Natasha's Dance

whole material culture of society had been imported from the West, there were, as Pushkin commented, no Russian words for basic things:

    But pantaloons, gilet, and frock -These words are hardly Russian stock.109

    Hence Russian writers were obliged to adapt or borrow words from the French to express the sentiments and represent the world of their readers in high society. Karamzin and his literary disciples (including

    the young Pushkin) aimed to ‘write as people speak’ - meaning how the people of taste and culture spoke, and in particular the ‘cultivated woman’ of polite society, who was, they realized, their ‘principal reader’.110 This ‘salon style’ derived a certain lightness and refinement from its Gallicized syntax and phraseology. But its excessive use of French loan words and neologisms also made it clumsy and verbose. And in its way it was just as far removed from the plain speech of the people as the Church Slavonic of the eighteenth century. This was the language of social pretension that Tolstoy satirized in the opening passages of War and Peace:

    Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe being then a new word in St Petersburg, used only by the elite.111

    Yet this salon style was a necessary stage in the evolution of the literary language. Until Russia had a wider reading public and more writers who were willing to use plain speech as their literary idiom, there would be no alternative. Even in the early nineteenth century, when poets such as Pushkin tried to break away from the foreign hold on the language by inventing Russian words, they needed to explain these to their salon audience. Hence in his story ‘The Peasant Girl’, Pushkin had to clarify the meaning of the Russian word ‘samobytnost” by adding in parenthesis its French equivalent, ‘individualite‘.112

5

    In November 1779 the Hermitage court theatre in St Petersburg staged the premiere of Kniazhnin’s comic opera Misfortune from a Carriage. It was an ironic venue for this hilarious satire on the slavish imitation of foreign ways. The sumptuous theatre, recently constructed by the Italian Quarenghi in the Winter Palace, was the home of the French Opera, the most prestigious of the foreign companies. Its elite public was impeccably turned out in the latest French clothes and hairstyles. Here was precisely the sort of Gallomania that Kniazhnin’s opera blamed for the moral corruption of society. The opera tells the story

    of a pair of peasant lovers, Lukian and Anyuta, who are prevented from getting married by their master’s jealous bailiff, Klimenty, who desires Anyuta for himself. As serfs, the pair belong to a foolish noble couple called the Firiulins (the ‘Ninnies’) whose only aim in life is to ape the newest fashions in Paris. The Firiulins decide that they must have a new coach that is all the rage. To raise the cash they instruct Klimenty to sell some of their serfs into military service. Klimenty picks Lukian. It is only when the lovers plead with their owners in the sentimental language of the Gallicized salon that Lukian is finally released. Until then, the Firiulins had regarded them as simply Russian serfs, and hence, they assumed, entirely unaffected by such emotions as love. But everything is put into a different perspective once Lukian and Anyuta speak in French cliches.113

    Kniazhnin’s satire was one of several to equate the foreign pretensions of Petersburg with the moral ruin of society. The Petersburg dandy, with his fashionable clothes, his ostentatious manners and effeminate French speech, had become an anti-model of the ‘Russian man’. He was the butt of comedies, from the character of Medor in Kantemir’s satire A Poor Lesson (1729) to Fonvizin’s Ivan in The Brigadier (1769). These comedies contained the ingredients of a national consciousness based on the antithesis of foreign and native. The decadent and artificial manners of the fop were contrasted with the simple, natural virtues of the peasantry; the material seductions of the European city with the spiritual values of the Russian countryside. Not only did the young dandy speak a foreign language to his Russian elders (whose inability to understand his Gallicisms was a source of comic misunderstanding), he also lived by a foreign moral code that threatened Russia’s patriarchal traditions. In Kheraskov’s comedy The Detester, which ran in Petersburg during the same year as Misfortune from a Carriage, the dandy figure Stovid advises a friend, who is unable to persuade a young girl to go out with him against her parents’ wishes, to ‘convince her that in Paris a child’s love for her parents is considered philistine’. The impressionable girl is won over by this argument, and Stovid then relates how he heard her tell her father: ‘“Stay away! In France fathers do not keep the company of their children, and only merchants let their hands be kissed by their daughters.” And then she spat at him.’ 114

    At the heart of all these satires was the notion of the West as a negation of Russian principles. The moral lesson was simple: through their slavish imitation of Western principles, the aristocrats had lost all sense of their own nationality. Striving to make themselves at home with foreigners, they had become foreigners at home.

    The nobleman who worships France - and thus despises Russia -was a stock character in all these comedies. ‘Why was I born a Russian?’ laments Diulezh in Sumarokov’s The Monsters (1750). ‘O Nature! Are you not ashamed to have given me a Russian father?’ Such was his contempt for his fellow countrymen that in a sequel to the play, Diulezh even challenges an acquaintance to a duel because he had dared to call him a ‘fellow Russian and a brother’.115 Fonvizin’s Ivan, in The Brigadier, considers France his ‘spiritual homeland’ for the simple reason that he was once taught by a French coachman. Returning from a trip to France, Ivan proclaims that ‘anyone who has ever been in Paris has the right not to count himself a Russian any more’.116

    This literary type continued as a mainstay of the nineteenth-century stage. Alexander Griboedov’s Chatsky in Woe from Wit (1822-4) becomes so immersed in European culture on his travels that he cannot bear to live in Moscow on his return. He departs again for Paris, claiming there is no longer any place for him in Russian life. Chatsky was a prototype of those ‘superfluous men’ who inhabit nineteenth-century Russian literature: Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s Pechorin (the Hero of Our Times (1840)), Turgenev’s Rudin (1856); the root of all their troubles a sense of alienation from their native land.

    There were many Chatskys in real life. Dostoevsky encountered some of them in the Russian emigre communities of Germany and France in the 1870s:

    [T]here have been all sorts of people [who have emigrated] but the vast majority, if not all of them, have more or less hated Russia, some of them on moral grounds, on the conviction that ‘in Russia there’s nothing to do for such decent and intelligent people as they’, others simply hating her without any convictions - naturally, one might say, physically: for her climate, her fields, her forests, her ways, her liberated peasants, her Russian history: in short, hating her for absolutely everything.117

    But it was not just the emigres - or the almost permanent encampment of wealthy Russians in the spa and sea resorts of Germany and France - who became divorced from their native land. The whole idea of a European education was to make the Russian feel as much at home in Paris as in Petersburg. This education made for a certain cosmopolitanism, which was one of Russia’s most enduring cultural strengths. It gave the educated classes a sense that they belonged to a broader European civilization, and this was the key to the supreme achievements of their national culture in the nineteenth century. Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Tchaikovsky, Diaghilev and Stravinsky - they all combined their Russianness with a European cultural identity. Writing from the summit of the 1870s, Tolstoy evoked the almost magic charm of this European world as seen through the eyes of Levin as he falls in love with the Shcherbatsky household in Anna Karenina (1873- 6):

    Strange as it may seem, Levin was in love with the whole family - especially the feminine half of it. He could not remember his mother, and his only sister was older than himself, so that in the Shcherbatskys’ house he encountered for the first time the home life of a cultured, honourable family of the old aristocracy, of which he had been deprived by the death of his own father and mother. All the members of the family, in particular the feminine half, appeared to him as though wrapped in some mysterious, poetic veil, and he not only saw no defects in them but imagined behind that poetic veil the loftiest sentiments and every possible perfection. Why the three young ladies had to speak French one day and English the next; why they had, at definite times and each in her turn, to practise the piano (the sound of which reached their brothers’ room upstairs, where the boys were studying); why those masters of French literature, music, drawing, and dancing came to the house; why at certain hours the three young ladies accompanied by Mademoiselle Linon were driven in a barouche to the Tverskoy boulevard wearing satin pelisses - long for Dolly, shorter for Natalie, and so short for Kitty that her shapely little legs in the tightly pulled-up red stockings were quite exposed; why they had to walk up and down the Tverskoy boulevard accompanied by a footman with a gold cockade in his hat - all this and much more that happened in their mysterious world he did not understand; but he knew that everything was perfect, and he was in love with the