Natasha's Dance

In the Western imagination these cultural forms have all too often

been perceived as 'authentically Russian'. Yet that perception is a myth

as well: the myth of exotic Russia. It is an image first exported by the

Ballets Russes, with their own exoticized versions of Natasha's dance,

and then shaped by foreign writers such as Rilke, Thomas Mann and

Virginia Woolf, who held up Dostoevsky as the greatest novelist and

peddled their own versions of the 'Russian soul'. If there is one myth

which needs to be dispelled, it is this view of Russia as exotic and

eslewhere. Russians have long complained that the Western public

does not understand their culture, that Westerners see Russia from

afar and do not want to know its inner subtleties, as they do with the

culture of their own domain. Though based partly on resentment and

wounded national pride, the complaint is not unjustified. We are

inclined to consign Russia's artists, writers and composers to the

cultural ghetto of a 'national school' and to judge them, not as individuals, but by how far they conform to this stereotype. We expect the Russians to be 'Russian' - their art easily distinguished by its use of folk motifs, by onion domes, the sound of bells, and full of 'Russian soul'. Nothing has done more to obscure a proper understanding of Russia and its central place in European culture between 1812 and 1917. The great cultural figures of the Russian tradition (Karamzin, Pushkin, Glinka, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Repin, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Chagall and Kandinsky, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Nabokov, Pasternak, Meyerhold and Eisenstein) were not simply 'Russians', they were Europeans too, and the two identities were intertwined and mutually dependent in a variety of ways. However hard they might have tried, it was impossible for Russians such as these to suppress either part of their identity.

For European Russians, there were two very different modes of personal behaviour. In the salons and the ballrooms of St Petersburg, at court or in the theatre, they were very 'comme il faut

': they performed their European manners almost like actors on a public stage. Yet on another and perhaps unconscious plane and in the less formal spheres of private life, native Russian habits of behaviour prevailed. Natasha's visit to her 'Uncle's' house describes one such switch: the way she is expected to behave at home, in the Rostov palace, or at the ball where she is presented to the Emperor, is a world apart from this village scene where her expressive nature is allowed free rein. It is evidently her gregarious enjoyment of such a relaxed social setting that communicates itself in her dance. This same sense of relaxation, of becoming 'more oneself in a Russian milieu, was shared by many Russians of Natasha's class, including her own 'Uncle', it would seem. The simple recreations of the country house or dacha - hunting in the woods, visiting the bath house or what Nabokov called the 'very Russian sport of hodit' po gribi (looking for mushrooms)'⁶ - were more than the retrieval of a rural idyll: they were an expression of one's Russianness. To interpret habits such as these is one of this book's aims. Using art and fiction, diaries and letters, memoirs and prescriptive literature, it seeks to apprehend the structures of the Russian national identity. 'Identity' these days is a fashionable term,

But it is not very meaningful unless one can show how it manifests itself in social interaction and behaviour. A culture is made up not simply of works of art, or literary discourses, but of unwritten codes, signs and symbols, rituals and gestures, and common attitudes that fix the public meaning of these works and organize the inner life of a society. So the reader will find here that works of literature, like War and Peace, are intercut with episodes from daily life (childhood, marriage, religious life, responses to the landscape, food and drinking habits, attitudes to death) where the outlines of this national consciousness may be discerned. These are the episodes where we may find, in life, the unseen threads of a common Russian sensibility, such as Tolstoy had imagined in his celebrated dancing scene.