NATASHA

night and see nanny praying by the door of our room, from where she could see the votive lamp. What fantastic fairy tales she told us when we went for a walk in the woods. They made me see the forest world anew, to love nature from a poetic point of view.'¹⁴³ The lost idyll of 'a Russian childhood', if ever it existed, was contained in these emotions, which remained associated with the image of the nanny in the adult memory. 'It may seem strange', wrote A. K. Chertkova (the wife of Tolstoy's secretary), 'but forty years have passed since our childhood, and our nanny still remains alive in my memory. The older I become, the clearer is the memory of childhood in my mind, and these recollections are so vivid that the past becomes the present and everything connected in my heart to the memory of my dear good little nanny becomes all the more precious.'¹⁴⁴

At the age of six or seven the noble child was transferred from the

care of a nanny to the supervision of a French or German tutor and then sent off to school. To be separated from one's nanny was to undergo a painful rite of passage from the world of childhood to that of youth and adulthood, as Guards officer Anatoly Vereshchagin recalled. When at the age of six he was told that he would be sent to school, he was 'frightened most of all by the thought of being separated from my nanny. I was so scared that I woke up crying in the night; I would call out for my nanny, and would plead with her not to leave me'.¹⁴⁵ The trauma was compounded by the fact that it entailed a transition from the female- regulated sphere of childhood play to the strict male domain of the tutor and the boarding school; from the Russian-speaking nursery to a house of discipline where the child was forced to speak French. The young and innocent would no longer be protected from the harsh rules of the adult world; he would suddenly be forced to put aside the language that had expressed his childhood feelings and adopt an alien one. To lose nanny was, in short, to be wrenched from one's own emotions as a child. But the separation could be just as difficult on the nanny's side:

Because Fevronia Stepanovna had always spoiled me endlessly, I became a cry-baby, and a proper coward, which I came to regret later when I joined the army. My nanny's influence paralysed the attempts of all my tutors to harden me and so I had to be sent away to boarding school. She found it difficult when I started to grow up and entered into the world of adult men. After cosseting me my whole childhood, she cried when I went swimming in the river with my elder brother and our tutor, or when I went riding, or when I first shot my father's gun. When, years later, as a young officer, I returned home, she got ready two rooms in the house for my return, but they looked like a nursery. Every day she would place two apples by my bed. It hurt her feelings that I had brought my batman home, since she thought it was her duty to serve me. She was shocked to discover that I smoked, and I did not have the heart to tell her that I drank as well. But the greatest shock was when I went to war to fight the Serbs. She tried to dissuade me from going and then, one evening, she said that she would come with me. We would live together in a little cottage and while I went to war she would clean the house and prepare the supper for the evening. Then on holidays we would spend the day together baking pies, as we had always done, and when the war was over we

would come back home with medals on my chest. I went to sleep peacefully that night, imagining that war was just as idyllic as she thought it was… Yet I needed nanny more than I had thought. When I was nine and our Swiss tutor first arrived, my father said that I had to share a room with my elder brother and this Mr Kaderli, moving out of the room I had shared with my nanny. It turned out that I was completely unable to undress or wash myself or even go to bed without my nanny's help. I did not know how to go to sleep without calling out for her, at least six times, to check that she was there. Getting dressed was just as hard. I had never put my own socks on.¹⁴⁶

It was not at all unusual for grown men and women to remain in frequent contact with their former nannies; indeed, for them to provide for them in their old age. Pushkin remained close to his old nanny, and he put her image into many of his works. In some ways she was his muse - a fact recognized by many of his friends, so that Prince Viazemsky, for example, signed off his letters to the poet with 'a deep bow of respect and gratitude to Rodionova!'¹⁴⁷ Pushkin loved his nanny more than anyone. Estranged from his own parents, he always called her 'Mama' and when she died, his was the grief of a son:

My friend in days devoid of good, My ageing and decrepit dove! Abandoned in a far-off wood, You still await me with your love. Beside the window in the hall, As if on watch, you sit and mourn, At times your knitting needles stall In hands now wrinkled and forlorn. Through long-deserted gates you peer Upon the dark and distant way: Forebodings, anguish, cares and fear Constrict your weary breast today.¹⁴⁸

Diaghilev, as well, was famously attached to his nanny. He had never known his mother, who had died when he was born. Nanny Dunia had been born a serf on the Yevreinov estate of his mother's family. She had nursed Diaghilev's mother before coming as part of

the dowry to his father's family in Perm. When Diaghilev moved as a student to St Petersburg, his nanny went with him and lived as a housekeeper in his flat. The famous Monday meetings of the 'World of Art' (Mir iskusstva) - the circle formed around the journal of that name from which the ideas of the Ballets Russes emerged - were all held in Diaghilev's apartment, where Nanny Dunia presided like a hostess near the samovar.¹⁴⁹ The painter Leon Bakst, a regular attender of these meetings, immortalized her image in his famous 1906 portrait of Diaghilev (plate 13).

The nanny was an almost sacred figure in that cult of childhood which the Russian gentry made its own. No other culture has been so sentimental or quite so obsessed about childhood. Where else can one find so many memoirs where the first few years of the writer's life were given so much space? Herzen's, Nabokov's and Prokofiev's - all of them inclined to linger far too long in the nursery of their memory. The essence of this cult was a hypertrophied sense of loss - loss of the ancestral home, loss of the mother or the nanny's tender care, loss of the peasant, child-like Russia contained in fairy tales. Little wonder, then, that the cultural elites became so fixated on folklore - for it took them back to their happy childhoods, to the days when they had listened to their nannies' tales on woodland walks and the nights when they had been sung off to sleep with lullabies. Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1852-7), Aksakov's Childhood Years (1856), Herzen's Past and Thoughts (1852-68), Nabokov's Speak, Memory (1947) - this is the canon of a literary cult that reinvented childhood as a blissful and enchanted realm:

Happy, happy, irrecoverable days of childhood! How can one fail to love and cherish its memories? Those memories refresh and elevate my soul and are the source of my greatest delight.¹⁵⁰

The way these Russians wrote about their childhood was extraordi-nary, too. They all summoned up a legendary world (Aksakov's memoirs were deliberately structured as a fairy tale), mixing myth and memory, as if they were not content to recollect their childhood, but felt a deeper need to retrieve it, even if that meant reinventing it. This same yearning to recover what Nabokov termed 'the legendary Russia

of my boyhood' can be felt in Benois and Stravinsky's Petrusbka (1911). This ballet expressed their shared nostalgia for the sounds and colours which they both recalled from the fairgrounds of their St Petersburg childhoods. And it can be felt in the musical childhood fantasies of Prokofiev, from The Ugly Duckling for voice and piano (1914) to the 'symphonic fairy tale' Peter and the Wolf (1936), which were inspired by the bedtime tales he had heard as a small boy.

6

'Oh please, Nurse, tell me again how the French came to Moscow.' Thus Herzen starts his sublime memoir My Past and Thoughts, one of the greatest works of Russian literature. Born in 1812, Herzen had a special fondness for his nanny's stories of that year. His family had been forced to flee the flames that engulfed Moscow, the young Herzen carried out in his mother's arms, and it was only through a safe conduct from Napoleon himself that they managed to escape to their Yaroslav estate. Herzen felt great 'pride and pleasure at [having] taken part in the Great War'. The story of his childhood merged with the national drama he so loved to hear: 'Tales of the fire of Moscow, of the battle of Borodino, of the Berezina, of the taking of Paris were my cradle songs, my nursery stories, my Iliad and my Odyssey.'¹⁵¹ For Herzen's generation, the myths of 1812 were intimately linked with their childhood memories. Even in the 1850s children were still brought up on the legends of that year.¹⁵² History, myth and memory were intertwined. For the historian Nikolai