Natasha's Dance (21 page)

    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.
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    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’).
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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.
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    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’.
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    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’.
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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.

    Compared to their parents, the Russian nobles who grew up after 1812 put a higher valuation on childhood. It took a long time for such attitudes to change, but already by the middle decades of the nineteenth century one can discern a new veneration of childhood on the part of those memoirists and writers who recalled their upbringing after 1812. This nostalgia for the age of childhood merged with a new reverence for the Russian customs which they had known as children through their fathers’ household serfs.

    In the eighteenth century the aristocracy had seen childhood as a preparation for the adult world. It was a stage to be overcome as soon as possible, and children who delayed this transition, like Mitrofan in Fonvizin’s
The Minor,
were regarded as simpletons. High-born children were expected to behave like ‘little adults’ and they were prepared to enter into society from an early age. Girls were taught to dance from eight years old. By the age of ten or twelve they were already going to the ‘children’s balls’ that were run by dancing masters in the fashionable houses, from which, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, they would graduate to their first grown-up ball. Natasha Rostov was relatively old, at eighteen years, when she attended her first ball and danced with Prince Andrei in
War and Peace.
Boys, meanwhile, were signed up for the Guards and dressed in their regimental uniforms long before they were old enough to hold a sword. Volkonsky joined his father’s regiment (a sergeant
in absentia)
at the tender age of six. By eight he was a sergeant in the Kherson Grenadiers; by nine, an adjutant to General Suvorov; although, of course, it was only later, at the age of sixteen, that he began active service on the battlefield. Boys destined for the civil service were sent to boarding school at the age of eight or nine, where they were indoctrinated in the service ethic and, like adult State officials, they wore a civil (rather than a school) uniform. School was seen as little more than an apprenticeship for the civil service and, since the student was allowed to join the service on his fifteenth birthday, few noble families thought it necessary to educate their sons beyond that age. Indeed, in so far as the Table of Ranks reinforced the principle of promotion by seniority, any further education was

    considered disadvantageous: the sooner one got on to the promotion ladder the better.

    The memoirist Vasily Selivanov grew up in a household where the seven sons were all prepared for military service from an early age. His father ran the family like a regiment, the sons all ranked by age and under strict instructions to stand up in his presence and call him ‘sir’. When Selivanov joined the Dragoons in 1830, at the age of seventeen, the transition from palace to barracks must have felt like going from one home to another.
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Not all noble families were quite as regimented as the Selivanovs, of course, but in many the relations between parents and their children were conducted on the same basic principles of discipline that ruled the institutions of the army and the state. Such rigour had not always been the case: the domestic life of the noble family in the seventeenth century might have been extremely patriarchal but it was also intimate. Rather, it was copied by the Russians from the West, especially England - although, like much that was brought to Russia in the eighteenth century, it became so ingrained in the nobility that it practically defined that class in the nineteenth century. Noble parents kept their children at arm’s length, which often meant the length of the longest corridor, or down the longest staircase to a separate basement floor in the servants’ quarters of their house. V. A. Sollogub grew up in a mansion on the Palace Embankment in St Petersburg. The adults lived in the main house while the children were consigned with their nanny and a wet nurse to an annexed wing, and only saw their parents briefly once or twice a day - for example, to thank them for their dinner (but not to eat with them) or to kiss them goodbye when they went away. ‘Our lives were entirely separate,’ Sollogub recalled, ‘and there was never any sign of emotion. We children were allowed to kiss our parents on the hand, but there was no fondling, and we had to address them in French with the formal “
vous
“. Children were subjected to a strict domestic code of servility, almost like the laws for serfs’.
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Nikolai Shatilov, who grew up in a wealthy landowning family of Tula province in the 1860s, was confined as a young boy to a separate apartment in the house, where he lived with his tutor and took all his meals: he did not see his parents ‘for months on end’.
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