Natasha's Dance, page 15
’To me, Onegin, all these splendours, This weary tinselled life of mine,
* The Emperor Alexander began taking a daily promenade along the Palace Embankment and the Nevsky Prospekt as far as the Anichkov bridge. It was, in the words of the memoirist Vigel, a ‘conscious striving by the Tsar for simplicity in daily life’ (F. F. Vigel’, Zapiski, chast’ 2 (Moscow, 1892.), p. 32.). Before 1800, no self-respecting nobleman would go anywhere in Petersburg except by carriage, and (as Kniazhnin’s comic opera testified) vast personal fortunes would be spent on the largest carriages imported from Europe. But, under Alexander’s influence, it became the fashion in St Petersburg to ‘faire le tour imperial‘.
This homage that the great world tenders,
My stylish house where princes dine -
Are empty… I’d as soon be trading
This tattered life of masquerading,
This world of glitter, fumes, and noise,
For just my books, the simple joys
Of our old home, its walks and flowers,
For all those haunts that I once knew…
Where first, Onegin, I saw you;
For that small churchyard’s shaded bowers,
Where over my poor nanny now
There stands a cross beneath a bough.’115
Pushkin’s masterpiece is, among many other things, a subtle exploration of the complex Russian-European consciousness that typified the aristocracy in the age of 1812. The literary critic Vissarion Belinsky said that Eugene Onegin was an encyclopaedia of Russian life, and Pushkin himself, in its final stanzas, developed the idea of the novel as life’s book. In no other work can one see so clearly the visceral influence of cultural convention on the Russian sense of self. In many ways, indeed, the novel’s central subject is the complex interplay between life and art. The syncretic nature of Tatiana’s character is an emblem of the cultural world in which she lives. At one moment she is reading a romantic novel; at another listening to her nanny’s superstitions and folk tales. She is torn between the gravitational fields of Europe and Russia. Her very name, Tatiana, as Pushkin underlines in a footnote, comes from the ancient Greek, yet in Russia it is ‘used only among the common people’.116 In the affairs of the heart, as well, Tatiana is subject to the different cultural norms of European Russia and the peasant countryside. As a rather young and impressionable girl from the provinces, she inhabits the imaginary world of the romantic novel and understands her feelings in these terms. She duly falls in love with the Byronic figure of Eugene and, like one of her fictional heroines, she writes to declare her love to him. Yet when the lovesick Tatiana asks her nanny if she has ever been in love, she becomes exposed to the influence of a very different culture where romantic love is a foreign luxury and obedience is a woman’s main virtue. The peasant nurse
tells Tatiana how she was married off at the age of just thirteen to an even younger boy whom she had never seen before:
I got so scared… my tears kept falling; And weeping, they undid my plait, Then sang me to the churchyard gate.117
This encounter between the two cultures represents Tatiana’s own predicament: whether to pursue her own romantic dreams or sacrifice herself in the traditional ‘Russian’ way (the way chosen by Maria Volkonsky when she gave up everything to follow her Decembrist husband to Siberia). Onegin rejects Tatiana - he sees her as a naive country girl - and then, after killing his friend Lensky in a duel, he disappears for several years. Meanwhile Tatiana is married to a man she does not really love, as far as one can tell, a military hero from the wars of 1812 who is ‘well received’ at court. Tatiana rises to become a celebrated hostess in St Petersburg. Onegin now returns and falls in love with her. Years of wandering through his native land have somehow changed the former dandy of St Petersburg, and finally he sees her natural beauty, her ‘lack of mannerisms or any borrowed tricks’. But Tatiana remains faithful to her marriage vows. She has come, it seems, to embrace her ‘Russian principles’ - to see through the illusions of romantic love. Looking through the books in Onegin’s library, she understands at last the fictive dimension of his personality:
A Muscovite in Harold’s cloak, Compendium of affectation, A lexicon of words in vogue… Mere parody and just a rogue?118
Yet even here, when Tatiana tells Onegin,
I love you (why should I dissemble?); But I am now another’s wife, And I’ll be faithful all my life119
we see in her the dense weave of cultural influences. These lines are adapted from a song well known among the Russian folk. Thought in Pushkin’s time to have been written by Peter the Great, it was translated into French by Pushkin’s own uncle. Tatiana could have read it in an old issue of Mercure de France. But she could also have heard it from her peasant nurse.120 It is a perfect illustration of the complex intersections between European and native Russian culture during Pushkin’s age.
Pushkin himself was a connoisseur of Russian songs and tales. Chulkov’s ABC of Russian Superstitions (1780-83) and Levshin’s Russian Tales (1788) were well-thumbed texts on Pushkin’s shelves. He had been brought up on the peasant tales and superstitions of his beloved nanny, Arina Rodionova, who became the model for Tatiana’s nurse. ‘Mama’ Rodionova was a talented narrator, elaborating and enriching many standard tales, judging by the transcripts of her stories that Pushkin later made.121 During his years of exile in the south in 1820-24 he became a serious explorer of the folk traditions, those of the Cossacks in particular, and then, when exiled to his family estate at Mikhailovskoe in 1824-6, he carried on collecting songs and tales. Pushkin used these as the basis of Ruslan and Liudmila (1820), his first major poem, which some critics panned as mere ‘peasant verse’, and for his stylized ‘fairy tales’ like Tsar Sultan which he composed in his final years. Yet he had no hesitation in mixing Russian stories with European sources, such as the fables of La Fontaine or the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. For The Golden Cockerel (1834) he even borrowed from the Legend of the Arabian Astrologer which he had come across in the 1832 French translation of The Legends of the Alhambra by Washington Irving. As far as Pushkin was concerned, Russia was a part of Western and world culture, and it did not make his ‘folk tales’ any less authentic if he combined all these sources in literary re-creations of the Russian style. How ironic, then, that Soviet nationalists regarded Pushkin’s stories as direct expressions of the Russian folk.*
* Akhmatova was denounced by the Soviet literary authorities for suggesting, quite correctly, that some of Pushkin’s sources for his ‘Russian tales’ were taken from The Thousand and One Nights.
By Pushkin’s death, in 1837, the literary use of folk tales had become commonplace, almost a condition of literary success. More than any other Western canon, Russian literature was rooted in the oral narrative traditions, to which it owed much of its extraordinary strength and originality. Pushkin, Lermontov, Ostrovsky, Nekrasov, Tolstoy, Leskov and Saltykov-Shchedrin - all to some degree could be thought of as folklorists, all certainly used folklore in many of their works. But none captured the essential spirit of the folk tale better than Nikolai Gogol.
Gogol was in fact a Ukrainian, and, were it not for Pushkin, who was his mentor and gave him the true plots of his major works, The Government Inspector (1836) and Dead Souls (1835-52), he might have written in the peasant dialect of his native Mirgorod, where Gogol’s father was well known (though unpublishable under Tsarist laws) as a writer in Ukrainian. During his childhood Gogol fell in love with the earthy idiom of the local peasantry. He loved their songs and dances, their terrifying tales and comic stories, from which his own fantastic tales of Petersburg would later take their cue. He first rose to fame as ‘Rudy [i.e. redhead] Panko, Beekeeper’, the pseudonymous author of a bestselling collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831-2), which fed the growing craze for Ukrainian folk tales. Aladin’s Kochubei, Somov’s Haidamaki and Kulzhinsky’s Cossack Hat had all been great successes in the Russian capital. But Gogol was nothing if not ambitious and, in 1828, when barely out of school, he came to Petersburg in the hope of making his own literary name. Working during the day as a humble clerk (of the sort that filled his stories), he wrote at night in his lonely attic room. He badgered his mother and sister to send him details of Ukrainian songs and proverbs, and even bits of costume which he wanted them to buy from the local peasants and send to him in a trunk. Readers were delighted with the ‘authenticity’ of Evenings on a Farm. Some critics thought that the stories had been spoilt by a ‘coarse’ and ‘improper’ folk language. But the language of the stories was their principal success. It echoed perfectly the musical sonorities of peasant speech - one of the reasons why the stories were adapted by Musorgsky for the unfinished Soroch-intsy Fair (1874-) and for St John’s Night on Bald Mountain (1867), and by Rimsky-Korsakov for May Night (1879) - and it could be
understood by Everyman. During the proof stage of Evenings on a Farm Gogol paid a visit to the typesetters. ‘The strangest thing occurred’, he explained to Pushkin. ‘As soon as I opened the door and the printers noticed me, they began to laugh and turned away from me. I was somewhat taken aback and asked for an explanation. The printer explained: “The items that you sent are very amusing and they have greatly amused the typesetters.”’122
More and more, common speech entered literature, as writers like Gogol began to assimilate the spoken idiom to their written form. Literary language thus broke free from the confines of the salon and flew out, as it were, into the street, taking on the sounds of colloquial Russian and ceasing in the process to depend on French loan words for ordinary things. Lermontov’s civic poetry was filled with the rhythms and expressions of the folk, as recorded by himself from peasant speech. His epic Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov (1837) imitates the style of the bylina; while his brilliantly patriotic Borodino (1837) (written to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the defeat of Napoleon’s army) re-creates the spirit of the battlefield by having it described from the peasant soldiers’ point of view:
For three long days we fired at random, We knew that we had not unmanned them, And neither meant to yield. Each soldier thought it should be ended: For had we fought or just pretended? And then it was that night descended Upon that fateful field.123
Russian music also found its national voice through the assimilation of folk song. The first Collection of Russian Folk Songs was assembled by Nikolai Lvov and annotated by Ivan Prach in 1790. The distinctive features of the peasant chant - the shifting tones and uneven rhythms that would become such a feature of the Russian musical style from Musorgsky to Stravinsky - were altered to conform to Western musical formulas so that the songs could be performed with conventional keyboard accompaniment (Russia’s piano-owning classes needed their folk music to be ‘pleasing to the ear’).124 The Lvov-Prach collection
was an instant hit, and it quickly went through several editions. Throughout the nineteenth century it was plundered by composers in search of ‘authentic’ folk material, so that nearly all the folk tunes in the Russian repertory, from Glinka to Rimsky-Korsakov, were derived from Lvov-Prach. Western composers also turned to it for exotic Russian colour and themes russes. Beethoven used two songs from the Lvov collection in the ‘Razumovsky’ string quartets (opus 59), commissioned in 1805 by the Russian ambassador in Vienna, Count Razumovsky, at the height of the Russo-Austrian alliance against Napoleon. One of the songs was the famous ‘Slava’ (‘Glory’) chorus -later used by Musorgsky in the coronation scene of Boris Godunov -which Beethoven used as the subject for a fugue in the scherzo of the opus 59 number 2 quartet. It was originally a sviatochnaya, a folk song sung by Russian girls to accompany their divination games at the New Year. Trinkets would be dropped into a dish of water and drawn out one by one as the maidens sang their song. The simple tune became a great national chorus in the war of 1812 - the Tsar’s name being substituted for the divine powers in the ‘Glory’ choruses; in later versions, the names of officers were added, too.125
The Imperial recruitment of this peasant theme was equally pronounced in Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar (1836). Its climactic version of the same ‘Glory’ chorus practically became a second national anthem in the nineteenth century.* Mikhail Glinka was exposed to Russian music from an early age. His grandfather had been in charge of music at the local church of Novospasskoe - in a region of Smolensk that was famous for the strident sound of its church bells - and his uncle had a serf orchestra that was renowned for performing Russian songs. In 1812 the Glinka home was overrun and pillaged by French troops as they advanced towards Moscow. Though he was only eight at the time, it must have stirred the patriotic feelings of the future Composer of A Life, whose plot was suggested by the peasant partisans. The opera tells the story of Ivan Susanin, a peasant from the estate of Mikhail Romanov, the founder of the Romanov dynasty, in Kostroma. According to legend, in the winter of 1612 Susanin had saved Mikhail’s
*After 1917 there were suggestions that the ‘Glory’ chorus should become the national anthem.
life by misdirecting the Polish troops who had invaded Russia in its ‘Time of Troubles’ (1605-13) and had come to Kostroma to murder Mikhail on the eve of his assumption of the throne. Susanin lost his life, but a dynasty was saved. The obvious parallels between Susanin’s sacrifice and the peasant soldiers’ in 1812 stimulated a romantic interest in the Susanin myth. Ryleev wrote a famous ballad about him and Mikhail Zagoskin two bestselling novels, set respectively in 1612 and 1812.
Glinka said that his opera was conceived as a battle between Polish and Russian music. The Poles were heard in the polonaise and the mazurka, the Russians in his own adaptations of folk and urban songs. Glinka’s supposed debt to folklore made him Russia’s first canonical ‘national composer’; while A Life took on the status of the quintessential ‘Russian opera’, its ritual performance on all national occasions practically enforced by Imperial decree. Yet in fact there were relatively few folk melodies (in a noticeable form) in the opera. Glinka had assimilated the folk style and expressed its basic spirit, but the music he wrote was entirely his own. He had fused the qualities of Russian peasant music with the European form. He had shown, in the words of the poet Odoevsky, that ‘Russian melody may be elevated to a tragic style’.126
In painting, too, there was a new approach to the Russian peasantry. The canons of good taste in the eighteenth century had demanded that the peasant be excluded, as a subject, from all serious forms of art. Classical norms dictated that the artist should present universal themes: scenes from antiquity or the Bible, set in a timeless Greek or Italian landscape. Russian genre painting developed very late, in the final decades of the eighteenth century, and its image of the common man was sentimentalized: plump peasant cherubs in a pastoral scene or sympathetic ‘rustic types’ with stock expressions to display that they had human feelings, too. It was a visual version of the sentimental novel or the comic opera which had highlighted the serfs’ humanity by telling of their love lives and romantic suffering. Yet, in the wake of 1812, a different picture of the peasantry emerged - one that emphasized their heroic strength and human dignity.
This can be seen in the work of Alexei Venetsianov, a quintessential child of 1812. The son of a Moscow merchant (from a family that
6. Alexei Venetsianov: Cleaning Beetroot, 1820
came originally from Greece), Venetsianov was a draughtsman and a land surveyor for the government before setting up as a painter and engraver in the 1800s. Like many of the pioneers of Russian culture (Musorgsky comes to mind), he received no formal education and remained outside the Academy throughout his life. In 1812 he came to the attention of the public for a series of engravings of the peasant partisans. Selling in huge numbers, they glorified the image of the partisans, drawing them in the form of warriors of ancient Greece and Rome, and from that point on the public called the partisans the ‘Russian Hercules’.127 The war of 1812 formed Venetsianov’s views. Although not a political man, he moved in the same circles as the Decembrists and shared their ideals. In 1815 he acquired through his wife a small estate in Tver and, four years later, he retired there, setting up a school for the village children and supporting several peasant
artists from his meagre income off the land. One of them was Grigory Soroka, whose tender portrait of his teacher, painted in the 1840s, is a moving testimony to Venetsianov’s character.
Venetsianov knew the peasants of his village individually - and in his best portraits, that is how he painted them. He conveyed their personal qualities, just as other portrait painters set out to convey the individual character of noblemen. This psychological aspect was revolutionary for its day, when, with few exceptions, portraitists turned out generic ‘peasant types’. Venetsianov focused on the close-up face, forcing viewers to confront the peasant and look him in the eyes, inviting them to enter his inner world. Venetsianov also pioneered the naturalist school of landscape painting in Russia. The character of the Tver countryside - its subdued greens and quiet earth colours - can be seen in all his work. He conveyed the vastness of the Russian land by lowering the horizon to enhance the immensity of the sky over its flat open spaces - a technique derived from icon painting and later copied by epic landscape painters such as Vrubel and Vasnetsov. Unlike the artists of the Academy, who treated landscape as mere background and copied it from European works, Venetsianov painted directly from nature. For The Threshing Floor (1820) he had his serfs saw out the end wall of a barn so that he could paint them at work inside it. No other painter brought such realism to his depictions of agricultural life. In Cleaning Beetroot (1820) he makes the viewer look at the dirty callused hands and exhausted expressions of the three young female labourers who dominate the scene. It was the first time that such ugly female forms - so foreign to the classical tradition - had appeared in Russian art. Yet these sad figures win our sympathy for their human dignity in the face of suffering. Venetsianov’s elevated vision of human toil was most apparent in his many images of peasant women. In perhaps his finest painting, a symbolic study of a peasant with her child, In the Ploughed Field: Spring (1827) (plate 4), he combines the distinctive Russian features of his female labourer with the sculptural proportions of an antique heroine. The woman in the field is a peasant goddess. She is the mother of the Russian land.
