#6532
#11 - JRL 6531
San Francisco Chronicle
November 3, 2002
Rooted in suffering/Russian art creates a nation's
identity
Reviewed by Walter C. Uhler
Walter C. Uhler lives in Philadelphia and has written widely about Russian
and military history.
Natasha's Dance
A Cultural History of Russia
By Orlando Figes
METROPOLITAN; 544 Pages; $35
Seventy-four years of Soviet rule and a decade of economic chaos have caused many Americans to mistrust Russia and deprecate things Russian. Yet, as Orlando Figes demonstrates in his scintillating history of its artistic culture, Russia has graced the planet with one of the world's most vibrant civilizations.
Consider that Russia has given us Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekov, Marc Chagall, Vasili Kandinsky, Peter Tchaikovsky, Boris Pasternak, Modest Mussorgsky, Maxim Gorky, Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Igor Stravinsky, George Balanchine, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Joseph Brodsky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, Vaslav Nijinsky, Ivan Turgenev, Sergei Prokofiev, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Anna Akhmatova and Konstantin Stanislavski -- just to name a few.
Unlike America's experience over the past two centuries, where the voices of serious artists have been difficult to hear in the cacophony of commerce and popular culture, Russia's artists, according to Figes, "took it upon themselves to create a national community of values and ideas through literature and art."
That was no small task, given the prospect of banishment, imprisonment or execution for one's artistic integrity. As another student of Russian culture, W. Bruce Lincoln, observed: "There is a level of suffering in Russia's artistic experience that exceeds that of Western nations." Such high stakes did not encourage frivolity; witness the Cold War cliche that in the West everything is permitted, but nothing matters, while in the East (Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) nothing is permitted, but everything matters.
Better yet, witness the words of poet Osip Mandelstam (written during the Stalinist 1930s): "Poetry is respected only in this country -- people are killed for it. There's no place where more people are killed for it." Even the Soviet Union's literary darling, Gorky, probably was murdered on Stalin's orders. Russia's czars had been less murderous, but Pushkin was banished to his estate, Dostoyevsky was subjected to a mock execution and subsequent imprisonment in Siberia and Tolstoy was excommunicated from Russia's Orthodox Church.
Peter the Great fostered the rise of Russia's great artists by creating a service nobility, compelling it to emulate the West and move to his ultimately magnificent St. Petersburg. By suppressing the Orthodox Church, Peter freed potential artists from Moscow and its stifling religious conformity.
Subsequent events -- which included the nobility's eventual release from compulsory service, its burgeoning nationalism (and disdain for France) in the wake of Russia's triumph over Napoleon, and its disillusionment with the failure of Czar Alexander to reform Russia -- caused increasing numbers of the nobility to break away to become artists. Pushkin, the creator of Russia's literary language, was one of the first to bolt.
As Figes makes clear, "For a nobleman to become an artist, then, was to reject the traditions of his class. It meant, in effect, to reinvent himself as an 'intelligent' -- a member of the intelligentsia -- whose duty was defined as service to 'the nation' rather than to the state." That duty led him to the Russian peasantry.
Tolstoy, for example, believed that Russia's soul resided in its peasants. Yet he was comforted by the conceit that Russia's European-educated upper classes were peasants in disguise. He advances this claim in a vignette in "War and Peace" describing the visit of Natasha Rostova (a "slim, graceful countess, reared in silks and velvets") to her eccentric "Uncle" and his unofficial peasant wife. During her visit, Natasha is swept away by the rhythms of an unfamiliar Russian folk song. Unconsciously, she commences dancing with the "spirit and the movements," which were "the inimitable and unteachable Russian ones" that her uncle had expected of her. Thus, Figes' "Natasha's Dance."
Although such peasant influences could be found in the 19th century child- rearing practices of the Russian nobility, Figes believes that Tolstoy's vision of Russia was as much a myth as the competing, if often overlapping, visions offered by Russia's other great artists. For example, Mussorgsky's "Pictures From an Exhibition," probably "did more than any other (work of classical music) to define the Russian style," but it, too, created a myth. It blended elements of Russian folk music with pure musical invention. Yet this was the Russia offered to its people and the world.
In fact, Figes claims "there is no quintessential national culture, only mythic images of it." Anyone searching for the "unseen threads of a common Russian sensibility" must bring an understanding of everyday Russian life to these mythic images -- precisely what Figes does so well in his book.
He is much less successful, however, in proving his assertion that these mythic images shaped "the ideas and allegiances of Russia's politics." Arguably, Russia's military encounters played a greater role in these areas. Nevertheless, "Natasha's Dance" is an exceptional history of Russian culture and a joy to read.
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