Natasha's Dance

Journey to the Land of Ophir (1784) he portrays a northern country ruled by the king Perega from his newly founded city of Peregrab. Like St Petersburg, the intended object of Shcherbatov’s satire, Peregrab is cosmopolitan and sophisticated but it is alien to the national traditions of Ophir, whose people still adhere to the moral virtues of Kvamo (read: Moscow), their former capital. At last the people of Peregrab rise up, the city falls and Ophir is returned to Kvamo’s simple way of life. Such idyllic views of the unspoilt past were commonplace in Rousseau’s age. Even Karamzin, a Westernist who was certainly not nostalgic for the old nobility, idealized the ‘virtuous and simple life of our ancestors’, when ‘the Russians were real Russians’, in his story Natalia (1792).

    For others, Russia’s virtues were preserved in the traditions of the countryside. Fonvizin found them in the Christian principles of the ‘old thinker’ Starodum, the homespun village mystic in his satire The Minor (1782). ‘Have a heart, have a soul, and you’ll always be a man,’ advises Starodum. ‘Everything else is fashion.’129 The idea of a truly Russian self that had been concealed and suppressed by the alien conventions of Petersburg society became commonplace. It had its origins in the sentimental cult of rural innocence - a cult epitomized by Karamzin’s tearful tale of Poor Liza (1792). Karamzin tells the story of a simple flower girl who is deceived in love by a dandy from St Petersburg and kills herself by drowning in a lake. The tale contained all the elements of this vision of a new community: the myth of the wholesome Russian village from which Liza is ejected by her poverty; the corruption of the city with its foreign ways; the tragic and true-hearted Russian heroine; and the universal ideal of marriage based on love.

    Poets like Pyotr Viazemsky idealized the village as a haven of natural simplicity:

    Here there are no chains,

    Here there is no tyranny of vanity.130

    Writers like Nikolai Novikov pointed to the village as the place where native customs had survived. The Russian was at home, he behaved more like himself, when he lived close to the land.131 For Nikolai Lvov, poet, engineer, architect, folklorist, the main Russian trait was spontaneity.

    In foreign lands all goes to a plan, Words are weighed, steps measured. But among us Russians there is fiery life, Our speech is thunder and sparks fly.132

    Lvov contrasted the convention-ridden life of the European Russians with the spontaneous behaviour and creativity of the Russian peasantry. He called on Russia’s poets to liberate themselves from the constraints of the classical canon and find inspiration from the free rhythms of folk song and verse.

    Central to this cult of simple peasant life was the notion of its moral purity. The radical satirist Alexander Radishchev was the first to argue that the nation’s highest virtues were contained in the culture of its humblest folk. His proof for this was teeth. In his Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (1790) Radishchev recalls an encounter with a group of village women dressed up in their traditional costumes for a holiday - their broad smiles ‘revealing rows of teeth whiter than the purest ivory’. The ladies of the aristocracy, who all had rotten teeth, would ‘be driven mad by teeth like these’:

    Come hither, my dear Moscow and Petersburg ladies, look at their teeth and learn from them how they keep them white. They have no dentists. They do not scrape their teeth with brushes and powders every day. Stand mouth to mouth with any one of them you choose: not one of them will infect your lungs with her breath. While yours, yes yours may infect them with the germ - of a disease… I am afraid to say what disease.133

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    In eighteenth-century panoramas of St Petersburg the open sky and space connect the city with a broader universe. Straight lines stretch to the distant horizon, beyond which, we are asked to imagine, lies the rest of Europe within easy reach. The projection of Russia into Europe had always been the raison d’etre of St Petersburg. It was not simply Peter’s ‘window on to Europe’ - as Pushkin once described the capital - but an open doorway through which Europe entered Russia and the Russians made their entry to the world.

    For Russia’s educated elites Europe was more than a tourist destination. It was a cultural ideal, the spiritual source of their civilization, and to travel to it was to make a pilgrimage. Peter the Great was the model of the Russian traveller to the West in search of self- improvement and enlightenment. For the next two hundred years Russians followed Peter’s journey to the West. The sons of the Petersburg nobility went to universities in Paris, Gottingen and Leipzig. The ‘Gottingen soul’ assigned by Pushkin to Lensky, the fashionable student in Eugene Onegin, became a sort of emblem of the European outlook shared by generations of Russian noblemen:

    Vladimir Lensky, just returning From Gottingen with soulful yearning, Was in his prime - a handsome youth And poet filled with Kantian truth. From misty Germany our squire Had carried back the fruits of art: A freedom-loving, noble heart, A spirit strange but full of fire, An always bold, impassioned speech, And raven locks of shoulder reach.134

    All the pioneers of Russia’s arts learned their crafts abroad: Tred-iakovsky, the country’s first real poet, was sent by Peter to study at the University of Paris; Andrei Matveev and Mikhail Avramov, its first secular painters, were sent to France and Holland; and, as we have

    seen, Berezovsky, Fomin and Bortnyansky learned their music in Italy. Mikhail Lomonosov, the nation’s first outstanding scholar and scientist, studied chemistry at Marburg, before returning to help found Moscow University, which today bears his name. Pushkin once quipped that the polymath ‘was our first university’.135

    The Grand Tour was a vital rite of passage for the aristocracy. The emancipation of the nobles from obligatory state service in 1762 had unleashed Russia’s more ambitious and curious gentry on the world. Gaggles of Golitsyns and Gagarins went to Paris; Dashkovs and Demi-dovs arrived in droves in Vienna. But England was their favourite destination. It was the homeland of a prosperous and independent landed gentry, which the Russian nobles aspired to become. Their Anglomania was sometimes so extreme that it bordered on the denial of their own identity. ‘Why was I not born an Englishwoman?’ lamented Princess Dashkova, a frequent visitor to and admirer of England, who had sung its praises in her celebrated Journey of a Russian Noblewoman (177 5).136 Russians flocked to the sceptred isle to educate themselves in the latest fashions and the designs of its fine houses, to acquire new techniques of estate management and landscape gardening, and to buy objets d’art, carriages and wigs and all the other necessary accoutrements of a civilized lifestyle.

    The travel literature that accompanied this traffic played a vital role in shaping Russia’s self-perception vis-a-vis the West. Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller (1791-1801), the most influential of this genre, educated a whole generation in the values and ideas of European life. Karamzin left St Petersburg in May 1789. Then, travelling first through Poland, Germany and Switzerland, he entered revolutionary France in the following spring before returning via London to the Russian capital. Karamzin provided his readers with a panorama of the ideal European world. He described its monuments, its theatres and museums, celebrated writers and philosophers. His ‘Europe’ was a mythic realm which later travellers, whose first encounter with Europe had been through reading his work, would look for but never really find. The historian Mikhail Pogodin took the Letters with him when he went to Paris in 1839. Even the poet Mayakovsky responded to that city, in 1925, through the sentimental prism of Karamzin’s work.137 The Letters taught the Russians how to act and feel as culti-

    vated Europeans. In his letters Karamzin portrayed himself as perfectly at ease, and accepted as an equal, in Europe’s intellectual circles. He described relaxed conversations with Kant and Herder. He showed himself approaching Europe’s cultural monuments, not as some barbaric Scythian, but as an urbane and cultivated man who was already familiar with them from books and paintings. The overall effect was to present Europe as something close to Russia, a civilization of which it was a part.

    Yet Karamzin also managed to express the insecurity which all the Russians felt in their European self-identity. Everywhere he went he was constantly reminded of Russia’s backward image in the European mind. On the road to Konigsberg two Germans were ‘amazed to learn that a Russian could speak foreign languages’. In Leipzig the professors talked about the Russians as ‘barbarians’ and could not believe that they had any writers of their own. The French were even worse, combining a condescension towards the Russians as students of their culture with contempt for them as ‘monkeys who know only how to imitate’.138 At times such remarks provoked Karamzin to exaggerated claims for Russia’s achievements. As he travelled around Europe, however, he came to the conclusion that its people had a way of thinking that was different from his own. Even after a century of reform, it seemed to him that perhaps the Russians had been Euro-peanized in no more than a superficial way. They had adopted Western manners and conventions. But European values and sensibilities had yet to penetrate their mental world.139

    Karamzin’s