Natasha's Dance (33 page)

    In the early nineteenth century Moscow’s trade was concentrated in the narrow winding streets of the Zamoskvoreche district, opposite the Kremlin on the Moscow river’s sleepy southern side. It was a world apart from the rest of Moscow, little touched by modern or European ways, with its patriarchal customs, its strict religious life and Old Beliefs, and its cloistered merchant houses built with their backs to the street. Belinsky called these homes ‘fortresses preparing for a siege, their windows shuttered and the gates firmly under lock and key. A knock starts a dog barking.’
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The appearance of the merchants, with their long
kaftans
and beards, was reminiscent of the peasantry, from which many of them had in fact emerged. The great Moscow textile dynasties - the Riabushinskys and the Tretiakovs, the Guchkovs, Alekseevs and the Vishniakovs - were all descended from serf forebears. For this reason, the Slavophiles idealized the merchants as the bearers of a purely Russian way of life. Slavophiles and merchants joined together in their opposition to free trade, fearing Western goods would swamp the home markets. Outraged by the foreign domination of the railways, they clubbed together to finance the first ‘Russian’ line, from Moscow to Sergiev Posad, in 1863. It was symbolic that its destination was a monastery, the hallowed shrine, indeed, of the Russian Church, and the spiritual centre of old Muscovy.

    The public image of the merchantry was fixed by the plays of Alexander Ostrovsky, himself a child of the Zamoskvoreche - his father had worked in the local judiciary, dealing mainly with the merchantry. After studying law at Moscow University, Ostrovsky

    (continued) tragedy of Anna Karenina are all connected with this metaphor: Anna’s first meeting with Vronsky at the Moscow station; Vronsky’s declaration of his love for her on the train to Petersburg; and her suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. Here was a symbol of modernity, of sexual liberation and adultery, that led unavoidably to death. All the more ironic and symbolic, then, that Tolstoy himself died in the stationmnster’s house at Astapovo (today ‘Lev Tolstoy’) on a dead end line to the south of Moscow.

    worked as a clerk in the civil courts, so he had direct experience of the scams and squabbles that filled his merchant plays. His first drama,
A Family Affair
(1849), was based on a case in the Moscow courts. It tells the depressing tale of a merchant called Bolshov. To escape his debts he pretends to be bankrupt by transferring all his assets to his daughter and son-in-law, who then run off with the money, leaving Bolshov to go to debtors’ jail. The play was banned by the Tsar, who thought its portrait of the merchantry - even if it was based on a story from real life - might prove damaging to its relations with the Crown. Ostrovsky was placed under police surveillance. Sacked from his job in the civil courts, he was forced to earn a living as a dramatist, and he soon turned out a batch of sell-out plays that all dealt with the strange and (at that time) exotic mores of the Moscow business world. The corrupting power of money, the misery of arranged marriages, domestic violence and tyranny, the escape of adultery - these are the themes of Ostrovsky’s plays. The most famous is perhaps
The Storm
(1860), which the Czech composer Leos Janacek would use as the basis for his opera
Katya Kabanova
(1921).

    The stereotype of the Russian merchant - greedy and deceitful, narrowly conservative and philistine, the embodiment of everything that was dreary and depressing in provincial towns - became a literary commonplace. In the novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy the traders who swindled the squires of their land symbolized the menace of the new commercial culture to the old-world values of the aristocracy. Take the scene in
Anna Karenina,
for example, where Stiva Oblonsky, the hopelessly spendthrift but endearing nobleman, agrees to sell his forests to a local merchant at far too low a price. When Levin tells Oblonsky of their true value, Oblonsky’s sense of honour as a nobleman forces him to go through with the deal, even though he knows that the merchant took advantage of his ignorance. All over Europe it was commonplace for the nineteenth-century cultural elites to hold trade and commerce in contempt, and such attitudes were equally pronounced in the intelligentsia. But nowhere else did they have such an effect as in Russia, where they poisoned the relations of the middle classes with the cultural elites and thereby closed off the possibility of Russia going down the capitalist-bourgeois path - until it was too late. Even as late as the 1890s merchants were excluded from the social

    circles of Moscow’s aristocracy. The governor of the city, the Grand Duke Sergei, would not have a merchant at his ball, even though merchants paid the largest share of the city’s taxes and some lent money personally to him. Consequently, many merchants had a deep mistrust of the aristocracy. The textile magnate and patron of the arts Pavel Tretiakov, an old-style Moscow merchant and an Old Believer, forbade his daughter to marry the pianist Alexander Ziloti, on the grounds that he was a nobleman and thus only after her inheritance. He reacted in a similar way to the marriage of his niece to A. I. Tchaikovsky (the composer’s brother), another nobleman, and not only that, but a nobleman from Petersburg.

    Yet one could also form a brighter view of the Moscow merchants from Ostrovsky’s plays. Indeed, for this reason there were merchants like the Botkins, Moscow’s tea importers, who patronized his work. Another group who liked Ostrovsky’s plays for their positive message about the merchantry were the so-called ‘native soil’ critics
(pochven-niki),
whose outlet was the journal
Moskvitianin (The Muscovite).
The influential critic Apollon Grigoriev was a leading member of the ‘native soil’ movement, along with the writer Fedor Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail. Ostrovsky’s plays, they said, had spoken a ‘new word’ on Russian nationality. As a social group that lay somewhere between the peasantry and the educated classes, the merchants, they believed, were uniquely qualified to lead the nation in a way that reconciled its Muscovite and Petrine elements. Ostrovsky’s merchants were neither Slavophile nor Westernist, Mikhail Dostoevsky argued in a review of
The Storm.
They had flourished in the European culture of the new Russia, yet had managed to retain the culture of the old; and in this sense, Dostoevsky claimed, the merchants showed the way for Russia to progress without social divisions.
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This interpretation was a reflection of the ‘native soil’ ideals of national integration that followed in the wake of the emancipation of the serfs. The decree evoked high hopes of a spiritual rebirth in which the Russian nation, the noble and the peasant, would become reconciled and reunited around the cultural ideals of the intelligentsia. The mixed-class origins of the ‘native soil’ critics, most of whom were
raznochintsy
types (from a minor noble background, with close connections to the world of trade), perhaps led them to idealize the merchants as the pioneers of a

    new classless society. Yet the merchants were in fact developing in an interesting way - they were breaking out of the old cultural ghetto of the Zamoskvoreche - and this was reflected in Ostrovsky’s later plays. In
The Final Sacrifice
(1878) the usual themes of money and domestic tyranny are almost overshadowed by the appearance of a new generation of merchants’ sons and daughters who are European in their ways. When an actress would not play the part of a merchant’s wife in the first production of
The Final Sacrifice,
arguing that she did not want to be seen in a peasant shawl, Ostrovsky reassured her that the merchant’s wife now dressed more fashionably than the ladies of the aristocracy.
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    By this time, indeed, there was a group of fabulously wealthy merchant dynasties, many far wealthier than the aristocracy, that had branched out from their family concerns to form vast conglomerates. The Riabushinskys, for example, added glass and paper, publishing and banking, and later motor cars, to their textile factories in Moscow; and the Mamontovs had an immense empire of railways and iron foundries. As they grew in confidence, these familes left behind the narrow cultural world of the Zamoskvoreche. Their sons adopted European ways, entered the professions and civic politics, patronized the arts, and generally competed with the aristocracy for pre-eminence in society. They acquired lavish mansions, dressed their wives in the latest clothes from Paris, gave brilliant parties, and dined at the elite English Club. Some of these young industrial barons were even rich enough to snub the aristocracy. Savva Morozov, the Moscow factory magnate and principal financier of the Moscow Arts Theatre, once received a request from the governor of Moscow to be shown around Morozov’s house. Morozov agreed and invited him to come the next day. But when the Grand Duke appeared with his retinue he was greeted by the butler, who informed him that Morozov was away.
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    Despite the old mistrust between the classes, many of these magnates felt a strong desire for acceptance by the leaders of society. They did not want to join the aristocracy. But they did want to belong to the cultural elite, and they knew that their acceptance depended on their public service and philanthropy - above all, on their support for the arts. This condition was particularly important in Russia, where the cultural influence of the intelligentsia was far stronger than it was in the West. Whereas in America and many parts of Europe, money was

    enough to become accepted in society, even if the old snobbish attitudes prevailed, Russia never shared the bourgeois cult of money, and its cultural elites were defined by a service ethic that placed a burden on the rich to use their wealth for the people’s benefit. Noble clans like the Sheremetevs spent huge sums on charity. In the case of Dmitry Sheremetev these sums represented a quarter of his income, and became a major reason for his growing debts in the middle of the nineteenth century. But Moscow’s leading merchants also took their charitable duties very earnestly indeed. Most of them belonged to the Old Belief, whose strict moral code (not unlike that of the Quakers) combined the principles of thrift, sobriety and private enterprise with a commitment to the public good. All the biggest merchant families assigned large chunks of their private wealth to philanthropic projects and artistic patronage. Savva Mamontov, the Moscow railway baron, became an opera impresario and a major patron of the ‘World of Art’, out of which the Ballets Russes emerged. He had been brought up by his father to believe that ‘idleness is vice’ and that ‘work is not a virtue’ but ‘a simple and immutable responsibility, the fulfilment of one’s debt in life’.
⁹⁰
Konstantin Stanislavsky, the co-founder of the Moscow Arts Theatre, was brought up with a similar attitude by his father, a Moscow merchant of the old school. Throughout the years from 1898 to 1917, when he acted and directed at the Moscow Arts, he carried on with business at his father’s factories. Despite his immense wealth, Stanislavsky could not contribute much to the theatre’s funds, because his father had allowed him only a modest income which did not allow him to ‘indulge in whims’.
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    These principles were nowhere more in evidence than in the life and work of Pavel Tretiakov, Russia’s greatest private patron of the visual arts. The self-made textile baron came from a family of Old Believer merchants from the Zamoskvoreche. With his long beard, full-length Russian coat and square-toed boots, he cut the figure of an old-school patriarch. But while he adhered throughout his life to the moral code and customs of the Old Belief, he had broken out of its narrow cultural world at an early age. Because his father was opposed to education, he had taught himself by reading books and mixing in the student and artistic circles of Moscow. When he began to collect art, in the mid-1850s, Tretiakov bought mainly Western paintings, but he soon

    realized that he lacked the expertise to judge their provenance, so, to avoid the risk of being swindled, he bought only Russian works from that point on. Over the next thirty years Tretiakov spent in excess of 1 million roubles on Russian art. His collection, when he left it to the city as the Tretiakov Museum in 1892, included an astonishing 1,276 Russian easel paintings - far more numerous than the Spanish paintings in the Prado (about 500) or the British ones in the National Gallery (335). This huge new source of private patronage was a vital boost for the Wanderers - young painters such as Ilya Repin and Ivan Kramskoi who had broken from the Academy of Arts in the early 1860s and, like the
kuchkists
under Stasov’s influence, had begun to paint in a ‘Russian style’. Without the patronage of Tretiakov, the Wanderers would not have survived these first hard years of independence, when the private art market beyond the court and the aristocracy was still extremely small. Their down-to-earth provincial scenes and landscape paintings appealed to the merchant’s ethnocentric taste. ‘As for me,’ Tretiakov informed the landscape painter Apollinary Goravsky, ‘I want neither abundant nature scenes, elaborate composition, dramatic lighting, nor any kind of wonders. Just give me a muddy pond and make it true to life.’
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The injunction was perfectly fulfilled by Savrasov in his painting
The Rooks Have Returned
(1871), a poetic evocation of rural Russia in the early spring thaw, which became Tretiakov’s favourite landscape painting and something of an icon of the Russian School. Its simple realism was to become a hallmark of the Moscow landscape school compared to the carefully arranged
veduta
scenes, with their European styling, stipulated by the Academy in St Petersburg.

    Tretiakov in business, the Wanderers in art - each sought to break free from the bureaucratic controls of St Petersburg; each looked to Moscow and the provinces for an independent market and identity. The Wanderers’ name (in Russian,
Peredvizhniki)
derived from the travelling exhibitions organized by their collective in the 1870s.* Nurtured on the civic and Populist ideals of the 1860s, they toured the provinces with their exhibitions, usually financed out of their own pockets, to raise the public’s consciousness of art. Sometimes they