Natasha's Dance (10 page)

    the need to take a leading role - dancing, singing at the piano, playing the coquette. Dandies turned their social lives into performance art: every mannered pose was carefully rehearsed. They prepared themselves, like Eugene Onegin, as actors going out before an audience.

    At least three hours he peruses His figure in the looking-glass.
⁸⁹

    Etiquette demanded that they hold themselves and act in the directed form: the way they walked and stood, the way they entered or left a room, the way they sat and held their hands, the way they smiled or nodded their heads - every pose and gesture was carefully scripted. Hence in the ballroom and reception hall the walls were lined with mirrors for the beau monde to observe their performance.

    The aristocracy of eighteenth-century Russia was aware of acting out its life as if upon a stage. The Russian nobleman was not born a ‘European’ and European manners were not natural to him. He had to learn such manners, as he learned a foreign language, in a ritualized form by conscious imitation of the West. Peter the Great began it all -reinventing himself and his aristocracy in the European mould. The first thing he did on his return from Europe, in 1698, was to order all the
boyars
to give up their
kaftans
for Western codes of dress. In a symbolic rupture with the past, he forbade them to wear beards, traditionally seen as a sign of holiness, and himself took the shears to reluctant courtiers.* Peter commanded his nobles to entertain after the European fashion: with his head of police he personally supervised the lists of guests at balls to be thrown by his selected hosts. The aristocracy was to learn to speak in French, to converse politely and to dance the minuet. Women, who had been confined to private quarters in the semi-Asiatic world of Muscovy, were to squeeze their bodies into corsets and grace society.

    These new social manners were expounded in a manual of etiquette,

    * In the Orthodox belief the beard was a mark of God and Christ (both were depicted wearing beards) and a mark of manhood (animals had whiskers). Because of Peter’s prohibition, wearing beards became a sign of ‘Russianness’ and of resistance to his reforms.

The Honourable Mirror to Youth,
which Peter had adapted and embellished from the German original. It advised its readers, among other things, not to ‘spit their food’, nor to ‘use a knife to clean their teeth’, nor ‘blow their nose like a trumpet’.
⁹⁰
To perform these manners required a conscious mode of action very different from the unself-conscious or ‘natural’ behaviour of the Russian; at such moments the Russian was supposed to be aware of acting differently from the way he would behave as a Russian. Books of etiquette like
The Honourable Mirror
advised the Russian nobleman to imagine himself in the company of foreigners while, at the same time, remaining conscious of himself as a Russian. The point was not to become a European, but rather to act as one. Like an actor with an eye to his own image on the stage, the nobleman was told to observe his own behaviour from a Russian point of view. It was the only way to judge its foreignness.
⁹¹

    The diaries and memoirs of the aristocracy are filled with descriptions of how young nobles were instructed to act in society. ‘The point was not to be but to appear,’
⁹²
recalled one memoirist. In this society, external appearances were everything and success was dependent on a subtle code of manners displayed only by those of breeding. Fashionable dress, good comportment, modesty and mildness, refined conversation and the capacity to dance with elegance - these were the qualities of being ‘
comme il fauf’.
Tolstoy boiled them down to first-class French; long, well-kept and polished nails; and ‘a constant expression of elegant and contemptuous ennui’.
⁹³
Polished nails and a cultivated air of boredom were also the defining features of the fop, according to Pushkin (this was how the poet was depicted in the famous portrait by Orest Kiprensky which appears to have been painted in the Fountain House).

    The European Russian had a split identity. His mind was a state divided into two. On one level he was conscious of acting out his life according to prescribed European conventions; yet on another plane his inner life was swayed by Russian customs and sensibilities. The distinction was not absolute, of course: there could be conscious forms of ‘Russianness’, as the Slavophiles would prove, just as it was possible for European habits to be so ingrained that they appeared and felt ‘natural’. But generally speaking, the European Russian was a ‘European’ on the public stage and a ‘Russian’ in those moments of his private life when, without even thinking, he did things in a way that

    only Russians did. This was the legacy from his ancestors which no European influence could totally erase. It enabled a countess like Natasha to dance the Russian dance. In every Russian aristocrat, however European he may have become, there was a discreet and instinctive empathy with the customs and beliefs, the habits and the rhythms of Russian peasant life. How, indeed, could it not be so when the nobleman was born in the countryside, when he spent his childhood in the company of serfs, and lived most of his life on the estate - a tiny island of European culture in a vast Russian peasant sea?

    The layout of the palace was a map of this divide in the nobleman’s emotional geography. There were the grand reception rooms, always cold and draughty, where formal European manners were the norm; and then there were the private rooms, the bedrooms and the boudoirs, the study and the parlour, the chapel and the icon room, and the corridors that ran through to the servants’ quarters, where a more informal, ‘Russian’ way of life was to be found. Sometimes this divide was consciously maintained. Count Sheremetev rearranged the rooms at the Fountain House so that all his public life was conducted on its left, or embankment, side, while the right side and the rooms that faced on to the garden at the rear were sealed off for his secret life. These private rooms were entirely different in their feel and style, with warm-coloured fabrics, wallpaper, carpets and Russian stoves, compared to the cold and stoveless public rooms with their parquet floors and marble mirrored walls.
⁹⁴
It was as if the count was attempting to create an intimate, domestic and more ‘Russian’ space in which to relax with Praskovya.

    In 1837 the Winter Palace in St Petersburg was gutted by a fire so immense it could be seen from villages some eighty kilometres away. It began in a wooden basement room and soon spread to the upper floors, which all had wooden walls and cavities behind the stone facades. The symbolism of the fire did not go unnoticed in a city built on myths of apocalypse: the old Russia was wreaking its revenge. Every palace had a ‘wooden Russia’ underneath its grand reception rooms. From the brilliant white ballroom in the Fountain House you could exit through a concealed mirror door and descend by a staircase to the servants’ quarters and another world. Here were kitchens where the open fires raged all day, a storehouse in the yard where peasant

    4.
Gerard de la Barthe:
A Cure Bath in Moscow, 1790

    carts delivered farm produce, a carriage house, a smithy, workshops, stables, cow sheds, an aviary, a large greenhouse, a laundry and a wooden
banya
or bath house.
⁹⁵

    Going to the
banya
was an old Russian custom. From medieval times it was popularly seen as a national institution, and not to bathe in one at least three times a week was practically taken as a proof of foreign origins. Every noble household had its own steam house. In towns and villages there was invariably a communal bath, where men and women sat steaming themselves, beating one another, according to the custom, with young birch leaf whips, and cooling themselves down by rolling around together in the snow. Because of its reputation as a place for sex and wild behaviour, Peter the Great attempted to stamp out the
banya
as a relic of medieval Rus’ and encouraged the building of Western bathrooms in the palaces and mansions of St Petersburg. But, despite heavy taxes on it, noblemen continued to prefer the Russian bath and, by the end of the eighteenth century, nearly every palace in St Petersburg had one.
⁹⁶

    The
banya
was believed to have special healing powers - it was called the ‘people’s first doctor’ (vodka was the second, raw garlic the

    third). There were all sorts of magical beliefs associated with it in folklore.
⁹⁷
To go to the
banya
was to give both your body and your soul a good cleaning, and it was the custom to perform this purge as a part of important rituals. The
banya
was a place for giving birth: it was warm and clean and private, and in a series of bathing rituals that lasted forty days, it purified the mother from the bleeding of the birth which, according to the Church and the popular belief that held to the idea of Christ’s bloodless birth, symbolized the fallen state of womanhood.
⁹⁸
The
banyans
role in prenuptial rites was also to ensure the woman’s purity: the bride was washed in the
banya
by her maids on the eve of her wedding. It was a custom in some places for the bride and groom to go to the bath house before their wedding night. These were not just peasant rituals. They were shared by the provincial nobility and even by the court in the final decades of the seventeenth century. According to the customs of the 1670s Tsar Alexei’s bride was washed in the
banya
on the day before her wedding, while a choir chanted sacred songs outside, after which she received the blessing of a priest.
⁹⁹
This intermingling of pagan bathing rites with Christian rituals was equally pronounced at Epiphany and Shrovetide (‘Clean Monday’), when ablution and devotion were the order of the day. On these holy days it was customary for the Russian family, of whatever social class, to clean the house, washing all the floors, clearing out the cupboards, purging the establishment of any rotten or unholy foods, and then, when this was done, to visit the bath house and clean the body, too.

    In the palace, the salon upstairs belonged to an entirely different, European world. Every major palace had its own salon, which served as the venue for concerts and masked balls, banquets, soirees, and sometimes even readings by the greatest Russian poets of the age. Like all palaces, the Fountain House was designed for the salon’s rituals. There was a wide sweeping driveway for the grand arrival by coach-and-four; a public vestibule for divesting cloaks and furs; a ‘parade’ staircase and large reception rooms for the guests to advertise their tasteful dress and etiquette. Women were the stars of this society. Every salon revolved around the beauty, charm and wit of a particular hostess - such as Anna Scherer in Tolstoy’s
War and Peace,
or Tatiana in Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin.
Having been excluded from the public domain under Muscovy, women took up leading roles in the European

    culture of the eighteenth century. For the first time in the history of the Russian state there was even a succession of female sovereigns. Women became educated and accomplished in the European arts. By the end of the eighteenth century the educated noblewoman had become the norm in high society - so much so that the uneducated noblewoman became a common subject of satire. Recalling his experience as the French ambassador in Petersburg during the 1780s, Count Segur believed that Russian noblewomen ‘had outstripped the men in this progressive march towards improvement: you already saw a number of elegant women and girls, remarkable for their graces, speaking seven or eight languages with fluency, playing several instruments, and familiar with the most celebrated romance writers and poets of France, Italy and England’. The men, by comparison, had nothing much to say.
¹⁰⁰

    Women set the manners of the salon: the kissing of the hand, the balletic genuflections and the feminized apparel of the fop were all reflections of their influence. The art of salon conversation was distinctly feminine. It meant relaxed and witty conversation which skipped imperceptibly from one topic to another, making even the most trivial thing a subject of enchanting fascination. It was also
de rigueur
not to talk for long on serious, ‘masculine’ topics such as politics or philosophy, as Pushkin underlined in
Eugene Onegin
:

    The conversation sparkled bright; The hostess kept the banter light And quite devoid of affectations; Good reasoned talk was also heard, But not a trite or vulgar word, No lasting truths or dissertations -And no one’s ears were shocked a bit By all the flow of lively wit.
¹⁰¹

    Pushkin said that the point of salon conversation was to flirt (he once claimed that the point of life was to ‘make oneself attractive to women’). Pushkin’s friends testified that his conversation was just as memorable as his poetry, while his brother Lev maintained that his real genius was for flirting with women.
¹⁰²