Natasha's Dance

6

'Oh please, Nurse, tell me again how the French came to Moscow.' Thus Herzen starts his sublime memoir My Past and Thoughts, one of the greatest works of Russian literature. Born in 1812, Herzen had a special fondness for his nanny's stories of that year. His family had been forced to flee the flames that engulfed Moscow, the young Herzen carried out in his mother's arms, and it was only through a safe conduct from Napoleon himself that they managed to escape to their Yaroslav estate. Herzen felt great 'pride and pleasure at [having] taken part in the Great War'. The story of his childhood merged with the national drama he so loved to hear: 'Tales of the fire of Moscow, of the battle of Borodino, of the Berezina, of the taking of Paris were my cradle songs, my nursery stories, my Iliad and my Odyssey.'¹⁵¹ For Herzen's generation, the myths of 1812 were intimately linked with their childhood memories. Even in the 1850s children were still brought up on the legends of that year.¹⁵² History, myth and memory were intertwined. For the historian Nikolai Karamzin, 1812 was a tragic year. While his Moscow neighbours moved to their estates, he refused to 'believe that the ancient holy city could be lost' and, as he wrote on 20 August, he chose instead to 'die on Moscow's walls'.¹⁵³ Karamzin's house burned down in the fires and, since he had not thought to evacuate his library, he lost his precious books to the flames as well. But Karamzin saved one book - a bulging notebook that contained the draft of his celebrated History of the Russian State (1818-26). Karamzin's masterpiece was the first truly national history - not just in the sense that it was the first by a Russian, but also in the sense that it rendered Russia's past as a national narrative. Previous histories of Russia had

been arcane chronicles of monasteries and saints, patriotic propaganda, or heavy tomes of documents compiled by German scholars, unread and unreadable. But Karamzin's History had a literary quality that made its twelve large volumes a nationwide success. It combined careful scholarship with the narrative techniques of a novelist. Karamzin stressed the psychological motivations of his historical protagonists - even to the point of inventing them - so that his account became more compelling to a readership brought up on the literary conventions of Romantic texts. Medieval Tsars like Ivan the Terrible or Boris Godunov became tragic figures in Karamzin's History - subjects for a modern psychological drama; and from its pages they walked on to the stage in operas by Musorgsky and Rimsky Korsakov.

The first eight volumes of Karamzin's History were published in 1818. 'Three thousand copies were sold within a month - something unprecedented in our country. Everyone, even high-born ladies, began to read the history of their country,' wrote Pushkin. 'It was a revelation. You could say that Karamzin discovered ancient Russia as Columbus discovered America.'¹⁵⁴ The victory of 1812 had encouraged a new interest and pride in Russia's past. People who had been raised on the old conviction that there was no history before the reign of Peter the Great began to look back to the distant past for the sources of their country's unexpected strengths. After 1812 history books appeared at a furious pace. Chairs were established in the universities (Gogol applied unsuccessfully for one at St Petersburg). Historical associations were set up, many in the provinces, and huge efforts were suddenly devoted to the rescuing of Russia's past. History became the arena for all those troubling questions about Russia's nature and its destiny. As Belinsky wrote in 1846, 'we interrogate our past for an explanation of our present and a hint of our future.'¹⁵⁵ This historical obsession was reinforced by the failure of the Decembrists. If Russia was no longer to pursue the Western path of history toward a modern constitutional stare, as the Decembrists and their supporters had hoped, what then was its proper destiny?

This was the question posed by Pyotr Chaadaev, the Guards officer and foppish friend of Pushkin, in his sensational First Philosophical Letter (1856). Chaadaev was another 'child of 1812'. He had fought

at Borodino, before resigning from the army, at the height of his career in 1821, to spend the next five years in Europe. An extreme Westernist - to the extent that he converted to the Roman Church - he was thrown into despair by Russia's failure to take the Western path in 1825. This was the context in which he wrote his Letter - 'at a time of madness' (by his own admission) when he tried to take his life. 'What have we Russians ever invented or created?' Chaadaev wrote in 1826. 'The time has come to stop running after others; we must take a fresh and frank look at ourselves; we must understand ourselves as we really are; we must stop lying and find the truth.'¹⁵⁶ The First Letter was an attempt to reveal this bleak and unpalatable truth. It was more a work of history than of philosophy. Russia, it concluded, stood 'outside of time, without a past or a future', having played no part in the history of the world. The Roman legacy, the civilization of the Western Church and the Renaissance - these had all passed Russia by - and now, after 1825, the country was reduced to a 'cultural void', an 'orphan cut off from the human family' which could imitate the nations of the West but never become one of them. The Russians were like nomads in their land, strangers to themselves, without a sense of their own national heritage or identity.¹⁵⁷

To the reader in the modern world - where self-lacerating national declarations are made in the media almost every month - the cataclysmic shock of the First Letter may be hard to understand. It took away the ground from under the feet of every person who had been brought up to believe in 'European Russia' as their native land. The outcry was immense. Patriots demanded the public prosecution of the 'lunatic' for 'the cruellest insult to our national honour', and, on the orders of the Tsar, Chaadaev was declared insane, placed under house arrest and visited by doctors every day.¹⁵⁸ Yet what he wrote had been felt by every thinking Russian for many years: the overwhelming sense of living in a wasteland or 'phantom country', as Belinsky put it, a country which they feared they might never really know; and the acute fear that, contrary to the raison d'etre of their civilization, they might never in fact catch up with the West. There were many similar expressions of this cultural pessimism after 1825. The triumph of reaction had engendered a deep loathing of the 'Russian way'. 'Real patriotism', wrote Prince Viazemsky in 1828, 'should consist of hatred for Russia

as she manifests herself at the present time.'¹⁵⁹ The literary critic Nadezhdin (who published the First Letter in his journal Telescope) himself wrote in 1834: 'We [the Russians] have created nothing. There is no branch of learning in which we can show something of our own. There is not a single person who could stand for Russia in the civilization of the world.'¹⁶⁰

The Slavophiles had an opposite response to the crisis posed by Chaadaev. They first emerged as a distinct grouping in the 1830s, when they launched their public disputes with the Westernists, but they too had their roots in 1812. The horrors of the French Revolution had led the Slavophiles to reject the universal culture of the Enlightenment and to emphasize instead those indigenous traditions that distinguished Russia from the West. This search for a more 'Russian' way of life was a common response to the debacle of 1825. Once it became clear that Russia would diverge from the Western path, European Russians, like Lavretsky in Turgenev's Nest of Gentlefolk (1859), began to explore - and find virtue in - those parts of Russian culture that were different from the West:

The free-thinker began to go to church and to order prayers to be said for him; the European began to steam himself in the Russian bath, to dine at two o'clock, to go to bed at nine, and to be talked to sleep by the gossip of an old butler…¹⁶¹

The Slavophiles looked first to the virtues they discerned in the patriarchal customs of the countryside - hardly surprising, given that they were born, for the most, to landed families that had lived in the same region for several hundred years. Konstantin Aksakov, the most famous and the most extremist of the Slavophiles, spent practically his entire life in one house, clinging to it, in the words of one contemporary, 'like an oyster to his shell'.¹⁶² They idealized the common folk (narod) as the true bearer of the national character (narodnost'). Slavophile folklorists such as Pyotr Kireevsky went out to the villages to transcribe the peasant songs, which they thought could be interpreted as historical expressions of the 'Russian soul'. As devout upholders of the Orthodox ideal, they maintained that the Russian was defined by Christian sacrifice and humility. This was the foundation of the spiritual

community (sobornost') in which, they imagined, the squire and his serfs were bound together by their patriarchal customs and Orthodox beliefs. Aksakov argued that this 'Russian type' was incarnated in the legendary folk hero Ilia Muromets, who appears in epic tales as protector of the Russian land against invaders and infidels, brigands and monsters, with his 'gentle strength and lack of aggression, yet his readiness to fight in a just defensive war for the people's cause'.* The peasant soldiers of 1812 had shown these very qualities. Myth entering history.

Karamzin's History was the opening statement in a long debate on Russia's past and future that would run right through its culture in the nineteenth century. Karamzin's own work was squarely situated in the monarchist tradition, which portrayed the Tsarist state and its noble servitors as a force for progress and enlightenment. The overarching theme of the History was Russia's steady advance towards the ideal of a unitary Imperial state whose greatness lay in the inherited wisdom of its Tsar and the innate obedience of its citizens. The Tsar and his nobles initiated change, while 'the people remain silent' ('narod bezmolvstvuet'), as Pushkin put it in the final stage direction of Boris Godunov. Pushkin shared Karamzin's statist view of Russian history -at least in his later years, after the collapse of his republican convictions (which were in any case extremely dubious) in 1825. In The History of Pugachev (1833) Pushkin emphasized the need for enlightened monarchy to protect the nation from the elemental violence ('cruel and merciless') of the Cossack rebel leader Pugachev and his peasant followers. By highlighting the role of paternal noblemen such as General Bibikov and Count Panin, who put down Pugachev yet pleaded with the Empress to soften her regime, Pushkin underscored the national leadership of the old landed gentry from which he was so proud to descend.

In contrast to these views was the democratic trend of Russian history advanced by the Decembrists and their followers. They stressed

* Dostoevsky shared this view. The Russians, he wrote in 1876, were 'a people devoted to sacrifice, seeking truth and knowing where truth can be found, as honest and pure in heart as one of their high ideals, the epic hero Ilia Muromets, whom they cherish as a saint' (F. Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, trans. K. Lantz, 2 vols. (London, 1993), vol. 1, p. 660).

the rebellious and freedom-loving spirit of the Russian people and idealized the medieval republics of Novgorod and Pskov, and the Cossack revolts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Pugachev's. They believed that the common people had always been the (hidden) moving force of history - a theory largely shaped by their observation of the peasant soldiers in the war of 1812. In response to Karamzin's famous motto 'The history of the nation belongs to the Tsar', the Decembrist historian Nikita Muraviev began his study with the fighting words: 'History belongs to the people.'¹⁶³

The origins of Russia was a major battlefield in this war between historians. Monarchists subscribed to the so-called Norman theory, originally devised by German historians in the eighteenth century, which maintained that the first ruling princes had arrived in Russia from Scandinavia (in the ninth century) by invitation from the warring Slavic tribes. The only real evidence for this argument was the Primary Chronicle - an eleventh-century account of the founding of the Kievan state in 862 - which had probably been written to justify what actually amounted to the Scandinavian conquest of Russia. The theory became increasingly untenable as nineteenth-century archaeologists drew attention to the advanced culture of the Slavic tribes in southern Russia. A picture emerged of a civilization stretching back to the ancient Scythians, the Goths, the Romans and the Greeks. Yet the Norman theory was a good foundation myth for the defenders of autocracy - supposing, as it did, that without a monarchy the Russians were incapable of governance. In Karamzin's words, before the establishment of princely rule, Russia had been nothing but an 'empty space' with 'wild and warring tribes, living on a level with the beasts and birds'.¹⁶⁴ Against that the democrats maintained that the Russian state had evolved spontaneously from the native customs of the Slavic tribes. According to this view, long before the Varangians arrived the Slavs had set up their own government, whose republican liberties were gradually destroyed by the imposition of princely rule. Versions of the argument were made by all those groups who believed in the natural predilection of the Slavic people for democracy: not just the Decembrists but left-wing Slavophiles, Polish historians (who used it to denounce the Tsarist system in Poland), and Populist historians in the Ukraine and (later on) in Russia, too.

Another battlefield was medieval Novgorod - the greatest monument to Russian liberty and, in the Decembrist view, historic proof of the people's right to rule themselves. Along with nearby Pskov, Novgorod was a flourishing civilization connected to the Hanseatic League of German trading towns prior to its conquest by Tsar Ivan III and its subjugation to Muscovy during the late fifteenth century. The Decembrists made a cult of the city republic. As a symbol of the people's long-lost freedoms, they saw its veche, or assembly, as a sacred legacy connecting Russia to the democratic traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. The teenage members of the 'holy artel' (1814-17) - among them several of the future Decembrists - opened all their meetings with the ceremonial ringing of the veche bell. In their manifestos the Decembrists used the terminology of medieval Novgorod, calling the future parliament the 'national veche'.¹⁶⁵ The myth of Novgorod took on a new meaning and subversive power after the suppression of their uprising. In 1830 Lermontov wrote a poem entitled Novgorod ('Brave sons of the Slavs, for what did you die?'), in which it was left deliberately unclear whether it was the fallen heroes of medieval Novgorod or the freedom fighters of 1825 whose loss was to be mourned. The same nostalgic note was struck by Dimtry Venevitanov in his pro-Decembrist poem Novgorod (1826):

Answer great city:

Where are your glorious days of liberty,

When your voice, the scourge of kings,

Rang true like the bells at your noisy assembly?

Say, where are those times?

They are so far away, oh, so far away!¹⁶⁶

The monarchist perception of medieval Novgorod formed a stark contrast. According to Karamzin, Moscow's conquest of the city was a necessary step towards the creation of a unitary state, and was recognized as such by its citizens. This submission was a sign of the Russian people's wisdom, in Karamzin's view: they recognized that freedom was worth nothing without order and security. The Novgoro-dians were thus the original consenting members in the leviathan of autocracy. They chose the protection of the Tsar in order to save

themselves from their own internal squabbles, which had played into the hands of the city's boyars, who became despotic and corrupt and who threatened to sell out to the neighbouring state of Lithuania. Karamzin's version was almost certainly closer to the historical truth than the Decembrists' vision of an egalitarian and harmonious republican democracy. Yet it too was a justifying myth. For Karamzin the lesson to be learned from his History was clear: that republics were more likely to become despotic than autocracies - and a lesson well worth underlining after the collapse of the French republic into the Napoleonic dictatorship.

The war of 1812 was itself a battlefield for these competing myths of Russian history. This was shown by its commemoration in the nineteenth century. For the Decembrists, 1812 was a people's war. It was the point at which the Russians came of age, the moment when they passed from childhood into adult citizens, and with their triumphant entry into Europe, they should have joined the family of European states. But for the defenders of the status quo, the war symbolized the holy triumph of the Russian autocratic principle, which alone saved Europe from Napoleon. It was a time when the Tsarist state emerged as God's chosen agent in a new historical dispensation.

The regime's image of itself was set in stone with the Alexandrine Column, built, ironically, by the French architect Auguste de Montfer-rand on Palace Square in Petersburg, and opened on the twentieth anniversary of the battle of Borodino. The angel on the top of the column was given the Tsar Alexander's face.¹⁶⁷ Five years later, work began in Moscow on a larger monument to the divine mission of the Russian monarchy - the grandiose Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on a site overlooking the Kremlin walls. Half war museum and half church, it was intended to commemorate the miraculous salvation of Moscow in 1812. Constantin Ton's design echoed the architectural language of the ancient Russian Church, but enlarged its proportions to an imperial scale. This colossal cathedral was the tallest building in Moscow when it was completed, after fifty years, in 1883, and even today, reconstructed after Stalin had it blown up in 1931 (one death sentence that might be justified on artistic grounds), it still dominates the cityscape.

Throughout the nineteenth century these two images of 1812 - as

8. Monument to the millennium of Russia in the square in front of St Sophia's Cathedral, Novgorod

a national liberation or imperial salvation - continued to compete for the public meaning of the war. On the one side was Tolstoy's War and Peace, a truly national drama which tells its history from the viewpoint of the noble and the serf. On the other were the monuments in stone, the triumphant arches and gates of victory in the pompous 'Empire style' that trumpeted Russia's imperial might; or the sound of all those cannons in Tchaikovsky's Overture of 1812. Even in the early1860s,

when there were high hopes for national unity in the wake of the emancipation of the serfs, these two visions were at loggerheads. The fiftieth anniversary of 1812 coincided with the millennium of the Russian state in 1862. The millennium was due to be commemorated in the spring in (of all symbolic places) Novgorod. But the Emperor Alexander II ordered its postponement to 26 August - the anniversary of the battle of Borodino and the sacred date of his own coronation in 1856. By merging these three anniversaries, the Romanov dynasty was attempting to reinvent itself as a national institution, consecrated by the holy victory of 1812, and one as old as the Russian state itself. The granite monument unveiled in Novgorod was a symbol of this claim. Shaped like the bell of the Novgorod assembly, it was encircled by a band of bas-reliefs with the sculptures of those figures - saints and princes, generals and warriors, scientists and artists - who had shaped a thousand years of Russian history. The great bell was crowned by Mother Russia, bearing in one hand the Orthodox cross and in the other a shield emblazoned with the Romanov insignia. The Decembrists were irate. Volkonsky, who had by now returned from his thirty years of exile, told Tolstoy that the monument had 'trampled on the sacred memory of Novgorod as well as on the graves of all those heroes who fought for our freedom in 1812'.¹⁶⁸