Natasha's Dance

were performed and understood in many different ways.

    To view a culture in this refracted way is to challenge the idea of a pure, organic or essential core. There was no ‘authentic’ Russian peasant dance of the sort imagined by Tolstoy and, like the melody to which Natasha dances, most of Russia’s ‘folk songs’ had in fact come

    from the towns.4 Other elements of the village culture Tolstoy pictured

    may have come to Russia from the Asiatic steppe - elements that had been imported by the Mongol horsemen who ruled Russia from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth century and then mostly settled down in Russia as tradesmen, pastoralists and agriculturalists. Natasha’s shawl was almost certainly a Persian one; and, although Russian peasant shawls were coming into fashion after 1812, their ornamental motifs were probably derived from oriental shawls. The balalaika was descended from the dombra, a similar guitar of Central Asian origin (it is still widely used in Kazakh music), which came to Russia in the sixteenth century.5 The Russian peasant dance tradition was itself derived from oriental forms, in the view of some folklorists in the nineteenth century. The Russians danced in lines or circles rather than in pairs, and the rhythmic movements were performed by the hands and shoulders as well as by the feet, with great importance being placed in female dancing on subtle doll-like gestures and the stillness of the head. Nothing could have been more different from the waltz Natasha danced with Prince Andrei at her first ball, and to mimic all these movements must have felt as strange to her as it no doubt appeared to her peasant audience. But if there is no ancient Russian culture to be excavated from this village scene, if much of any culture is imported from abroad, then there is a sense in which Natasha’s dance is an emblem of the view to be taken in this book: there is no quintessential national culture, only mythic images of it, like Natasha’s version of the peasant dance.

    It is not my aim to ‘deconstruct’ these myths; nor do I wish to claim, in the jargon used by academic cultural historians these days, that Russia’s nationhood was no more than an intellectual ‘construction’. There was a Russia that was real enough - a Russia that existed before ‘Russia’ or ‘European Russia’, or any other myths of the national identity. There was the historical Russia of ancient Muscovy, which had been very different from the West, before Peter the Great forced it to conform to European ways in the eighteenth century. During Tolstoy’s lifetime, this old Russia was still animated by the traditions of the Church, by the customs of the merchants and many of the gentry on the land, and by the empire’s 60 million peasants, scattered in half a million remote villages across the forests and the steppe, whose way of life remained little changed for centuries. It is the heartbeat of this

    Russia which reverberates in Natasha’s dancing scene. And it was surely not so fanciful for Tolstoy to imagine that there was a common sense which linked the young countess to every Russian woman and every Russian man. For, as this book will seek to demonstrate, there is a Russian temperament, a set of native customs and beliefs, something visceral, emotional, instinctive, passed on down the generations, which has helped to shape the personality and bind together the community. This elusive temperament has proved more lasting and more meaningful than any Russian state: it gave the people the spirit to survive the darkest moments of their history, and united those who fled from Soviet Russia after 1917. It is not my aim to deny this national consciousness, but rather to suggest that the apprehension of it was enshrined in myth. Forced to become Europeans, the educated classes had become so alienated from the old Russia, they had so long forgotten how to speak and act in a Russian way, that when, in Tolstoy’s age, they struggled to define themselves as ‘Russians’ once again, they were obliged to reinvent that nation through historical and artistic myths. They rediscovered their own ‘Russianness’ through literature and art, just as Natasha found her ‘Russianness’ through the rituals of the dance. Hence the purpose of this book is not simply to debunk these myths. It is rather to explore, and to set out to explain, the extraordinary power these myths had in shaping the Russian national consciousness.

    The major cultural movements of the nineteenth century were all organized around these fictive images of Russia’s nationhood: the Slavophiles, with their attendant myth of the ‘Russian soul’, of a natural Christianity among the peasantry, and their cult of Muscovy as the bearer of a truly ‘Russian’ way of life which they idealized and set out to promote as an alternative to the European culture adopted by the educated elites since the eighteenth century; the Westernizers, with their rival cult of St Petersburg, that ‘window on to the West’, with its classical ensembles built on marshland reclaimed from the sea - a symbol of their own progressive Enlightenment ambition to redraw Russia on a European grid; the Populists, who were not far from Tolstoy, with their notion of the peasant as a natural socialist whose village institutions would provide a model for the new society; and the

    Scythians, who saw Russia as an ‘elemental’ culture from the Asiatic

    steppe which, in the revolution yet to come, would sweep away the dead weight of European civilization and establish a new culture where man and nature, art and life, were one. These myths were more than just ‘constructions’ of a national identity. They all played a crucial role in shaping the ideas and allegiances of Russia’s politics, as well as in developing the notion of the self, from the most elevated forms of personal and national identity to the most quotidian matters of dress or food, or the type of language one used. The Slavophiles illustrate the point. Their idea of ‘Russia’ as a patriarchal family of homegrown Christian principles was the organizing kernel of a new political community in the middle decades of the nineteenth century which drew its members from the old provincial gentry, the Moscow merchants and intelligentsia, the priesthood and certain sections of the state bureaucracy. The mythic notion of Russia’s nationhood which brought these groups together had a lasting hold on the political imagination. As a political movement, it influenced the government’s position on free trade and foreign policy, and gentry attitudes towards the state and peasantry. As a broad cultural movement the Slavophiles adopted a

    certain style of speech and dress, distinct codes of social interaction and behaviour, a style of architecture and interior design, their own approach to literature and art. It was all bast shoes and homespun

    coats and beards, cabbage soup and kvas, folk-like wooden houses and brightly coloured churches with onion domes.

    In the Western imagination these cultural forms have all too often

    been perceived as ‘authentically Russian’. Yet that perception is a myth

    as well: the myth of exotic Russia. It is an image first exported by the

    Ballets Russes, with their own exoticized versions of Natasha’s dance,

    and then shaped by foreign writers such as Rilke, Thomas Mann and

    Virginia Woolf, who held up Dostoevsky as the greatest novelist and

    peddled their own versions of the ‘Russian soul’. If there is one myth

    which needs to be dispelled, it is this view of Russia as exotic and

    eslewhere. Russians have long complained that the Western public

    does not understand their culture, that Westerners see Russia from

    afar and do not want to know its inner subtleties, as they do with the

    culture of their own domain. Though based partly on resentment and

    wounded national pride, the complaint is not unjustified. We are

    inclined to consign Russia’s artists, writers and composers to the

    cultural ghetto of a ‘national school’ and to judge them, not as individuals, but by how far they conform to this stereotype. We expect the Russians to be ‘Russian’ - their art easily distinguished by its use of folk motifs, by onion domes, the sound of bells, and full of ‘Russian soul’. Nothing has done more to obscure a proper understanding of Russia and its central place in European culture between 1812 and 1917. The great cultural figures of the Russian tradition (Karamzin, Pushkin, Glinka, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Repin, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Chagall and Kandinsky, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Nabokov, Pasternak, Meyerhold and Eisenstein) were not simply ‘Russians’, they were Europeans too, and the two identities were intertwined and mutually dependent in a variety of ways. However hard they might have tried, it was impossible for Russians such as these to suppress either part of their identity.

    For European Russians, there were two very different modes of personal behaviour. In the salons and the ballrooms of St Petersburg, at court or in the theatre, they were very ‘comme il faut‘: they performed their European manners almost like actors on a public stage. Yet on another and perhaps unconscious plane and in the less formal spheres of private life, native Russian habits of behaviour prevailed. Natasha’s visit to her ‘Uncle’s‘ house describes one such switch: the way she is expected to behave at home, in the Rostov palace, or at the ball where she is presented to the Emperor, is a world apart from this village scene where her expressive nature is allowed free rein. It is evidently her gregarious enjoyment of such a relaxed