In “War and Peace” the young countess Natasha, after a day’s hunting, ends up in the modest dwelling of an elderly relative, Michail Nikanorjc, an army pensioner who has retired there with Anisya Fyodorova, his faithful housekeeper who has become his de facto wife.
The strains of a balalaika become audible from the servants’ room and the girl falls instinctively into the rhythms of the dance. So “Uncle” Michail seizes his guitar and starts playing a popular Russian folk love song, inviting her to dance.
“Natasha threw off the shawl from her shoulders, ran forward to face ‘Uncle’, and setting her arms akimbo, struck an attitude. Where, how and when had this young countess, educated by an emigrée French governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit, and obtained that manner which should, one would have supposed, long ago have been effaced? But the spirit and the movements were those inimitable and unteachable Russian ones that “Uncle” had expected of her.
And she handled it all with such complete precision, that Anisya Fyodorovna had tears in her eyes as she watched this slim, graceful countess, so different from herself, who yet was able to understand all that was in Anisya and in Anisya’s father and mother, and in every Russian man and woman.”

“Natasha’s Dance. A Cultural History of Russia” (edited by Penguin-Allen Lane, 728 pages, € 49.50) is the title of the new extraordinary work by Orlando Figes, the author of another wonderful book “A People’s Tragedy” (published in Italy by Corbaccio Editore) on the October Revolution and the taking root of Communism in USSR.
Why, according to Figes, does that page by Tolstoy summarise the destiny of the Russian culture as it has developed over the past three centuries and the questions it has led to? Questions such as: what does being Russian mean? What is the position and mission of Russia in the world? Where is the real Russia? In Europe or in Asia? In St. Petersburg or in Moscow? In the tsarist, communist, post-communist empire and in its “suburbs”, along the “muddy” streets of the village where Natasha’s “uncle” lived?
We mentioned destiny, but we should also mention mystery, because, as we look more closely into the matter, that genuinely Russian music Tolstoy feels embodies the folk spirit does not come from the countryside, but from the towns; peasant and provincial traditions and folklore come from the Asian steppe; the shawl Natasha was wearing was of Persian origins; the balalaika played by the servants descended from a similar guitar widely used in Kazakh music; Natasha’s dance itself is of eastern origins.

Hence the Russian spirit and folklore are cultural mythologies, intellectual constructions aimed at creating a national awareness and identity which would otherwise not exists. Based on an incredible amount of documents and reference material, in a multifaceted play of literary, pictorial and musical sources, Figes’ treatise carefully puts together the kaleidoscopic cultural background which witnessed Russia’s birth starting from the 19th century:
Slavophiles, with their Russian spirit myth and their veneration for Moscow as the centre of the only model of life befitting a real Russian;
the Westerners, with the rival St. Petersburg myth, the “window on the West”, and the desire to rebuild the country on a European basis;
Populists, with their vision of peasants as natural socialists and the institution of the Village as a model for future society;
Shiites with their idea of Russia as an Asian reality which would in the future eliminate the weight of a dead European civilisation and establish a new culture.
These are themes, claims and contradictions which continue to return today, now that the seventy-year communist period is over, and which explain the difficulties and “inconsistencies” of a prime minister such as Vladimir Putin, who sways between a political, economic and social attraction towards Europe and a geopolitical reality which repositions him towards Asia.

In 1800, and before a poet such as Pushkin had made his triumphant although unexpected entry, inaugurating an extraordinary intellectual flourishing, there still was no national Russian literature. In compiling his “Pantheon of Russian writers”, the historian Karamazin could not put more than twenty names together …

Up to that time Russia had been a religious civilization, linked to the Eastern Church of Byzantine inspiration, without scientific revolutions, maritime discoveries, large cities, princely patrons, middle class, universities or private schools.
Until the reign of Peter the Great, in 1682, there was no painting except for icons, no landscapes, no perspective, still life or portraits. The Mongolian occupation, which lasted three hundred years, from the middle of the 13th century, cut Russia off from the European Renaissance.
It was Peter the Great who tried to renew the ties, and did so in his own way. No more kaftans, no more beards, which had up to then been a sign of saintliness, and French became the official language…
A memorialist of the time observed that it was imperative “not to be, but to appear”. Europeans on the stage of life and Russians in their private lives. And this is how things continued to be during the whole of the 18th century.



The watershed came in 1812 with the invasion by Napoleon’s army, the mythical names of the great battles, Beresina, Borodino, the flames which reduced Moscow to ashes, the final defeat of the “small Corsican”. It was then that the aristocrats, faced with the heroic deeds of a popular army, realised that it was the peasants and not they who were the Motherland’s favourite sons.
Europeanization broke against the wall of national expansionistic egoism.
The Russian gentlemen perfectly understood their French counterparts and were more familiar with the language of their enemies than with the idiom of their servants and soldiers.
And yet it was thanks to the latter that Russia was able to win. Just over a decade later, this was to start the “Decembrists”’ uprising and open the Pandora box of political and social claims leading to the 1927 revolution.



Suddenly, the old world no longer held appeal, and the “dear, old boys of the 18th century”, as Pushkin ironically wrote, were of no more interest to anyone. At the same time, however, as Chadaev noted in his “First Philosophical letter”, the Russians found themselves “outside time, with neither a past nor a future”.
They had no Roman inheritance, no Western Catholic civilization, no Renaissance; the country was a “cultural vacuum”, an “orphan separated from the human family”, which could imitate the European nations but could never become one of them, nomads in their own country, foreigners to themselves, without a personal identity.
During the whole of the nineteenth century Russia struggled in this contradictory situation. Ever since the times of Peter the Great, and hence for two centuries, Russia had been following the West but, when it reached it, it realised that it was something different. Yet, it did not know what it was. The result was a return to the past which could only find a purpose in its own mythicisation.

This is when the dream of a third Rome was born, from Moscow defeating the Golden Mongol horde in 1550, Ivan the Terrible building St. Basil’s cathedral in thanks for the victory and Moscow taking the place of Constantinople and proclaiming itself as its heir. On the crossroads between East and West, open to the influences brought by the empire’s advance towards the East, its Eastern heart showed even more vividly. And yet, as Diaghilev noted at the beginning of the 20th century, “everything new is here. St. Petersburg, by comparison, is a city of artistic gossip, pedantic professors and of weekend watercolour painters”.




That very St. Petersburg which was born as an antithesis to medieval Moscow, a symbol of modernity and progress. But Moscow‘s avant-garde nature was not the advance of novelty. It was just a way of drinking from primordial springs in an attempt to better refresh itself. Kandinsky found nourishment for his pictorial abstractionism in the Komi Ugro-Finnish peoples, 800 kilometres North-East of the capital.
European artists such as Gauguin, Picasso, Klee and Nolde also followed the same process: still, while they had to travel overseas or to another continent to find inspiration, Kandinsky was able to find it at home.



And so did Malevich, Chagall, Goncharova: tribal cultures from the Asian steppe, the primitivism and barbarism emanating from them were what Russia needed to free itself from the weight of Europe and of its rules. One realises that the words of Napoleon “scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar” are truer than westernised Russians believe. From Turgenev to Bulgakov, Akhatova, Chadaev, Berdiaev, Godunov, Bukharin and Rimsky-Korsakov, the Mongolian origins were part of the Russian reality, and the many centuries of Mongolian occupation were characterised by collaborationism, not by resistance. It was the rediscovery of a past which had been forgotten and/or denied.
Dostojevsky wrote: “We must set aside the subtle fear of being called Asian Barbarians by Europe, and say that we are more Asian than European. That is our destiny. In Asia we will be Lords. In Europe we were Tartars, in Asia we can be European”.
Blok, Belv and the finest Russian intelligentsia defined themselves Shiite, from the nomadic Iranian population which left central Asia in the eighth century B.C. and governed the steppe around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea for the following five hundred years. It was not a sudden explosion: Pushkin also, half a century earlier, had sung: “Now moderation is not appropriate/I want to drink like a wild Shiite”.
Block can now carry on: “We are Shiites/Yes, Asians, a starving, almond-eyed tribe”.

The last Romanov
The Bloody Sunday in St.Petersburgh

This jumble of populism, primitive Christianity, paganism and pauperism, helps to understand the reasons for the Bolshevik victory in 1917, notwithstanding all the Marxist expectations and theories: the working classes, industrialization and so on. For the Russians property was a real theft, excessive wealth really immoral, manual labour was really the sole source of merit.
Truth and Justice gave to the October Revolution a nearly religious status, and it was on these bases that it established itself. With the emigration during the ‘20s another paradox was witnessed. Cosmopolitans, elitists, fugitives from communism, the Stravinskijs, the Nabokovs, intellectuals, aristocrats and the middle-class: all had their papers in order to fit into the French, German and English polite society which welcomed them. Seemingly, they were more European than Europeans.
But on one side they were in conflict with the intellectual coldness of those who saw the light of the new world in the revolution which had swept them away, and on the other side nostalgia plunged them back into a Russianness which allowed neither contamination nor camouflage. Stravinskij, an intransigent layman, did not miss a single service in the Orthodox Cathedral of rue Daru and filled his house with icons; Chodasevic always carried Pushkin’s works with him: “All I own are eight small books/, and they contain my Country”. All the rest is modern history, even though in reviewing with Figes “Russia through the lens of communism”, one shudders at the thought of how a revolution devoured itself and established a hellish and horrific mechanism that steamrollered its finest intelligentsia.
Mandestalm remarked in the ‘30s: “Poetry is really respected only in this Country. In no other place have so many people been killed in its name”. Out of the 700 intellectuals who participated in the First Congress of Writers in 1934, only 50 were able to take part in the second edition, which took place twenty years later.
And those who were unable to attend had not died through natural causes. TRANSLATED BY INTERPRES