Natasha's Dance

make a swarm of minute Flames in the midst of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.27

    There is also reason to suppose that the shamanistic cults of the Mongol tribes were incorporated in the Russian peasant faith, as

    Kandinsky and his fellow anthropologists had argued at the end of the nineteenth century (although it is telling that they found no trace of the Muslim religion which the Golden Horde adopted in the fourteenth century).* Many of the peasant sects, the ‘Wailers’ and the ‘Jumpers’, for example, used techniques that were highly reminiscent of the Asian shamans’ to reach a trance-like state of religious ecstasy.28

    The Holy Fool (yurodivyi) was probably descended from the Asian shamans, too, despite his image as the quintessential ‘Russian type’ in many works of art. It is difficult to say where the Holy Fools came from. There was certainly no school for Holy Fools and, like Rasputin (who was in his way a sort of Holy Fool), they seem to have emerged as simple men, with their own techniques of prophecy and healing, which enabled them to set out on their life of religious wandering. In Russian folklore, the ‘fool for the sake of Christ’, or Holy Fool for short, held the status of a saint - though he acted more like an idiot or madman than the self-denying martyr demanded by St Paul. Widely deemed to be clairvoyant and a sorcerer, the Holy Fool dressed in bizarre clothes, with an iron cap or harness on his head and chains beneath his shirt. He wandered as a poor man round the countryside, living off the alms of the villagers, who generally believed in his supernatural powers of divination and healing. He was frequently received and given food and lodgings in the households of the provincial aristocracy.

    The Tolstoy family retained the services of a Holy Fool at Yasnaya Polyana. In his semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical Childhood, Tolstoy recounts a memorable scene in which the children of the household hide in a dark cupboard in Fool Grisha’s room to catch a glimpse of his chains when he goes to bed:

    Almost immediately Grisha arrived with his soft tread. In one hand he had

    his staff, in the other a tallow candle in a brass candlestick. We held our breaths.

    ’Lord Jesus Christ! Most Holy Mother of God! To the Father, the Son and

    the Holy Ghost…’ he kept saying, drawing the air into his lungs and speaking

    * Long after shamanism became fashionable, the Muslim impact on Russian culture remained taboo. Even in St Petersburg, a city founded on the principle of religious tolerance, there was no mosque until 1909.

    with the different intonations and abbreviations peculiar to those who often repeat these words.

    With a prayer he placed his staff in a corner of the room and inspected his bed; after which he began to undress. Unfastening his old black girdle, he slowly divested himself of his tattered nankeen coat, folded it carefully and hung it over the back of a chair… His movements were deliberate and thoughtful.

    Clad only in his shirt and undergarment he gently lowered himself on the bed, made the sign of the cross all round it, and with an effort (for he frowned) adjusted the chains beneath his shirt. After sitting there for a while and anxiously examining several tears in his linen he got up and, lifting the candle with a prayer to the level of the glass case where there were some icons, he crossed himself before them and turned the candle upside down. It spluttered and went out.

    An almost full moon shone in through the windows which looked towards the forest. The long white figure of the fool was lit up on one side by its pale silvery rays; from the other its dark shadow, in company with the shadow from the window-frames, fell on the floor, on the walls and up to the ceiling. Outside in the courtyard the watchman was striking on his iron panel.

    Folding his huge hands on his breast, Grisha stood in silence with bowed head before the icons, breathing heavily all the while. Then with difficulty he sank to his knees and began to pray.

    At first he softly recited familiar prayers, only emphasizing certain words; then he repeated them, but louder and with much animation. Then he began to pray in his own words, making an evident effort to express himself in Church Slavonic. Though incoherent, his words were touching. He prayed for all his benefactors (as he called those who received him hospitably), among them for our mother and us; he prayed for himself, asking God to forgive him his grievous sins, and he kept repeating: ‘Oh God, forgive my enemies!’ He rose to his feet with a groan and repeating the same words again and again, fell to the floor and again got up despite the weight of his chains, which knocked against the floor every time with a dry harsh sound…

    For a long time Grisha continued in this state of religious ecstasy, improvising prayers. Now he would repeat several times in succession Lord, have mercy but each time with renewed force and expression. Then he prayed Forgive me, O Lord teach me how to live… teach me how to live, O Lord so feelingly that he might be expecting an immediate answer to his petition.

    The piteous sobs were all that we could hear… He rose to his knees, folded his hands on his breast and was silent.29

    Writers and artists portrayed the Holy Fool as an archetype of the simple Russian believer. In Pushkin’s and in Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov the Holy Fool appears as the Tsar’s conscience and as the voice of the suffering people. Prince Myshkin, the epileptic, Christ-like hero of The Idiot, is called a Holy Fool by the rich landowner Rogo-zhin; and Dostoevsky clearly wanted to create in him a genuinely Christian individual who, like the Holy Fool, is driven to the margins of society. In his painting In Russia (1916) Mikhail Nesterov portrayed the Holy Fool as the unofficial spiritual leader of the Russian people. Yet the Fool’s untutored and largely improvised sacraments probably owed more to the Asian shamans than they did to the Russian Church. Like a shaman, the Holy Fool performed a sort of whirling dance with strange shrieks and cries to enter into a state of religious ecstasy; he used a drum and bells in his magic rituals; and he wore his chains in the belief, which was shared by Asian shamans, that iron had a supernatural quality. Like a shaman, too, the Holy Fool frequently employed the image of the raven in his rituals - a bird with a magic and subversive status in Russian folklore. Throughout the nineteenth century the peasants of the Volga region saw the Cossack rebel leaders Pugachev and Razin in the form of giant ravens in the sky.30

    Many common elements of Russian clothing were also Asiatic in their origins - a fact reflected in the Turkic derivation of the Russian words for clothes like kaftan, zipun (a light coat), armiak (heavy coat), sarafan and khalat.31Even the Tsar’s crown or Cap of Monomakh -by legend handed down from Byzantium - was probably of Tatar origin.32 The food of Russia, too, was deeply influenced by the cultures of the East, with many basic Russian dishes, such as plov (pilaff), lapsha (noodles) and tvorog (curd cheese) imported from the Caucasus and Central Asia, and other eating habits, like the Russian taste for horsemeat and koumis (fermented mare’s milk) no doubt handed down from the Mongol tribes. In contrast to the Christian West and most Buddhist cultures of the East, there was no religious sanction against eating horsemeat in Russia. Like the Mongol tribes, the Russians even bred a type of horse specifically to eat or (in the Volga region) to

    milk for koumis. Such practices were practically unknown in western Europe - at least until the nineteenth century, when French social reformers began to advocate the eating of horsemeat as a solution to the problems of poverty and malnutrition. But even then there was something of a stigma attached to eating horses. The practice of breeding horses for meat was regarded as barbaric in the West.33

    All the major tribes of Central Asia - the Kazakhs, the Uzbeks, the Kalmyks and Kirghiz - were offshoots of the Golden Horde. With the dissolution of the Horde in the fifteenth century, they had remained on the Russian steppe and became the allies or the subjects of the Tsar. The ancestors of the Kazakhs - Islamic-Turkic Mongols - left the Golden Horde in the fifteenth century. Gradually they became closer to the Russians as they were forced out of the richest steppeland pastures by their rival tribes, the Dzhungars and the Uzbeks. The Uzbeks also came out of the Horde in the fifteenth century. They settled down to an agricultural life on the fertile plain of Ferghana, inheriting the riches of the old Iranian oasis towns between the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers (the heritage of Tamerlane), on which basis they went on to found the Uzbek states of Bukhara, Khiva and Khokand and established trade relations with the Tsar. As for the Kalmyks, they were western Mongols (Oirats) who had left the Mongol army and stayed put on the steppe when the Golden Horde dissolved (the Turkic verb kalmak - from which the Kalmyks get their name - means ‘to stay’). Driven west by other tribes, they settled with their herds near Astrakhan on the northern Caspian shores and became the main suppliers of the Russian cavalry, driving 50,000 horses every year to Moscow until the trade declined in the eighteenth century.34 Russian settlers drove the Kalmyks off the Volga steppe in the early decades