Were Russians Nothing but Copycats?

The “Natasha” whose “dance” Orlando Figes has chosen as the identifying metaphor for his “cultural history of Russia” is Natasha Rostova, heroine of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” After an exciting day of fox-hunting, she and her aristocratic party repair to the modest home of “Uncle,” a distant relative much lower in social status. There a very “Russian” (nonaristocratic) meal is topped off by some equally “Russian” guitar music, which inspires Natasha, taught only the most refined “European” ballroom dancing, to perform--perfectly--a very “Russian” (peasant) folk dance.

Tolstoy (quite implausibly) attributes this miraculous act of cultural cross-dressing to the “Russian air she breathed”; for him the dance symbolized a much-desired symbiotic unity of the whole Russian nation, lord and peasant, shown in his novel in their common determination to expel the French invaders of 1812 and, as here, to some degree sharing a common “culture.” In Orlando Figes’ history of this culture, the major theme is the interaction thus symbolized between the European culture first assimilated by the nobility and the “native” culture of the peasant masses.

Figes, author of two earlier books on Russian history (a study of the pre-Revolutionary peasantry and a prize-winning history of the 1917 Revolution), begins the story of Europeanization with the reforms of Peter the Great in the early 18th century and continued less coercively by his successors. Not surprisingly, this program of cultural assimilation triggered a reaction. Were Russians nothing but copycats? Even in the 18th century, latent patriots therefore sought to celebrate what was native in their culture. This highly charged internal face-off between European influence and Russian tradition continued even after the Revolution of 1917. It is a complex and fascinating story, and Figes tells it well, with lots of picturesque detail.

Figes has formulated the nature of this confrontation impartially and clearly, recognizing that no cultures are “pure”; all are amalgams of various influences developed over time, some home-grown, but mostly borrowed. He also does not claim completeness; an all-inclusive history would require many volumes, even if it confined itself to “high” culture (literature, art, architecture, music) rather than to culture in the larger anthropological sense. Instead, he has selected certain recurrent themes, which he formulates and selectively illustrates.

We begin with St. Petersburg, Peter’s fiat city, his “window to Europe.” As Figes aptly puts it, St. Petersburg was not only a new city, it was also a “project of cultural engineering.” Peter compelled the leading noble families to build Western-style houses in the new capital. One such family was the Sheremetevs, whose extravagant palace on the Fontanka Canal much later contained the humble dwelling of the great poet Anna Akhmatova, providing Figes with a neat symbolic linkage. Where once a serf orchestra had performed European music, a poet of European stature, whose portrait by Modigliani hung on her wall, recorded in immortal words the devastation her country suffered from the nightmarish cruelty and cultural vandalism of Stalin’s tyranny.

Between these two poles, Figes takes us through successive stages, among them the “Decembrist” conspiracy of 1825, when the “children of 1812” made a hopelessly ineffective attempt to “Europeanize,” by coup d’etat, the archaic Russian autocracy. Figes then focuses vividly on one of the conspirators, Sergei Volkonsky, scion of a prominent aristocratic family, who spent 30 years in Siberian exile. During those years, the stifling reign of Nicholas I, the confrontation between “Europe” and “Russia” continued on many levels, the government’s efforts to isolate the country from baneful Western influences being countered by the intelligentsia’s determination to continue importing them.

Yet elements of that same intelligentsia also sought earnestly for authentic cultural values among the Russian folk, and reflections of such values found their way into the work of writers (Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, later many others), painters (Aleksei Venetsianov, later Ilya Repin) and composers (Mikhail Glinka, later Modest Musorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Aleksandr Borodin). Figes next takes up a favorite theme in Russian literature (and life): the contrast between St. Petersburg and Moscow. St. Petersburg was the quintessential “geometric” planned European city, locus of the court; Moscow was the overgrown Russian village, where gentlefolk maintained capacious mansions where they spent their winters and overspent their incomes on lavish hospitality. Figes provides succulent details of gluttonous Moscow banquets. Figes also traces, later in the century, Moscow’s enormous growth as a commercial and industrial center and the development of merchant dynasties, some of which became notable patrons of the arts. Finally, after 1917, Moscow triumphed, replacing St. Petersburg as the capital and becoming an “imperial city.”

The populist movement of the 1870s was another effort to bring the two cultures together, as hundreds of educated youth “went to the people,” hoping to bring the peasants “European” enlightenment and to assimilate what was valuable in the peasants’ own culture, especially their communal landholding system, idolized as a natural nucleus of socialism. The attempted integration was a failure, but peasant-worship survived. Count Leo Tolstoy dressed and longed to live like a peasant but continued to read in four languages and write profusely. Yet disillusionment did set in. Anton Chekhov’s “Peasants” and Ivan Bunin’s “The Village” shocked the peasant lovers with images of a peasantry as debased in culture as they were impoverished. Perhaps, as Maxim Gorky believed, the peasants were no repository of a uniquely Russian culture but simply savages with a propensity for violence. Paradoxically, in the same pre-revolutionary period, Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev captivated Europe with Russian music and ballet that drew heavily on Russian folk culture.

One cultural locus that the Russian upper and lower classes could have shared was the Orthodox Church, but even this linkage was flawed. Much of the peasant population had broken with the church in the 17th century, becoming known as the “Old Believers” and later splitting into many sects; and the Europeanized elite traditionally took their religion lightly, many following Western leads and becoming atheists. Yet a contrary tendency was also present, manifested in the belief of such writers as Gogol and Feodor Dostoevsky that Russian peasant Christianity was destined to save the world.

Figes also takes us on a welcome excursion among the Asian minorities of the empire, showing that they too left their mark on Russian culture, using the painter Vasily Kandinsky as his example. Clearly, the centuries of Mongol-Tatar domination must have had an effect, not all of it negative. Though not strictly Asian, the Caucasus, conquered by Russia in the 19th century, was likewise an area of cultural ambiguity. Were the Russians carrying civilization to such peoples as the Armenians and Georgians, who had embraced Christianity six centuries before they did?

Crossing into the Soviet period, we find a new configuration, a small minority struggling to impose a European utopian ideology on the masses, capitalizing on and manipulating their accumulated discontents. Society was upended, and the former “haves” became the lowest of “have-nots,” 2 million or so of them being driven out of the country altogether. Still, the proletarian Soviet regime needed the services of the surviving intelligentsia to create a culture that would “engineer human souls,” according to communist specifications. Literature, theater, cinema and music were all pressed into service, and Figes provides striking detail on the troubled careers of such figures as poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, film director Sergei Eisenstein and composer Dmitry Shostakovich. The regime was a capricious taskmaster, little concerned with artistic integrity; and these and many others had grave difficulties complying with its demands, their careers often ending in arrest, exile and even execution.

Figes ends his wide-ranging tour with a welcome chapter on the Russian diaspora, which carried Russian culture to foreign soil. The exiles’ creativity remained extraordinary. Such figures as Bunin, writer Aleksei Remizov, poet Vladislav Khodasevich, poet Marina Tsvetaeva and writer Vladimir Nabokov; artists Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova and Marc Chagall; composers Sergei Rachmaninov, Sergei Prokofiev and Stravinsky; and many others, though living in the West, each in his or her own way remained Russian. Figes concludes with a moving account of Stravinsky’s first return to Russia, in 1962. “The smell of Russian earth is different,” the composer proclaimed. “I love it.”

The amount of material Figes has at least surveyed is staggering. He tells us that he relied on a team of assistants, and the book has a formidable apparatus of endnotes and “suggestions for further reading.” Perhaps his process of supervising his assistants was faulty; at any rate, a disturbing number of errors made it into the text. Many are trivial, but even the trivial ones undermine one’s confidence in other “facts” the author adduces. One example: Lexicographers believe that it was not, as Figes claims, Napoleon’s soldiers who created the now international word “bistro” by demanding fast service in Moscow (bystro is Russian for “fast”), but Russian soldiers in 1814 doing the same in Paris.

However, no doubt such mistakes are troubling mainly to scholars. From “Natasha’s Dance,” the ordinary reader will get a vivid, entertaining and enlightening account of what it has meant to be culturally a Russian over the last three centuries.