#6588
#9 - JRL 6588
Washington Post
December 5, 2002
book review
Mother Russia's Contentious Children
By Jamey Gambrell, a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Harriman
Institute. His translation of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva's "Earthly
Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922"
NATASHA'S DANCE
A Cultural History of Russia
By Orlando Figes
Henry Holt. 729 pp. $35
Orlando Figes' "Natasha's Dance" is as long as a classic Russian novel, if somewhat shorter than "War and Peace," a scene from which provides the title and sets the stage for Figes' "history of ideas and attitudes -- concepts of the nation" by which Russia has for the past 200 years "tried to understand itself." In Tolstoy's novel, the young countess Natasha Rostova astounds everyone by instinctively performing a peasant dance as though she had been raised in a humble izba. Tolstoy presented the scene as an encounter between Russia's upper-class European culture and its indigenous peasant culture, and marveled at the perseverance of an "authentic," native Russian self within an aristocrat "reared in silks and velvets."
Figes similarly examines the encounters and clashes between diverse cultural strands to elucidate the "mythic notion of Russia's nationhood which . . . [has] had a lasting hold on the [Russian] political imagination," while acknowledging that the country is too vast and varied for there to be a single "quintessential national culture." His engaging excursion through Russian culture begins in the early 18th century, with Peter the Great's willful founding of St. Petersburg, Russia's "window on the West," and ends behind the dank Iron Curtain of the Brezhnev period. While it is for the most part an expert and loving tour, Figes fails to wrestle fully with the most troubling chapter in modern Russian cultural life: the Stalinist period, when culture and the arts were entirely at the unpredictable mercy of constant, unpredictable shifts of state policy.
Figes' book documents, objectively yet sympathetically, how "for the past two hundred years the arts in Russia have served as the arena for political, philosophical and religious debate in the absence of a parliament or a free press." This arena has always been fractious and potentially dangerous, for writers in particular. The political imagination that courses through Russian culture has cycled manic-depressively through love affairs with the West and contempt for everything Western, enchantment with the "real" Russia (Christian and pagan) and despair over Russia's "backwardness." Profound guilt over the rift between the educated classes and a mythologized "Russian people" lies at the heart of every plunge of the national mood.
A history professor at the University of London, Figes examines the periodic fashions for Russian folk art and music and peasant dress among the upper classes and artists searching for a "genuine Russian style." The reader unfamiliar with Russian cultural affairs may be forgiven for feeling a bit dizzy and confused here: Every time you turn around, artists, writers and musicians are "discovering" or "returning to the real Russia," "rejecting Western values" or "affirming Russia's unique spiritual mission," etc. One might begin to wonder where it was they had all gone to have to orchestrate such frequent, tormented returns home.
Other than Paris, possible destinations included the largely Muslim regions of the Caucasus and Central Asia, the "other side" of the Russian soul. Figes' chapter on this overlooked subject is particularly topical. "Long before the Russians ever knew their colonies as ethnographic facts," he argues, "they had invented them in their literature and arts." The empire's eastern stretches were a fairy-tale land that offered an alluring sense of identity for Russians. On the one hand, when disillusioned with the wicked, unforgiving West, they reveled in projecting a fearsome "Asiatic" nature, as the poet Alexander Blok did in "The Scythians": "You are millions, we are multitudes / And multitudes and multitudes. / Come fight! Yes, we are Scythians, / Yes, Asiatics, a slant-eyed greedy tribe." On the other hand, as Dostoevski wrote: "Asia is the America which we have not discovered. . . . In Asia we can be Europeans." Anyone who has spent time talking over tea or vodka in a Russian kitchen will recognize these obsessions.
It all began, Figes argues, with Peter the Great, whose forced Europeanization of the nobility led, by the end of the 18th century, to a ruling class that barely spoke its native language. Each cycle of infatuation and disenchantment could result in violent emotional swings, as "conservatives" became "revolutionaries," "liberals" metamorphosed into "Slavophiles," and yet another utopia turned dystopian.
Figes adeptly pursues these twists and turns through the 19th century, illustrating them with absorbing accounts of the lives of artists and writers, of aristocrats like the exiled Decembrist leader Prince Sergei Volkonsky, and of serfs like the opera singer Praskovia, who eventually married her master, the wealthy Count Sheremetev. When he "crosses the barrier of 1917," however, Figes' subject begins to elude him. He chronicles Stalinist oppression and the persecution of artists like Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova; he understands the degradation of the arts under the Stalinist regime. But to say, for instance, that "Soviet Moscow was supremely confident, its confidence reflected in the huge building projects of the 1930s . . . and the forward-upward images of Socialist Realist 'art,' " is to introduce an important distortion. The only thing reflected in those projects was Stalin's success at imposing his will to power. The rules of the game had been fundamentally altered.
In 1932, Stalin abolished all independent artistic organizations; eventually the centralized "creative unions" (the Writers' Union, Artists' Union, etc.) were formed, and in 1934 the usefully vague doctrine of Socialist Realism was decreed. Russian -- now Soviet -- culture, its literature and art, was no longer the same kind of political debating ground it had once been. Not only were the dangers far greater -- the gulag, torture or a bullet in the skull -- but all writers and artists now competed for the resources of a single patron: the state, as administered by their fellow artists and competitors. It was simply not possible for a public work of art to "mean" in the same way; any work suspected of merely disregarding the new reality, much less contesting it, could not be published, performed or exhibited, even if its creator was left untouched.
The bursts of "resentful contempt" for the West that had long characterized Russian culture were institutionalized, harnessed for the party's uses, and raised to pathological levels under Stalin. Khrushchev's thaw relaxed control over culture, allowing some different voices to emerge (especially Russian nationalism), but the pathology remained entrenched. After Stalin's death, vying political factions within the ruling elite co-opted cultural-identity politics for their own ends. A genuine cultural debate began to reemerge only when dissidents, samizdat writers and unofficial artists simply refused to recognize Soviet rules. Figes argues that the "cultural tradition which [this book] charts reached the end of a natural cycle" in the Brezhnev period, but in fact that cycle was unceremoniously halted by Stalin's 1932 decree. Figes barely mentions samizdat and nonconformist or dissident culture. This omission is a shame, because it was in nonconformist culture that the core themes of his book -- Russia vs. the West, the intelligentsia vs. the people (no longer just the peasantry, but Soviet Everyman) -- once again became the lifeblood of cultural contention.
Figes is back on more solid ground in his chapter on "Russia abroad," the huge, fantastically talented pool of Russian emigres that swamped Berlin and Paris between the wars, some of whom later moved to the United States. One might quibble with some of his interpretations, but he is dealing with an arena in which "mythic notions" of Russia engage in relatively free battle in Western and emigre venues.
Though he does not venture as far as perestroika, Figes' book is important background reading for those who wish to understand present-day Russia. The ancestors of today's "reformers," "nationalists," "communists" and derzhavniki (proponents of a strong state) are all descendants of the artists and cultural figures that populate Figes' book. Listen closely to contemporary Russian writers, politicians and ideologues and, hundreds of years later, you will find the same arguments, the same vocabulary, the same tortured wrestling with the fate imposed by geography.
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