Natasha's Dance (18 page)

    Nerchinsk was a bleak, ramshackle settlement of wooden huts built around the stockades of the prison camp. Maria rented a small hut from one of the local Mongolian settlers. ‘It was so narrow,’ she recalled, ‘that when I lay down on my mattress on the floor my head touched the wall and my feet were squashed against the door.’
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She shared this residence with Katya Trubetskoi, another young princess who had followed her Decembrist husband to Siberia. They survived on the small income the authorities allowed them from their dispossessed estates. For the first time in their lives they were forced to do the chores that had always been performed for them by the huge domestic staff in their palaces. They learned to clean clothes, bake bread, grow vegetables and to cook their food on the wood stove. They soon forgot their taste for French cuisine and began to live ‘like Russians, eating pickled cabbage and black bread’.
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Maria’s strength of character - reinforced by the routines of the culture she had left behind - was the key to her survival in Siberia. She scrupulously observed all the saints’ days and the birthdays of the relatives in Russia who had long forgotten hers. She always made a point of dressing properly, in a fur hat and a veil, even on her journeys to the peasant market in Nerchinsk. She played the French clavichord she had carefully packed up and carted all the way across the frozen Asian steppes,

    no doubt at enormous inconvenience. She kept up her English by translating books and journals sent out in the post; and every day she took dictation from the prisoners, who as ‘politicals’ were strictly barred from writing letters in the camp. They called Maria their ‘window on to the world’.
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    Siberia brought the exiles together. It showed them how to live truly by the principles of communality and self-sufficiency which they had so admired in the peasantry. In Chita, where they moved in 1828, the dozen prisoners and their families formed themselves into an
artel,
a collective team of labourers, and divided up the tasks between themselves. Some built the log huts in which their wives and children were to live, later to be joined by the prisoners themselves. Others took up trades like carpentry, or making shoes and clothes. Volkonsky was the gardener-in-chief. They called this community their ‘prison family’ and in their imaginations it came close to re-creating the egalitarian simplicity of the peasant commune.
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Here was that spirit of togetherness which the men of 1812 had first encountered in the regiment.

    Family relations became closer, too. Gone were the servants who had taken over child care for the noble family of the eighteenth century. The Siberian exiles brought up their own children and taught them all they knew. ‘I was your wet nurse,’ Maria told her children, ‘your nanny and, in part, your tutor, too.’
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Misha, a new son, was born in 1832; Elena (‘Nellinka’), a daughter, in 1834. The following year the Volkonskys were resettled in the village of Urik, thirty kilometres outside Irkutsk, where they had a wooden house and a plot of land, just like all the other villagers. Misha and Elena grew up with the local peasant children. They learned to play their games - hunting for birds’ nests, fishing for brown trout, setting rabbit traps and catching butterflies. ‘Nellinka is growing up a true Siberian’, Maria wrote to her friend Katya Trubetskoi.

    She talks only in the local dialect and there is no way of stopping her doing so. As for Misha, I have to allow him to go camping in the woods with the wild boys from the village. He loves adventure; he wept uncontrollably the other day because he had slept through an alarm caused by the appearance of a wolf on our doorstep. My children are growing up
a la Rousseau,
like two little savages, and there is very little I can do about it except to insist that they

    talk French with us when at home… But I must say that this existence suits their health.
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    The boy’s father took a different view. Full of pride, he told a friend that Misha had grown up a ‘true Russian in feeling’.
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    For the adults, too, exile meant a simpler and more ‘Russian’ way of life. Some of the Decembrist exiles settled in the countryside and married local girls. Others took up Russian customs and pastimes, in particular hunting in the game-rich forests of Siberia.
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And all of them were forced, for the first time in their lives, to become fluent in their native tongue. For Maria and Sergei, accustomed as they were to speak and think in French, this was one of the hardest aspects of their new existence. On their first encounter in that Nerchinsk prison cell they were forced to speak in Russian (so that the guards could understand), but they did not know the words for all the complex emotions they were feeling at that moment, so their conversation was somewhat artificial and extremely limited. Maria set about the study of her native language from a copy of the Scriptures in the camp. Sergei’s Russian, which he had written as an officer, became more vernacular. His letters from Urik are littered with Siberian colloquialisms and misspellings of elementary words (‘if, ‘doubt’, ‘May’ and ‘January’).
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    Sergei, like his son, was ‘going native’. With every passing year he became more peasant-like. He dressed like a peasant, grew his beard, rarely washed, and began to spend most of his time working in the fields or talking with the peasants at the local market town. In 1844 the Volkonskys were allowed to settle in Irkutsk. Maria was immediately accepted into the official circles of the new governor, Muraviev-Amursky, who made no secret of his sympathy for the Decembrist exiles and looked upon them as an intellectual force for the development of Siberia. Maria welcomed this opportunity to become integrated in society again. She set up several schools, a foundling hospital and a theatre. She hosted the town’s main salon in their house, where the governor himself was a frequent visitor. Sergei was seldom there. He found the ‘aristocratic atmosphere’ of Maria’s household disagreeable and preferred to remain at his farm in Urik, coming into Irkutsk just for market days. But after twenty years of seeing his wife suffer in Siberia, he was not about to stand in her way.

    5.
The ‘peasant prince’: Sergei Volkonsky in Irkutsk. Daguerreotype, 1845

    The ‘peasant prince’, for his part, was widely viewed as an eccentric. N. A. Belogolovy, who grew up in Irkutsk in the 1840s, recalls how people were shocked ‘to see the prince on market days sitting on the seat of a peasant cart piled high with flour bags and engaged in a lively conversation with a crowd of peasants whilst they shared a grey bread roll’.
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The couple had constant petty arguments. Maria’s brother, A. N. Raevsky, who had been entrusted with the management of her

    estates, used the rents to pay his gambling debts. Sergei accused Maria of siding with her brother, who had the support of the Raevskys, and in the end he made legal provisions to separate his own estates from hers so as to secure his children’s legacy.
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From the annual income which they received from their land back in Russia (approximately 4,300 roubles) Sergei assigned 3,300 roubles to Maria (enough for her to live comfortably in Irkutsk), leaving just 1,000 roubles for himself to manage on his little farm.
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Increasingly estranged, Sergei and Maria began to live separately (in his letters to his son, Sergei later called it a ‘divorce’)
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- although at the time only the ‘prison family’ was aware of their arrangements.* Maria had a love affair with the handsome and charismatic Decembrist exile Alessandro Poggio, the son of an Italian nobleman who had come to Russia in the 1770s. In Irkutsk Poggio was a daily visitor to Maria’s house, and, although he was a friend of Sergei, he was seen there much too often in her husband’s absence for the gossip not to spread. It was rumoured that Poggio was the father of Misha and Elena - a suggestion which still bothered Sergei in 1864, the year before his death, when he wrote his final letter to his ‘dear friend’ Poggio.
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Eventually, to keep up the appearance of a married life, Sergei built a wooden cabin in the courtyard of Maria’s house, where he slept and cooked his meals and received his peasant friends. Belogolovy recalls a rare appearance in Maria’s drawing room. ‘His face was smeared with tar, his long unkempt beard had bits of straw, and he smelled of the cattle yard… Yet he still spoke perfect French, pronouncing all his “r’s” like a true Frenchman.’
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    The urge to lead a simple peasant life was shared by many noblemen (Volkonsky’s distant cousin, Leo Tolstoy, comes to mind). This very ‘Russian’ quest for a ‘Life of Truth’ was more profound than the romantic search for a ‘spontaneous’ or ‘organic’ existence which motivated cultural movements elsewhere in Europe. At its heart was a religious vision of the ‘Russian soul’ that encouraged national prophets - from the Slavophiles in the 1830s to the Populists in the 1870s - to

    * Their marital problems were later covered up by the Raevsky and Volkonsky families by excising whole chunks of their correspondence from their family archives, and this was continued in the publications of the Soviet period, when the Decembrists were heroized. None the less, traces of their separation are still to be found in the archives.

    worship at the altar of the peasantry. The Slavophiles believed in the moral superiority of the Russian peasant commune over modern Western ways and argued for a return to these principles. The Populists were convinced that the egalitarian customs of the commune could serve as a model for the socialist and democratic reorganization of society; they turned to the peasants in the hope of finding allies for their revolutionary cause. For all these intellectuals, Russia was revealed, as a messianic truth, in the customs and beliefs of its peasantry. To enter into Russia, and to be redeemed by it, entailed a renunciation of the sinful world into which these children of the gentry had been born. Volkonsky, in this sense, was the first in a long line of Russian noblemen who found their nation, and their salvation, in the peasantry, and his moral quest was rooted in the lessons he had drawn from 1812. He turned his back on what he saw as the false relations of the old class-based society and looked with idealistic expectations towards a new society of equal men. ‘I trust no one with society connections’, he wrote to Ivan Pushchin, his old Decembrist friend, in 1841. ‘There is more honesty and integrity of feeling in the peasants of Siberia.’
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    Like all the Decembrist exiles, Volkonsky saw Siberia as a land of democratic hope. Here, it seemed to them, was a young and childlike Russia, primordial and raw, rich in natural resources. It was a frontier land (an ‘America’) whose pioneering farmers were not crushed by serfdom or the state (for there were few serf owners in Siberia), so that they had retained an independent spirit and resourcefulness, a natural sense of justice and equality, from which the old Russia might renew itself. The youthful energy of its unbridled peasants contained Russia’s democratic potential. Hence the Decembrists immersed themselves in the study of Siberian folklore and history; they set up village schools or, like Maria, taught the peasants in their homes; and, like Sergei, they took up peasant crafts or worked the land themselves. The Prince found comfort and a sense of purpose in his peasant toil. It was a release from the endlessness of captive time. ‘Manual labour is such a healthy thing’, Volkonsky wrote to Pushchin. ‘And it is a joy when it feeds one’s family and is of benefit to other people too.’
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    But Volkonsky was more than a farmer; he was an agricultural institute. He imported textbooks and new types of seed from European Russia (Maria’s letters home were filled with lists of gardening needs)

    and he spread the fruits of his science to the peasants, who came to him for advice from miles around.
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The peasants, it would seem, had a genuine respect for ‘our prince’, as they called Volkonsky. They liked his frankness and his openness with them, the ease with which he spoke in their local idiom. It made them less inhibited than they normally were with noblemen.
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    This extraordinary ability to enter into the world of the common people requires comment. Tolstoy, after all, never really managed it, even though he tried for nearly fifty years. Perhaps Volkonsky’s success is explained by his long experience of addressing the peasant soldiers in his regiments. Or perhaps, once the conventions of his European culture were stripped away, he could draw on the Russian customs he had grown up with. His transformation was not unlike the one that takes place in Natasha in the scene in
War and Peace
when she suddenly discovers in her ‘Uncle’s‘ forest cabin that the spirit of the peasant dance is in her blood.

    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