Natasha's Dance

4

The musical life of eighteenth-century Russia was dominated by the court and by small private theatres such as Sheremetev's. Public theatres, which were long-established in the towns of western Europe, did not really feature in the cultural life of Russia until the 1780s. The aristocracy preferred their own society and they rarely attended the public theatres, which catered mainly to the clerks and traders of the towns with vaudevilles and comic operas. 'In our day,' one Princess Yankova recalled, 'it was considered more refined to go [to the theatre] by the personal invitation of the host, and not to one where anyone could go in exchange for money. And who indeed among our intimate friends did not possess his own private theatre?'⁸³

There were serf theatres on 173 estates, and serf orchestras on 300 estates, between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries.⁸⁴ Besides the Sheremetevs, the Goncharovs, the Saltykovs, the Orlovs and Shepelevs, the Tolstoys and Nashchokins all had large serf troupes and separate theatre buildings that could be compared with the court theatres of Catherine the Great (the Hermitage Theatre in the Winter Palace and the Chinese Theatre at Tsarskoe Selo) from which they took their cue. Catherine set the pattern for the theatre in Russia. She herself wrote plays and comic operas; she began the fashion for the high French style in the Russian theatre; and it was she who first advanced the Enlightenment idea of the theatre as a school of public manners and sensibilities. The serf theatre played a central role on the noble estate during Catherine's reign.

In 1762, the Empress liberated the nobility from compulsory service to the state. She wanted her nobility to resemble a European one. It was a turning point in the cultural history of the aristocracy. Relieved of their stately duties, many noblemen retired to the country and developed their estates. The decades following the emancipation of the nobility were the golden age of the pleasure palace, with galleries for art, exquisite parks and gardens, orchestras and theatres appearing for the first time in the Russian countryside. The estate became much more than just an economic unit or living space. It became an island of European culture on Russian peasant soil.

The Sheremetev serf troupe was the most important theatre of its kind, and it played a major role in the development of the Russian opera. It was ranked on a level with the court theatre in Petersburg and was considered far superior to the leading company in Moscow, whose theatre was located on the site of the Bolshoi Theatre today. The Moscow theatre's English director, Michael Meddox, complained that Kuskovo, which did not charge admission, had deprived his theatre of an audience.⁸⁵ Pyotr Sheremetev had established the serf troupe at Kuskovo in the 1760s. He was not an artistic man, but the theatre was a fashionable addition to his grand estate and it enabled him to entertain the court. In 1775 the Empress Catherine attended a performance of the French opera in the open-air theatre at Kuskovo. This encouraged Sheremetev to build a proper theatre, large enough to stage the foreign operas so beloved by the Empress, between 1777

and 1787. He left its direction to his son, Count Nikolai Petrovich, who was well acquainted with the French and Italian opera from his European travels in the early 1770s. Nikolai trained his serf performers in the disciplined techniques of the Paris Opera. Peasants were selected at an early age from his various estates and trained as musicians for the theatre orchestra or as singers for the troupe. There was also a German who taught the violin, a French singing teacher, a language instructor in Italian and French, a Russian choir master, and several foreign ballet masters, most of them from the court. The Sheremetev theatre was the first in Russia to stage ballets on their own, rather than as part of an opera, as was common in the eighteenth century. Under the direction of Nikolai Petrovich it produced over twenty French and Russian ballets, many of them receiving their first performance in Russia, long before they were put on at court.⁸⁶ The Russian ballet was born at Kuskovo.

So, too, was the Russian opera. The Sheremetev theatre began the practice of performing operas in Russian, which stimulated the composition of native works. The earliest, Anyuta (premiered at Tsarskoe Selo in 1772.), was produced at Kuskovo in 1781; and Misfortune from a Carriage by Vasily Pashkevich, with a libretto by Kniazhnin (first put on at the Hermitage Theatre in 1779) was seen at Kuskovo within a year.* Before the final quarter of the eighteenth century, opera was imported from abroad. Italians made the running early on. Giovanni Ristori's Calandro was performed by a group of Italian singers from the Dresden court in 1731. The Empress Anna, enchanted by this 'exotic and irrational entertainment', recruited Francesco Araia's Venetian company to entertain her court in Petersburg, which staged La Forza dell'amore in the Winter Palace on the Empress's birthday in 1736. Starting with Araia, Italians occupied the post of maestro di capella at the Imperial court, with just two exceptions, until the nineteenth century. Consequently, the first Russian composers were strongly influenced by the Italian style. Maxim Berezovsky, Dmitry Bortnyansky and Yevstignei Fomin were all taught by the Italians of St Petersburg, and then sent to study in Italy itself.

* Stepan Degterov, the composer of Minin and Pozharsky (1811), was a former Sheremetev serf.

Berezovsky was Mozart's fellow student in the composition school of Padre Martini.*

The love affair between Petersburg and Venice was continued by Glinka, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky. It was ironically a Venetian, Catterino Cavos, who pioneered the Russian national opera. Cavos came to Petersburg in 1798 and immediately fell in love with the city, which reminded him of his native town. In 1803 the Emperor Alexander took control of the public theatres and placed Cavos in charge of the Bolshoi Kamenny, until then the only public opera house and exclusively reserved for Italian opera. Cavos built the Bolshoi Kamenny into a stronghold of Russian opera. He wrote works such as Ilya Bogatyr (1807) on heroic national themes with librettos in Russian, and his music was strongly influenced by Russian and Ukrainian folk songs. Much of Glinka's operatic music, which the nationalists would champion as the foundation of the Russian tradition, was in fact anticipated by Cavos. The 'national character' of Russian music was thus first developed by a foreigner.+

The French were also instrumental in the development of a distinctive Russian musical style. Catherine the Great had invited a French opera troupe to the Petersburg court as one of her first acts on the assumption of the throne in 1762. During her reign the court opera was among the best in Europe. It staged the premiere of several major works, including Giovanni Paisiello's Il barbiere di Siviglia (1782). The French comic opera, with its rustic village setting and its reliance on folk dialect and music, was a major influence on early Russian operas and Singspiels like Anyuta (similar to Favart's Annette et

* Berezovsky was elected to the Accademia Philharmonica in Bologna. He returned to Russia in 1775 and, two years later, committed suicide. Tarkovsky's film Nostalgia (1983) is a commentary on exile as told through the story of Berezovsky's life. It tells of a Russian emigre in Italy engaged in research on his doppelganger and fellow countryman, an ill-fated eighteenth-century Russian composer.

+ This was not the end of the Cavos connection with the Russian opera. Catterino's son, the architect Alberto Cavos, redesigned the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow after it was burned down in 1853. He also built the Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. His daughter, Camille Cavos, married the court architect and portrait painter Nikolai Benois, whose family had fled to St Petersburg from the French Revolution in the 1790s, and their son, Alexander Benois, established the Ballets Russes with Sergei Diaghilev.

Lubin), St Petersburg Bazaar and The Miller Magician (based on Rousseau's Le devin du village). These operas were the staple of the Sheremetev repertoire: huge numbers of them were performed at Kuskovo and Ostankino. With their comic peasant characters and their stylized motifs from folk song, they gave voice to an emerging Russian national consciousness.

One of the earliest Russian operas was specially commissioned by the Sheremetevs for the open-air theatre at Kuskovo in 1781. Green with Jealousy, or The Boatman from Kuskovo was a panegyric to the Sheremetev palace and its park, which served as a backdrop to the opera on the stage.⁸⁷ The production was a perfect illustration of the way in which the palace had itself become a kind of theatre for the acting out of Russian noble life, a huge stage set for the display of wealth and European ways.

The design and the decor of the palace and its park contained much theatricality. The high stone archway into the estate marked the entrance into another world. The landscaped gardens and the manor house were laid out, like the props upon a stage, to create a certain emotion or theatrical effect. Features such as sculptured 'peasants' or 'cattle' in the woods, or temples, lakes and grottoes in the English park, intensified this sense of being in a place of make-believe.⁸⁸ Kuskovo was full of dramatic artifice. The main house was made of wood that was carved to look like stone. In the park Fedor Argunov's extraordinary grotto pavilion was full of playfulness: its internal walls were lined with artificial shells and sea creatures; and (in a reference to the house in Petersburg) its baroque cupola was constructed in the form of a fountain.

In its everyday routines and public entertainments the palace was a kind of theatre, too. The daily ceremonies of the nobleman - the rituals connected with his morning prayer, his breakfast, lunch and dinner, his dressing and undressing, his office work and hunting, his washing and his bed - were performed from a detailed script that needed to be learned by the master and a huge supporting cast of domestic serfs. Then there were certain social functions which served as an arena for the ritualized performance of cultivated ways, the salon or the ball where the nobles demonstrated their European manners and good taste. Women put on wigs and beauty spots. They were conscious of

the need to take a leading role - dancing, singing at the piano, playing the coquette. Dandies turned their social lives into performance art: every mannered pose was carefully rehearsed. They prepared themselves, like Eugene Onegin, as actors going out before an audience.

At least three hours he peruses His figure in the looking-glass.⁸⁹

Etiquette demanded that they hold themselves and act in the directed form: the way they walked and stood, the way they entered or left a room, the way they sat and held their hands, the way they smiled or nodded their heads - every pose and gesture was carefully scripted. Hence in the ballroom and reception hall the walls were lined with mirrors for the beau monde to observe their performance.

The aristocracy of eighteenth-century Russia was aware of acting out its life as if upon a stage. The Russian nobleman was not born a 'European' and European manners were not natural to him. He had to learn such manners, as he learned a foreign language, in a ritualized form by conscious imitation of the West. Peter the Great began it all -reinventing himself and his aristocracy in the European mould. The first thing he did on his return from Europe, in 1698, was to order all the boyars to give up their kaftans for Western codes of dress. In a symbolic rupture with the past, he forbade them to wear beards, traditionally seen as a sign of holiness, and himself took the shears to reluctant courtiers.* Peter commanded his nobles to entertain after the European fashion: with his head of police he personally supervised the lists of guests at balls to be thrown by his selected hosts. The aristocracy was to learn to speak in French, to converse politely and to dance the minuet. Women, who had been confined to private quarters in the semi-Asiatic world of Muscovy, were to squeeze their bodies into corsets and grace society.

These new social manners were expounded in a manual of etiquette,

* In the Orthodox belief the beard was a mark of God and Christ (both were depicted wearing beards) and a mark of manhood (animals had whiskers). Because of Peter's prohibition, wearing beards became a sign of 'Russianness' and of resistance to his reforms.

The Honourable Mirror to Youth, which Peter had adapted and embellished from the German original. It advised its readers, among other things, not to 'spit their food', nor to 'use a knife to clean their teeth', nor 'blow their nose like a trumpet'.⁹⁰ To perform these manners required a conscious mode of action very different from the unself-conscious or 'natural' behaviour of the Russian; at such moments the Russian was supposed to be aware of acting differently from the way he would behave as a Russian. Books of etiquette like The Honourable Mirror advised the Russian nobleman to imagine himself in the company of foreigners while, at the same time, remaining conscious of himself as a Russian. The point was not to become a European, but rather to act as one. Like an actor with an eye to his own image on the stage, the nobleman was told to observe his own behaviour from a Russian point of view. It was the only way to judge its foreignness.⁹¹

The diaries and memoirs of the aristocracy are filled with descriptions of how young nobles were instructed to act in society. 'The point was not to be but to appear,'⁹² recalled one memoirist. In this society, external appearances were everything and success was dependent on a subtle code of manners displayed only by those of breeding. Fashionable dress, good comportment, modesty and mildness, refined conversation and the capacity to dance with elegance - these were the qualities of being 'comme il fauf'. Tolstoy boiled them down to first-class French; long, well-kept and polished nails; and 'a constant expression of elegant and contemptuous ennui'.⁹³ Polished nails and a cultivated air of boredom were also the defining features of the fop, according to Pushkin (this was how the poet was depicted in the famous portrait by Orest Kiprensky which appears to have been painted in the Fountain House).

The European Russian had a split identity. His mind was a state divided into two. On one level he was conscious of acting out his life according to prescribed European conventions; yet on another plane his inner life was swayed by Russian customs and sensibilities. The distinction was not absolute, of course: there could be conscious forms of 'Russianness', as the Slavophiles would prove, just as it was possible for European habits to be so ingrained that they appeared and felt 'natural'. But generally speaking, the European Russian was a 'European' on the public stage and a 'Russian' in those moments of his private life when, without even thinking, he did things in a way that

only Russians did. This was the legacy from his ancestors which no European influence could totally erase. It enabled a countess like Natasha to dance the Russian dance. In every Russian aristocrat, however European he may have become, there was a discreet and instinctive empathy with the customs and beliefs, the habits and the rhythms of Russian peasant life. How, indeed, could it not be so when the nobleman was born in the countryside, when he spent his childhood in the company of serfs, and lived most of his life on the estate - a tiny island of European culture in a vast Russian peasant sea?

The layout of the palace was a map of this divide in the nobleman's emotional geography. There were the grand reception rooms, always cold and draughty, where formal European manners were the norm; and then there were the private rooms, the bedrooms and the boudoirs, the study and the parlour, the chapel and the icon room, and the corridors that ran through to the servants' quarters, where a more informal, 'Russian' way of life was to be found. Sometimes this divide was consciously maintained. Count Sheremetev rearranged the rooms at the Fountain House so that all his public life was conducted on its left, or embankment, side, while the right side and the rooms that faced on to the garden at the rear were sealed off for his secret life. These private rooms were entirely different in their feel and style, with warm-coloured fabrics, wallpaper, carpets and Russian stoves, compared to the cold and stoveless public rooms with their parquet floors and marble mirrored walls.⁹⁴ It was as if the count was attempting to create an intimate, domestic and more 'Russian' space in which to relax with Praskovya.

In 1837 the Winter Palace in St Petersburg was gutted by a fire so immense it could be seen from villages some eighty kilometres away. It began in a wooden basement room and soon spread to the upper floors, which all had wooden walls and cavities behind the stone facades. The symbolism of the fire did not go unnoticed in a city built on myths of apocalypse: the old Russia was wreaking its revenge. Every palace had a 'wooden Russia' underneath its grand reception rooms. From the brilliant white ballroom in the Fountain House you could exit through a concealed mirror door and descend by a staircase to the servants' quarters and another world. Here were kitchens where the open fires raged all day, a storehouse in the yard where peasant

4. Gerard de la Barthe: A Cure Bath in Moscow, 1790

carts delivered farm produce, a carriage house, a smithy, workshops, stables, cow sheds, an aviary, a large greenhouse, a laundry and a wooden banya or bath house.⁹⁵

Going to the banya was an old Russian custom. From medieval times it was popularly seen as a national institution, and not to bathe in one at least three times a week was practically taken as a proof of foreign origins. Every noble household had its own steam house. In towns and villages there was invariably a communal bath, where men and women sat steaming themselves, beating one another, according to the custom, with young birch leaf whips, and cooling themselves down by rolling around together in the snow. Because of its reputation as a place for sex and wild behaviour, Peter the Great attempted to stamp out the banya as a relic of medieval Rus' and encouraged the building of Western bathrooms in the palaces and mansions of St Petersburg. But, despite heavy taxes on it, noblemen continued to prefer the Russian bath and, by the end of the eighteenth century, nearly every palace in St Petersburg had one.⁹⁶

The banya was believed to have special healing powers - it was called the 'people's first doctor' (vodka was the second, raw garlic the

third). There were all sorts of magical beliefs associated with it in folklore.⁹⁷ To go to the banya was to give both your body and your soul a good cleaning, and it was the custom to perform this purge as a part of important rituals. The banya was a place for giving birth: it was warm and clean and private, and in a series of bathing rituals that lasted forty days, it purified the mother from the bleeding of the birth which, according to the Church and the popular belief that held to the idea of Christ's bloodless birth, symbolized the fallen state of womanhood.⁹⁸ The banyans role in prenuptial rites was also to ensure the woman's purity: the bride was washed in the banya by her maids on the eve of her wedding. It was a custom in some places for the bride and groom to go to the bath house before their wedding night. These were not just peasant rituals. They were shared by the provincial nobility and even by the court in the final decades of the seventeenth century. According to the customs of the 1670s Tsar Alexei's bride was washed in the banya on the day before her wedding, while a choir chanted sacred songs outside, after which she received the blessing of a priest.⁹⁹ This intermingling of pagan bathing rites with Christian rituals was equally pronounced at Epiphany and Shrovetide ('Clean Monday'), when ablution and devotion were the order of the day. On these holy days it was customary for the Russian family, of whatever social class, to clean the house, washing all the floors, clearing out the cupboards, purging the establishment of any rotten or unholy foods, and then, when this was done, to visit the bath house and clean the body, too.

In the palace, the salon upstairs belonged to an entirely different, European world. Every major palace had its own salon, which served as the venue for concerts and masked balls, banquets, soirees, and sometimes even readings by the greatest Russian poets of the age. Like all palaces, the Fountain House was designed for the salon's rituals. There was a wide sweeping driveway for the grand arrival by coach-and-four; a public vestibule for divesting cloaks and furs; a 'parade' staircase and large reception rooms for the guests to advertise their tasteful dress and etiquette. Women were the stars of this society. Every salon revolved around the beauty, charm and wit of a particular hostess - such as Anna Scherer in Tolstoy's War and Peace, or Tatiana in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Having been excluded from the public domain under Muscovy, women took up leading roles in the European

culture of the eighteenth century. For the first time in the history of the Russian state there was even a succession of female sovereigns. Women became educated and accomplished in the European arts. By the end of the eighteenth century the educated noblewoman had become the norm in high society - so much so that the uneducated noblewoman became a common subject of satire. Recalling his experience as the French ambassador in Petersburg during the 1780s, Count Segur believed that Russian noblewomen 'had outstripped the men in this progressive march towards improvement: you already saw a number of elegant women and girls, remarkable for their graces, speaking seven or eight languages with fluency, playing several instruments, and familiar with the most celebrated romance writers and poets of France, Italy and England'. The men, by comparison, had nothing much to say.¹⁰⁰

Women set the manners of the salon: the kissing of the hand, the balletic genuflections and the feminized apparel of the fop were all reflections of their influence. The art of salon conversation was distinctly feminine. It meant relaxed and witty conversation which skipped imperceptibly from one topic to another, making even the most trivial thing a subject of enchanting fascination. It was also de rigueur not to talk for long on serious, 'masculine' topics such as politics or philosophy, as Pushkin underlined in Eugene Onegin:

The conversation sparkled bright; The hostess kept the banter light And quite devoid of affectations; Good reasoned talk was also heard, But not a trite or vulgar word, No lasting truths or dissertations -And no one's ears were shocked a bit By all the flow of lively wit.¹⁰¹

Pushkin said that the point of salon conversation was to flirt (he once claimed that the point of life was to 'make oneself attractive to women'). Pushkin's friends testified that his conversation was just as memorable as his poetry, while his brother Lev maintained that his real genius was for flirting with women.¹⁰²

The readership of literature in Pushkin's age was by and large female. In Eugene Onegin we first meet the heroine Tatiana with a French book in her hands. Russian literary language, which developed at this time, was consciously designed by poets such as Pushkin to reflect the female taste and style of the salon. Russia barely had a national literature until Pushkin appeared on the literary scene (hence his god-like status in that society). 'In Russia', wrote Madame de Stael in the early 1800s, 'literature consists of a few gentlemen.'¹⁰³ By the 1830s, when Russia had a growing and vibrant literature, the persistence of attitudes like this had become a source of literary satire by patriotic writers such as Pushkin. In his story The Queen of Spades (1834), the old countess, a lady from the reign of Catherine the Great, is astonished when her grandson, whom she has requested to bring her a new novel, asks if she would like a Russian one. 'Are there any Russian novels?' the old lady asks.¹⁰⁴ Yet at the time when de Stael was writing the absence of a major literary canon was a source of great embarrassment to literate Russians. In 1802 the poet and historian Nikolai Karamzin compiled a 'Pantheon of Russian Writers', beginning with the ancient bard Bojan and ending in the present day: it stretched to only twenty names. The literary high points of the eighteenth century - the satires of Prince Antioch Kantemir, the odes of Vasily Trediakovsky and Pavel Sumarokov, the tragedies of Yakov Kniazhnin and the comedies of Denis Fonvizin - hardly amounted to a national literature. All their works were derived from genres in the neoclassical tradition. Some were little more than translations of European works with Russian names assigned to the characters and the action transferred to Russia. Vladimir Lukin, Catherine's court playwright, Russified a large number of French plays. So did Fonvizin in the 1760s. In the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century some 500 works of literature were published in Russia. But only seven were of Russian origin.¹⁰⁵

The absence of a national literature was to haunt Russia's young intelligentsia in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Karamzin explained it by the absence of those institutions (literary societies, journals, newspapers) that helped constitute European society.¹⁰⁶ The Russian reading public was extremely small - a minuscule proportion of the total population in the eighteenth century - and publishing was

dominated by the Church and the court. It was very difficult, if not impossible, for a writer to survive from his writings. Most Russian writers in the eighteenth century were obliged, as noblemen, to serve as state officials, and those like the fabulist Ivan Krylov who turned their backs on the civil service and tried to make a living from their own writings nearly always ended up extremely poor. Krylov was obliged to become a children's tutor in the houses of the rich. He worked for some time at the Fountain House.¹⁰⁷

But the biggest impediment to the development of a national literature was the undeveloped state of the literary language. In France or England the writer wrote largely as people spoke; but in Russia there was a huge divide between the written and the spoken forms of the language. The written language of the eighteenth century was a clumsy combination of archaic Church Slavonic, a bureaucratic jargon known as Chancery, and Latinisms imported by the Poles. There was no set grammar or orthography, and no clear definition of many abstract words. It was a bookish and obscure language, far removed from the spoken idiom of high society (which was basically French) and the plain speech of the Russian peasantry.

Such was the challenge that confronted Russia's poets at the beginning of the nineteenth century: to create a literary language that was rooted in the spoken language of society. The essential problem was that there were no terms in Russian for the sort of thoughts and feelings that constitute the writer's lexicon. Basic literary concepts, most of them to do with the private world of the individual, had never been developed in the Russian tongue: 'gesture', 'sympathy', 'privacy', 'impulsion' and 'imagination' - none could be expressed without the use of French.¹⁰⁸ Moreover, since virtually the whole material culture of society had been imported from the West, there were, as Pushkin commented, no Russian words for basic things:

But pantaloons, gilet, and frock -These words are hardly Russian stock.¹⁰⁹

Hence Russian writers were obliged to adapt or borrow words from the French to express the sentiments and represent the world of their readers in high society. Karamzin and his literary disciples (including

the young Pushkin) aimed to 'write as people speak' - meaning how the people of taste and culture spoke, and in particular the 'cultivated woman' of polite society, who was, they realized, their 'principal reader'.¹¹⁰ This 'salon style' derived a certain lightness and refinement from its Gallicized syntax and phraseology. But its excessive use of French loan words and neologisms also made it clumsy and verbose. And in its way it was just as far removed from the plain speech of the people as the Church Slavonic of the eighteenth century. This was the language of social pretension that Tolstoy satirized in the opening passages of War and Peace:

Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe being then a new word in St Petersburg, used only by the elite.¹¹¹

Yet this salon style was a necessary stage in the evolution of the literary language. Until Russia had a wider reading public and more writers who were willing to use plain speech as their literary idiom, there would be no alternative. Even in the early nineteenth century, when poets such as Pushkin tried to break away from the foreign hold on the language by inventing Russian words, they needed to explain these to their salon audience. Hence in his story 'The Peasant Girl', Pushkin had to clarify the meaning of the Russian word 'samobytnost" by adding in parenthesis its French equivalent, 'individualite'.¹¹²