Natasha's Dance (68 page)

    On the other hand, the sheer monotony of the never-ending steppe drove many Russian poets to despair. Mandelstam called it the ‘watermelon emptiness of Russia’ and Musorgsky, ‘the All-Russian bog’.
¹²¹
At such moments of despair these artists were inclined to view the steppe as a limitation on imagination and creativity. Gorky thought that the boundless plain had

    the poisonous peculiarity of emptying a man, of sucking dry his desires. The peasant has only to go out past the bounds of the village and look at the emptiness around him to feel in a short time that this emptiness is creeping into his very soul. Nowhere around can one see the results of creative labour. The estates of the landowners? But they are few and inhabited by enemies. The towns? But they are far away and not much more cultured. Round about lie endless plains and in the centre of them, insignificant, tiny man abandoned on this dull earth for penal labour. And man is filled with the feeling of indifference killing his ability to think, to remember his past, to work out his ideas from experience.
¹²²

    but it was not just the peasant who became more dull from living on the steppe. The gentry did as well. The loneliness of living in a

    country house, miles away from any neighbours in that social class, the lack of stimulation, the interminable hours without anything to do but stare out of the windows at the endless plain: is it any wonder that the gentry became fat and sluggish on the steppe? Saltykov-Shchedrin gives a wonderful description of this mental slumber in
The Golovlyov Family
(1880):

    [Arina] spent most of the day dozing. She would sit in her armchair by the table where her grubby playing-cards were laid out and doze. Then she would wake with a start, look through the window and vacantly stare at the seemingly boundless fields, stretching away into the remote distance… All around lay fields, fields without end, with no trees on the horizon. However, since Arina had lived almost solely in the country since childhood, this miserable landscape did not strike her as in the least depressing; on the contrary, it even evoked some kind of response in her heart, stirring sparks of feeling still smouldering there. The better part of her being had lived in those bare endless fields and instinctively her eyes sought them out at every opportunity. She would gaze at the fields receding into the distance, at rain-soaked villages resembling black specks on the horizon, at white churches in village graveyards, at multi-coloured patches of light cast on the plain by clouds wandering in the rays of the sun, at a peasant she had never seen before, who was in fact walking between the furrows but who seemed quite still to her. As she gazed she would think of nothing - rather, her thoughts were so confused they could not dwell on anything for very long. She merely gazed and gazed, until a senile drowsiness began to hum in her ears again, veiling the fields, churches, villages and that distant, trudging peasant in mist.
¹²³

    The Russians have a word for this inertia -
Oblomovshchina -
from the idle nobleman in Goncharov’s
Oblomov
who spends the whole day dreaming and lying on the couch.* Thanks to the literary critic Nikolai Dobroliubov, who first coined the term soon after the book’s publication in 1859,
Oblomovsh china
came to be regarded as a national disease. Its symbol was Oblomov’s dressing gown
(khalat).

*
Though Gogol, too, had referred to such Russian ‘lie-a-beds’ in the second volume of
Dead Souls
(N. Gogol,
Dead Souls,
trans. D. Magarshack (Harmondsworth, 1961),

    p. 265).

    Dobroliubov even claimed that the ‘most heartfelt striving of all our Oblomovs is their striving for repose in a dressing gown’.
¹²⁴
Goncharov made a careful point of emphasizing the Asian origin of his hero’s dressing gown. It was ‘a real oriental dressing-gown, without the slightest hint of Europe, without tassels, without velvet trimmings’, and in the true ‘Asiatic fashion’ its sleeves ‘got wider from the shoulders to the hands’.
¹²⁵
Living ‘like a sultan’, surrounded by his serfs, and never doing anything that they could be commanded to do instead for him, Oblomov became a cultural monument to Russia’s ‘Asiatic immobility’. Lenin used the term when he grew frustrated with the unreformability of Russian social life. ‘The old Oblomov is with us’, he wrote in 1920, ‘and for a long while yet he will still need to be washed, cleaned, shaken and given a good thrashing if something is to come of him.’
¹²⁶

    In 1874 the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St Petersburg hosted an extraordinary exhibition by the artist Vasily Vereshchagin, whose enormous battle scenes of the Turkestan campaign had recently returned with high acclaim from a European tour. Huge crowds came to see the exhibition (30,000 copies of the catalogue were sold in the first week) and the building of the Ministry became so cramped that several fights broke out as people jostled for a better view. Veresh-chagin’s pictures were the public’s first real view of the Imperial war which the Russians had been fighting for the past ten years against the Muslim tribes as the Tsar’s troops conquered Turkestan. The Russian public took great pride in the army’s capture of the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva, followed by its conquest of Tashkent and the arid steppe of Central Asia right up to the borders with Afghanistan and British India. After its defeat in the Crimean War, the campaign showed the world that Russia was a power to be reckoned with. But Vereshchagin’s almost photographic battle images revealed a savagery which had not been seen by civilians before. It was not clear who was more ‘savage’ in his pictures of the war: the Russian troops or their Asiatic opponents. There was ‘something fascinating, something

    deeply horrifying, in the wild energy of these canvases’, concluded one reviewer in the press. ‘We see a violence that could not be French or even from the Balkans: it is half-barbarian and semi-Asiatic - it is a Russian violence.’
¹²⁷

    It had not originally been the painter’s aim to draw this parallel. Vereshchagin started out as an official war artist, and it was not part of his remit to criticize the conduct of the Russian military. He had been invited by General Kaufman, the senior commander of the Turkestan campaign, to join the army as a surveyor, and had fought with distinction (the only Russian painter ever to be honoured with the Order of St George) before receiving the commission from the Grand Duke Vladimir (the same who had bought Repin’s
The Volga Barge Haulers)
for the Asian battle scenes.
¹²⁸
But his experience of the war in Turkestan had given rise to doubts about the ‘civilizing mission’ of the Russian Empire in the East. On one occasion, after the Russian troops had massacred the people of a Turkmen village, Vereshchagin dug their graves himself. None of his compatriots would touch the dead.
¹²⁹
Vereshchagin came to see the war as a senseless massacre. ‘It is essential to underline that both sides pray to the same God’, he advised his friend Stasov on a piece he was preparing for the exhibition, ‘since this is the tragic meaning of my art.’
¹³⁰
The message of Vereshchagin’s epic canvases was clearly understood. He portrayed the Asian tribesmen, not as savages, but as simple human beings who were driven to defend their native land. ‘What the public saw’, Stasov later wrote, ‘was both sides of the war - the military conquest and the human suffering. His paintings were the first to sound a loud protest against the barbarism of the Imperial war.’
¹³¹

    There was a huge storm of controversy. Liberals praised the artist for his stance against all war.* Conservatives denounced him as a ‘traitor to Russia’, and mounted a campaign to strip him of his Order of St George.
¹³²
General Kaufman became so enraged when he saw the artist’s pictures that he began to shout and swear at Vereshchagin and

    * Even Kaiser Wilhelm II, the most militarist of the German Emperors, told Vereshchagin at his Berlin exhibition in 1897:’
Vos tableaux sont la meilleure assurance contre la guerre’
(F. I. Bulgakov, V. V.
Vereshchagin i ego proizvedeniia
(St Petersburg, 1905), P. 11).

    physically attacked him in the presence of his fellow officers. The General Staff condemned his paintings as a ‘slander against the Imperial army’, and called for them to be destroyed; but the Tsar, ironically, was on the liberals’ side. Meanwhile, the right-wing press was outraged by the fact that Vereshchagin had been offered a professorship by the Imperial Academy of Arts (and even more outraged when the artist turned it down). Critics attacked his ‘barbarous art’ on the racist grounds that no real Russian worth the name could paint such tribesmen as equal human beings. ‘It is an offence’, argued a professor in the journal
Russian World,
‘to think that all these works were painted by a man who calls himself a European! One can only suppose that he ceased to be a Russian when he painted them; he must have taken on the mind of one of his Asian savages.’
¹³³

    As his opponents knew, Vereshchagin was of Tatar origin. His grandmother had been born into a Turkmen tribe.
¹³⁴
For this reason he felt a close affinity for the landscape and the people of the Central Asian steppe. ‘I insist’, he once wrote to Stasov, ‘that I only learned to paint when I went to Turkestan. I had more freedom for my studies there than I would have had if I had studied in the West. Instead of the Parisian attic, I lived in a Kirghiz tent; instead of the paid model, I drew real people.’
¹³⁵
Stasov claimed that Vereshchagin’s feeling for the Central Asian steppe ‘could only have been felt by an artist from Russia (not a European) who had lived among the people of the East’.
¹³⁶

    Bitter and depressed by the campaign against him in the nationalist press, Vereshchagin fled St Petersburg, where the police had refused to protect him from threats against his life. He left Russia well before the exhibition’s end. Vereshchagin travelled first to India, where he felt, as he wrote to tell Stasov, ‘that something draws me ever farther to the East’. Then he trekked through the Himalayas, pointing out in sketches which he sent back to his friend ‘the architectural similarities between Tibet and ancient Rus”.
¹³⁷
Stasov was forbidden to display these sketches in the public library of St Petersburg (even though he was its chief librarian).
¹³⁸
Under pressure from the right-wing press, a warrant for the arrest of the exiled painter was despatched to the border with Mongolia.
¹³⁹
The warrant was issued from the very building where Vereshchagin’s paintings were displayed, until they were purchased by Tretiakov (no academy would accept them). Banned for twenty

    years from his native land, Vereshchagin spent the remainder of his life in western Europe, where his paintings were acclaimed. But he always longed to return to the East, and he finally did so in 1904, when Admiral Makarov invited him to join the fleet as an artist during the war against Japan. He was killed three months later on the
Petropav-lovsk
when a bomb explosion sank the ship, drowning all on board.

    In Russia’s educated circles the military conquest of the Central Asian steppe produced two opposing reactions. The first was the sort of imperialist attitude which Vereshchagin’s paintings had done so much to offend. It was based on a sense of racial superiority to the Asiatic tribes, and at the same time a fear of those same tribes, a fear of being swamped by the ‘yellow peril’ which reached fever pitch in the war against Japan. The second reaction was no less imperialist but it justified the empire’s eastern mission on the questionable grounds that Russia’s cultural homeland was on the Eurasian steppe. By marching into Asia, the Russians were returning to their ancient home. This rationale was first advanced in 1840 by the orientalist Grigoriev. ‘Who is closer to Asia than we are?’ Grigoriev had asked. ‘Which of the European races retained more of the Asian element than the Slavic races did, the last of the great European peoples to leave their ancient homeland in Asia?’ It was ‘Providence that had called upon the Russians to reclaim the Asian steppe’; and because of ‘our close relations with the Asiatic world’, this was to be a peaceful process of ‘reunion with our primeval brothers’, rather than the subjugation of a foreign race.
¹⁴⁰
During the campaign in Central Asia the same thesis was advanced. The Slavs were returning to their ‘prehistoric home’, argued Colonel Veniukov, a geographer in Kaufman’s army, for ‘our ancestors had lived by the Indus and the Oxus before they were displaced by the Mongol hordes’. Veniukov maintained that Central Asia should be settled by the Russians. The Russian settlers should be encouraged to intermarry with the Muslim tribes to regenerate the ‘Turanian’ race that had once lived on the Eurasian steppe. In this way the empire would expand on the ‘Russian principle’ of ‘peaceful evolution and assimilation’ rather than by conquest and by racial segregation, as in the empires of the European states.
¹⁴¹

    The idea that Russia had a cultural and historic claim in Asia became a founding myth of the empire. During the construction of the