Natasha's Dance

4

As readers of War and Peace will know, the war of 1812 was a vital watershed in the culture of the Russian aristocracy. It was a war of national liberation from the intellectual empire of the French - a moment when noblemen like the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys struggled to break free from the foreign conventions of their society and began new lives on Russian principles. This was no straightforward metamorphosis (and it happened much more slowly than in Tolstoy's novel, where the nobles rediscover their forgotten national ways almost overnight). Though anti-French voices had grown to quite a chorus in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the aristocracy was still immersed in the culture of the country against which they were at war. The salons of St Petersburg were filled with young admirers of Bonaparte, such as Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace. The most fashionable set was that of Counts Rumiantsev and Caulaincourt, the French ambassador in Petersburg, the circle in which Tolstoy's Helene moved. 'How can we fight the French?' asks Count Rostopchin, the Governor of Moscow, in War and Peace. 'Can we arm ourselves

against our teachers and divinities? Look at our youths! Look at our ladies! The French are our Gods. Paris is our Kingdom of Heaven.'⁹¹ Yet even in these circles there was horror at Napoleon's invasion, and their reaction against all things French formed the basis of a Russian renaissance in life and art.

In the patriotic climate of 1812 the use of French was frowned upon in the salons of St Petersburg - and in the streets it was even dangerous. Tolstoy's novel captures perfectly the spirit of that time when nobles, who had been brought up to speak and think in French, struggled to converse in their native tongue. In one set it was agreed to ban the use of French and impose a forfeit on those who made a slip. The only trouble was that no one knew the Russian word for 'forfeit' - there was none - so people had to call out 'forfaiture'. This linguistic nationalism was by no means new. Admiral Shishkov, sometime Minister of Public Education, had placed the defence of the Russian language at the heart of his campaign against the French as early as 1803. He was involved in a long dispute with the Karamzinians, in which he attacked the French expressions of their salon style and wanted literary Russian to return to its archaic Church Slavonic roots.* For Shishkov the influence of French was to blame for the decline of the Orthodox religion and the old patriarchal moral code: the Russian way of life was being undermined by a cultural invasion from the West.

Shishkov's stock began to rocket after 1812. Renowned as a card player, he was a frequent guest in the fashionable houses of St Petersburg, and between rounds of vingt-et-un he would preach the virtues of the Russian tongue. Among his hosts, he took on the status of a 'national sage' and (perhaps in part because they owed him gambling debts) they paid him to tutor their sons.⁹² It became a fashion

* These disputes over language involved a broader conflict about 'Russia' and what it should be - a follower of Europe or a unique culture of its own. They looked forward to the arguments between the Slavophiles and the Westerners. The Slavophiles did not emerge as a distinct grouping for another thirty years, but the term 'Slavophile' was first used in the 1800s to describe those, like Shishkov, who favoured Church Slavonic as the 'national' idiom (see Iu. Lotman and B. Uspenskii, 'Spory o iazyke v nachale XIX v. kak fakt russkoi kul'tury', in Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii, 24, Uchenye zapiski tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, vyp. 39 (Tartu, 1975), pp. 210-1 1).

for the sons of noblemen to learn to read and write their native tongue. Dmitry Sheremetev, the orphaned son of Nikolai Petrovich and Praskovya, spent three years on Russian grammar and even rhetoric as a teenager in the 1810s - as much time as he spent on learning French.⁹³ For lack of Russian texts, children learned to read from the Scriptures - indeed, like Pushkin, they were often taught to read by the church clerk or a local priest.⁹⁴ Girls were less likely to be taught the Russian script than boys. Unlike their brothers, who were destined to become army officers or landowners, they would not have much business with the merchants or the serfs and hence little need to read or write their native tongue. But in the provinces there was a growing trend for women as well as men to learn Russian. Tolstoy's mother, Maria Volkonsky, had a fine command of literary Russian, even writing poems in her native tongue.⁹⁵ Without this growing Russian readership the literary renaissance of the nineteenth century would have been inconceivable. Previously the educated classes in Russia had read mainly foreign literature.

In the eighteenth century the use of French and Russian had demarcated two entirely separate spheres: French the sphere of thought and sentiment, Russian the sphere of daily life. There was one form of language (French or Gallicized 'salon' Russian) for literature and another (the plain speech of the peasantry, which was not that far apart from the spoken idiom of the merchants and the clergy) for daily life. There were strict conventions on the use of languages. For example, a nobleman was supposed to write to the Tsar in Russian, and it would have seemed audacious if he wrote to him in French; but he always spoke to the Tsar in French, as he spoke to other noblemen. On the other hand, a woman was supposed to write in French, not just in her correspondence with the sovereign but with all officials, because this was the language of polite society; it would have been deemed a gross indecency if she had used Russian expressions.⁹⁶ In private correspondence, however, there were few set rules, and by the end of the eighteenth century the aristocracy had become so bilingual that they slipped quite easily and imperceptibly from Russian into French and back again. Letters of a page or so could switch a dozen times, sometimes even in the middle of a sentence, without prompting by a theme.

Tolstoy played on these differences in War and Peace to highlight the social and cultural nuances involved in Russian French. For example, the fact that Andrei Bolkonsky speaks Russian with a French accent places him in the elite pro-French section of the Petersburg aristocracy. Or that Andrei's friend, the diplomat Bilibin, speaks by preference in French and says 'only those words in Russian on which he wished to put a contemptuous emphasis' indicates that Bilibin was a well-known cultural stereotype that readers would easily recognize: the Russian who would rather he were French. But perhaps the best example is Helene - the princess who prefers to speak in French about her extramarital affairs because 'in Russian she always felt that her case did not sound clear, and French suited it better'.⁹⁷ In this passage Tolstoy is deliberately echoing the old distinction between French as the language of deceit and Russian as the language of sincerity. His use of dialogue has a similarly nationalist dimension. It is no coincidence that the novel's most idealized characters speak exclusively in Russian (Princess Maria and the peasant Karataev) or (like Natasha) speak French only with mistakes.

Of course, no novel is a direct window on to life and, however much it might approach that realist ideal in War and Peace, we cannot take these observations as an accurate reflection of reality. To read the correspondence of the Volkonskys - of course not forgetting that they became the Bolkonskys of War and Peace - is to find a far more complex situation than that presented by Tolstoy. Sergei Volkonsky wrote in French but inserted Russian phrases when he mentioned daily life on the estate; or he wrote in Russian when he aimed to underline a vital point and emphasize his own sincerity. By inclination, particularly after 1812, he wrote mostly in Russian; and he was obliged to in his letters from Siberia after 1825 (for his censors only read Russian). But there were occasions when he wrote in French (even after 1825): for example, when he wrote in the subjunctive mode or used formal phrases and politesses; or in passages where, in contravention of the rules, he wanted to express his views on politics in a language the censors would not understand. Sometimes he used French to explain a concept for which there was no Russian word - 'diligence', 'duplicite' and 'discretion'.⁹⁸

In its customs and its daily habits the aristocracy was struggling to

become more 'Russian', too. The men of 1812 gave up feasts of haute cuisine for spartan Russian lunches, as they strived to simplify and Russianize their opulent lifestyle. Noblemen took peasant 'wives' with growing frequency and openness (what was good for a Sheremetev was also good for them) and there were even cases of noblewomen living with or marrying serfs." Even Arakcheev, the Minister of War who became so detested for his brutal regime in the army, kept an unofficial peasant wife by whom he had two sons who were educated in the Corps des Pages.¹⁰⁰ Native crafts were suddenly in vogue. Russian china with scenes from rural life was increasingly preferred to the classical designs of imported eighteenth-century porcelain. Karelian birch and other Russian woods, especially in the more rustic stylings of serf craftsmen, began to compete with the fine imported furniture of the classical palace, and even to displace it in those private living spaces where the nobleman relaxed. Count Alexander Osterman-Tolstoy, a military hero of 1812, was the owner of a magnificent mansion on the English Embankment in St Petersburg. The reception rooms had marble walls and mirrors with sumptuous decorations in the French Empire style, but after 1812 he had his bedroom lined with rough wooden logs to give it the appearance of a peasant hut.¹⁰¹

Recreations were going Russian, too. At balls in Petersburg, where European dances had always reigned supreme, it became the fashion to perform the pliaska and other Russian dances after 1812. Countess Orlova was renowned for these peasant dances, which she studied and performed at Moscow balls.¹⁰² But there were other noblewomen who, like Natasha Rostov, had somehow taken in the spirit of the dance, as if they had breathed it 'from the Russian air'. Princess Elena Golitsyn danced her first pliaska at a New Year's Ball in Petersburg in 1817. 'Nobody had taught me how to dance the pliaska. It was simply that I was a "Russian girl". I had grown up in the country, and when I heard the refrain of our village song, "The Maid Went to Fetch the Water", I could not stop myself from the opening hand movements of the dance.'¹⁰³

Rural recreations were another indication of this newfound Russian-ness. It was at this time that the dacha first emerged as a national institution, although the country or suburban summer house did not become a mass phenomenon until the final decades of the nineteenth

century (Chekhov's Cherry Orchard was famously cut down for dacha building land). The high aristocracy of Petersburg was renting dachas in the eighteenth century. Pavlovsk and Peterhof were their preferred resorts, where they could escape the city's heat and take in the fresh air of the pinewood forests or the sea. The Tsars had elaborate summer palaces with immense pleasure gardens in both of these resorts. During the early nineteenth century the dacha fashion spread to the minor gentry, who built more modest houses in the countryside.

In contrast to the formal classicism of the urban palace, the dacha was constructed in a simple Russian style. It was usually a double-storeyed wooden building with a mezzanine verandah that ran all round the house with ornate window and door-frame carvings seen more commonly on peasant huts, although some of the grander dachas might incongruously add a Roman arch and columns to the front. The dacha was a place for Russian relaxations and pursuits: picking mushrooms in the woods, making jams, drinking tea from the samovar, fishing, hunting, visiting the bath house, or spending the whole day, like Goncharov's Oblomov, in an oriental khalat. A month in the country allowed the nobleman to throw off the pressures of the court and official life, to become more himself in a Russian milieu. It was common to dispense with formal uniforms and to dress in casual Russian clothes. Simple Russian food took the place of haute cuisine, and some dishes, such as summer soup with kvas (okroshka), fish in aspic and pickled mushrooms, tea with jam, or cherry brandy, became practically synonymous with the dacha way of life.¹⁰⁴

Of all the countryside pursuits, hunting was the one that came the closest to a national institution, in the sense that it united nobleman and serf as fellow sportsmen and fellow countrymen. The early nineteenth century was the heyday of the hunt - a fact that was connected to the gentry's rediscovery of 'the good life on the estate' after 1812. There were noblemen who gave up their careers in the civil service and retired to the country for a life of sport. The Rostovs' 'Uncle' in War and Peace was typical:

'Why don't you enter the service, Uncle?'

'I did once, but gave it up. I am not fit for it…I can't make head or tail of it. That's for you- I haven't brains enough. Now hunting is another matter…

There were two kinds of hunting in Russia - the formal chase with hounds, which was very grand, and the simple type of hunting by a man on foot with a solitary hound and a serf companion, as immortalized in Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album (1852). The formal chase was conducted in the manner of a military campaign, sometimes lasting several weeks, with hundreds of riders, huge packs of dogs and a vast retinue of hunting serfs camping out on the estates of the nobility. Lev Izmailov, Marshal of the Riazan Nobility, took 3,000 hunters and 2,000 hounds on his 'campaigns'.¹⁰⁶ Baron Mengden kept an elite caste of hunting serfs with their own scarlet livery and special Arab horses for the hunt. When they left, with the baron at their head, they took several hundred carts with hay and oats, a hospital on wheels for wounded dogs, a mobile kitchen and so many servants that the baron's house was emptied, leaving his wife and daughters with only a bartender and a boy.¹⁰⁷ This type of hunting was dependent on the gentry's ownership of vast serf armies and virtually all the land - conditions which persisted until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Like the English hunt, it was serious and stuffy, rigidly observing the social hierarchy, with the hunting serfs, if not running with the hounds, then clearly in a subservient role.

By contrast, Turgenev's type of hunting was relatively egalitarian -and it was so in a distinctly Russian way. When the nobleman went hunting with his serf companion he left behind the civilization of his palace and entered the world of the peasantry. Squire and serf were brought together by this type of sport. They dressed much the same; they shared their food and drink when they stopped along the way; they slept side by side in peasant huts and barns; and, as described in Turgenev's Sketches, they talked about their lives in a spirit of companionship that often made them close and lasting friends.¹⁰⁸ There was much more to this than the usual 'male bonding' around sport. As far as the squire was concerned, the hunt on foot was a rural odyssey, an encounter with an undiscovered peasant land; it was almost incidental how many birds or beasts were shot. In the final lyrical episode of the Sketches, where the narrator sums up all the joys of hunting, there is barely mention of the sport itself. What emerges from this perfect piece of writing is the hunter's intense love of the Russian countryside and its changing beauty through the different seasons of the year:

And a summer morning in July! Has anyone save a hunter ever experienced the delight of wandering through bushes at dawn? Your feet leave green imprints in grass that is heavy and white with dew. You push aside wet bushes - the warm scent accumulated in the night almost smothers you; the air is impregnated with the fresh bitter-sweet fragrance of wormwood, the honeyed scent of buckwheat and clover; far off an oak forest rises like a wall, shining purple in the sunshine; the air is still fresh, but the coming heat can already be felt. Your head becomes slightly dizzy from such an excess of sweet scents. And there's no end to the bushes. Away in the distance ripening rye glows yellow and there are narrow strips of rust-red buckwheat. Then there's the sound of a cart; a peasant drives by at walking pace, leaving his horse in the shade before the sun gets hot. You greet him, pass on, and after a while the metallic rasping of a scythe can be heard behind you. The sun is rising higher and higher, and the grass quickly dries out. It's already hot. First one hour, then another passes. The sky darkens at the edges and the motionless air is aflame with the prickly heat.¹⁰⁹

Russian forms of dress became the height of fashion after 1812. At balls and receptions in St Petersburg, and from the 1830s at the court as well, society ladies began to appear in national costume, complete with the sarafan tunic and kokoshnik head-dress of old Muscovy. The Russian peasant shawl was hugely popular with noblewomen in the 1810s. There had been a fashion for oriental shawls in Europe during the last decades of the eighteenth century which the Russians had copied by importing their own shawls from India. But after 1812 it was Russian peasant shawls that became the rage, and serf workshops emerged as major centres of the fashion industry.¹¹⁰ The Russian gown (kapot), traditionally worn by peasant and provincial merchant wives, entered haute couture slightly earlier, in the 1780s, when Catherine the Great took to wearing one, but it too was widely worn from about 1812. The kaftan and khalat (a splendid sort of housecoat or dressing gown in which one could lounge about at home and receive guests) came back into fashion among noblemen. The podyovka, a short kaftan traditionally worn by the peasantry, was added to the wardrobe of the nobleman as well. To wear such clothes was not just to relax and be oneself at home; it was, in the words of one memoirist, 'to make a conscious statement of one's Russianness'.¹¹¹ When, in 1827,

Tropinin painted Pushkin wearing a khalat (plate 22), he was portraying him as a gentleman who was perfectly at ease with the customs of his land.

A fashion for the 'natural' look took hold of noblewomen in the 1820s. The new ideal of beauty focused on a vision of the purity of the female figures of antiquity and the Russian peasantry. Fidel Bruni's portrait of Zinaida Volkonsky (1810) illustrates this style. Indeed, according to society rumour, it was precisely her simplicity of dress that had attracted the amorous attentions of the Emperor,¹¹² who was himself susceptible to all of Nature's charms. * Women took to wearing cotton clothes. They dressed their hair in a simple style and rejected heavy make-up for the pale complexion favoured by this cult of unadorned Nature.¹¹³ The turn toward Nature and simplicity was widespread throughout Europe from the final decades of the eighteenth century. Women had been throwing out their powdered wigs and renouncing heavy scents like musk for light rose waters that allowed the natural fragrance of clean flesh to filter through. There it had developed under the influence of Rousseau and Romantic ideas about the virtues of Nature. But in Russia the fashion for the natural had an extra, national dimension. It was linked to the idea that one had to strip away the external layers of cultural convention to reveal the Russian personality. Pushkin's Tatiana in Eugene Onegin was the literary incarnation of this natural Russianness - so much so that the simple style of dress worn by noblewomen became known as the 'Onegin'.¹¹⁴ Readers saw Tatiana as a 'Russian heroine' whose true self was revealed in the memories of her simple childhood in the countryside:

'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 letour 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.