Natasha's Dance

alien and an artificial place became commonplace after 1812, as the romantic yearning for a more authentically national way of life seized hold of the literary imagination. But the foreign

    character of Petersburg had always been a part of its popular mythology. From the moment it was built, traditionalists attacked it for its European ways. Among the Old Believers, the Cossacks and the peasants, rumours spread that Peter was a German, and not the real Tsar, largely on account of the foreigners he had brought to Petersburg and the attendant evils of European dress, tobacco, and the shaving-off of beards. By the middle of the eighteenth century there was a thriving underground mythology of tales and rumours about Petersburg. Stories abounded of the ghost of Peter walking through the streets, of weird mythic beasts hopping over churches, or of all-destroying floods washing up the skeletons of those who had perished in the building of the town.20 This oral genre later nourished in the literary salons of St Petersburg and Moscow, where writers such as Pushkin and Odoev-sky used it as the basis of their own ghost stories from the capital. And so the myth of Petersburg took shape - an unreal city that was alien to Russia, a supernatural realm of fantasies and ghosts, a kingdom of oppression and apocalypse.

    Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman - subtitled a ‘Tale of Petersburg’ - was the founding text of this literary myth. The poem was inspired by Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great which stands on Senate Square as the city’s genus loci. Like the poem that would make it so famous, the statue symbolized the dangerous underpinning of the capital’s imperial grandeur - on the one hand trumpeting Peter’s dazzling achievements in surpassing nature and, on the other, leaving it unclear to what extent he actually controlled the horse. Was he about to fall or soar up into space? Was he urging his mount on or trying to restrain it in the face of some catastrophe? The horseman seemed to teeter on the edge of an abyss, held back only by the taut reins of his steed.21 The huge granite rock - so wild in its appearance - on which the statue stood, was itself an emblem of the tragic struggle between man and nature. The city hewn in stone is never wholly safe from the incursions of the watery chaos from which it was claimed, and this sense of living on the edge was wonderfully conveyed by Falconet.

    In 1909 a technical commission inspected the statue. Engineers bored holes into the bronze. They had to pump out 1,500 litres of water from inside.22 Without protective dikes, flooding was a constant threat to Petersburg. Pushkin set his poem in 1824, the year of one

    10. Etienne-Maurice Falconet: The Bronze Horseman. Monument to Peter the Great, 1782

    such flood. The Bronze Horseman tells the story of the flood and a sad clerk called Eugene, who finds the house of his beloved, Parasha, washed away. Driven to the verge of madness, Eugene roams the city and, coming across Falconet’s horseman, castigates the Tsar for having built a city at the mercy of the flood. The statue stirs in anger and chases the poor clerk, who runs all night in terror of its thundering brass hooves. Eugene’s body is finally washed up on the little island where Parasha’s house was taken by the flood. The poem can be read in many different ways - as a clash between the state and the individual, progress and tradition, the city and nature, the autocracy and the people - and it was the standard by which all those later writers, from Gogol to Bely, debated the significance of Russia’s destiny:

    Proud charger, whither art thou ridden? Where leapest thou? and where, on whom Wilt plant thy hoof?23

    For the Slavophiles, Peter’s city was a symbol of the catastrophic rupture with Holy Rus’; for the Westerners, a progressive sign of Russia’s Europeanization. For some, it was the triumph of a civilization, the conquering of nature by order and reason; for others, it was a monstrous artifice, an empire built on human suffering that was tragically doomed.

    More than anyone, it was Gogol who fixed the city’s image as an alienating place. As a young ‘Ukrainian writer’ struggling to survive in the capital, Gogol lived among the petty clerks whose literary alter egos fill his Tales of Petersburg (1842). These are sad and lonely figures, crushed by the city’s oppressive atmosphere and doomed, for the most part, to die untimely deaths, like Pushkin’s Evgeny in The Bronze Horseman. Gogol’s Petersburg is a city of illusions and deceit. ‘Oh have no faith in this Nevsky Prospekt… It is all deception, a dream, nothing is what it seems!’ he warns in ‘Nevsky Prospekt’, the first of the Tales of Petersburg. ‘Nevsky Prospekt deceives at all hours of the day, but the worst time of all is night, when the entire city becomes a welter of noise and flashing lights… and when the Devil himself is abroad, kindling the street-lamps with one purpose only: to show everything in a false light.’24 Hidden in the shadows of this glittering parade, Gogol’s ‘little men’ scuttle between their offices in vast ministerial buildings and the equally soulless tenement apartments in which they live - alone, of course. Gogol’s Petersburg is a ghostly image of the real city, a nightmare vision of a world deprived of grace, where only human greed and vanity can thrive. In ‘The Overcoat’, the last of the Tales, the humble civil servant Akaky Akakievich is forced to scrimp and save to replace his threadbare overcoat that has long become the joke of his fashionable seniors in the ministry. The new coat restores his sense of pride and individual worth: it becomes a symbol of his acceptance by his peers, who throw a champagne party in celebration. But he is robbed of the prized fur while walking home across a dark and ‘endless square’. His efforts to retrieve it by appealing to an important Personage’ come to naught. He becomes ill and dies,

    a tragic figure crushed by a cold and uncaring society. But Akaky’s ghost walks the streets of Petersburg. One night it haunts the Important Personage and robs him of his coat.

    Dostoevsky said that the whole of Russian literature ‘came out from underneath Gogol’s “Overcoat”’,25 His own early tales, especially The Double (1846), are very Gogolesque, although in later works, such as Crime and Punishment (1866), he adds an important psychological dimension to the capital’s topography. Dostoevsky creates his unreal city through the diseased mental world of his characters, so that it becomes ‘fantastically real’.26 In the minds of dreamers like Raskol-nikov, fantasy becomes reality, and life becomes a game in which any action, even murder, can be justified. Here is a place where human feelings are perverted and destroyed by human isolation and rationality. Dostoevsky’s Petersburg is full of dreamers, a fact which he explained by the city’s cramped conditions, by the frequent mists and fog which came in from the sea, by the icy rain and drizzle which made people sick. This was a place of fevered dreams and weird hallucinations, of nerves worn thin by the sleepless White Nights of the northern summer when dreamland and the real world became blurred. Dostoevsky himself was not immune to such flights of fantasy. In 1861 he recalled a ‘vision of the Neva’ which he himself had had in the early 1840s and included in the short story ‘A Weak Heart’ (1841). Dostoevsky claimed that it was the precise moment of his artistic self-discovery:

    I remember once on a wintry January evening I was hurrying home from the Vyborg side… When I reached the Neva, I stopped for a minute and threw a piercing glance along the river into the smoky, frostily dim distance, which had suddenly turned crimson with the last purple of a sunset… Frozen steam poured from tired horses, from running people. The taut air quivered at the slightest sound, and columns of smoke like giants rose from all the roofs on both embankments and rushed upward through the cold sky, twining and untwining on the way, so that it seemed new buildings were rising above the old ones, a new city was forming in the air… It seemed as if all that world, with all its inhabitants, strong and weak, with all their habitations, the refuges of the poor, or the gilded palaces for the comfort of the powerful of this world, was at that twilight hour like a fantastic vision of fairyland, like a

    dream which in its turn would vanish and pass away like vapour in the dark blue sky.27

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    Moscow, by contrast, was a place of down-to-earth pursuits. With the rise of Petersburg in the eighteenth century, Moscow became the centre of the ‘good life’ for the nobility. Pushkin said that it attracted ‘rascals and eccentrics’ - independent noblemen who ‘shunned the court and lived without a care, devoting all their passions to harmless scandal-mongering and hospitality’.28 Moscow was a capital without a court -and without a court to occupy themselves, its grandees gave themselves to sensual amusement. Moscow was famous for its restaurants and clubs, its sumptuous balls and entertainments - in sum, for everything that Petersburg was not. Petersburgers despised Moscow for its sinful idleness. ‘Moscow is an abyss of hedonistic pleasure’, wrote Nikolai Turgenev, a poet in the circle of the Decembrists. ‘All its people do is eat, drink, sleep, go to parties and play cards - and all at the expense of the suffering of their serfs.’29 Yet no one could deny its Russian character. ‘Moscow may be wild and dissolute’, wrote F. F. Vigel, ‘but there is no point in trying to change it. For there is a part of Moscow in us all, and no Russian can expunge Moscow.’30

    Moscow was the food capital of Russia. No other city could boast such a range of restaurants. There were high-class dining clubs like the Angleterre, where Levin and Oblonsky have their famous