Orlando Figes
New York : Metropolitan Books, 2002. (2003)
Tags:
Non Fiction
Non Fictionttt
SUMMARY:
'Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, did 'more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know.' Now, in Natasha's Dance, this internationally renowned historian does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together.' 'Beginning in the eighteenth century with the building of St. Petersburg - a 'window on the West' - and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself - its, character, spiritual essence, history, and destiny. What did it mean to be Russian - an illiterate serf or an imperial courtier? And where was the true Russia - in Europe or in Asia? Figes skillfully interweaves the great works - by Dostoevsky and Chekhov, Stravinsky and Chagall - with folk embroidery, peasant songs, religious icons, and all the customs of daily life, from eating, drinking, and bathing habits to beliefs about death and the spirit world. His fascinating characters range high and low; the revered Tolstoy, who left his deathbed to search the wilderness for the Kingdom of God; the serf girl Praskovya, who became Russian opera's first superstar, won the heart of her owner, and shocked society by becoming his wife; the composer Stravinsky, who returned to Russia after fifty years in the West and discovered that the homeland the had left had never left his heart.'--BOOK JACKET.
NATASHA’S DANCE
Copyright © 2002 by Orlando Figes
ISBN: 08050-5783-8
Contents
List of Illustrations and Photographic Acknowledgements - ix
Notes on the Maps and Text - xv
Maps - xviii
Introduction - xxv
1 EUROPEAN RUSSIA - I
2. CHILDREN OF I 8 I 2. - 69
3. MOSCOW! MOSCOW! - 147
4. THE PEASANT MARRIAGE - 217
5. IN SEARCH OF THE RUSSIAN SOUL - 289
6. DESCENDANTS OF GENGHIZ KHAN - 355
7. RUSSIA THROUGH THE SOVIET LENS - 431
8. RUSSIA ABROAD - 523
List of Illustrations
and Photographic
Acknowledgements
Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be happy to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.
CHAPTER OPENERS
1. Benjamin Paterssen:
2. Adolphe Ladurnier:
Petrushka, Moscow
3. St Basil’s Cathedral, Red Square, Moscow, during the late nineteenth
century (photo: David King Collection, London)
4
by Netta Peacock. Victoria Albert Museum Picture Library,
London
5. Natalia Goncharova: backdrop design for
Victoria
6. Scvthian figures: late nineteenth-centurv archaeological engraving
List of Illustrations and Photographic Acknowledgements
7. Anna Akhmatova at the Fountain House. Copyright © Museum of Anna Akhmatova in the Fountain House, St Petersburg
8. Igor and Vera Stravinsky arriving at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow, 21 September 1962. Reproduced from Igor and Vera Stravinsky, A
TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Shifting the huge granite rock for the pedestal of
2. Seventeenth-century Muscovite costumes. Engraving from Adam Olearius,
3. The Sheremetev theatre at Ostankino. Photograph copyright © William C. Brumfield.
4. Gerard de la Barthe: A
5. The ‘peasant prince’: Sergei Volkonsky in Irkutsk. Daguerreotype by A. Lavignon, 1845 (photo: Novosti, London)
6. Alexei Venetsianov:
