NATASHA

restored in the1850sby Fedor Solntsev in the seventeenth-century Muscovite

style, complete with tiled ovens and kokoshnik- shapedarches. Below: Vasily

Surikov: The Boyar's Wife Morozova (1884). The faces were all drawn by

Surikov from Old Believers living in Moscow.

The Faberge Workshop in Moscow crafted objects in a Russian style that was very different from the Classical and Rococo jewels it made in Petersburg. Above: Imperial Presentation Kovsh (an ancient type of ladle) in green nephrite, gold, enamel and diamonds, presented by the Tsar Nicholas II to the French Ambassador in 1906. Below: Silversiren vase by Sergei Vashkov (1908). The female bird wears a kokoshnik and her

wings are set with tourmalines.

THE ARTIST AND THE PEOPLE'S

CAUSE. Ilya Repin's Portrait of Vladimir Stasov (1873), the nationalist critic whose dogmatic views on the need for art to engage with the people were a towering and, at times, oppressive influence on Musorgsky and Repin. 'What a picture of the Master you have made!' the composer wrote. 'He seems to crawl out of the canvas and into the room.' Below: Repin: The Volga Barge Haulers (1873,). Stasov saw the painting as a commen- tary on the latent force of social protest in the Russian people. Opposite: Ivan Kramskoi: The Peasant Ignatii Pirogov (1874) - a startlingly ethnographic portrait of the peasant as an individual human being.

Leon Bakst: Portrait of Diaghilev with his Nanny (1906). Diaghilev had never known his mother, who had died when he was born.

Writers, too, immersed themselves in peasant life. In the words of Saltykov-Shchedrin, the peasant had become 'the hero of our time'.⁹ The literary image of the Russian peasant in the early nineteenth century was by and large a sentimental one: he was a stock character with human feelings rather than a thinking individual. Everything changed in 1852, with the publication of Turgenev's masterpiece, Sketches from a Hunter's Album. Here, for the first time in Russian literature, readers were confronted with the image of the peasant as a rational human being, as opposed to the sentient victim depicted in previous sentimental literature. Turgenev portrayed the peasant as a person capable of both practical administration and lofty dreams. He felt a profound sympathy for the Russian serf. His mother, who had owned the large estate in Orel province where he grew up, was cruel and ruthless in punishing her serfs. She had them beaten or sent off to a penal colony in Siberia - often for some minor crime. Turgenev describes her regime in his terrifying story 'Punin and Barburin' (1874), and also in the unforgettable 'Mumu' (1852), where the princess has a serf's dog shot because it barks. Sketches from a Hunter's Album played a crucial role in changing public attitudes towards the serfs and the question of reform. Turgenev later said that the proudest moment in his life came shortly after 1861, when two peasants approached him on a train from Orel to Moscow and bowed down to the ground in the Russian manner to 'thank him in the name of the whole people'.¹⁰

Of all those writing about peasants, none was more inspiring to

the Populists than Nikolai Nekrasov. Nekrasov's poetry gave a new, authentic voice to the 'vengeance and the sorrow' of the peasantry. It was most intensely heard in his epic poem Who Is Happy in Russia? (1863-78), which became a holy chant among the Populists. What attracted them to Nekrasov's poetry was not just its commitment to

the people's cause, but its angry condemnation of the gentry class, from which Nekrasov himself came. His verse was littered with colloquial expressions that were taken directly from peasant speech. Poems such as On the Road (1844) or The Peddlers (1861) were practically tran-scriptions of peasant dialogue. The men of the forties, such as Turg-enev, who were brought up to regard the language of the peasants as too coarse to be 'art', accused Nekrasov of launching an 'assault on poetry'.¹¹ But the students were inspired by his verse.

The question of the peasant may have been the question of the day. But every answer was a myth. As Dostoevsky wrote:

The question of the people and our view of them… is our most important question, a question on which our whole future rests… But the people are still a theory for us and they still stand before us as a riddle. We, the lovers of the people, regard them as part of a theory, and it seems not one of us loves them as they really are but only as each of us imagines them to be. And should the Russian people turn out not as we imagined them, then we, despite our love of them, would at once renounce them without regret.¹²

Each theory ascribed certain virtues to the peasant which it then took as the essence of the national character. For the Populists, the peasant was a natural socialist, the embodiment of the collective spirit that distinguished Russia from the bourgeois West. Democrats like Herzen saw the peasant as a champion of liberty - his wildness embodying the spirit of the Russia that was free. The Slavophiles regarded him as a Russian patriot, suffering and patient, a humble follower of truth and justice, like the folk hero Ilia Muromets. They argued that the peasant commune was a living proof that Russia need not look beyond its national borders for guiding moral principles. 'A commune,' declared one of the movement's founding members, Konstantin Aksakov, 'is a union of the people who have renounced their egoism, their individuality, and who express their common accord; this is an act of love, a noble Christian act.'¹³ Dostoevsky, too, saw the peasant as a moral animal, the embodiment of the 'Russian soul'; once he even claimed, in a famous argument, that the simple 'kitchen muzhik' was morally superior to any bourgeois European gentleman. The peasants, he maintained, 'will show us a new path', and, far from having something to teach them, 'it is we who must bow down before the people's truth'.¹⁴

This convergence on the peasant issue was indicative of a broader national consensus or ideology which emerged in Russia at this time. The old arguments between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles gradually died down as each side came to recognize the need for Russia to find a proper balance between Western learning and native principles. There were hints of such a synthesis as early as 1847, when the doyen of the Westernizers, the radical critic Belinsky, said that, as

far as art was concerned, he was 'inclined to side with the Slavophiles' against the cosmopolitans.¹⁵ For their part, the younger Slavophiles were moving to the view in the 1850s that 'the nation' was contained in all classes of society, not just the peasants, as the older ones maintained. Some even argued, in a way that made them virtually indistinguishable from the Westernizers, that the nation's true arena was the civic sphere and that Russia's progress in the world was dependent on the raising of the peasants to that sphere.¹⁶ In short, by the 1860s there was a common view that Russia should evolve along a European path of liberal reform, yet not break too sharply from its unique historical traditions. It was a case of keeping Peter and the peasant, too. This was the position of the 'native soil' movement to which Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail belonged in the 1860s.

Populism was the cultural product of this synthesis and, as such, it became something of a national creed. The romantic interest in folk culture which swept through Europe in the nineteenth century was nowhere felt more keenly than among the Russian intelligentsia. As the poet Alexander Blok wrote (with just a touch of irony) in 1908:

… the intelligentsia cram their bookcases with anthologies of folk-songs, epics, legends, incantations, dirges;