Natasha's Dance

finally abandoned for the national way. ‘Let us Russians be Russians, not copies of the French’, wrote Princess

    Dashkova; ‘let us remain patriots and retain the character of our ancestors’.151 Karamzin, too, renounced ‘humanity’ for ‘nationality’. Before the French Revolution he had held the view that ‘the main thing is to be, not Slavs, but men. What is good for Man, cannot be bad for the Russians; all that Englishmen or Germans have invented for the benefit of mankind belongs to me as well, because I am a man’.152 But by 1802 Karamzin was calling on his fellow writers to embrace the Russian language and ‘become themselves’:

    Our language is capable not only of lofty eloquence, of sonorous descriptive poetry, but also of tender simplicity, of sounds of feeling and sensibility. It is richer in harmonies than French; it lends itself better to effusions of the soul… Man and nation may begin with imitation but in time they must become themselves to have the right to say: ‘I exist morally’.’153

    Here was the rallying cry of a new nationalism that flourished in the era of 1812.

2

    overleaf: Adolphe Ladurnier: View of the White Hall in the Winter Palace,

    St Petersburg, 1838

1

    At the height of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, in August 1812, Prince Sergei Volkonsky was delivering a report to the Emperor Alexander in St Petersburg. Alexander asked the young aide-de-camp about the morale of the troops. ‘Your Majesty!’ the prince replied. ‘From the Supreme Commander to the ordinary soldier, every man is prepared to lay down his life in the patriotic cause.’ The Emperor asked the same about the common people’s mood, and again Volkonsky was full of confidence. ‘You should be proud of them. For every single peasant is a patriot.’ But when that question turned to the aristocracy, the prince remained silent. Prompted by the Emperor, Volkonsky at last said: ‘Your Majesty! I am ashamed to belong to that class. There have been only words.” It was the defining moment of Volkonsky’s life - a life that tells the story of his country and his class in an era of national self-discovery.

    There were many officers who lost their pride in class but found their countrymen in the ranks of 1812. For princes like Volkonsky it must have been a shock to discover that the peasants were the nation’s patriots: as noblemen they had been brought up to revere the aristocracy as the ‘true sons of the fatherland’. Yet for some, like Volkonsky, this revelation was a sign of hope as well - the hope that in its serfs the nation had its future citizens. These liberal noblemen would stand up for ‘the nation’ and the ‘people’s cause’, in what would become known as the Decembrist uprising on 14 December 1825.* Their alliance with the peasant soldiers on the battlefields of 1812 had shaped their democratic attitudes. As one Decembrist later wrote, ‘we were the children of 1812’.2

    Sergei Volkonsky was born in 1788 into one of Russia’s oldest noble families. The Volkonskys were descended from a fourteenth-century prince, Mikhail Chernigovsky, who had attained glory (and was later made a saint) for his part in Moscow’s war of liberation against the Mongol hordes, and had been rewarded with a chunk of land on the

    * They shall be referred to here as the Decembrists, even though they did not gain that name until after 1825.

    Volkona river, to the south of Moscow, from which the dynasty derived its name.3 As Moscow’s empire grew, the Volkonskys rose in status as military commanders and governors in the service of its Grand Dukes and Tsars. By the 1800s the Volkonskys had become, if not the richest of the ancient noble clans, then certainly the closest to the Emperor Alexander and his family. Sergei’s mother, Princess Alexandra, was the Mistress of the Robes to the Dowager Empress, the widow of the murdered Emperor Paul, and as such the first non-royal lady of the Empire. She lived for the most part in the private apartments of the Imperial family at the Winter Palace and, in the summer, at Tsarskoe Selo (where the schoolboy poet Pushkin once caused a scandal by jumping on this cold and forbidding woman whom he had mistaken for her pretty French companion Josephine). Sergei’s uncle, General Paul Volkonsky, was a close companion of the Emperor Alexander and, under his successor Nicholas I, was appointed Minister of the Court, in effect the head of the royal household, a post he held for over twenty years. His brother Nikita was married to a woman, Zinaida Volkonsky, who became a maid of honour at Alexander’s court and (perhaps less honourably) the Emperor’s mistress. His sister Sophia was on first name terms with all the major European sovereigns. At the Volkonsky house in Petersburg - a handsome mansion on the Moika river where Pushkin rented rooms on the lower floor - there was a china service that had been presented to her by the King of England, George IV. ‘That was not the present of a king,’ Sophia liked to say, ‘but the gift of a man to a woman.’4 She was married to the Emperor’s closest friend, Prince Pyotr Mikhailovich Volkonsky, who rose to become his general chief- of-staff.

    Sergei himself had practically grown up as an extended member of the Imperial family. He was educated at the Abbot Nicola’s on the Fontanka, an institute established by the emigres from France and patronized by the most fashionable families of Petersburg. From there he graduated to the Corps des Pages, the most elite of the military schools, from which, naturally, he joined the Guards. At the battle of Eylau in 1807 the young cornet was wounded by a bullet in his side. Thanks to his mother’s lobbying, he was transferred to the Imperial staff in St Petersburg, where he joined a select group of glamorous young men - the aides-de-camp to the Emperor. The Tsar was fond of

    the serious young man with charming manners and softly spoken views, even though his idol-worship of Napoleon - a cult shared at that time by many noblemen (like Pierre Bezukhov at the start of War and Peace) - was frowned upon at court. He called him ‘Monsieur Serge’, to distinguish him from his three brothers (who were also aides-de-camp) and the other Volkonskys in his entourage.5 The prince dined with the Emperor every day. He was one of the few who were permitted to enter the Emperor’s private apartments unannounced. The Grand Duke Nicholas - later to become Tsar Nicholas I - who was nine years younger than Sergei, would, as a boy, ask the aide-decamp to position his toy soldiers in the formation of Napoleon’s armies at Austerlitz.6 Two decades later he sent his playmate to Siberia.

    In 1808 Volkonsky returned to the army in the field and, in the course of the next four years, he took part in over fifty battles, rising by the age of twenty-four to the rank of major-general. Napoleon’s invasion shook the Prince from the pro-French views he had held in common with much of the Petersburg elite. It stirred in him a new sense of ‘the nation’ that was based upon the virtues of the common folk. The patriotic spirit of the ordinary people in 1812 - the heroism of the soldiers, the burning-down of Moscow to save it from the French, and the peasant partisans who forced the Grande Armee to hurry back to Europe through the snow - all these were the signs, it seemed to him, of a national reawakening. ‘Russia has been honoured by its peasant soldiers,’ he wrote to his brother from the body-littered battlefield of Borodino on 26 August 1812. ‘They may be only serfs, but these men have fought like citizens for their motherland.’7

    He was not alone in entertaining democratic thoughts. Volkonsky’s friend (and fellow Decembrist), the poet Fedor Glinka, was equally impressed by the patriotic spirit of the common folk. In his Letters of a Russian Officer (1815) he compared the serfs (who were ‘ready to defend their motherland with scythes’) with the aristocracy (who ‘ran off to their estates’ as the French approached Moscow).8 Many officers came to recognize the peasant’s moral worth. ‘Every day,’ wrote one, ‘I meet peasant soldiers who are just as good and rational as any nobleman. These simple men have not yet been corrupted by the absurd conventions of our society, and they have their own moral ideas which are just as good.’9 Here, it seemed, was the spiritual

    potential for a national liberation and spiritual rebirth. ‘If only we could find a common language with these men’, wrote one of the future Decembrists, ‘they would quickly understand the rights and duties of a citizen.’10

    Nothing in the background of these officers had prepared them for the shock of this discovery. As noblemen they had been brought up to regard their fathers’ serfs as little more than human beasts devoid of higher virtues and sensibilities. But in the war they were suddenly thrown into the peasants’ world: they lived in their villages, they shared their food and fears with the common soldiers, and at times, when they were wounded or lost without supplies, they depended on those soldiers’ know-how to survive. As their respect for the common people grew, they adopted a more humanitarian approach to the men under their command. ‘We rejected the harsh discipline of the old system,’ recalled Volkonsky, ‘and tried through friendship with our men to win their love and trust.’11 Some set up field schools to teach the soldiers how to read. Others brought them into discussion circles where they talked about the abolition of serfdom and social justice for the peasantry. A number of future Decembrists drew up ‘army constitutions’ and other proposals to better the conditions of the soldiers in the ranks. These documents, which were based on a close study of the soldier’s way of life, may be seen as embryonic versions of the ethnographic works which so preoccupied the Slavophile and democratic intelligentsia in the 1830s and 1840s. Volkonsky, for example, wrote a detailed set of ‘Notes on the Life of the Cossacks in Our