Natasha's Dance

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    In the eighteenth century the aristocracy had seen childhood as a preparation for the adult world. It was a stage to be overcome as soon as possible, and children who delayed this transition, like Mitrofan in Fonvizin’s The Minor, were regarded as simpletons. High-born children were expected to behave like ‘little adults’ and they were prepared to enter into society from an early age. Girls were taught to dance from eight years old. By the age of ten or twelve they were already going to the ‘children’s balls’ that were run by dancing masters in the fashionable houses, from which, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, they would graduate to their first grown-up ball. Natasha Rostov was relatively old, at eighteen years, when she attended her first ball and danced with Prince Andrei in War and Peace. Boys, meanwhile, were signed up for the Guards and dressed in their regimental uniforms long before they were old enough to hold a sword. Volkonsky joined his father’s regiment (a sergeant in absentia) at the tender age of six. By eight he was a sergeant in the Kherson Grenadiers; by nine, an adjutant to General Suvorov; although, of course, it was only later, at the age of sixteen, that he began active service on the battlefield. Boys destined for the civil service were sent to boarding school at the age of eight or nine, where they were indoctrinated in the service ethic and, like adult State officials, they wore a civil (rather than a school) uniform. School was seen as little more than an apprenticeship for the civil service and, since the student was allowed to join the service on his fifteenth birthday, few noble families thought it necessary to educate their sons beyond that age. Indeed, in so far as the Table of Ranks reinforced the principle of promotion by seniority, any further education was

    considered disadvantageous: the sooner one got on to the promotion ladder the better.

    The memoirist Vasily Selivanov grew up in a household where the seven sons were all prepared for military service from an early age. His father ran the family like a regiment, the sons all ranked by age and under strict instructions to stand up in his presence and call him ‘sir’. When Selivanov joined the Dragoons in 1830, at the age of seventeen, the transition from palace to barracks must have felt like going from one home to another.128 Not all noble families were quite as regimented as the Selivanovs, of course, but in many the relations between parents and their children were conducted on the same basic principles of discipline that ruled the institutions of the army and the state. Such rigour had not always been the case: the domestic life of the noble family in the seventeenth century might have been extremely patriarchal but it was also intimate. Rather, it was copied by the Russians from the West, especially England - although, like much that was brought to Russia in the eighteenth century, it became so ingrained in the nobility that it practically defined that class in the nineteenth century. Noble parents kept their children at arm’s length, which often meant the length of the longest corridor, or down the longest staircase to a separate basement floor in the servants’ quarters of their house. V. A. Sollogub grew up in a mansion on the Palace Embankment in St Petersburg. The adults lived in the main house while the children were consigned with their nanny and a wet nurse to an annexed wing, and only saw their parents briefly once or twice a day - for example, to thank them for their dinner (but not to eat with them) or to kiss them goodbye when they went away. ‘Our lives were entirely separate,’ Sollogub recalled, ‘and there was never any sign of emotion. We children were allowed to kiss our parents on the hand, but there was no fondling, and we had to address them in French with the formal “vous“. Children were subjected to a strict domestic code of servility, almost like the laws for serfs’.129 Nikolai Shatilov, who grew up in a wealthy landowning family of Tula province in the 1860s, was confined as a young boy to a separate apartment in the house, where he lived with his tutor and took all his meals: he did not see his parents ‘for months on end’.130

    Distant fathers were, of course, the norm in nineteenth-century Europe, but there were few cultures where the mother was as remote as

    she tended to be in the Russian noble family. It was the custom for a noble child to be put into the care of a wet nurse almost from the day they were born. Even as the child grew up there were many noble mothers who were just too busy with their social life, or with other babies, to give them the attention that they must have surely craved. ‘Mother was extremely kind, but we hardly ever saw her’ is a phrase that crops up often in nineteenth-century memoirs about gentry life.131 Anna Karenina, although not a model parent, was not exceptional in her ignorance of the routines of her children’s nursery (‘I’m so useless here’).132

    It was not unusual, then, for the noble child to grow up without any direct parental discipline. Parents often left their children to the care of relatives (typically a spinster aunt or grandmother) or to the supervision of their nannies and the maids and the rest of the domestic staff. Yet the servants were naturally afraid to discipline their master’s children (the ‘little masters’ and the ‘little mistresses’), so they tended to indulge them and let them have their way. Boys, in particular, were prone to misbehave (‘little monsters’), knowing very well that their parents would defend them if their nanny, a mere serf, dared to complain. Critics of the social system, like the writer Saltykov-Shchedrin, argued that this latitude encouraged noble children to be cruel to serfs; in their adult lives they carried on in the belief that they could lord it over all their serfs and treat them as they liked. It is certainly conceivable that the selfishness and cruelty towards the serfs that ran right through the governing elites of Tsarist Russia went back in some cases to the formative experiences of childhood. For example, if a noble child was sent to the local parish school (a practice that was common in the provinces), he would go with a serf boy, whose sole purpose was to take the whipping for his master’s misdemeanours in the class. How could this develop any sense of justice in the noble child?

    Yet there were bonds of affection and respect between many noble children and their serfs. Herzen argued that children liked to be with the servants ‘because they were bored in the drawing-room and happy in the pantry’ and because they shared a common temperament.

    This resemblance between servants and children accounts for their mutual attraction. Children hate the aristocratic ideas of the grown-ups and their benevolently condescending manners, because they are clever and understand

    that in the eyes of grown-up people they are children, while in the eyes of servants they are people. Consequently they are much fonder of playing cards or lotto with the maids than with visitors. Visitors play for the children’s benefit with condescension. They give way to them, tease them, and stop playing whenever they feel like it; the maids, as a rule, play as much for their own sakes as for the children’s, and that gives the game interest. Servants are extremely devoted to children, and this is not the devotion of a slave, but the mutual affection of the weak and the simple.133

    Writing as a socialist, Herzen put down his ‘hatred of oppression’ to the ‘mutual alliance’ he had formed with the servants as a child against the senior members of the house. He recalled: ‘At times, when I was a child, Vera Artamonovna [his nanny] would say by way of the greatest rebuke for some naughtiness: “Wait a bit, you will grow up and turn into just such another master as the rest.” I felt this a horrible insult. The old woman need not have worried herself - just such another as the rest, anyway, I have not become.’1’4 Much of this, of course, was written for effect; it made for a good story. Yet other writers similarly claimed that their populist convictions had been formed by their childhood contacts with the serfs.135

    The high-born Russian boy spent his childhood in the downstairs servants’ world. He was cared for by his serf nanny, who slept by his side in the nursery, held him when he cried, and in many cases became like a mother to him. Everywhere he went he was accompanied by his serf ‘uncle’. Even when he went to school or enrolled in the army this trusted servant would act as his guardian. Young girls, too, were chaperoned by a ‘shaggy footman’ - so-called on account of the fur coat he wore over the top of his livery - like the one imagined as ‘a huge and matted bear’ in Tatiana’s dream in Eugene Onegin:

    She dare not look to see behind her, And ever faster on she reels; At every turn he seems to find her, The shaggy footman at her heels!…136

    By necessity the children of the servants were the playmates of the high-born child - for in the countryside there would not be other

    children of a similar social class for miles around. Like many nineteenth-century memoirists, Anna Lelong had fond memories of the games she played with the village girls and boys: throwing games with blocks of wood (gorodki); bat-and- ball games played with bones and bits of scrap metal (babki and its many variants); clapping-singing-dancing games; and divination games. In the summer she would go swimming with the village children in the river, or she would be taken by her nanny to the villages to play with the younger children as their mothers threshed the rye. Later, in the autumn, she would join the village girls to pick whortleberries and make jam. She loved these moments when she was allowed to enter the peasant world. The fact that it was forbidden by her parents, and that her nanny made her promise not to tell, made it even more exciting for the girl. In the pantry was an atmosphere of warmth and intimacy that was missing in her parents’ drawing room. ‘I would get up very early and go into the maids’ room where they were already at their spinning wheels, and nanny would be knitting