Natasha's Dance (5 page)

    Muscovy was a religious civilization. It was rooted in the spiritual traditions of the Eastern Church which went back to Byzantium. In some ways it resembled the medieval culture of central Europe, to which it was related by religion, language, custom and much else besides. But historically and culturally it remained isolated from Europe. Its western territories were no more than a toehold on the European continent: the Baltic lands were not captured by the Russian empire until the 1720s, the western Ukraine and the lion’s share of Poland not until the end of the eighteenth century. Unlike central Europe Muscovy had little exposure to the influence of the Renaissance or the Reformation. It took no part in the maritime discoveries or the scientific revolutions of the early modern era. It had no great cities in the European sense, no princely or episcopal courts to patronize the arts, no real burgher or middle class, and no universities or public schools apart from the monastery academies.

    The dominance of the Church hindered the development in Muscovy of the secular art forms that had taken shape in Europe since the Renaissance. Instead, the icon was the focal point of Muscovy’s religious way of life. It was an artefact of daily ritual as much as it was a creative work of art. Icons were encountered everywhere - not just in homes and churches but in shops and offices or in wayside shrines. There was next to nothing to connect the icon to the European tradition of secular painting that had its origins in the Renaissance. True, in the late seventeenth century Russian icon-painters such as Simon Ushakov had started to abandon the austere Byzantine style of medieval icon-painting for the classical techniques and sensuality of the Western baroque style. Yet visitors from Europe were invariably shocked by the primitive condition of Russia’s visual arts. ‘Flat and ugly’, observed Samuel Collins, English physician to the Russian court, of the Kremlin’s icons in the 1660s; ‘if you saw their images, you would take them for no better than gilded gingerbread’.
¹⁸
The first secular portraits
(parsuny)
date from as late as the 1650s. However, they still retain a flat iconic style. Tsar Alexei, who reigned from 1645 to 1676, is
the first Russian ruler for whom we have anything remotely resembling a reliable likeness. Other types of painting (still life, landscape, allegory, genre) were entirely absent from the Russian repertoire until Peter’s reign, or even later still.

    The development of other secular forms of art was equally impeded by the Russian Church. Instrumental music (as opposed to sacred singing) was regarded as a sin and was ruthlessly persecuted by the ecclesiastical authorities. However, there was a rich folk tradition of minstrels and musicians, or
skomorokhi
(featured by Stravinsky in
Petrushka),
who wandered through the villages with tambourines and
gusli
(a type of zither), avoiding the agents of the Church. Literature as well was held back by the omnipresent Church. There were no printed news sheets or journals, no printed plays or poetry, although there was a lively industry of folk tales and verse published in the form of illustrated prints
(lubki)
as cheap printing techniques became available towards the end of the seventeenth century. When Peter came to the throne in 1682 no more than three books of a non-religious nature had been published by the Moscow press since its establishment in the 1560s.
¹⁹

    Peter hated Muscovy. He despised its archaic culture and parochialism, its superstitious fear and resentment of the West. Witch hunts were common and foreign heretics were burned in public on Red Square -the last, a Protestant, in 1689, when Peter was aged seventeen. As a young man, Peter spent a great deal of his time in the special ‘German’ suburb where, under pressure from the Church, Moscow’s foreigners were forced to live. He dressed in Western clothes, shaved his beard and, unlike the Orthodox, he ate meat during Lent. The young Tsar travelled through northern Europe to learn for himself the new technologies which Russia would need to launch itself as a continental military power. In Holland he worked as a shipbuilder. In London he went to the observatory, the arsenal, the Royal Mint and the Royal Society. In Konigsberg he studied artillery. From his travels he picked up what he needed to turn Russia into a modern European state: a navy modelled on the Dutch and the English ones; military schools that were copies of the Swedish and the Prussian; legal systems borrowed from the Germans; and a Table of (civil service) Ranks adapted from the Danes. He commissioned battle scenes and portraits to publicize the prestige of his state; and he purchased sculptures and decorative paintings for his European palaces in Petersburg.

    Everything in the new capital was intended to compel the Russians to adopt a more European way of life. Peter told his nobles where to

    live, how to build their houses, how to move around the town, where to stand in church, how many servants to keep, how to eat at banquets, how to dress and cut their hair, how to conduct themselves at court, and how to converse in polite society. Nothing in his dragooned capital was left to chance. This obsessive regulation gave St Petersburg the image of a hostile and oppressive place. Here were the roots of the nineteenth-century myth of the ‘unreal city’ - alien and threatening to the Russian way of life - which was to play a central role in Russian literature and art. ‘In Petersburg’, wrote Benois, ‘there is that same Roman spirit, a hard and absolute spirit of order, a spirit of formally perfect life, unbearable for the general Russian slovenliness, but unquestionably not without charm.’ Benois compared the city to a ‘sergeant with a stick’ - it had a ‘machine-like character’ - whereas the Russians were like a ‘dishevelled old woman’.
²⁰
The nineteenth-century image of the Imperial city was defined by the notion of its regimentation. De Custine remarked that Petersburg was more like ‘the general staff of an army than the capital of a nation’.
²¹
And Herzen said that its uniformity reminded him of a ‘military barracks’.
²²
This was a city of inhuman proportions, a city ordered by the abstract symmetry of its architectural shapes rather than by the lives of its inhabitants. Indeed, the very purpose of these shapes was to regiment the Russians, like soldiers, into line.

    Yet underneath the surface of this European dream world the old Russia still showed through. Badgered by the Tsar to build classical facades, many of the nobles allowed animals to roam in the courtyards of their palaces in Petersburg, just as they did in their Moscow yards, so that Peter had to issue numerous decrees forbidding cows and pigs from wandering on to his fine European avenues.
²³
But even the Nevsky, the most European of his avenues, was undone by a ‘Russian’ crookedness. Designed as a formal ‘prospekt’ running in a straight line from the Admiralty, at one end, to the Alexander Nevsky monastery, three kilometres away at the other, it was built by separate crews from either end. But they failed to keep the line and when it was completed in 1715 there was a distinct kink where the two teams met.
²⁴

    The Sheremetev palace on the Fontanka river is a legendary symbol of the Petersburg tradition. The people of that city call it ‘Fountain House’. The poet Anna Akhmatova, who lived there, on and off, in an annexe flat from 1926 to 1952, thought of it as a precious inner space which she co-inhabited with the spirits of the great artistic figures of the past. Pushkin, Krylov, Tiutchev and Zhukovsky - they had all been there.

    I don’t have special claims

    On this illustrious house,

    But it happens that almost my whole life

    I have lived under the celebrated roof

    Of the Fountain Palace… As a pauper

    I arrived and as a pauper I will leave…
²⁵

    The history of the palace is a microcosm of the Petrine plan to set down Western culture on Russian soil. It was built on a plot of marshland granted in 1712 by the Tsar to Boris Sheremetev, the Field Marshal of Peter’s army at the battle of Poltava. At that time the site was on the edge of Petersburg and its forests gave the palace a rural character. Peter’s gift was one of several to distinguished servitors. They were ordered to construct European-style palaces with regular facades on the Fontanka side as part of the Tsar’s plan to develop Petersburg. Legend has it that the land was empty in 1712. But Akhmatova believed that a Swedish farmstead had been there, since she distinguished oak trees from pre-Petrine times.
²⁶

    By the beginning of the eighteenth century the Sheremetev family was already well established as a hugely wealthy clan with close connections to the court. Distantly related to the Romanovs, the Sheremetevs had been rewarded with enormous tracts of land for their loyal service to the ruling house as military commanders and diplomats. Boris Sheremetev was a long-standing ally of Peter’s. In 1697 he had travelled with the Tsar on his first trip to Europe, where he remained as Russian ambassador to Poland, Italy and Austria. A

    veteran of the wars against the Swedes, in 1705 he became Russia’s first appointed count
(graf)
- a title Peter imported from Europe as part of his campaign to Westernize the Russian aristocracy. Boris was the last of the old
boyars,
the leading noblemen of Muscovy whose wealth and power derived from the favour of the Tsar (they had all but disappeared by the end of Peter’s reign as newly titled nobles superseded them). Russia did not have a gentry in the Western sense -an independent class of landowners that could act as a counterbalance to the power of the Tsar. From the sixteenth century the state had swept away the quasi-feudal rights of the local princes and turned all nobles
(dvoriane)
into servants of the court
(dvor).
Muscovy was conceived as a patrimonial state, owned by the Tsar as his personal fiefdom, and the noble was legally defined as the Tsar’s ‘slave’.* For his services the nobleman was given land and serfs, but not as outright or allodial property, as in the West, and only on condition that he served the Tsar. The slightest suspicion of disloyalty could lead to demotion and the loss of his estates.

    Before the eighteenth century Russia had no grand noble palaces. Most of the Tsar’s servitors lived in wooden houses, not much bigger than peasant huts, with simple furniture and clay or wooden pots. According to Adam Olearius, the Duke of Holstein’s envoy to Muscovy during the 1630s, few Russian noblemen had feather beds; instead, ‘they lie on benches covered with cushions, straw, mats, or clothes; in winter they sleep on flat-topped stoves… [lying] with their servants… the chickens and the pigs’.
²⁷
The nobleman seldom visited his various estates. Despatched from one place to another in the Tsar’s vast empire, he had neither the time nor the inclination to put down roots in one locality. He looked upon his estates as a source of revenue, to be readily exchanged or sold. The beautiful estate of Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, for example, exchanged hands over twenty times during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was lost in games of cards and drinking bouts, sold to different people at the same time, loaned and bartered, mortgaged and remortgaged, until after

    *Even as late as the nineteenth century noblemen of every rank, including counts and barons, were required to sign off their letters to the Tsar with the formulaic phrase ‘Your Humble Slave’.

    2.
Seventeenth-century Muscovite costumes. Engraving, 1669

    years of legal wrangling to settle all the questions of its ownership, it was bought by the Volkonsky family in the 1760s and eventually passed down through his mother to the novelist Tolstoy.
²⁸
Because of this constant state of flux there was little real investment by the nobles in the land, no general movement to develop estates or erect palaces, and none of what took place in Western Europe from medieval times: the gradual concentration of a family domain in one locality, with property passed down from one generation to the next, and ties built up with the community.

    The cultural advancement of the Muscovite
boyars
was well behind that of the European nobles in the seventeenth century. Olearius considered them ‘among the barbarians… [with] crude opinions about the elevated natural sciences and arts’.
²⁹
Dr Collins complained that ‘they know not how to eat peas and carrots boiled but, like swine, eat them shells and all’.
³⁰
This backwardness was in part the result of the Mongol occupation of Russia from about 1230 to the middle of the fifteenth century. The Tatars left a profound trace on
boyar
customs

    and habits. For over three hundred years, the period of the Renaissance in the West, Russia was cut off from European civilization. The country which emerged from the Mongol period was far more inward-looking than it had been at the start of the thirteenth century, when Kievan Rus’, the loose confederation of principalities which constituted the first Russian state, had been intimately linked with Byzantium. The old princely families were undermined and made more servile to the state of Muscovy, whose economic and military power provided the key to Russia’s liberation from the Mongol khans. The Russian nobleman of the Muscovite era
(c.
15 50-1700) was not a landed lord in the European sense. He was a servant of the Crown. In his material culture there was little to distinguish him from the common folk. He dressed like the merchant in the semi-oriental
kaftan
and fur coat. He ruled his family, like the merchant and the peasant, via the patriarchal customs of the
Domostroi
- the sixteenth-century manual that instructed Russians how to discipline their households with the Bible and the birch. The manners of the Russian nobleman were proverbially boorish. Even magnates such as Boris Sheremetev could behave at times like drunken louts. During Tsar Peter’s trip to England his entourage resided at the villa of the diarist John Evelyn at Sayes Court, Kent. The damage which they caused in their three-month stay was so extensive - lawns dug up, curtains torn, furniture destroyed, and family portraits used for target practice by the visitors - that Evelyn was obliged to present the Russian court with a large bill.
³¹
The majority of the nobility could not read and many of them could not even add up simple sums.
³²
Little travelled or exposed to Europeans, who were forced to settle in a special suburb in Moscow, the nobleman mistrusted new or foreign ways. His life was regulated by the archaic rituals of the Church - its calendar arranged to count the years from the notional creation of the world (with the birth of Adam) in 5509 bc* With Peter’s reformation of society, the nobleman became the agency, and his palace the arena, of Russia’s introduction to European