NATASHA

Moscow's semi-oriental nature was given full expression in the so-called neo-Byzantine style of architecture that dominated its reconstruction in the 1830s and 1840s. The term is misleading, for the architecture was in fact quite eclectic, mixing elements of the neo-Gothic and medieval Russian styles with Byzantine and classical motifs. The term was fostered by Nicholas I and his ideologists to signal Russia's cultural turning away from the West in the wake of the suppression of the Decembrists. The Tsar sympathized with a Slavophile world view that associated Russia with the eastern traditions of Byzantium. Churches like the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, with its onion domes and belltowers, its tent roofs and kokoshnik pediments, combined elements of the Greek-Byzantine and medieval Russian styles. With buildings such as this, Moscow's rebirth was soon mythologized as a national renaissance, a conscious rejection of the European culture of St Petersburg in favour of a return to the ancient native traditions of Muscovy.

The opposition between Moscow and St Petersburg was fundamental to the ideological arguments between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles about Russia's cultural destiny. The Westernizers held up Petersburg as the model of their Europe-led ideas for Russia, while the Slavophiles idealized Moscow as a centre of the ancient Russian way of life. The Slavophile ideal of a spiritual community united by homegrown Russian customs seemed to be embodied in the medieval contours of the town - the Kremlin walls so firmly rooted to the ground that they seemed to grow from it. The city's tightly knit communities, its homely character, symbolized the familial spirit of old Rus'.

Moscow's mythic self-image was all about its 'Russian character'.

The Moscow way of life was more provincial, it was closer to the habits of the Russian people than the gentry's way of life in Petersburg. Moscow's palaces resembled small estates. They were spacious and expansive, built for entertaining on a massive scale, with large central courtyards that functioned as farms, with pens for cows and poultry, vegetable allotments, sheds for storing produce brought in from the country for the winter months and, in some of the larger mansions, like Zinaida Volkonsky's on the Tver Boulevard, extensive greenhouses for growing exotic winter fruits.* The poet Batiushkov has left a good description of the old-world country atmosphere in a Moscow noble house:

The mansion is built around a big courtyard which is full of litter and firewood; behind there is a garden with vegetables, and at the front a large porch with rails, as they used to have at the country houses of our grandfathers. Entering the house, you will come across the doorman playing cards - he plays from morning until night. The rooms are without wallpaper - the walls are covered in large portraits, on one side with heads of Russian Tsars, and on the other Judith holding the severed head of Holofernes on a large silver dish, and a naked Cleopatra with a snake: marvellous creations by the hand of a domestic servant. We see the table laid with bowls of cabbage soup, sweet pea porridge, baked mushrooms and bottles of kvas. The host is dressed in a sheepskin coat, the hostess in a coat; on the right side of the table are the parish priest, the parish teacher and the Holy Fool; on the left - a crowd of children, the old witchdoctor, a French madame and a German tutor.¹⁴

The interior of the Moscow palace was arranged for private comfort rather than public display. 'All the rooms are furnished with rich carpets,' remarked Batiushkov, 'with mirrors, chandeliers, armchairs and divans - everything designed to make one feel at home.'¹⁵ The Moscow mansion was cosy and domestic, almost bourgeois, by comparison with the more formal palaces of Petersburg. The Empire style, which in Petersburg was principally expressed in a grandiose public architecture, manifested itself in Moscow in the opulence of the orna-

* The ground floor of the Volkonsky (Beloselsky) house was later taken over by the Eliseev shop, the 'Russian Fortnum and Mason', which remains there today.

merit and furnishing of private noble space.¹⁶ The Moscow mansion of the Sheremetev clan, the Staraya Vozdizhenka, had no formal reception rooms as such. The living rooms were cluttered with furniture, plants and ornaments, and the walls all covered with family portraits and icons with their votive lamps.¹⁷ This was where the Muscovite love of comfort met the Victorian aesthetics of the European middle class. The Sheremetevs called their Moscow house the 'family refuge'. Owning as they did their most ancient lands in the Moscow region (including the estate that is occupied today by the city's main airport at Sheremetevo), they thought of the old city as their home. 'All our family traditions, all our historical connections to Russia, drew me back to Moscow,' recalled Sergei Sheremetev, the grandson of Nikolai Petrovich, 'and every time I returned to Moscow I felt spiritually renewed.'¹⁸

Sergei's feeling was a common one. Many Russians felt that Moscow was a place where they could be more 'Russian', more at ease with themselves. Here was a city that reflected their spontaneous and relaxed character. One that shared their love of the good life. 'Petersburg is our head, Moscow is our heart', went a Russian proverb. Gogol drew the contrast in another way:

Petersburg is an accurate, punctual kind of person, a perfect German, and he looks at everything in a calculated way. Before he gives a party, he will look into his accounts. Moscow is a Russian nobleman, and if he's going to have a good time, he'll go all the way until he drops, and he won't worry about how much he's got in his pockets. Moscow does not like halfway measures… Petersburg likes to tease Moscow for his awkwardness and lack of taste. Moscow reproaches Petersburg because he doesn't know how to speak Russian… Russia needs Moscow, Petersburg needs Russia.¹⁹

2

The idea of Moscow as a 'Russian' city developed from the notion of St Petersburg as a foreign civilization. The literary conception of St Petersburg as an alien and an artificial place became commonplace after 1812, as the romantic yearning for a more authentically national way of life seized hold of the literary imagination. But the foreign

character of Petersburg had always been a part of its popular mythology. From the moment it was built, traditionalists attacked it for its European ways. Among the Old Believers, the Cossacks and the peasants, rumours spread that Peter was a German, and not the real Tsar, largely on account of the foreigners he had brought to Petersburg and the attendant evils of European dress, tobacco, and the shaving-off of beards. By the middle of the eighteenth century there was a thriving underground mythology of tales and rumours about Petersburg. Stories abounded of the ghost of Peter walking through the streets, of weird mythic beasts hopping over churches, or of all-destroying floods washing up the skeletons of those who had perished in the building of the town.²⁰ This oral genre later nourished in the literary salons of St Petersburg and Moscow, where writers such as Pushkin and Odoev-sky used it as the basis of their own ghost stories from the capital. And so the myth of Petersburg took shape - an unreal city that was alien to Russia, a supernatural realm of fantasies and ghosts, a kingdom of oppression and apocalypse.

Pushkin's Bronze Horseman - subtitled a 'Tale of Petersburg' - was the founding text of this literary myth. The poem was inspired by Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter the Great which stands on Senate Square as the city's genus loci. Like the poem that would make it so famous, the statue symbolized the dangerous underpinning of the capital's imperial grandeur - on the one hand trumpeting Peter's dazzling achievements in surpassing nature and, on the other, leaving it unclear to what extent he actually controlled the horse. Was he about to fall or soar up into space? Was he urging his mount on or trying to restrain it in the face of some catastrophe? The horseman seemed to teeter on the edge of an abyss, held back only by the taut reins of his steed.²¹ The huge granite rock - so wild in its appearance - on which the statue stood, was itself an emblem of the tragic struggle between man and nature. The city hewn in stone is never wholly safe from the incursions of the watery chaos from which it was claimed, and this sense of living on the edge was wonderfully conveyed by Falconet.

In 1909 a technical commission inspected the statue. Engineers bored holes into the bronze. They had to pump out 1,500 litres of water from inside.²² Without protective dikes, flooding was a constant threat to Petersburg. Pushkin set his poem in 1824, the year of one

10. Etienne-Maurice Falconet: The Bronze Horseman. Monument to Peter the Great, 1782

such flood. The Bronze Horseman tells the story of the flood and a sad clerk called