Natasha's Dance (15 page)

    For some officers it was not enough to identify themselves with the common people’s cause: they wanted to take on the identity of common men themselves. They Russified their dress and behaviour in an effort to move closer to the soldiers in the ranks. They used Russian words in their military speech. They smoked the same tobacco as their men; and in contravention of the Petrine ban, they grew beards. To some extent such democratization was necessary. Denis Davydov, the celebrated leader of the Cossack partisans, had found it very hard to raise recruits in the villages: the peasants saw his glittering Hussar uniform as alien and ‘French’. Davydov was forced, as he noted in his diary, to ‘conclude a peace with the villagers’ before he could even speak to them. ‘I learned that in a people’s war it is not enough to speak the common tongue: one must also step down to the people’s level in one’s manners and one’s dress. I began to wear a peasant’s
kaftan,
I grew a beard, and instead of the Order of St Anne, I wore the image of St Nicholas.’
¹⁵
But the adoption of these peasant ways was more than just a strategy of quick-thinking officers. It was a declaration of their nationality.

    Volkonsky took command of a partisan brigade and pursued Napoleon’s troops as far as Paris during 1813-14. The next year, with 20,000 roubles in his chest, a carriage and three servants provided by his mother, he travelled to Vienna for the Peace Congress. He then returned to Paris, where he moved in the circles of the political reformers Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant, and went on to London, where he saw the principles of constitutional monarchy in operation as he watched the House of Commons discuss the lunacy of George III. Volkonsky had planned to go to the United States - ‘a country that had captured the imagination of all Russian youth because of its independence and democracy’ - but the resumption of the war

    with Napoleon’s escape from Elba obliged him to return to Petersburg.
¹⁶
None the less, like those of many Decembrists, Volkonsky’s views had been deeply influenced by his brief encounter with the West. It confirmed his conviction in the personal dignity of every human being - an essential credo of the Decembrists which lay at the foundation of their opposition to the autocratic system and serfdom. It formed his belief in meritocracy - a view strengthened by his conversations with Napoleon’s officers, who impressed him with their free thought and confidence. How many Neys and Davouts had been stifled by the rigid caste system of the Russian army? Europe made him think of Russia’s backwardness, of its lack of basic rights or public life, and helped him focus his attention on the need to follow Europe’s liberal principles.

    The young officers who came back from Europe were virtually unrecognizable to their parents. The Russia they returned to in 1815 was much the same as the Russia they had left. But they had greatly changed. Society was shocked by their ‘rude peasant manners’.
¹⁷
And no doubt there was something of a pose - the swagger of the veteran - in these army ways. But they differed from their elders in far more than their manners and dress. They also differed from them in their artistic tastes and interests, their politics and general attitudes: they turned their backs on the frivolous diversions of the ballroom (though not their own revelry) and immersed themselves in serious pursuits. As one explained: ‘We had taken part in the greatest events of history, and it was unbearable to return to the vacuous existence of St Petersburg, to listen to the idle chatter of old men about the so-called virtues of the past. We had advanced a hundred years.’
¹⁸
As Pushkin wrote in his verse ‘To Chaadaev’ in 1821:

    The fashionable circle is no longer in fashion.

    You know, my dear, we’re all free men now.

    We keep away from society; don’t mingle with the ladies.

    We’ve left them at the mercy of old men,

    The dear old boys of the eighteenth century.
¹⁹

    Dancing, in particular, was regarded as a waste of time. The men of 1812 wore their swords at formal balls to signal their refusal to take

    part. The salon was rejected as a form of artifice. Young men retreated to their studies and, like Pierre in
War and Peace,
went in search of the intellectual key to a simpler and more truthful existence. Together, the Decembrists formed a veritable ‘university’. Between them they had an encyclopaedic range of expertise, from folklore, history and archaeology to mathematics and the natural sciences, and they published many learned works, as well as poetry and literature, in the leading journals of their day.

    The alienation felt by these young men from their parents’ generation and society was common to all ‘children of 1812’, poets and philosophers as well as officers. It left a profound imprint on the cultural life of Russia in the nineteenth century. The ‘men of the last century’ were defined by the service ethic of the Petrine state. They set great store by rank and hierarchy, order and conformity to rational rules. Alexander Herzen - who was actually born in 1812 - recalled how his father disapproved of all emotional display. ‘My father disliked every sort of
abandon,
every sort of frankness; all this he called familiarity, just as he called every feeling sentimentality.’
²⁰
But the children who grew up in Herzen’s age were all impulsiveness and familiarity. They rebelled against the old disciplinarianism, blaming it for ‘Russia’s slave mentality’, and they looked instead to advance their principles through literature and art.
²¹
Many withdrew from the military or civil service with the aim of leading a more honest life. As Chatsky put it, in Griboedov’s drama
Woe from Wit,
‘I’d love to serve, but I am sickened by servility.’

    It is hard to overstate the extent to which the Russian cultural renaissance of the nineteenth century entailed a revolt against the service ethic of the eighteenth century. In the established view, rank quite literally defined the nobleman: unlike all other languages, the word in Russian for an official
(chinovnik)
derived from that for rank
(chin).
To be a nobleman was to take one’s place in the service of the state, either as a civil servant or as an officer; and to leave that service, even to become a poet or an artist, was regarded as a fall from grace. ‘Service now in Russia is the same as life’, wrote one official in the 1810s: ‘we leave our offices as if we are going to our graves.’
²²
It was inconceivable for a nobleman to be an artist or a poet, except in his spare time after office work, or as a gentleman enthusiast on his estate. Even the great eighteenth-century

    poet Gavril Derzhavin combined his writing with a military career, followed by appointments as a senator and provincial governor, before ending up as Minister of Justice in 1802-3.

    During the early nineteenth century, as the market for books and painting grew, it became possible, if not easy, for the independent writer or artist to survive. Pushkin was one of the first noblemen to shun the service and take up writing as a ‘trade’; his decision was seen as derogation or breaking of ranks. The writer N. I. Grech’ was accused of bringing shame upon his noble family when he left the civil service to become a literary critic in the 1810s.
²³
Music too was thought unsuitable as a profession for the nobleman. Rimsky-Korsakov was pushed into the naval service by his parents, who looked upon his music ‘as a prank’.
²⁴
Musorgsky was sent to the Cadet School in Petersburg and was then enrolled in the Preobrazhensky Guards. Tchaikovsky went to the School of Jurisprudence where his family expected him to graduate to the civil service and not forget but put away his childish passion for music. For the nobleman to become an artist, then, was to reject the traditions of his class. He had, in effect, to reinvent himself as an
‘intelligent’
- a member of the intelligentsia - whose duty was defined as service to ‘the nation’ rather than to the state.

    Only two of the great nineteenth-century Russian writers (Gonch-arov and Saltykov-Shchedrin) ever held high rank in the government service, although nearly all of them were noblemen. Goncharov was a censor. But Saltykov-Shchedrin was a tireless critic of the government, and as a vice-governor and a writer he always took the side of the ‘little man’. It was axiomatic to this literary tradition that the writer should stand up for human values against the service ethic based on rank. Thus in Gogol’s ‘The Diary of a Madman’ (1835), the literary lunatic, a humble councillor, ridicules a senior official: ‘And what if he is a gentleman of the court? It’s only a kind of distinction conferred on you, not something that you can see, or touch with your hands. A court chamberlain doesn’t have a third eye in the middle of his forehead.’ Similarly, in Chekhov’s story ‘Abolished!’ (1891) we are meant to laugh at the retired major (Izhits) who is thrown into confusion by the abolition of his former rank: ‘God knows who I am,’ the old major says. ‘They abolished all the majors a year ago!’
²⁵

    Unwilling to conform to their fathers’ rules and bored by the

    routines of the civil service, the young men of Pushkin’s generation sought release in poetry, philosophy and drunken revelry. As Silvio remarks in Pushkin’s
Tales of Belkin
(1831), wild behaviour ‘was the fashion in our day’.
²⁶
Carousing was perceived as a sign of freedom, an assertion of the individual spirit against the regimentation of the army and bureaucracy. Volkonsky and his fellow officers demonstrated their independence from the deferential customs of high society by mocking those who followed the Emperor and his family on their Sunday promenades around St Petersburg.
²⁷
Another officer, the Decembrist Mikhail Lunin, was well known for his displays of the free will. On one occasion he turned his brilliant wit against a general who had forbidden his officers to ‘offend propriety’ by bathing in the sea at Peterhof, a fashionable resort on the Gulf of Finland near St Petersburg where there was a garrison. One hot afternoon Lunin waited for the general to approach. He leapt into the water fully clothed, and stood at attention and saluted him. The bewildered general asked what this was all about. ‘I am swimming,’ Lunin said, ‘and so as not to disobey Your Excellency’s order, I am swimming in a manner not to offend propriety.’
²⁸

    The young men of the Decembrist circles spent much time in revelry. Some, like the serious Volkonsky, disapproved. But others, like Pushkin and his friends of the Green Lamp, a loose symposium of libertines and poets, saw the fight for freedom as a carnival. They found liberty in a mode of life and art that dispensed with the stifling conventions of society.
²⁹
When they were playing cards or drinking and debating with their friends, they were able to relax and express themselves, ‘as Russians’, in the easy language of the street. This was the idiom of much of Pushkin’s verse - a style that fused the language of politics and philosophical thought with the vocabulary of intimate emotion and the crude colloquialisms of the whorehouse and the inn.

    Friendship was the saving grace of these wild orgies, according to Pushkin:

    For one can live in friendship

    With verses and with cards, with Plato and with wine, And hide beneath the gentle cover of our playful pranks A noble heart and mind.
³⁰

    Volkonsky said the same of his fellow officers. They happily transgressed the public code of decency, but in their dealings with each other they kept themselves in moral check through the ‘bonds of comradeship’.
³¹
There was a cult of brotherhood in the Decembrist camp. It evolved into the cult of the collective which would become so important to the political life of the Russian intelligentsia. The spirit was first forged in the regiment - a natural ‘family’ of patriots. Nikolai Rostov in
War and Peace
discovers this community on his return from leave. Suddenly he

    felt for the first time how close was the bond that united him to Denisov and the whole regiment. On approaching [the camp] Rostov felt as he had done when approaching his home in Moscow. When he saw the first hussar with the unbuttoned uniform of his regiment, when he recognized red-haired Dementyev and saw the picket ropes of the roan horses, when Lavrushka gleefully shouted to his master, ‘The Count has come!’ and Denisov, who had been asleep on his bed, ran all dishevelled out of the mud hut to embrace him, and the officers collected round to greet the new arrival, Rostov experienced the same feeling as when his mother, his father, and his sister had embraced him, and tears of joy choked him so that he could not speak. The regiment was also a home, and as unalterably dear and precious as his parents’ house.
³²

    Through such bonds young officers began to break away from the rigid hierarchies of the service state. They felt themselves to belong to a new community - a ‘nation’, if you will - of patriotic virtue and fraternity where the noble and the peasant lived in harmony. The nineteenth-century quest for Russian nationhood began in the ranks of 1812.

    This outlook was shared by all the cultural figures in the orbit of the Decembrists: not just by those in its leading ranks, but by those, more numerous, who sympathized with the Decembrists without actively engaging in plans for a rebellion (‘Decembrists without December’). Most of the poets among them (Gnedich, Vostokov, Merzliakov, Odoevsky and Ryleev, though less so Pushkin) were preoccupied with civic themes. Renouncing the aesthetics and the frivolous concerns of Karamzin’s salon style, they wrote epic verses in a suitably spartan style. Many of them compared the soldiers’ bravery in the recent wars to the heroic deeds of ancient Greece and Rome.

    Some monumentalized the peasants’ daily toil; they raised it to the status of patriotic sacrifice. The duty of the poet, as they saw it, was to be a citizen, to dedicate himself to the national cause. Like all the men of 1812, they saw their work as part of a democratic mission to learn about and educate the common people so as to unite society on Russian principles. They rejected the Enlightenment idea that ‘all the nations should become the same’ and, in the words of one critic, called on ‘all our writers to reflect the character of the Russian folk’.
³³