Natasha's Dance

exchanged or sold. The beautiful estate of Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, for example, exchanged hands over twenty times during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was lost in games of cards and drinking bouts, sold to different people at the same time, loaned and bartered, mortgaged and remortgaged, until after

    *Even as late as the nineteenth century noblemen of every rank, including counts and barons, were required to sign off their letters to the Tsar with the formulaic phrase ‘Your Humble Slave’.

    2. Seventeenth- century Muscovite costumes. Engraving, 1669

    years of legal wrangling to settle all the questions of its ownership, it was bought by the Volkonsky family in the 1760s and eventually passed down through his mother to the novelist Tolstoy.28 Because of this constant state of flux there was little real investment by the nobles in the land, no general movement to develop estates or erect palaces, and none of what took place in Western Europe from medieval times: the gradual concentration of a family domain in one locality, with property passed down from one generation to the next, and ties built up with the community.

    The cultural advancement of the Muscovite boyars was well behind that of the European nobles in the seventeenth century. Olearius considered them ‘among the barbarians… [with] crude opinions about the elevated natural sciences and arts’.29 Dr Collins complained that ‘they know not how to eat peas and carrots boiled but, like swine, eat them shells and all’.30 This backwardness was in part the result of the Mongol occupation of Russia from about 1230 to the middle of the fifteenth century. The Tatars left a profound trace on boyar customs

    and habits. For over three hundred years, the period of the Renaissance in the West, Russia was cut off from European civilization. The country which emerged from the Mongol period was far more inward-looking than it had been at the start of the thirteenth century, when Kievan Rus’, the loose confederation of principalities which constituted the first Russian state, had been intimately linked with Byzantium. The old princely families were undermined and made more servile to the state of Muscovy, whose economic and military power provided the key to Russia’s liberation from the Mongol khans. The Russian nobleman of the Muscovite era (c. 15 50-1700) was not a landed lord in the European sense. He was a servant of the Crown. In his material culture there was little to distinguish him from the common folk. He dressed like the merchant in the semi-oriental kaftan and fur coat. He ruled his family, like the merchant and the peasant, via the patriarchal customs of the Domostroi - the sixteenth-century manual that instructed Russians how to discipline their households with the Bible and the birch. The manners of the Russian nobleman were proverbially boorish. Even magnates such as Boris Sheremetev could behave at times like drunken louts. During Tsar Peter’s trip to England his entourage resided at the villa of the diarist John Evelyn at Sayes Court, Kent. The damage which they caused in their three-month stay was so extensive - lawns dug up, curtains torn, furniture destroyed, and family portraits used for target practice by the visitors - that Evelyn was obliged to present the Russian court with a large bill.31 The majority of the nobility could not read and many of them could not even add up simple sums.32 Little travelled or exposed to Europeans, who were forced to settle in a special suburb in Moscow, the nobleman mistrusted new or foreign ways. His life was regulated by the archaic rituals of the Church - its calendar arranged to count the years from the notional creation of the world (with the birth of Adam) in 5509 bc* With Peter’s reformation of society, the nobleman became the agency, and his palace the arena, of Russia’s introduction to European

    * Peter the Great introduced the Western (Julian) calendar in 1700. But by 1752 the rest of Europe had changed to the Gregorian calendar - thirteen days ahead of the Julian calendar (which remained in force in Russia until 1918). In terms of time, Imperial Russia always lagged behind the West.

    ways. His palace was much more than a noble residence, and his estate was far more than a noble pleasure ground or economic entity: it became its locality’s centre of civilization.

    Peter laid the basis of the modern absolutist (European) state when he turned all the nobles into servants of the Crown. The old boyar class had enjoyed certain rights and privileges that stemmed from its guardianship of the land and serfs - there had been a Boyars’ Council, or Duma, that had approved the Tsar’s decrees, until it was replaced by the Senate in 1711. But Peter’s new aristocracy was defined entirely by its position in the civil and military service, and its rights and privileges were set accordingly. Peter established a Table of Ranks that ordered the nobles according to their office (rather than their birth) and allowed commoners to be given noble status for their service to the state. This almost military ordering of the nobles had a deep and lasting effect on their way of life. As readers of Gogol will know, the Russian nobleman was obsessed by rank. Every rank (and there were fourteen in Peter’s Table) had its own uniform. The progression from white to black trousers, the switch from a red to a blue ribbon, from silver to gold thread, or the simple addition of a stripe, were ritual events of immense significance in the nobleman’s well-ordered life. Every rank had its own noble title and mode of address: ‘Your High Excellency’ for the top two ranks; ‘Your Excellency’ for those in ranks three and four; and so on down the scale. There was a strict and elaborate code of etiquette which set out how nobles of each rank should address the other ranks, or those older or younger than themselves. A senior nobleman writing to a younger nobleman could sign off his letter with simply his surname; but the younger nobleman, in his reply, was expected to add his title and rank to his surname, and failure to do so was considered an offence which could end in scandal and a duel.33 Etiquette further demanded that a nobleman in the civil service should pay his respects at a superior civil servant’s household on the namedays and the birthdays of his family, as well as on all religious holidays. At balls and public functions in St Petersburg it was considered a grave error if a young man remained seated while his elders stood. Hence at the theatre junior officers would remain standing in the slips in case a senior officer entered during the performance. Every officer was said to be on duty at all times. G. A. Rimsky-

    Korsakov (a distant forebear of the composer) was kicked out of the Guards in 1810 because at a dinner following a ball he loosened the top button of his uniform.34 Rank also carried considerable material privileges. Horses at post stations were allocated strictly according to the status of the travellers. At banquets food was served first to the higher-ranking guests, seated with the hosts at the top end of the Russian P(n)-shaped table, followed by the lower ranking at the bottom end. If the top end wanted second helpings, the bottom ends would not be served at all. Prince Potemkin once invited a minor nobleman to a banquet at his palace, where the guest was seated at the bottom end. Afterwards he asked him how he had enjoyed the meal. ‘Very much, Your Excellency,’ the guest replied. ‘I saw everything.’35

    The Sheremetevs rose very quickly to the top of this new social hierarchy. When Boris Sheremetev died in 1719, the Tsar told his widow that he would be ‘like a father’ to his children. Pyotr Sheremetev, his sole surviving son, was brought up at the court, where he became one of the few selected companions to the heir to the throne (Peter II).36 After a teenage career in the Guards, Sheremetev became a chamberlain to the Empress Anna, and then to the Empress Elizabeth. Under Catherine the Great, he became a senator and was the first elected Marshal of the Nobility. Unlike other court favourites, who rose and fell with the change of sovereign, Sheremetev remained in office for six consecutive reigns. His family connections, the protection he enjoyed from the influential courtier Prince Trubetskoi, and his links with Catherine’s diplomatic adviser Count Nikitza Panin, prevented him from being made a victim to the whim of any sovereign. He was one of Russia’s first noblemen to be independent in the European sense.

    The fantastic wealth of the Sheremetev clan had a lot to do with this new confidence. With land in excess of 800,000 hectares and more than 200,000 ‘census serfs’ (which meant perhaps a million actual serfs), by the time of Pyotr’s death in 1788, the Sheremetevs were, by some considerable distance, the biggest landowning family in the world. In monetary terms, with an annual income of around 630,000 roubles (Ј63,000) in the 1790s, they were just as powerful, and considerably richer than, the greatest English lords, the Dukes of Bedford and Devonshire, Earl Shelburne and the Marquess of Rockingham, all

    of whom had annual incomes of approximately Ј50,000.37 Like most noble fortunes, the Sheremetevs’ was derived in the main from enormous Imperial grants of land and serfs in reward for their service to the state. The richest dynasties of the aristocracy had all stood near the summit of the Tsarist state during its great territorial expansion between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries and had consequently been rewarded with lavish endowments of fertile land in the south of Russia and Ukraine. These were the Sheremetevs and the Stroganovs, the Demidovs and Davydovs, the Vorontsovs and Yusu-povs. Like a growing number of magnates in the eighteenth century, the Sheremetevs also made a killing out of trade. In that century the Russian economy grew at a fantastic rate, and as the owners of vast tracts of forest land, paper mills and factories, shops and other urban properties, the Sheremetevs earned huge profits from this growth. By the end of the eighteenth century the Sheremetevs were