Natasha's Dance (12 page)

    Yet this sense of being part of Europe also made for divided souls. ‘We Russians have two fatherlands: Russia and Europe,’ Dostoevsky wrote. Alexander Herzen was a typical example of this Westernized elite. After meeting him in Paris Dostoevsky said that he did not emigrate - he was born an emigrant. The nineteenth-century writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin explained this condition of internal exile well. ‘In Russia,’ he recalled of the 1840s, ‘we existed only in a factual sense, or as it was said then, we had a “mode of life”. We went to the office, we wrote letters to our relatives, we dined in restaurants, we conversed with each other and so on. But spiritually we were all inhabitants of France.’
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For these European Russians, then, ‘Europe’ was not just a place. It was a region of the mind which they inhabited through their education, their language, their religion and their general attitudes.

    They were so immersed in foreign languages that many found it challenging to speak or write their own. Princess Dashkova, a vocal advocate of Russian culture and the only female president ever of the Russian Academy of Sciences, had the finest European education. ‘We were instructed in four different languages, and spoke French fluently,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘but my Russian was extremely poor.’
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Count Karl Nesselrode, a Baltic German and Russia’s foreign minister from 1815 to 1856, could not write or even speak the language of the country he was meant to represent. French was the language of high society, and in high-born families the language of all personal relation-ships as well. The Volkonskys, for example, a family whose fortunes we shall follow in this book, spoke mainly French among themselves. Mademoiselle Callame, a French governess in the Volkonsky household, recalled that in nearly fifty years of service she never heard the Volkonskys speak a word of Russian, except to give orders to the domestic staff. This was true even of Maria (nee Raevskaya), the wife of Prince Sergei Volkonsky, Tsar Alexander’s favourite aide-de-camp in 1812. Despite the fact that she had been brought up in the Ukrainian provinces, where noble families were more inclined to speak their native Russian tongue, Maria could not write in Russian properly. Her letters to her husband were in French. Her spoken Russian, which she had picked up from the servants, was very primitive and full of peasant slang. It was a common paradox that the most refined and cultured Russians could speak only the peasant form of Russian which they

    had learnt from the servants as children.
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Here was the European culture of Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
- a culture in which Russians ‘spoke in that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought’.
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They conversed in their native Russian as if they were Frenchmen who had only been in Russia for a year.

    This neglect of the Russian language was most pronounced and persistent in the highest echelons of the aristocracy, which had always been the most Europeanized (and in more than a few cases of foreign origin). In some families children were forbidden to speak Russian except on Sundays and religious holidays. During her entire education Princess Ekaterina Golitsyn had only seven lessons in her native tongue. Her mother was contemptuous of Russian literature and thought Gogol was ‘for the coachmen’. The Golitsyn children had a French governess and, if she ever caught them speaking Russian, she would punish them by tying a red cloth in the shape of a devil’s tongue around their necks.
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Anna Lelong had a similar experience at the Girls’ Gymnasium, the best school for noble daughters in Moscow. Those girls caught speaking Russian were made to wear a red tin bell all day and stand like dunces, stripped of their white aprons, in the corner of the class; they were forced to remain standing even during meals, and received their food last.
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Other children were even more severely punished if they spoke Russian - sometimes even locked in a room.
¹²⁵
The attitude seems to have been that Russian, like the Devil, should be beaten out of noble children from an early age, and that even the most childish feelings had to be expressed in a foreign tongue. Hence that tiny yet revealing episode in the Oblonsky drawing-room in
Anna Karenina,
when Dolly’s little daughter comes into the room where her mother is in conversation with Levin:

    ’You are very, very absurd!’ Dolly repeated, tenderly looking into his face.

    ’Very well, then, let it be as though we had not spoken a word about it. What

    is it, Tanya?’ she said in French to the little girl who had come in. ‘Where’s my spade, Mama?’

    ’I am speaking French, and you must answer in French.’ The little girl tried to, but she could not remember the French for spade;

    her mother prompted her, and then told her in French where to look. All this

    made a disagreeable impression on levin.

    Everything in Dolly’s house and children struck him now as by no means so charming as before.

    ’Why does she talk French with the children?’ he thought. ‘It’s so affected and unnatural. And the children sense it. Learning French and unlearning sincerity,’ he thought to himself, unaware that Dolly had reasoned over and over again in the same fashion and yet had decided that, even at the cost of some loss of sincerity, the children must be taught French in that way.
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    Such attitudes continued to be found in high-born families throughout the nineteenth century, and they shaped the education of some of Russia’s most creative minds. As a boy in the 1820s, Tolstoy was instructed by the kind of German tutor he portrayed so memorably in
Childhood
(1852). His aunt taught him French. But apart from a few of Pushkin’s poems, Tolstoy had no contact with Russian literature before he went to school at the age of nine. Turgenev was taught by French and German tutors, but he only learned to read and write in Russian thanks to the efforts of his father’s serf valet. He saw his first Russian book at the age of eight, after breaking into a locked room that contained his father’s Russian library. Even at the turn of the twentieth century there were Russian noblemen who barely spoke the language of their fellow countrymen. Vladimir Nabokov described his ‘Uncle Ruka’, an eccentric diplomat, as talking in a

    fastidious combination of French, English and Italian, all of which he spoke with vastly more ease than he did his native tongue. When he resorted to Russian, it was invariably to misuse or garble some extremely idiomatic or even folksy expression, as when he would say at table with a sudden sigh:
‘Je suis triste et seul comme une bylinka v pole
(as lonesome as a “grass blade in the field”).’
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    Uncle Ruka died in Paris at the end of 1916, the last of the old-world Russian aristocracy.

    The Orthodox religion was equally remote from the consciousness of the Westernized elites. For religion played but a minor role in the upbringing of the aristocracy. Noble families, immersed in the secular culture of the French Enlightenment, thought little of the need to educate their children in the Russian faith, although by force of habit

    and conformity they continued to baptize them in the state religion and observed its rituals. The Voltairean attitudes that ruled in many noble households brought a greater sense of religious tolerance - which was just as well since, with all their foreign tutors and their peasant serfs, the palace could be home to several different faiths. Orthodoxy, in so far as it was practised mainly in the servants’ quarters, came at the bottom of the social pile - below the Protestantism of the German tutors and the Catholicism of the French. This pecking order was reinforced by the fact that there was no Russian Bible - only a Psalter and a Book of Hours - until the 1870s. Herzen read the New Testament in German and went to church in Moscow with his Lutheran mother. But it was only when he was fifteen (and then only because it was an entry requirement for Moscow University) that his father hired a Russian priest to instruct him in the Orthodox religion. Tolstoy received no formal religious education as a child, while Turgenev’s mother was openly contemptuous of Orthodoxy, which she saw as the religion of the common people, and instead of the usual prayers at meals substituted a daily reading from a French translation of Thomas a Kempis. This tendency to patronize Orthodoxy as a ‘peasant faith’ was commonplace among the aristocracy. Herzen told the story of a dinner-party host who, when asked if he was serving Lenten dishes out of personal conviction, replied that it was ‘simply and solely for the sake of the servants’.
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    Set against this domination by Europe, satires such as Kniazhnin’s and Kheraskov’s began to define the Russian character in terms which were distinct from the values of the West. These writers set up the antithesis between foreign artifice and native truth, European reason and the Russian heart or ‘soul’, that would form the basis of the national narrative in the nineteenth century. At the heart of this discourse was the old romantic ideal of the native soil - of a pure ‘organic’ Russia uncorrupted by civilization. St Petersburg was all deceit and vanity, a narcissistic dandy constantly observing its own reflection in the Neva river. The real Russia was in the provinces, a place without pretensions or alien conventions, where simple ‘Russian’ virtues were preserved.

    For some this was a question of the contrast between Moscow and St Petersburg. The roots of the Slavophile movement go back to the

    late eighteenth century and the defence of the old gentry culture of Moscow and its provinces against the Europeanizing Petrine state. The landed gentry, it was said, were closer to the customs and religion of the people than Peter’s courtiers and career bureaucrats. The writer Mikhail Shcherbatov was the most vocal spokesman of the old nobility. In his
Journey to the Land of Ophir
(1784) he portrays a northern country ruled by the king Perega from his newly founded city of Peregrab. Like St Petersburg, the intended object of Shcherbatov’s satire, Peregrab is cosmopolitan and sophisticated but it is alien to the national traditions of Ophir, whose people still adhere to the moral virtues of Kvamo (read: Moscow), their former capital. At last the people of Peregrab rise up, the city falls and Ophir is returned to Kvamo’s simple way of life. Such idyllic views of the unspoilt past were commonplace in Rousseau’s age. Even Karamzin, a Westernist who was certainly not nostalgic for the old nobility, idealized the ‘virtuous and simple life of our ancestors’, when ‘the Russians were real Russians’, in his story
Natalia
(1792).

    For others, Russia’s virtues were preserved in the traditions of the countryside. Fonvizin found them in the Christian principles of the ‘old thinker’ Starodum, the homespun village mystic in his satire
The Minor
(1782). ‘Have a heart, have a soul, and you’ll always be a man,’ advises Starodum. ‘Everything else is fashion.’
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The idea of a truly Russian self that had been concealed and suppressed by the alien conventions of Petersburg society became commonplace. It had its origins in the sentimental cult of rural innocence - a cult epitomized by Karamzin’s tearful tale of
Poor Liza
(1792). Karamzin tells the story of a simple flower girl who is deceived in love by a dandy from St Petersburg and kills herself by drowning in a lake. The tale contained all the elements of this vision of a new community: the myth of the wholesome Russian village from which Liza is ejected by her poverty; the corruption of the city with its foreign ways; the tragic and true-hearted Russian heroine; and the universal ideal of marriage based on love.

    Poets like Pyotr Viazemsky idealized the village as a haven of natural simplicity:

    Here there are no chains,

    Here there is no tyranny of vanity.
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    Writers like Nikolai Novikov pointed to the village as the place where native customs had survived. The Russian was at home, he behaved more like himself, when he lived close to the land.
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For Nikolai Lvov, poet, engineer, architect, folklorist, the main Russian trait was spontaneity.

    In foreign lands all goes to a plan, Words are weighed, steps measured. But among us Russians there is fiery life, Our speech is thunder and sparks fly.
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    Lvov contrasted the convention-ridden life of the European Russians with the spontaneous behaviour and creativity of the Russian peasantry. He called on Russia’s poets to liberate themselves from the constraints of the classical canon and find inspiration from the free rhythms of folk song and verse.

    Central to this cult of simple peasant life was the notion of its moral purity. The radical satirist Alexander Radishchev was the first to argue that the nation’s highest virtues were contained in the culture of its humblest folk. His proof for this was teeth. In his
Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow
(1790) Radishchev recalls an encounter with a group of village women dressed up in their traditional costumes for a holiday - their broad smiles ‘revealing rows of teeth whiter than the purest ivory’. The ladies of the aristocracy, who all had rotten teeth, would ‘be driven mad by teeth like these’:

    Come hither, my dear Moscow and Petersburg ladies, look at their teeth and learn from them how they keep them white. They have no dentists. They do not scrape their teeth with brushes and powders every day. Stand mouth to mouth with any one of them you choose: not one of them will infect your lungs with her breath. While yours, yes yours may infect them with the germ - of a disease… I am afraid to say what disease.
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    In eighteenth-century panoramas of St Petersburg the open sky and space connect the city with a broader universe. Straight lines stretch to the distant horizon, beyond which, we are asked to imagine, lies the rest of Europe within easy reach. The projection of Russia into Europe had always been the
raison d’etre
of St Petersburg. It was not simply Peter’s ‘window on to Europe’ - as Pushkin once described the capital - but an open doorway through which Europe entered Russia and the Russians made their entry to the world.