Natasha's Dance полностью

Many Russian families had Mongol origins. 'Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar,' Napoleon once said. The coats of arms of Russian families - where Muslim motifs such as sabres, arrows, crescent moons and the 8-pointed star are much in evidence - bear witness to this Mongol legacy. There were four main groups of Mongol descendants. First there were those descended from the Turkic-speaking nomads who had swept in with the armies of Genghiz Khan in the thirteenth century and settled down in Russia following the break-up of the 'Golden Horde', the Russian name for the Mongol host with its gleaming tent encampment on the Volga river, in the fifteenth century. Among these were some of the most famous names in Russian history: writers like Karamzin, Turgenev, Bulgakov and Akhmatova; philosophers like Chaadaev, Kireevsky, Berdiaev; statesmen like Godunov, Bukharin, Tukhachevsky; and composers like Rimsky-Korsakov. * Next were the families of Turkic origin who came to Russia from the west: the Tiutchevs and Chicherins, who came from Italy; or the Rachmaninovs, who had arrived from Poland in the eighteenth century. Even the Kutuzovs were of Tatar origin (qutuz is the Turkic word for 'furious' or 'mad') - an irony in view of the great general Mikhail Kutuzov's status as a hero made of purely Russian

* The name Turgenev derives from the Mongol word for 'swift' (tiirgen); Bulgakov from the Turkic word 'to wave' (bulgaq); Godunov from the Mongol word godon ('a stupid person'); and Korsakov from the Turkic word qorsaq, a type of steppeland fox. Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko. She changed her name to Akhmatova (said to be the name of her Tatar great-grandmother) when her father said he did not want a poet in his family. Akhmatova claimed descent from Khan Akhmat, a direct descendant of Genghiz Khan and the last Tatar khan to receive tribute from the Russian princes the was assassinated in 14X1). Nadezhda Mandelstam believed that Akhmatova had invented the Tatar origins of her great-grandmother (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned (London,1989), p. 449).

22. (opposite) Vastly Kandinsky: sketches of buildings in the Komi region, including a church with a Mongolian-type roof. From the Vologda

Diary of 1889

stuff. Families of mixed Slav and Tatar ancestry made up a third category. Among these were some of Russia's grandest dynasties - the Sheremetevs, Stroganovs and Rostopchins - although there were many at a lower level, too. Gogol's family, for instance, was of mixed Polish and Ukrainian descent but it shared a common ancestry with the Turkic Gogels, who derived their surname from the Chuvash word gogul-a type of steppeland bird (Gogol was renowned for his bird-like features, especially his beaky nose). The final group were Russian families who changed their names to make them sound more Turkic, either because they had married into a Tatar family, or because they had bought land in the east and wanted smooth relations with the native tribes. The Russian Veliaminovs, for example, changed their name to the Turkic Aksak (from aqsaq, meaning 'lame') to facilitate their purchase of enormous tracts of steppeland from the Bashkir tribes near Orenburg: and so the greatest family of Slavophiles, the Aksakovs, was founded.¹⁰

Adopting Turkic names became the height of fashion at the court of Moscow between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Tatar influence from the Golden Horde remained very strong and many noble dynasties were established. During the eighteenth century, when Peter's nobles were obliged to look westwards, the fashion fell into decline. But it was revived in the nineteenth century - to the point where many pure-bred Russian families invented legendary Tatar ancestors to make themselves appear more exotic. Nabokov, for example, claimed (perhaps with tongue in cheek) that his family was descended from no less a personage than Genghiz Khan himself, who 'is said to have fathered the Nabok, a petty Tatar prince in the twelfth century who married a Russian damsel in an era of intensely artistic Russian culture'.¹¹

After Kandinsky had returned from the Komi region he gave a lecture on the findings of his trip to the Imperial Ethnographic Society in St Petersburg. The auditorium was full. The shamanistic beliefs of the Eurasian tribes held an exotic fascination for the Russian public at

23. Masked Buriat shaman with drum, drumstick and horse-sticks. Note the iron on his robe. Early 1900s