Natasha's Dance

overarching themes. He felt ambivalent about Russia’s progress since the fall of Muscovy. He was sympathetic to the idealism of the Old Believers. He thought that only prayer could overcome the sadness and despair of life in Russia. And he held to the conviction that the Old Believers were the last ‘authentic Russians’, whose way of life had not yet been disturbed by European ways. Such ideas were widely held in the 1860s, not just by the Slavophiles, who idealized the patriarchy of old Muscovy, but by Populist historians such as Kostomarov and Shchapov, who wrote social histories of the schismatics, and by ethnographers who made studies of the Old Believers in Moscow. These views were shared by writers such as Dostoevsky - at that time a member of the ‘native soil’ movement (pocbvennichestvo), a sort of synthesis between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles which was immensely influential among writers and critics in the early 1860s. The character Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment has a name that means ‘schismatic’.

    The painter Vasily Surikov also focused on the history of the Old Believers to explore the clash between the people’s native customs and the modernizing state. His two great history paintings, The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy (1881) and The Boyar’s Wife Morozova (1884) (plate 7) are the visual counterparts of Khovanshchina. Surikov was closer to the Slavophiles than Musorgsky, whose mentor Stasov, despite his nationalism, was a confirmed Westernist. Surikov idealized Moscow as a ‘legendary realm of the authentic Russian way of life’.81 He was born in 1848 to a Cossack family in the Siberian town of Krasnoyarsk. Having graduated from the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, he settled down in Moscow, which made him ‘feel at home’ and inspired him to paint on historical themes. ‘When I first stepped out on to Red Square it evoked memories of home, and from that emerged the image of the Streltsy, right down to the composition and the colour scheme.’82 Surikov spent several years making ethnographic sketches of the Old Believers in the Rogozhskoe and Preobrazhenskoe areas of the city, where much of Moscow’s small trade, and about a third of its total population, was crammed into houses in the narrow winding streets. His idea was that history was depicted on the faces of these types. The Old Believers took a shine to him, Surikov recalled, ‘because

    I was the son of a Cossack and because I didn’t smoke’. They overlooked their traditional superstition that to paint a person was a sin, allowing Surikov to sketch them. All the faces in The Boyar’s Wife Morozova were drawn from living people in Moscow. Morozova herself was modelled on a pilgrim from Siberia. Hence Tolstoy, who was among the first to see the painting, was so full of praise for the crowd figures: ‘The artist has caught them splendidly! It is as if they are alive! One can almost hear the words they’re whispering.’83

    When they were exhibited in the 1880s Surikov’s two paintings were hailed by the democratic intelligentsia, who saw the Streltsy revolt and the stubborn self-defence of the Old Believers as a form of social protest against Church and state. The 1880s was a time of renewed political repression following the assassination of Alexander

    II by revolutionary terrorists in March 1881. The new Tsar, Alexander III, was a political reactionary who soon sacked his father’s liberal ministers and passed a series of decrees rolling back their reforms: new controls were imposed on local government; censorship was tightened; the personal rule of the Tsar was reasserted through his direct agents in the provinces; and a modern police state began to take shape. In this context the democrats had reason to regard the historical figures of Surikov’s paintings as a symbol of their opposition to the Tsarist state. Morozova, in particular, was seen as a popular martyr. This was how the artist had portrayed the famous widow, a scion of the wealthy Moscow boyar family and a major patron of the Old Belief at the time of the Nikonian reforms in the mid-seventeenth century. In Surikov’s huge painting (it stands several metres high) she is depicted on a sledge, being dragged towards her execution on Red Square, her hand extended upwards in the Old Believers’ two-fingered sign of the cross as a gesture of defiance against the state. Morozova appears as a woman of real character and dignity who is prepared to die for an idea. The emotion on her face was drawn directly from contemporary life. In 1881 the artist had been present at the public execution of a female revolutionary - another woman who had been prepared to die for her ideas - and he had been shocked by the ‘wild look’ on her face as she was marched to the gallows.84 History was alive on Moscow’s streets.

6

    Moscow grew into a great commercial centre in the nineteenth century. Within sixty years, the peaceful nest of gentlefolk Napoleon had found was transformed into a bustling metropolis of shops and offices, theatres and museums, with sprawling industrial suburbs that every year drew hordes of immigrants. By 1900, with 1 million people, Moscow was, along with New York, one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Three-quarters of its population had been born elsewhere.85 The railways held the key to Moscow’s growth. All the major lines converged on the city, the geographic centre between east and west, the agricultural south and the new industrial regions of the north. Financed mainly by Western companies, the railways opened new markets for Moscow’s trade and linked its industries with provincial sources of labour and raw materials. Thousands of commuters came in every day by train. The cheap boarding houses in the areas around the city’s nine main stations were always overcrowded with casual labourers from the countryside. Moscow, then, emerged as the metropolis of capitalist Russia - a position it still occupies today. Provincial towns like Tver, Kaluga and Riazan, all brought into Moscow’s orbit by the train, fell into decay as Moscow’s manufacturers sent their goods by rail directly to the local rural markets, and shoppers came themselves to buy in Moscow, where, even taking into account the cost of a third-class railway fare, prices still worked out cheaper than in district towns. Moscow’s rise was the demise of its own provincial satellites, which spelt ruin for those gentry farmers, like the Ranevskys in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, who depended on these towns as consumers of their grain. They were unprepared for the international market which the railways opened up. Chekhov’s play begins and ends with a train journey. The railway was a symbol of modernity: it brought in a new life and destroyed the old.*

    * It is interesting to compare Chekhov’s treatment of this symbol with Tolstoy’s. For Chekhov, who believed in progress through science and technology (he was, after all, a doctor), the railway was a force of good (for example, in the short story ‘Lights’) as well as bad (for example, in ‘My Life’). But for Tolstoy, a nobleman nostalgic for the simple country life, the railway was a force of destruction. The most important moments in the

    (continued)

    Moscow’s emergence as an economic giant was associated with its transition from a noble- to a merchant-dominated town. But so, too, was its cultural renaissance in the nineteenth century - a renaissance that made Moscow one of the most exciting cities in the world: as their wealth grew, Moscow’s leading merchants grabbed hold of the city’s government and patronized its arts.

    In the early nineteenth century Moscow’s trade was concentrated in the narrow winding streets of the Zamoskvoreche district, opposite the Kremlin on the Moscow river’s sleepy southern side. It was a world apart from the rest of Moscow, little touched by modern or European ways, with its patriarchal customs, its strict religious life and Old Beliefs, and its cloistered merchant houses built with their backs to the street. Belinsky called these homes ‘fortresses preparing for a siege, their windows shuttered and the gates firmly under lock and key. A knock starts a dog barking.’86 The appearance of the merchants, with their long kaftans and beards, was reminiscent of the peasantry, from which many of them had in fact emerged. The great Moscow textile dynasties - the Riabushinskys and the Tretiakovs, the Guchkovs, Alekseevs and the Vishniakovs - were all descended from serf forebears. For this reason, the Slavophiles idealized the merchants as the bearers of a purely Russian way of life. Slavophiles and merchants joined together in their opposition to free trade, fearing Western goods would swamp the home markets. Outraged by the foreign domination of the railways, they clubbed together to finance the first ‘Russian’ line, from Moscow to Sergiev Posad, in 1863. It was symbolic that its destination was a monastery, the hallowed shrine, indeed, of the Russian Church, and the spiritual centre of old Muscovy.

    The public image of the merchantry was fixed by the plays of Alexander Ostrovsky, himself a child of the Zamoskvoreche - his father had worked in the local judiciary, dealing mainly with the merchantry. After studying law at Moscow University, Ostrovsky

    (continued) tragedy of Anna Karenina are all connected with this metaphor: Anna’s first meeting with Vronsky at the Moscow station; Vronsky’s declaration of his love for her on the train to Petersburg; and her suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. Here was a symbol of modernity, of sexual liberation and adultery, that led unavoidably to death. All the more ironic and symbolic, then, that Tolstoy himself died in the stationmnster’s house at Astapovo (today ‘Lev Tolstoy’) on a dead end line to the south of Moscow.

    worked as a clerk in the civil courts, so he had direct experience of the scams and squabbles that filled his merchant plays. His first drama, A Family Affair (1849), was based on a case in the Moscow courts. It tells the depressing tale of a merchant called Bolshov. To escape his debts he pretends to be bankrupt by transferring all his