ‘Uncle’, it would seem. The simple recreations of the country house or
dacha -
hunting in the woods, visiting the bath house or what Nabokov called the ‘very Russian sport of
hodit’ po gribi
(looking for mushrooms)’
⁶
- were more than the retrieval of a rural idyll: they were an expression of one’s Russianness. To interpret habits such as these is one of this book’s aims. Using art and fiction, diaries and letters, memoirs and prescriptive literature, it seeks to apprehend the structures of the Russian national identity. ‘Identity’ these days is a fashionable term,

    But it is not very meaningful unless one can show how it manifests itself in social interaction and behaviour. A culture is made up not simply of works of art, or literary discourses, but of unwritten codes, signs and symbols, rituals and gestures, and common attitudes that fix the public meaning of these works and organize the inner life of a society. So the reader will find here that works of literature, like
War and Peace,
are intercut with episodes from daily life (childhood, marriage, religious life, responses to the landscape, food and drinking habits, attitudes to death) where the outlines of this national consciousness may be discerned. These are the episodes where we may find, in life, the unseen threads of a common Russian sensibility, such as Tolstoy had imagined in his celebrated dancing scene.

    A few words are in order on the structure of the book. It is an interpretation of a culture, not a comprehensive history, so readers should beware that some great cultural figures will perhaps get less than their full pages’ worth. My approach is thematic. Each chapter explores a separate strand of the Russian cultural identity. The chapters progress from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century, but the rules of strict chronology are broken in the interest of thematic coherence. There are two brief moments (the closing sections of chapters 3 and 4) where the barrier of 1917 is crossed. As on the other few occasions where periods of history, political events or cultural institutions are handled out of sequence, I have provided some explanation for readers who lack detailed knowledge of Russian history. (Those needing more may consult the Table of Chronology.) My story finishes in the Brezhnev era. The cultural tradition which it charts reached the end of a natural cycle then, and what has come afterwards may well be the start of something new. Finally, there are themes and variations that reappear throughout the book, leitmotifs and lineages like the cultural history of St Petersburg and the family narratives of the two great noble dynasties, the Volkonskys and the Sheremetevs. The meaning of these twists and turns will be perceived by the reader only at the end.

    overleaf:
Benjamin Paterssen:
Vue de la grande parade au Palais de L’Empereur Alexandre 1er a St Petersburg, c.1803

    On a misty spring morning in 1703 a dozen Russian horsemen rode across the bleak and barren marshlands where the Neva river runs into the Baltic sea. They were looking for a site to build a fort against the Swedes, then at war with Russia, and the owners of these long-abandoned swamps. But the vision of the wide and bending river flowing to the sea was full of hope and promise to the Tsar of landlocked Russia, riding at the head of his scouting troops. As they approached the coast he dismounted from his horse. With his bayonet he cut two strips of peat and arranged them in a cross on the marshy ground. Then Peter said: ‘Here shall be a town.’
¹

    Few places could have been less suitable for the metropolis of Europe’s largest state. The network of small islands in the Neva’s boggy delta were overgrown with trees. Swept by thick mists from melting snow in spring and overblown by winds that often caused the rivers to rise above the land, it was not a place for human habitation, and even the few fishermen who ventured there in summer did not stay for long. Wolves and bears were its only residents.
²
A thousand years ago the area was underneath the sea. There was a channel flowing from the Baltic sea to lake Ladoga, with islands where the Pulkovo and Pargolovo heights are found today. Even in the reign of Catherine the Great, during the late eighteenth century, Tsarskoe Selo, where she built her Summer Palace on the hills of Pulkovo, was still known by the locals as Sarskoe Selo. The name came from the Finnish word for an island,
saari.

    When Peter’s soldiers dug into the ground they found water a metre or so below. The northern island, where the land was slightly higher, was the only place to lay firm foundations. In four months of furious activity, in which at least half the workforce died, 20,000 conscripts built the Peter and Paul Fortress, digging out the land with their bare hands, dragging logs and stones or carting them by back, and carrying the earth in the folds of their clothes.
³
The sheer scale and tempo of construction was astonishing. Within a few years the estuary became an energetic building site and, once Russia’s control of the coast had been secured with victories over Sweden in 1709-10, the city took on a new shape with every passing day. A quarter of a million serfs and