NATASHA

understand

that in the eyes of grown-up people they are children, while in the eyes of servants they are people. Consequently they are much fonder of playing cards or lotto with the maids than with visitors. Visitors play for the children's benefit with condescension. They give way to them, tease them, and stop playing whenever they feel like it; the maids, as a rule, play as much for their own sakes as for the children's, and that gives the game interest. Servants are extremely devoted to children, and this is not the devotion of a slave, but the mutual affection of the weak and the simple.¹³³

Writing as a socialist, Herzen put down his 'hatred of oppression' to the 'mutual alliance' he had formed with the servants as a child against the senior members of the house. He recalled: 'At times, when I was a child, Vera Artamonovna [his nanny] would say by way of the greatest rebuke for some naughtiness: 'Wait a bit, you will grow up and turn into just such another master as the rest.' I felt this a horrible insult. The old woman need not have worried herself - just such another as the rest, anyway, I have not become.'¹'⁴ Much of this, of course, was written for effect; it made for a good story. Yet other writers similarly claimed that their populist convictions had been formed by their childhood contacts with the serfs.¹³⁵

The high-born Russian boy spent his childhood in the downstairs servants' world. He was cared for by his serf nanny, who slept by his side in the nursery, held him when he cried, and in many cases became like a mother to him. Everywhere he went he was accompanied by his serf 'uncle'. Even when he went to school or enrolled in the army this trusted servant would act as his guardian. Young girls, too, were chaperoned by a 'shaggy footman' - so- called on account of the fur coat he wore over the top of his livery - like the one imagined as 'a huge and matted bear' in Tatiana's dream in Eugene Onegin:

She dare not look to see behind her, And ever faster on she reels; At every turn he seems to find her, The shaggy footman at her heels!…¹³⁶

By necessity the children of the servants were the playmates of the high-born child - for in the countryside there would not be other

children of a similar social class for miles around. Like many nineteenth-century memoirists, Anna Lelong had fond memories of the games she played with the village girls and boys: throwing games with blocks of wood (gorodki); bat-and-ball games played with bones and bits of scrap metal (babki and its many variants); clapping-singing-dancing games; and divination games. In the summer she would go swimming with the village children in the river, or she would be taken by her nanny to the villages to play with the younger children as their mothers threshed the rye. Later, in the autumn, she would join the village girls to pick whortleberries and make jam. She loved these moments when she was allowed to enter the peasant world. The fact that it was forbidden by her parents, and that her nanny made her promise not to tell, made it even more exciting for the girl. In the pantry was an atmosphere of warmth and intimacy that was missing in her parents' drawing room. 'I would get up very early and go into the maids' room where they were already at their spinning wheels, and nanny would be knitting socks. I would listen to the stories about peasants being sold, about young boys sent to Moscow or girls married off. There was nothing like this in my parents' house.' Listening to such stories, she 'began to understand what serfdom meant and it made me wish that life was different'.¹³⁷

Herzen wrote that there existed 'a feudal bond of affection' between the noble family and its household serfs.¹³⁸ We have lost sight of this bond in the histories of oppression that have shaped our views of serfdom since 1917. But it can be found in the childhood memoirs of the aristocracy; it lives on in every page of nineteenth-century literature; and its spirit can be felt in Russian paintings - none more lyrical than Venetsianov's Morning of the Lady of the Manor (1823) (plate 3).

Of all the household servants, those associated with childcare (the maid, the wet nurse and the nanny) were the closest to the family. They formed a special caste that died out suddenly after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. They were set apart from the other serfs by their fierce devotion and, hard though it may be to understand today, many of them derived all their joy from serving the family. Given special rooms in the main house and treated, on the whole, with kindness and respect, such women became part of the family and many were kept on and provided for long after they had ceased to work. The nostalgia

7. A wet nurse in traditional Russian dress. Early-twentieth-century photograph

of the nobleman for his childhood was associated with the warmth and tenderness of his relationship with these people.

The wet nurse was a particularly important figure in the Russian noble family. Russians continued to employ a peasant wet nurse long after it had become the conventional wisdom in the rest of Europe for mothers to breastfeed their own infants. Child-rearing handbooks of the early nineteenth century were overtly nationalist in their defence

of this habit, claiming that the 'milk of a peasant girl can give lifelong health and moral purity to the noble child'.¹³⁹ It was common for the wet nurse to be dressed, and sometimes even painted, in traditional Russian dress - a custom that continued in many families until the revolution of 1917.* Ivan Argunov, the Sheremetevs' artist, depicted several 'unknown peasant girls' who were most probably wet nurses. The fact that a girl like this should become the subject of a portrait painting, commissioned for display in her owner's house, in itself speaks volumes about her position in the culture of the Russian aristocracy. Pavel Sumarokov, recalling daily life among the nobility in the eighteenth century, said that the wet nurse was given pride of place among all the domestic staff. The family would call her by her name and patronymic rather than by the nickname that was given to most serfs. She was also the only servant who was allowed to remain seated in the presence of the mistress or the master of the house.¹⁴⁰ Noble memoirs from the nineteenth century are filled with descriptions of the family's affection for their old wet nurse, who was likely to be treated as a much-loved member of the family and provided with living quarters until she died. Anna Lelong loved her nurse Vasilisia 'more than anyone', and parting from her, as she had to do when she left home to get married, caused her 'dreadful grief. The intimacy of their relationship, which was 'like that of a mother and a daughter', stemmed from the death of the nurse's infant son. Because of her duties to nurse Anna, she had been obliged to abandon him. Guilt and surrogacy became intertwined, for both Anna and her nurse. Later on, when Anna's husband died, she took it upon herself to care for her old nurse, who came to live with her at the family estate.¹⁴¹

But it was the nanny who was closest to the heart of the noble child.

' The artist Dobuzhinsky described the spectacular appearance of the traditional wet nurse on the streets of Petersburg before 1917: 'She had a kind of 'parade uniform', a pseudo-peasant costume, theatrically designed, which was worn right up to the outbreak of the war in 1914. One often saw a fat, red-cheeked wet nurse walking beside her fashionably dressed mistress. She would be dressed in a brocade blouse and cape, and a pink head-dress if the baby was a girl, or a blue one if it was a boy. In the

summer the wet nurses used to wear coloured sarafans with lots of small gold or glass

buttons and muslin balloon sleeves'. (M. V. Dobuzhinskii vospominaniia (New York, 1976, p. 34.)

The stereotype of the old-fashioned nanny - the sort that appears in countless works of art from Eugene Onegin to Boris Godunov -was a simple and kind- hearted Russian peasant woman who got the children up, supervised their play, took them out for walks, fed them, washed them, told them fairy tales, sang them songs and comforted them at night when they woke up with nightmares. More than a surrogate mother, the nanny was the child's main source of love and emotional security. 'Simply and unthinkingly,' reminisced one woman of her noble childhood, 'I imbibed the life-giving fluids of love from my nanny, and they keep me going even now. How many loyal and loving Russian nannies have guarded and inspired the lives of their children, leaving an indelible impression upon them.'¹⁴²

Such indeed was the lasting influence of the nanny's tender care that many nineteenth-century memoirists became obsessed with the nostalgic topic of their nursery years. This was not some arrested development. Rather it was a reflection of the fact that their primary emotions were locked up in that distant chamber of their past. Time and time again these memoirists stress that it was their nanny who taught them how to love and how to live. For some, the key was their nanny's innate kindness, which awoke their moral sensibilities; for others, it was her religious faith, which brought them into contact with the spiritual world. 'How wonderful was our nanny!' Lelong recalled. 'She was intelligent and always serious, and she was very devout; I would often wake up in the nursery at