Natasha's Dance полностью

court and risen through its ranks to become a retainer of Ivan IV ('the Terrible'). Ivan set Bekbulatovich to rule over the boyars' domains while he himself retreated to the countryside, taking the title 'Prince of Moscow'. The appointment was a temporary and tactical manoeuvre on Ivan's part to tighten his control of his rebellious guards, the oprichnina. Bekbulatovich was only nominally in charge. But Ivan's choice was clearly motivated by the high prestige which the Golden Horde retained within society. At the end of his short 'reign', Ivan rewarded Bekbulatovich with a rich estate of 140,000 hectares along with the title of the Grand Prince of Tver. But under Boris Godunov Bekbulatovich was accused of treason, deprived of his estate and forced into the monastery of St Cyril, near Belo Ozero. Boris Godunov was the other Tsar descendant of the Golden Horde - the great-great-great-great-grandson of a Tatar khan named Chet who had entered the service of the Moscow princes in the middle of the fourteenth century.²³

It was not just Mongol nobles who settled down in Russia. The Mongol invasion involved a huge migration of nomadic tribes who had been forced to find new pastures on the steppe through the overpopulation of Mongolia. The whole Eurasian steppe, from the Ukraine to Central Asia, was engulfed by incoming tribes. Many of the immigrants became absorbed in the settled population and stayed behind in Russia when the Golden Horde was pushed back to Mongolia. Their Tatar names are still marked on maps of southern Russia and the Volga lands: Penza, Chembar, Ardym, Anybei, Kevda, Ardatov and Alatyr. Some of the settlers were cohorts of the Mongol army stationed as administrators in the southern borderlands between the Volga and the river Bug. Others were traders or artisans who went to work in the Russian towns, or poor nomads who were forced to become peasant farmers when they lost their herds. There was such a heavy influx of these Tatar immigrants, and so much intermingling with the native population over several centuries, that the idea of a peasantry of purely Russian stock must be seen as no more than myth.

The Mongol influence went deep into the roots of Russian folk culture. Many of the most basic Russian words have Tatar origins -loshad (horse), bazar (market), ambar (barn), sunduk (chest) and several hundred more.²⁴ As already noted, imported Tatar words were particularly common in the languages of commerce and adminis-

tration, where the descendants of the Golden Horde dominated. By the fifteenth century the use of Tatar terms had become so modish at the court of Muscovy that the Grand Duke Vasily accused his courtiers of 'excessive love of the Tatars and their speech'.²⁵ But Turkic phrases also left their mark on the language of the street - perhaps most notably in those 'davai' verbal riffs which signal the intention of so many daily acts: 'davai poidem' ('Come on, let's go'), ' davai posidim' ('Come on, let's sit down'), and ' davai popem' ('Come on, let's get drunk').

Russian customs were equally influenced by the Tatar immigration, although this is easier to establish at the level of the court and high society, where Russian customs of hospitality were clearly influenced by the culture of the khans, than it is at the level of the common Russian folk. None the less, the archaeologist Veselovsky traced the Russian folk taboos connected with the threshold (such as not to step on it or not to greet a person across it) to the customs and beliefs of the Golden Horde. He also found a Mongol origin for the Russian peasant custom of honouring a person by throwing them into the air - a ceremony performed by a crowd of grateful peasants on Nabokov's father after he had settled a dispute on the estate.²⁶

From my place at table I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvellous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curious casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of fold in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute Flames in the midst of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.²⁷