Natasha's Dance (64 page)

    Long before the Russians ever knew their colonies as ethnographic facts, they had invented them in their literature and arts. The Caucasus occupied a special place in the Russian imagination, and for much of the nineteenth century, as the Tsar’s armies struggled to control its mountainous terrain and fought a bloody war against its Muslim tribes, Russian writers, artists and composers identified with it in a romantic way. The Caucasus depicted in their works was a wild and dangerous place of exotic charm and beauty, where the Russians from the north were strikingly confronted by the tribal cultures of the

    Muslim south. It was Pushkin who did more than anyone to fix the Russian image of the Caucasus. He reinvented it as the ‘Russian Alps’, a place for contemplation and recuperation from the ills of urban life, in his poem
The Prisoner of the Caucasus
- a sort of
Childe Harold
of the Orient. The poem served as a guidebook for several generations of Russian noble families who travelled to the Caucasus for a spa cure. By the 1830s, when Lermontov set his novel
A Hero of Our Times
in the spa resort of Piatigorsk, the ‘Caucasian cure’ had become so fashionable among the upper classes that the annual trek southwards was even being compared to the pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca.
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Some travellers were disappointed not to find the wild, exotic spirit of Pushkin’s poem in the grey and prosaic actuality of the Russian garrison towns where, for safety’s sake, they were obliged to stay. Such was the craving for adventure and romance that even a patently second-rate (and today almost entirely forgotten) belletrist like Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky was widely hailed as a literary genius (the ‘Pushkin of prose’) simply on account of his Caucasian tales and travelogues.
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    This fascination with the Caucasus centred on more than a search for exotic charm, at least as far as Russia’s writers were concerned. Pushkin’s generation was deeply influenced by the ‘southern theory’ of Romanticism expounded by Sismondi in his
De la litterature du Midi de I’Europe
(1813), which portrayed the ancient Arabs as the original Romantics. For Russia’s young Romantics, who were looking for a source to distinguish Russian culture from the West, Sismondi’s theory was a revelation. Suddenly, it seemed, the Russians had their own ‘south’ in the Caucasus, a unique colony of Muslim-Christian culture whose possession brought them closer to the new Romantic spirit than any of the nations of the West. In his essay
On Romantic Poetry
(1823) the writer Orest Somov claimed that Russia was the birthplace of a new Romantic culture because through the Caucasus it had taken in the spirit of Arabia. The Decembrist poet Vilgem Kiukhelbeker called for a Russian poetry that combined ‘all the mental treasures of both Europe and Arabia’.
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Lermontov once said that Russian poetry would find its destiny by ‘following the East instead of Europe and the French’.
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    The Cossacks were a special caste of fiercely Russian soldiers living

    since the sixteenth century on the empire’s southern and eastern frontiers in their own self-governing communities in the Don and Kuban regions along the Terek river in the Caucasus, on the Orenburg steppe and, in strategically important settlements, around Omsk, lake Baikal and the Amur river in Siberia. These ur-Russian warriors were semi-Asiatic in their way of life, with little to distinguish them from the Tatar tribesmen of the eastern steppes and the Caucasus, from whom indeed they may have been descended (‘Cossack’ or
‘quzzaq’
is a Turkic word for horseman). Both the Cossack and the Tatar tribesman displayed a fierce courage in the defence of their liberties; both had a natural warmth and spontaneity; both loved the good life. Gogol emphasized the ‘Asiatic’ and ‘southern’ character of the Ukrainian Cossacks in his story ‘Taras Bulba’: in fact, he used these two terms interchangeably. In a related article (‘A Look at the Making of Little Russia’, that is, Ukraine) he spelled out what he meant:

    The Cossacks are a people belonging to Europe in terms of their faith and location, but at the same time totally Asiatic in their way of life, their customs and their dress. They are a people in which two opposite parts of the world, two opposing spirits have strangely come together: European prudence and Asiatic abandon; simplicity and cunning; a strong sense of activity and a love of laziness; a drive towards development and perfection and at the same time a desire to appear scornful of any perfection.
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    As a historian Gogol tried to link the nature of the Cossacks to the periodic waves of nomadic in-migration that had swept across the steppe since ‘the Huns in ancient times’. He maintained that only a warlike and energetic people such as the Cossacks was able to survive on the open plain. The Cossacks rode ‘in Asiatic fashion across the steppe’. They rushed with the ‘swiftness of a tiger out of hiding places when they launched a raid’.
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Tolstoy, who had come to know the Cossacks as an officer in the army, also thought of them as semi-Asiatic in character. In
The Cossacks
(1863) Tolstoy showed in ethnographic detail that the Russian Cossacks on the northern side of the Terek river lived a way of life that was virtually indistinguishable from that of the Chechen hill tribes on the Terek’s southern side.

    When Pushkin travelled to the Caucasus, in the early 1820s, he

    thought of himself as going to a foreign land. ‘I have never been beyond my own unbounded Russia’, he wrote in
A Journey to Arzrum
(1836).
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But Lermontov, who went there a decade later, embraced the Caucasus as his ‘spiritual homeland’ and asked its mountains to bless him ‘as a son’:

    At heart I am yours

    Forever and everywhere yours!
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    The mountains were the inspiration and indeed the setting of many his works, including his greatest masterpiece,
A Hero of Our Times,
the first Russian prose novel. Born in Moscow in 1814, Lermontov had suffered from rheumatic fevers as a boy and so he was taken on a number of occasions to the spa resort of Piatigorsk. The wild romantic spirit of its mountain scenery left a lasting imprint on the young poet. In the early 1830s he was a student of oriental literature and philosophy at Moscow University. From that time he was strongly drawn to the fatalistic outlook which he saw as Russia’s inheritance from the Muslim world (an idea he explores in the final chapter of
A Hero of Our Times).
Lermontov took a keen interest in Caucasian folklore, especially the legends told by Shora Nogmov, a mullah-turned-Guards-officer from Piatigorsk, about the exploits of the mountain warriors. One of these tales inspired him to write his first major poem,
Izmail Bey,
in 1832 (though it was not passed for publication until many years later). It told the story of a Muslim prince surrendered as a hostage to the Russian troops in their conquest of the Caucasus. Brought up as a Russian nobleman, Izmail Bey abandons his commission in the Russian army and takes up the defence of his Chechen countrymen, whose villages are destroyed by the Tsarist troops. Lermontov himself was enrolled in the Guards to fight these mountain tribes, and to some degree he identified with Izmail Bey, feeling much the same divided loyalties. The poet fought with extraordinary courage against the Chechens at Fort Grozny, but he was repulsed by the savage war of terror he witnessed against the Chechen strongholds in the mountain villages. In
Izmail Bey
Lermontov concludes with a bitter condemnation of the Russian Empire which the Tsarist censor’s pen could not disguise:

    Where are the mountains, steppes and oceans Yet to be conquered by the Slavs in war? And where have enmity and treason Not bowed to Russia’s mighty Tsar? Circassian fight no more! Likely as not, Both East and West will share your lot. The time will come: you’ll say, quite bold, ‘I am a slave but my Tsar rules the world.’ The time will come: the North will be graced By an awesome new Rome, a second Augustus.

    Auls are burning, their defenders mastered,

    The homeland’s sons have fallen in battle.

    Like steady comets, fearful to the eyes,

    A glow is playing across the skies,

    A beast of prey with bayonet, the victor

    Charges into a peaceful house,

    He kills the children and the old folks,

    And with his bloody hand he strokes

    The unmarried girls and young mothers.

    But a woman’s heart can match her brother’s!

    After those kisses, a dagger’s drawn,

    A Russian cowers, gasps - he’s gone!

    ’Avenge me comrade!’ And in just a breath

    (A fine revenge for a murderer’s death)

    The little house now burns, a delight to their gaze,

    Circassian freedom set ablaze!
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    Lermontov was an accomplished watercolourist and in one self-portrait he paints himself with a Circassian sword gripped firmly in his hand, his body wrapped in a Caucasian cloak, and the cartridge cases worn by mountain tribesmen fixed on to the front of his Guards uniform. This same mixed identity, semi-Russian and semi-Asiatic, was assigned by Lermontov to Pechorin, the subject of
A Hero of Our Times.
Restless, cynical and disillusioned with the high society of St Petersburg, Pechorin undergoes a transformation when he is trans-ferred, as a Guards officer, to the Caucasus. He falls in love with Bela,

    24.
Watercolour copy of a lost self-portrait with Circassian sword and cloak by Mikhail Lermontov, 1837

    the daughter of a Circassian chief, learns her Turkic language, and wears Circassian dress to declare his love for her. At one point the narrator compares him to a Chechen bandit. This, it seems, was the essential point: there was no clear boundary between the ‘civilized’ behaviour of the Russian colonists and the ‘barbarous’ acts of the Asiatic tribes.

    Lermontov was not the only Russian to adopt the Caucasus as his

    ’spiritual home’. The composer Balakirev was another ‘son of the mountains’. The founder of the ‘Russian music school’ came from ancient Tatar stock, and he was proud of it, judging from the frequency with which he posed for portraits in Caucasian costumes.
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‘The Circassians’, he wrote to Stasov in 1862, ‘beginning with their costume (I know no better dress than that of the Circassians) are as much to my taste as to Lermontov’s.’
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Rimsky-Korsakov described Balakirev as ‘half-Russian and half-Tatar in his character’. Stravinsky recalled him as a ‘large man, bald, with a Kalmyk head and the shrewd, sharp-eyed look of a Lenin’.
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In 1862 Balakirev toured the Caucasus. He fell in love with the region’s wild landscape. It summoned up the spirit of his favourite poet, Lermontov. ‘Of all things Russian’, he wrote to Stasov from Piatigorsk, ‘Lermontov affects me most of all.’
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    Balakirev attempted to evoke this love for the writer in his symphonic poem
Tamara
(1866-81), based upon Lermontov’s poem of that name. Lermontov’s
Tamara
(1841) retold the folk story of a Georgian queen whose seductive voice lured lovers to her castle in the mountains overlooking the Terek river. After a night of orgiastic dancing she would throw the bodies of the lovers she had murdered from the tower of the castle into the river far below. It was the spirit of Tamara’s ‘whirling dance’, as Stasov was to put it, which Balakirev tried to re-create in the frenzied music of his piano suite:

    And strange wild sounds

    All night were heard from there

    As if in this empty tower

    A hundred horny young men and girls

    Came together on a wedding night

    Or on the feast of a great funeral.’

    The musical devices which Balakirev used were mostly from the common stock of ‘oriental sounds’ - sensuous chromatic scales, syncopated dance-like rhythms and languorous harmonies designed to conjure up the exotic world of hedonistic pleasure which people in the West had long associated with the Orient. But Balakirev also intro duced a stunning new device which he had picked up from his transcriptions of Caucasian folk songs. For Balakirev had noticed that in

    all these songs the harmonies were based on the pentatonic (or five-tone) scale common to the music of Asia. The distinctive feature of the pentatonic or ‘Indo-Chinese’ scale is its avoidance of semitones and thus of any clear melodic gravitation towards any particular tone. It creates the sense of ‘floating sounds’ which is characteristic of Southeast Asian music in particular.
Tamara
was the first major piece of Russian music to make extensive use of the pentatonic scale. Bala-kirev’s innovation was akin to the discovery of a new artistic language with which to give Russian music its ‘Eastern feel’ and make it so distinct from the music of the West. The pentatonic scale would be used in striking fashion by every Russian composer who followed in the Balakirev ‘national school’, from Rimsky-Korsakov to Stravinsky.