NATASHA

Radishchev was the first to argue that the nation's highest virtues were contained in the culture of its humblest folk. His proof for this was teeth. In his Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (1790) Radishchev recalls an encounter with a group of village women dressed up in their traditional costumes for a holiday - their broad smiles 'revealing rows of teeth whiter than the purest ivory'. The ladies of the aristocracy, who all had rotten teeth, would 'be driven mad by teeth like these':

Come hither, my dear Moscow and Petersburg ladies, look at their teeth and learn from them how they keep them white. They have no dentists. They do not scrape their teeth with brushes and powders every day. Stand mouth to mouth with any one of them you choose: not one of them will infect your lungs with her breath. While yours, yes yours may infect them with the germ - of a disease… I am afraid to say what disease.¹³³

6

In eighteenth-century panoramas of St Petersburg the open sky and space connect the city with a broader universe. Straight lines stretch to the distant horizon, beyond which, we are asked to imagine, lies the rest of Europe within easy reach. The projection of Russia into Europe had always been the raison d'etre of St Petersburg. It was not simply Peter's 'window on to Europe' - as Pushkin once described the capital - but an open doorway through which Europe entered Russia and the Russians made their entry to the world.

For Russia's educated elites Europe was more than a tourist destination. It was a cultural ideal, the spiritual source of their civilization, and to travel to it was to make a pilgrimage. Peter the Great was the model of the Russian traveller to the West in search of self-improvement and enlightenment. For the next two hundred years Russians followed Peter's journey to the West. The sons of the Petersburg nobility went to universities in Paris, Gottingen and Leipzig. The 'Gottingen soul' assigned by Pushkin to Lensky, the fashionable student in Eugene Onegin, became a sort of emblem of the European outlook shared by generations of Russian noblemen:

Vladimir Lensky, just returning From Gottingen with soulful yearning, Was in his prime - a handsome youth And poet filled with Kantian truth. From misty Germany our squire Had carried back the fruits of art: A freedom-loving, noble heart, A spirit strange but full of fire, An always bold, impassioned speech, And raven locks of shoulder reach.¹³⁴

All the pioneers of Russia's arts learned their crafts abroad: Tred-iakovsky, the country's first real poet, was sent by Peter to study at the University of Paris; Andrei Matveev and Mikhail Avramov, its first secular painters, were sent to France and Holland; and, as we have

seen, Berezovsky, Fomin and Bortnyansky learned their music in Italy. Mikhail Lomonosov, the nation's first outstanding scholar and scientist, studied chemistry at Marburg, before returning to help found Moscow University, which today bears his name. Pushkin once quipped that the polymath 'was our first university'.¹³⁵

The Grand Tour was a vital rite of passage for the aristocracy. The emancipation of the nobles from obligatory state service in 1762 had unleashed Russia's more ambitious and curious gentry on the world. Gaggles of Golitsyns and Gagarins went to Paris; Dashkovs and Demi-dovs arrived in droves in Vienna. But England was their favourite destination. It was the homeland of a prosperous and independent landed gentry, which the Russian nobles aspired to become. Their Anglomania was sometimes so extreme that it bordered on the denial of their own identity. 'Why was I not born an Englishwoman?' lamented Princess Dashkova, a frequent visitor to and admirer of England, who had sung its praises in her celebrated Journey of a Russian Noblewoman (177 5).¹³⁶ Russians flocked to the sceptred isle to educate themselves in the latest fashions and the designs of its fine houses, to acquire new techniques of estate management and landscape gardening, and to buy objets d'art, carriages and wigs and all the other necessary accoutrements of a civilized lifestyle.

The travel literature that accompanied this traffic played a vital role in shaping Russia's self-perception vis-a-vis the West. Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveller (1791-1801), the most influential of this genre, educated a whole generation in the values and ideas of European life. Karamzin left St Petersburg in May 1789. Then, travelling first through Poland, Germany and Switzerland, he entered revolutionary France in the following spring before returning via London to the Russian capital. Karamzin provided his readers with a panorama of the ideal European world. He described its monuments, its theatres and museums, celebrated writers and philosophers. His 'Europe' was a mythic realm which later travellers, whose first encounter with Europe had been through reading his work, would look for but never really find. The historian Mikhail Pogodin took the Letters with him when he went to Paris in 1839. Even the poet Mayakovsky responded to that city, in 1925, through the sentimental prism of Karamzin's work.¹³⁷ The Letters taught the Russians how to act and feel as culti-

vated Europeans. In his letters Karamzin portrayed himself as perfectly at ease, and accepted as an equal, in Europe's intellectual circles. He described relaxed conversations with Kant and Herder. He showed himself approaching Europe's cultural monuments, not as some barbaric Scythian, but as an urbane and cultivated man who was already familiar with them from books and paintings. The overall effect was to present Europe as something close to Russia, a civilization of which it was a part.

Yet Karamzin also managed to express the insecurity which all the Russians felt in their European self-identity. Everywhere he went he was constantly reminded of Russia's backward image in the European mind. On the road to Konigsberg two Germans were 'amazed to learn that a Russian could speak foreign languages'. In Leipzig the professors talked about the Russians as 'barbarians' and could not believe that they had any writers of their own. The French were even worse, combining a condescension towards the Russians as students of their culture with contempt for them as 'monkeys who know only how to imitate'.¹³⁸ At times such remarks provoked Karamzin to exaggerated claims for Russia's achievements. As he travelled around Europe, however, he came to the conclusion that its people had a way of thinking that was different from his own. Even after a century of reform, it seemed to him that perhaps the Russians had been Euro-peanized in no more than a superficial way. They had adopted Western manners and conventions. But European values and sensibilities had yet to penetrate their mental world.¹³⁹

Karamzin's doubts were shared by many educated Russians as they struggled to define their 'Europeanness'. In 1836 the philosopher Chaadaev was declared a lunatic for writing in despair that, while the Russians might be able to imitate the West, they were unable to internalize its essential moral values and ideas. Yet, as Herzen pointed out, Chaadaev had only said what every thinking Russian had felt for many years. These complex feelings of insecurity, of envy and resentment, towards Europe, still define the Russian national consciousness.

Five years before Karamzin set off on his travels, the writer and civil servant Denis Fonvizin had travelled with his wife through Germany and Italy. It was not their first trip to Europe. In 1777-8 they had

toured the spas of Germany and France looking for a cure for Fonvi-zin's migraines. On this occasion it was a stroke, which paralysed his arm and made him slur his speech, that compelled the writer to go abroad. Fonvizin took notes and wrote letters home with his observations on foreign life and the character of various nationalities. These Travel Letters were the first attempt by a Russian writer to define Russia's spiritual traditions as different from, and indeed superior to, those of the West.

Fonvizin did not set out as a nationalist. Fluent in several languages, he cut the figure of a St Petersburg cosmopolitan, with his fashionable dress and powdered wig. He was renowned for the sharpness of his tongue and his clever wit, which he put to good effect in his many satires against Gallomania. But if he was repelled by the trivialities and false conventions of high society, this had less to do with xenophobia than with his own feelings of social alienation and superiority. The truth was that Fonvizin was a bit of a misanthrope. Whether in Paris or St Petersburg, he nursed a contempt for the whole beau monde - a world in which he moved as a senior bureaucrat in the Foreign Ministry. In his early letters from abroad Fonvizin depicted all the nations as the same. 'I have seen,' he wrote from France in 1778, 'that in any land there is much more bad than good, that people are people everywhere, that intelligence is rare and idiots abound in every country, and that, in a word, our country is no worse than any other.' This stance of cultural relativism rested on the idea of enlightenment as the basis of an international