Natasha's Dance (62 page)

    Almost immediately Grisha arrived with his soft tread. In one hand he had

    his staff, in the other a tallow candle in a brass candlestick. We held our breaths.

    ’Lord Jesus Christ! Most Holy Mother of God! To the Father, the Son and

    the Holy Ghost…’ he kept saying, drawing the air into his lungs and speaking

    * Long after shamanism became fashionable, the Muslim impact on Russian culture remained taboo. Even in St Petersburg, a city founded on the principle of religious tolerance, there was no mosque until 1909.

    with the different intonations and abbreviations peculiar to those who often repeat these words.

    With a prayer he placed his staff in a corner of the room and inspected his bed; after which he began to undress. Unfastening his old black girdle, he slowly divested himself of his tattered nankeen coat, folded it carefully and hung it over the back of a chair… His movements were deliberate and thoughtful.

    Clad only in his shirt and undergarment he gently lowered himself on the bed, made the sign of the cross all round it, and with an effort (for he frowned) adjusted the chains beneath his shirt. After sitting there for a while and anxiously examining several tears in his linen he got up and, lifting the candle with a prayer to the level of the glass case where there were some icons, he crossed himself before them and turned the candle upside down. It spluttered and went out.

    An almost full moon shone in through the windows which looked towards the forest. The long white figure of the fool was lit up on one side by its pale silvery rays; from the other its dark shadow, in company with the shadow from the window-frames, fell on the floor, on the walls and up to the ceiling. Outside in the courtyard the watchman was striking on his iron panel.

    Folding his huge hands on his breast, Grisha stood in silence with bowed head before the icons, breathing heavily all the while. Then with difficulty he sank to his knees and began to pray.

    At first he softly recited familiar prayers, only emphasizing certain words; then he repeated them, but louder and with much animation. Then he began to pray in his own words, making an evident effort to express himself in Church Slavonic. Though incoherent, his words were touching. He prayed for all his benefactors (as he called those who received him hospitably), among them for our mother and us; he prayed for himself, asking God to forgive him his grievous sins, and he kept repeating: ‘Oh God, forgive my enemies!’ He rose to his feet with a groan and repeating the same words again and again, fell to the floor and again got up despite the weight of his chains, which knocked against the floor every time with a dry harsh sound…

    For a long time Grisha continued in this state of religious ecstasy, improvising prayers. Now he would repeat several times in succession
Lord, have mercy
but each time with renewed force and expression. Then he prayed
Forgive me, O
Lord teach me how to live… teach me how to live, O Lord
so feelingly that he might be expecting an immediate answer to his petition.

    The piteous sobs were all that we could hear… He rose to his knees, folded his hands on his breast and was silent.
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    Writers and artists portrayed the Holy Fool as an archetype of the simple Russian believer. In Pushkin’s and in Musorgsky’s
Boris Godunov
the Holy Fool appears as the Tsar’s conscience and as the voice of the suffering people. Prince Myshkin, the epileptic, Christ-like hero of
The Idiot,
is called a Holy Fool by the rich landowner Rogo-zhin; and Dostoevsky clearly wanted to create in him a genuinely Christian individual who, like the Holy Fool, is driven to the margins of society. In his painting
In Russia
(1916) Mikhail Nesterov portrayed the Holy Fool as the unofficial spiritual leader of the Russian people. Yet the Fool’s untutored and largely improvised sacraments probably owed more to the Asian shamans than they did to the Russian Church. Like a shaman, the Holy Fool performed a sort of whirling dance with strange shrieks and cries to enter into a state of religious ecstasy; he used a drum and bells in his magic rituals; and he wore his chains in the belief, which was shared by Asian shamans, that iron had a supernatural quality. Like a shaman, too, the Holy Fool frequently employed the image of the raven in his rituals - a bird with a magic and subversive status in Russian folklore. Throughout the nineteenth century the peasants of the Volga region saw the Cossack rebel leaders Pugachev and Razin in the form of giant ravens in the sky.
³⁰

    Many common elements of Russian clothing were also Asiatic in their origins - a fact reflected in the Turkic derivation of the Russian words for clothes like
kaftan, zipun
(a light coat),
armiak
(heavy coat),
sarafan
and
khalat.
³¹
Even the Tsar’s crown or Cap of Monomakh -by legend handed down from Byzantium - was probably of Tatar origin.
³²
The food of Russia, too, was deeply influenced by the cultures of the East, with many basic Russian dishes, such as
plov
(pilaff),
lapsha
(noodles) and
tvorog
(curd cheese) imported from the Caucasus and Central Asia, and other eating habits, like the Russian taste for horsemeat and
koumis
(fermented mare’s milk) no doubt handed down from the Mongol tribes. In contrast to the Christian West and most Buddhist cultures of the East, there was no religious sanction against eating horsemeat in Russia. Like the Mongol tribes, the Russians even bred a type of horse specifically to eat or (in the Volga region) to

    milk for
koumis.
Such practices were practically unknown in western Europe - at least until the nineteenth century, when French social reformers began to advocate the eating of horsemeat as a solution to the problems of poverty and malnutrition. But even then there was something of a stigma attached to eating horses. The practice of breeding horses for meat was regarded as barbaric in the West.
³³

    All the major tribes of Central Asia - the Kazakhs, the Uzbeks, the Kalmyks and Kirghiz - were offshoots of the Golden Horde. With the dissolution of the Horde in the fifteenth century, they had remained on the Russian steppe and became the allies or the subjects of the Tsar. The ancestors of the Kazakhs - Islamic-Turkic Mongols - left the Golden Horde in the fifteenth century. Gradually they became closer to the Russians as they were forced out of the richest steppeland pastures by their rival tribes, the Dzhungars and the Uzbeks. The Uzbeks also came out of the Horde in the fifteenth century. They settled down to an agricultural life on the fertile plain of Ferghana, inheriting the riches of the old Iranian oasis towns between the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers (the heritage of Tamerlane), on which basis they went on to found the Uzbek states of Bukhara, Khiva and Khokand and established trade relations with the Tsar. As for the Kalmyks, they were western Mongols (Oirats) who had left the Mongol army and stayed put on the steppe when the Golden Horde dissolved (the Turkic verb
kalmak
- from which the Kalmyks get their name - means ‘to stay’). Driven west by other tribes, they settled with their herds near Astrakhan on the northern Caspian shores and became the main suppliers of the Russian cavalry, driving 50,000 horses every year to Moscow until the trade declined in the eighteenth century.
³⁴
Russian settlers drove the Kalmyks off the Volga steppe in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Most of the tribesmen moved back east, but others settled in Russia, where they took up trades or farming, and converted to the Orthodox belief. Lenin was descended from one of these Kalmyks. His paternal grandfather, Nikolai Ulianov, was a Kalmyk son from Astrakhan. This Mongol descent was clearly visible in Lenin’s looks.

    To commemorate the defeat of the Mongol khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan Ivan the Terrible ordered the construction of a new cathedral on Red Square in Moscow. St Basil’s, as it was to become popularly known in honour of the city’s favourite Holy Fool, was completed in 1560, just five years after its construction had begun. The cathedral was far more than a symbol of Russia’s victory over the Mongol khanates. It was a triumphant proclamation of the country’s liberation from the Tatar culture that had dominated it since the thirteenth century. With its showy colours, its playful ornament and outrageous onion domes, St Basil’s was intended as a joyful celebration of the Byzantine traditions to which Russia now returned (although, to be truthful, there was nothing so ornate in the Orthodox tradition and the mosque-like features of the cathedral were probably derived from an oriental style).

    The cathedral was originally named the Intercession of the Virgin -to mark the fact that Kazan was captured on that sacred feast day (Pokrova) in 1552. Moscow’s victory against the Tatars was conceived as a religious triumph, and the empire which that victory launched was in many ways regarded as an Orthodox crusade. The conquest of the Asiatic steppe was portrayed as a holy mission to defend the Church against the Tatar infidels. It was set out in the doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome - a doctrine which St Basil’s cast in stone - whereby Russia came to see itself as the leader of a truly universal Christian empire built on the traditions of Byzantium. Just as the mighty Russian state was built on the need to defend its Christian settlers on the heathen steppe, so the Russian national consciousness was forged by this religious war against the East. In the Russian mind this religious boundary was always more important than any ethnic one, and the oldest terms for a foreigner (for example,
inoverets)
carry connotations of a different faith. It is equally telling that the word in Russian for a peasant
(krestianin),
which in all other European languages stems from the idea of the country or the land, is connected with the word for a Christian
(khristianin).

    From the capture of Kazan in 1552 to the revolution in 1917, the

    Russian Empire grew at the fantastic rate of over 100,000 square kilometres every year. The Russians were driven east by fur, the ‘soft gold’ that accounted for one-third of the Imperial coffers at the height of the fur trade in the seventeenth century.
³⁵
Russia’s colonial expansion was a massive hunt for bears and minks, sables, ermine, foxes and otters. Close on the heels of the fur trappers came the Cossack mercenaries, such as those commanded by the Russian hero Ermak, who seized the ore-rich mines of the Urals for his patron Stroganov and finally defeated the khanate of Siberia in 1582. Then came the Tsar’s troops, who constructed fortresses and exacted tributes from the native tribes, followed shortly after by the Church’s missionaries, who set out to deprive them of their shamanistic cults. Surikov’s enormous painting
Ermak’s Conquest of Siberia
(1895) - a crowded battlescene between the icon-bearing, musket-firing Cossacks and the heathen bow-and-arrow tribesmen with their shamans beating drums - did more than any other work of art to fix this mythic image of the Russian empire in the national consciousness. As Surikov portrayed it, the real point of the conquest was to undermine the shamans who enjoyed a divine status in the Asiatic tribes.

    This religious conquest of the Asiatic steppe was far more fundamental to the Russian empire than the equivalent role such missions played in the overseas empires of the European states. The explanation for this is geography. There was no great ocean to divide Russia from its Asian colonies: the two were part of the same land mass. The Ural mountains, which officially divided the European steppe from the Asiatic one, were physically no more than a series of big hills with large tracts of steppeland in between, and the traveller who crossed them would have to ask his driver where these famous mountains were. So without a clear geographical divide to distinguish them from their Asian colonies, the Russians looked instead to cultural categories. This became especially important in the eighteenth century, when Russia sought to redefine itself as a European empire with a presence in the West. If Russia was to be styled as a Western state, it needed to construct a clearer cultural boundary to set itself apart from this Asiatic other’ in the Orient. Religion was the easiest of these categories. All the Tsar’s non-Christian tribes were lumped together as ‘Tartars’, whatever their origins or faith, Muslim, shamanic or Buddhist. To

    reinforce this ‘good and evil’ split, the word ‘Tartar’ was deliberately misspelled (with the extra V) to bring it into line with the Greek word for ‘hell’
(tartarus).
More generally, there was a tendency to think of all of Russia’s newly conquered territories (Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia) as one undifferentiated ‘east’ - an
‘Aziatshchina’
- which became a byword for ‘oriental langour’ and ‘backwardness’. The image of the Caucasus was orientalized, with travellers’ tales of its wild and savage tribes. Eighteenth-century maps consigned the Caucasus to the Muslim East, though geographically it was in the south, and historically it was an ancient part of the Christian West. In Georgia and Armenia the Caucasus contained Christian civilizations which went back to the fourth century, five hundred years before the Russians converted to Christianity. They were the first states in Europe to adopt the Christian faith - before even the conversion of Constantine the Great and the foundation of the Byzantine empire.

    Nowhere were the Russians more concerned to erect cultural boundaries than in Siberia. In the eighteenth-century imagination the Urals were built up into a vast mountain range, as if shaped by God on the middle of the steppe to mark the eastern limit of the civilized world.* The Russians on the western side of these mountains were Christian in their ways, whereas the Asians on the eastern side were described by Russian travellers as ‘savages’ who needed to be tamed.
³⁶
To Asianize its image, Russian atlases in the eighteenth century deprived Siberia of its Russian name
(Sibir’)
and referred to it instead as the ‘Great Tatary’, a title borrowed from the Western geographic lexicon. Travel writers wrote about its Asiatic tribes, the Tungus and the Yakuts and the Buriats, without ever mentioning the settled Russian population in Siberia, even though it was already sizeable. In this way, which came to justify the whole colonial project in the east, the steppe was reconstructed in the Russian mind as a savage and exotic wilderness whose riches were untapped. It was ‘our Peru’ and ‘our India’.
³⁷