Natasha's Dance (45 page)

    The 1905 Revolution confirmed all their fears. For years the intelligentsia had dreamed of a genuinely democratic revolution. Since the 1890s liberals and socialists had joined together in their campaign for

    political reform. They rejoiced in the spring of 1905, when the entire country appeared to be united in the demand for democratic rights. In October 1905, with the Russian empire engulfed by popular revolts, the army crippled by soldiers’ mutinies, and his own throne threatened by a general strike, Nicholas II finally gave in to the pressure of his liberal ministers to concede a series of political reforms. The October Manifesto, as these became known, was a sort of constitution -although it was not issued in that name because the Tsar refused to recognize any formal constraints on his autocratic power. The Manifesto granted civil liberties and a legislative parliament (or Duma) elected on a broad franchise. The country celebrated. New political parties were formed. People talked of a new Russia being born. But the political revolution was all the time developing into a social one, as the workers pressed their radical demands for industrial democracy in a growing wave of strikes and violent protests, and the peasantry resumed their age-old struggle for the land, confiscating property and forcing the nobility from their estates. The national unity of 1905 was soon shown to be illusory, as liberals and socialists went their separate ways after October. For the propertied elites, the October Manifesto was the final goal of the revolution. But for the workers and the peasantry, it was only the beginning of a social revolution against all property and privilege. The frightened liberals recoiled from their commitment to the revolution. The growing insubordination of the lower classes, the fighting in the streets, the rural arson and destruction of estates, and the mistrust and the hatred on the faces of the peasants which continued to disturb the landed nobles long after order was bloodily restored - all these destroyed the romance of ‘the people’ and their cause.

    In 1909 a group of philosophers critical of the radical intelligentsia and its role in the Revolution of 1905 published a collection of essays called
Vekhi (Landmarks)
in which this disenchantment was power-fully expressed. The essays caused a huge storm of controversy - not least because their writers (former Marxists like Pyotr Struve and Nikolai Berdyaev) had all had spotless (that is, politically radical) credentials - which in itself was symptomatic of the intelligentsia’s new mood of doubt and self-questioning. The essays were a fierce attack on the nineteenth-century cult of ‘the people’ and its tendency

    to subordinate all other interests to the people’s cause. Through this pursuit of material interests the intelligensia was pushing Russia to a second revolution, much more violent and destructive than the first. Civilization was under threat and it was the duty of the educated classes to face this reality:

This is the way we are:
not only can we not dream about fusing with the people but we must fear them worse than any punishment by the government, and we must bless that authority which alone with its bayonets and prisons manages to protect us from the popular fury.
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    There was a general feeling, which the essays had expressed, that the masses would destroy Russia’s fragile European civilization and that, come the revolution, Russia would be dragged down to the level of the semi-savage peasantry. Andrei Bely’s novel
Petersburg
(1913-14) is filled with images of the city being overrun by Asiatic hordes. Even Gorky, a hero and a champion of the common man, succumbed to the new apocalyptic mood. ‘You are right
666
times over’, he wrote to a literary friend in 1905, ‘[the revolution] is giving birth to real barbarians, just like those that ravaged Rome.’
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    This dark mood was captured in what must surely be the bleakest portrait of rural life in any literature: Ivan Bunin’s novella
The Village
(1910). Bunin had experience of peasant life. Unlike Turgenev or Tolstoy, who were scions of the elite aristocracy, Bunin belonged to the minor provincial gentry, who had always lived in close proximity to the peasants and whose lives resembled theirs in many ways. Bunin saw the peasant as the ‘national type’ and his stories about them were intended to be judgements on the Russian people and their history. He had never had any illusions about the spiritual or noble qualities of the peasants. His diaries are filled with horrific incidents he had seen or heard about in the villages: a woman who was beaten by her drunken husband so that she had to be ‘bandaged up like a mummy’; another woman raped so often by her husband that she bled to death.
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Bunin’s early stories dealt with the harsh realities of country life in the 1890s - a decade of famine and flight from the land. They are full of images of destruction and decay: abandoned villages, factories belching blood red smoke, the peasants old or sick. Here Bunin’s village

    was a realm of natural beauty that was being undermined and gradually destroyed by the new industrial economy. After 1905, however, Bunin changed his view of the village. He came to see it not just as a victim, but as the main agent of its own demise.
The Village
is set in 1905 in a place called Durnovo (from the word ‘
durnoi’,
meaning ‘bad’ or ‘rotten’). Its peasants are portrayed as dark and ignorant, thieving and dishonest, lazy and corrupt. Nothing much takes place in Durnovo. There is no plot in Bunin’s work. It consists of a description of the dreary existence of a tavern keeper who has just enough intelligence to realize the emptiness of his own life. ‘God, what a place! It’s a prison!’ he concludes. Yet, as Bunin’s tale implies, all of peasant Russia is a Durnovo.
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The Village
gave a huge jolt to society. More perhaps than any other work, it made the Russians think about the hopeless destiny of their peasant land. ‘What stunned the reader in this book’, wrote one critic, ‘was not the depiction of the peasant’s material, cultural and legal poverty… but the realization that there was no escape from it. The most that the peasant, as depicted by Bunin, was capable of achieving… was only the awareness of his hopeless savagery, of being doomed.’
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Gorky wrote about
The Village
that it had forced society to think seriously ‘not just about the peasant but about the question of whether Russia is to be or not to be’.
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    Like Bunin, Maxim Gorky knew what village life was like: his disenchantment with the peasantry was based on experience. He came from the ‘lower depths’ himself - an orphan who had survived by scavenging along the banks of the Volga river and roaming round the towns, a street urchin dressed in rags. Tolstoy once said of Gorky that he seemed ‘to have been born as an old man’ - and indeed Gorky had known more human suffering in his first eight years than the count would see in all his eight decades. Gorky’s grandfather’s household in Nizhnyi Novgorod, where he had been brought up after the death of his father, was, as he described it in
My Childhood
(1913), a microcosm of provincial Russia - a place of poverty, cruelty and meanness, where the men took to the bottle in a big way and the women found solace in God. All his life he felt a profound loathing for this ‘backward’ peasant Russia-a contempt that aligned him with the Bolsheviks:

    When I try to recall those vile abominations of that barbarous life in Russia, at times I find myself asking the question: is it worth while recording them? And with ever stronger conviction I find the answer is yes, because that was the real loathsome truth and to this day it is still valid. It is that truth which must be known down to the very roots, so that by tearing them up it can be completely erased from the memory, from the soul of man, from our whole oppressive and shameful life.
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    In 1888, at the age of twenty, Gorky had ‘gone to the people’ with a Populist called Romas who tried to set up a co-operative and organize the peasants in a village on the Volga near Kazan. The enterprise ended in disaster. The villagers burned them out after Romas failed to heed the threats of the richer peasants, who had close links with the established traders in the nearby town and resented their meddling. Three years later, Gorky was beaten unconscious by a group of peasant men when he tried to intervene on behalf of a woman who had been stripped naked and horsewhipped by her husband and a howling mob after being found guilty of adultery. Experience left Gorky with a bitter mistrust of the ‘noble savage’. It led him to conclude that, however good they may be on their own, the peasants left all that was fine behind when they ‘gathered in one grey mass’:

    Some dog-like desire to please the strong ones in the village took possession of them, and then it disgusted me to look at them. They would howl wildly at each other, ready for a fight - and they would fight over any trifle. At these moments they were terrifying and they seemed capable of destroying the very church where only the previous evening they had gathered humbly and submissively, like sheep in a fold.
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    Looking back on the violence of the revolutionary years - a violence he put down to the ‘savage instincts’ of the Russian peasantry - Gorky wrote in 1922:

    Where then is that kindly, contemplative Russian peasant, the indefatigable searcher after truth and justice, so convincingly and beautifully presented to the world by Russian nineteenth-century literature? In my youth I earnestly sought for such a man throughout the Russian countryside but I did not find him.
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    In 1916 Diaghilev was asked where the Ballets Russes had its intellectual origins. In the Russian peasantry, he replied: ‘in objects of utility (domestic implements in the country districts), in the painting on the sleighs, in the designs and the colours of peasant dresses, or the carving around a window frame, we found our motifs, and on this foundation we built’.
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In fact the Ballets Russes was a direct descendant of the ‘going to the people’ in the 1870s.

    It all began at Abramtsevo, the artists’ colony established by the Mamontovs on their estate near Moscow, which soon became the focus for the arts and crafts movement. The railway magnate’s wife Elizaveta was a well-known sympathizer of the Populists and, soon after the estate was purchased in 1870, she set up a school and a hospital for the peasants in its grounds. In 1876 a carpentry workshop was added where pupils who had graduated from the school might learn a useful trade. The aim was to revive the peasant handicrafts that were fast disappearing as the railways brought in cheaper factory products from the towns. Artists like Gartman and Elena Polenova took their inspiration from this peasant art and, under Polenova’s direction, new workshops were soon set up to cater to the growing middle-class market for pottery and linen in the peasant style. Polenova and her artists would go around the villages copying the designs on the window frames and doors, household utensils and furniture, which they would then adapt for the stylized designs of the craft goods manufactured in the colony’s workshops. Polenova collected several thousand peasant artefacts which can still be seen in the Craft Museum at Abramtsevo. She saw these artefacts as the remnants of an ancient Russian style that was still alive, and which gave them, in her view, a value that was higher than the Muscovite designs that had inspired artists in the past. For the latter were a part of a dead tradition that was now as remote to the Russian people as ‘the art of Africa or Ancient Greece’.
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In her own pictures and furniture designs Polenova tried, as she put it, to express ‘the vital spirit of the Russian people’s poetic view of nature’, using animal motifs and floral ornaments which she had sketched from peasant artefacts.
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    15.
Elena Polenova: ‘Cat and Owl’ carved door, Abramtsevo workshop, early
1890s

    Urban fans of this ‘neo-national’ style took it as a pure and authentic Russian art. Stasov, for example, thought that Polenova’s ‘Cat and Owl’ door could be taken for the work of ‘some amazingly talented but anonymous master of our ancient Rus”.
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But in fact it was a fantasy. By the early 1890s, when the door was carved, Polenova had

    moved on from copying folk designs to assimilating them to the art nouveau style, which made her work even more appealing to the urban middle class.

    Other artists trod the same path from ethnographic to commercial art. At the Solomenko embroidery workshops in Tambov province, for example, the artists’ designs were becoming increasingly attuned to the bourgeois tastes of the city women who could afford these luxury goods. Instead of the gaudy colours favoured by the peasants in their own designs (orange, red and yellow), they used the subdued colours (dark green, cream and brown) that appealed to urban tastes. The same change took place at the textile workshops of Talashkino, established by Princess Maria Tenisheva on her estate in Smolensk in 1898. The local peasant women ‘did not like our colours’, Tenisheva recalled, ‘they said they were too “drab”’, and she had to pay the weavers bonuses to get them to use them in their work.
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