Natasha's Dance (42 page)

    significant that Tolstoy did not know how to end the tale. Two different

    conclusions were published: one in which the hero kills the peasant woman, the other where he commits suicide.

    Tolstoy’s own life story was unresolved as well. In the middle of the 1870s, when the ‘going to the people’ reached its apogee, Tolstoy experienced a moral crisis that led him, like the students, to seek his salvation in the peasantry. As he recounts in A
Confession
(1879-80), he had suddenly come to realize that everything which had provided meaning in his life - family happiness and artistic creation - was in fact meaningless. None of the great philosophers brought him any comfort. The Orthodox religion, with its oppressive Church, was unacceptable. He thought of suicide. But suddenly he saw that there was a true religion in which to place his faith - in the suffering, labouring and communal life of the Russian peasantry. ‘It has been my whole life’, he wrote to his cousin. ‘It has been my monastery, the church where I escaped and found refuge from all the anxieties, the doubts and temptations of my life.’
⁵⁷

    Yet even after his spiritual crisis Tolstoy was ambivalent: he idealized the peasants and loved to be with them, but for many years he could not bring himself to break from the conventions of society and become one himself. In many ways he only played at being a ‘peasant’. When he went out for a walk or rode his horse he put on peasant garb - he was known throughout the world for his peasant shirt and belt, his trousers and bast shoes - but when he went to Moscow, or dined with friends, he dressed in tailored clothes. During the day he would labour in the fields at Yasnaya Polyana - then return to his manor house for a dinner served by waiters in white gloves. The painter Repin visited the writer in 1887 to paint the first in a series of portraits of Tolstoy. A man of genuinely humble origins, Repin was disgusted by the count’s behaviour. ‘To descend for a day into this darkness of the peasantry’s existence and proclaim: “I am with you” - that is just hypocrisy.’
⁵⁸
Nor, it seems, were the peasants taken in. Four years later, at the height of the famine in 1891, Repin visited the count again. Tolstoy insisted on showing him the ‘peasant way’ to plough a field. ‘Several times’, Repin recalled, ‘some Yasnaya Polyana peasants walked by, doffed their caps, bowed, and then walked on as if taking no notice of the count’s exploit. But then another peasant group appears, evidently from the next village. They stop and stare for

    a long while. And then a strange thing happens. Never in my life have I seen a clearer expression of irony on a simple peasant’s face.’
⁵⁹

    Tolstoy was aware of the ambiguity, and for years he agonized. As a writer, and a Russian one at that, he felt the artist’s responsibility to provide leadership and enlightenment for the people. This was why he had set up the peasant schools, expended his energy on writing country tales, and started a publishing venture (‘The Intermediary’) to print the classics (Pushkin, Gogol, Leskov and Chekhov) for the growing mass of readers in the countryside. Yet at the same time he was moving to the view that the peasants were the teachers of society and that neither he nor any other scion of the world’s immoral civilizations had anything to give. From his teaching at the village schools, he came to the conclusion that the peasant had a higher moral wisdom than the nobleman - an idea he explained by the peasant’s natural and communal way of life. This is what the peasant Karataev teaches Pierre in
War and Peace:

    Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them, but he loved and lived affectionately with everything that life brought him in contact with, particularly with man - not any particular man, but those with whom he happened to be… To Pierre he always remained… an unfathomable, rounded, eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.
⁶⁰

    With every passing year, Tolstoy strived to live more and more like a peasant. He learned how to make his own shoes and furniture. He gave up writing and spent his time working in the fields. In a turn from his previous life, he even advocated chastity, and became a vegetarian. Sometimes in the evening he would join the pilgrims walking on the road from Moscow to Kiev, which passed by the estate. He would walk with them for miles, returning barefoot in the early morning hours with a new confirmation of his faith. ‘Yes, these people know God,’ he would say. ‘Despite all their superstitions, their belief in St Nicholas-of-the-spring and St Nicholas-of-the-winter, or the Icon of Three Hands, they are closer to God than we are. They lead moral, working lives, and their simple wisdom is in many ways superior to all the artifices of our culture and philosophy.’
⁶¹

    In 1862, Tolstoy married Sofya (Sonya) Behrs, the daughter of Dr Andrei Behrs, the house doctor of the Kremlin Palace in Moscow, in a ceremony at the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Assumption. Tolstoy drew on this event when he came to write the splendid wedding scene between Kitty and Levin in
Anna Karenina.
As in many gentry weddings of the time, the ceremony combines Orthodox and peasant rituals; and there is an insistence, voiced by Kitty’s mother Princess Shcherbatskaya, ‘on all the conventions being strictly observed’.
⁶²
Indeed, one can read the scene as an ethnographic document about this special aspect of the Russian way of life.

    Every Russian knows the verses from Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
in which the lovesick Tatiana asks her nurse if she has ever been in love. The peasant woman replies by telling the sad story of how she came to be married, at the age of just thirteen, to an even younger boy she had never seen before:

    ’Oh, come! Our world was quite another! We’d never heard of love, you see. Why, my good husband’s sainted mother Would just have been the death of me!’ ‘Then how’d you come to marry, nanny?’ ‘The will of God, I guess… My Danny Was younger still than me, my dear, And I was just thirteen that year. The marriage maker kept on calling For two whole weeks to see my kin, Till father blessed me and gave in. I got so scared - my tears kept falling; And weeping, they undid my plait, Then sang me to the churchyard gate.

    ’And so they took me off to strangers… But you’re not even listening, pet.’
⁶³

    The scene encapsulates the contrast between the two different cultures - the European and the folk - in Russian society. Whereas Tatiana looks at marriage through the prism of romantic literature, her nurse regards it from the viewpoint of a patriarchal culture where individual sentiments or choices about love are foreign luxuries. Tolstoy draws the same contrast in Kitty’s wedding scene. During the ceremony Dolly thinks back tearfully to her own romance with Stiva Oblonsky and, ‘forgetting the present’ (meaning all his sexual infidelities), ‘she remembered only her young and innocent love’. Meanwhile, in the entrance to the church stands a group of ordinary women who have come in from the street to ‘look on breathless with excitement’ as the bridal couple take their marriage vows. We listen to them chattering among themselves:

    ’Why is her face so tear-stained? Is she being married against her will?’ ‘Against her will to a fine fellow like that? A prince, isn’t he?’ ‘Is that her sister in the white satin? Now hear how the deacon will roar:

    ”Wife, obey thy husband!” ‘ ‘Is it the Tchudovsky choir?’ ‘No, from the Synod.’ ‘I asked the footman. It seems he’s taking her straight to his home in the

    country. They say he’s awfully rich. That’s why she’s being married to him.’ ‘Oh no. They make a very well-matched pair.’

    ’What a dear little creature the bride is - like a lamb decked for the slaughter. Say what you like, one does feel sorry for the girl.’
⁶⁴

    ’A lamb decked for the slaughter’ is perhaps not how Kitty felt - her love affair with Levin was a true romance - but, if Sonya’s own experience is anything to go by, she might have found some points of contact with these women from the street.

    Sonya was eighteen when she married Tolstoy - rather young by European standards but not by Russian ones. Eighteen was in fact the average age of marriage for women in nineteenth-century Russia - far younger than even in those pre-industrial parts of western Europe where women tended to marry relatively early (around the age of twenty-five).
⁶⁵
(For the past 300 years no other European country has

    had an average female age at first marriage as low as twenty years -and in this respect Russian marriage more closely fits the Asiatic pattern.)
⁶⁶
Tatiana’s nurse was, therefore, not exceptional in marrying so young, even though thirteen was the youngest she could marry under Russian canon law. Serf owners liked their peasant girls to marry young, so that they could breed more serfs for them; the burden of taxation could be easily arranged so that peasant elders took the same opinion. Sometimes the serf owners enforced early marriages -their bailiffs lining up the marriageable girls and boys in two separate rows and casting lots to decide who would marry whom.
⁶⁷
Among the upper classes (though not the merchantry) girls married at an older age, although in the provinces it was not unusual for a noble bride to be barely older than a child. Sonya Tolstoy would have sympathized with Princess Raevskaya, who became a widow at the age of thirty-five

    - by which time she had given birth to seventeen children, the first at the age of just sixteen.
⁶⁸

    The arranged marriage was the norm in peasant Russia until the beginning of the twentieth century. The peasant wedding was not a love match between individuals (‘We’d never heard of love,’ recalls Tatiana’s nurse). It was a collective rite intended to bind the couple and the new household to the patriarchal culture of the village and the Church. Strict communal norms determined the selection of a spouse

    - sobriety and diligence, health and child-rearing qualities being more important than good looks or personality. By custom throughout Russia, the parents of the groom would appoint a matchmaker in the autumn courting season who would find a bride in one of the nearby villages and arrange for her inspection at a
smotrinie.
If that was successful the two families would begin negotiations over the bride price, the cost of her trousseau, the exchange of household property and the expenses of the wedding feast. When all this was agreed a formal marriage contract would be sealed by the drinking of a toast which was witnessed by the whole community and marked by the singing of a ceremonial song and a
kborovod.
⁶⁹
Judging from the plaintive nature of these songs, the bride did not look forward to her wedding day. There was a whole series of prenuptial songs - most of them laments in which the bride would ‘wail’, as the nineteenth-century folklorist Dahl described it, ‘to mourn the loss of maidenhood’.
⁷⁰
The

    prenuptial
khorovod,
which was sung and danced by the village girls in spring, was a sad and bitter song about the life to come in their husband’s home:

    They are making me marry a lout

    With no small family.

    Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh dear me!

    With a father, and a mother

    And four brothers

    And sisters three.

    Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh dear me!

    Says my father-in-law,

    ’Here comes a bear!’

    Says my mother-in-law,

    ’Here comes a slut!’

    My sisters-in-law cry,

    ’Here comes a do-nothing!’

    My brothers-in-law cry,

    ’Here comes a mischief-maker!’

    Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh dear me!
⁷¹

    The bride and groom played a largely passive role in the peasant wedding rituals, which were enacted by the whole community in a highly formalized dramatic performance. The night before the wedding the bride was stripped of the customary belt that protected her maid enly purity and was washed by village girls in the bath house. The bridal shower
(devichnik)
had an important symbolic significance. It was accompanied by ritual songs to summon up the magic spirits of the bath house which were believed to protect the bride and her children. The water from the towel with which the bride was dried was then wrung out and used to leaven dough for the ritual dumplings served to the guests at the wedding feast. The climax of this bath-house rite was the unplaiting of the maiden’s single braid, which was then replaited as two braids to symbolize her entry into married life. As in Eastern cultures, the display of female hair was seen as a sexual enticement, and all married Russian peasant women kept their plaited hair hidden underneath a kerchief or head-dress. The bride’s virginity

    was a matter of communal importance and, until it had been confirmed, either by the finger of the matchmaker or by the presence of bloodstains on the sheets, the honour of her household would remain in doubt. At the wedding feast it was not unusual for the guests to act as witnesses to the bride’s deflowering - sometimes even for guests to strip the couple and tie their legs together with embroidered towels.

    Among the upper classes there were still traces of these patriarchal customs in the nineteenth century, and among the merchants, as anyone familiar with Ostrovsky’s plays will know, this peasant culture was very much alive. In the aristocracy arranged marriages remained the norm in Russia long after they had been replaced in Europe by romantic ones; and although romantic love became more influential in the nineteenth century, it never really became the guiding principle. Even among the most educated families, parents nearly always had the final say over the choice of a spouse, and the memoir literature of the time is filled with accounts of love affairs that crashed against their opposition. By the end of the nineteenth century a father would rarely refuse to sanction his child’s marriage; yet, in deference to the old custom, it remained accepted practice for the suitor to approach the parents first and ask for their permission to propose.