Natasha's Dance полностью

The 'coronation' (venchane), as the wedding ceremony was called in Russia, symbolized the grace that the bridal couple received from the Holy Spirit as they founded a new family or domestic church. The crowns were usually made of leaves and flowers. They were crowns of joy and martyrdom, for every Christian marriage involved sacrifice by either side. Yet the crowns had a more secular significance as well: for among the common people the bridal pair were called the 'Tsar' and 'Tsarina', and proverbs said the wedding feast was meant to be 'potsarskii' - a banquet fit for kings.⁷⁹

The traditional Russian marriage was a patriarchal one. The husband's rights were reinforced by the teachings of the Church, by custom,

by canon and by civil laws. According to the 1835 Digest of Laws, a wife's main duty was to 'submit to the will of her husband' and to reside with him in all circumstances, unless he was exiled to Siberia.⁸⁰ State and Church conceived the husband as an autocrat - his absolute authority over wife and family a part of the divine and natural order. 'The husband and the wife are one body,' declared Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the arch-reactionary Procurator-General of the Holy Synod and personal tutor to the last two Tsars. 'The husband is the head of the wife. The wife is not distinguished from her husband. Those are the basic principles from which the provisions of our law proceed.'⁸¹ In fact, Russian women had the legal right to control their property - a right, it seems, that was established in the eighteenth century, and in some respects to do with property they were better off than women in the rest of Europe or America.⁸² But women were at a severe disadvantage when it came to inheriting family property; they had no legal right to request a separation or to challenge the authority of their husband; and, short of a severe injury, they had no protection against physical abuse.

'Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh dear me!' The bridal lament was not unwarranted. The peasant wife was destined for a life of suffering - so much so, indeed, that her life became a symbol of the peasant's misery, used by nineteenth-century writers to highlight the worst aspects of Russian life. The traditional peasant household was much larger than its European counterpart, often containing more than a dozen members, with the wives and families of two or three brothers living under the same roof as their parents. The young bride who arrived in this household was likely to be burdened with the meanest chores, the fetching and the cooking, the washing and the childcare, and generally treated like a serf. She would have to put up with the sexual advances of not just her husband, but his father, too, for the ancient peasant custom of snokbachestvo gave the household elder rights of access to her body in the absence of his son. Then there were the wife-beatings. For centuries the peasants had claimed the right to beat their wives. Russian proverbs were full of advice on the wisdom of such violence:

'Hit your wife with the butt of the axe, get down and see if she's breathing. If she is, she's shamming and wants some more.'

'The more you beat the old woman, the tastier the soup will be.'

'Beat your wife like a fur coat, then there'll be less noise.'

'A wife is nice twice: when she's brought into the house [as a bride] and when she's carried out of it to her grave.'⁸³

For those who saw the peasant as a natural Christian (that is, practically the whole of the intelligentsia) such barbaric customs presented a problem. Dostoevsky tried to get around it by claiming that the people should be judged by the 'sacred things for which they yearn' rather than 'their frequent acts of bestiality', which were no more than surface covering, the 'slime of centuries of oppression'. Yet even Dostoevsky stumbled when it came to wife-beating: