Natasha's Dance полностью

Dobroliubov even claimed that the 'most heartfelt striving of all our Oblomovs is their striving for repose in a dressing gown'.¹²⁴ Goncharov made a careful point of emphasizing the Asian origin of his hero's dressing gown. It was 'a real oriental dressing-gown, without the slightest hint of Europe, without tassels, without velvet trimmings', and in the true 'Asiatic fashion' its sleeves 'got wider from the shoulders to the hands'.¹²⁵ Living 'like a sultan', surrounded by his serfs, and never doing anything that they could be commanded to do instead for him, Oblomov became a cultural monument to Russia's 'Asiatic immobility'. Lenin used the term when he grew frustrated with the unreformability of Russian social life. 'The old Oblomov is with us', he wrote in 1920, 'and for a long while yet he will still need to be washed, cleaned, shaken and given a good thrashing if something is to come of him.'¹²⁶

In 1874 the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St Petersburg hosted an extraordinary exhibition by the artist Vasily Vereshchagin, whose enormous battle scenes of the Turkestan campaign had recently returned with high acclaim from a European tour. Huge crowds came to see the exhibition (30,000 copies of the catalogue were sold in the first week) and the building of the Ministry became so cramped that several fights broke out as people jostled for a better view. Veresh-chagin's pictures were the public's first real view of the Imperial war which the Russians had been fighting for the past ten years against the Muslim tribes as the Tsar's troops conquered Turkestan. The Russian public took great pride in the army's capture of the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva, followed by its conquest of Tashkent and the arid steppe of Central Asia right up to the borders with Afghanistan and British India. After its defeat in the Crimean War, the campaign showed the world that Russia was a power to be reckoned with. But Vereshchagin's almost photographic battle images revealed a savagery which had not been seen by civilians before. It was not clear who was more 'savage' in his pictures of the war: the Russian troops or their Asiatic opponents. There was 'something fascinating, something

deeply horrifying, in the wild energy of these canvases', concluded one reviewer in the press. 'We see a violence that could not be French or even from the Balkans: it is half-barbarian and semi-Asiatic - it is a Russian violence.'¹²⁷

It had not originally been the painter's aim to draw this parallel. Vereshchagin started out as an official war artist, and it was not part of his remit to criticize the conduct of the Russian military. He had been invited by General Kaufman, the senior commander of the Turkestan campaign, to join the army as a surveyor, and had fought with distinction (the only Russian painter ever to be honoured with the Order of St George) before receiving the commission from the Grand Duke Vladimir (the same who had bought Repin's The Volga Barge Haulers) for the Asian battle scenes.¹²⁸ But his experience of the war in Turkestan had given rise to doubts about the 'civilizing mission' of the Russian Empire in the East. On one occasion, after the Russian troops had massacred the people of a Turkmen village, Vereshchagin dug their graves himself. None of his compatriots would touch the dead.¹²⁹ Vereshchagin came to see the war as a senseless massacre. 'It is essential to underline that both sides pray to the same God', he advised his friend Stasov on a piece he was preparing for the exhibition, 'since this is the tragic meaning of my art.'¹³⁰ The message of Vereshchagin's epic canvases was clearly understood. He portrayed the Asian tribesmen, not as savages, but as simple human beings who were driven to defend their native land. 'What the public saw', Stasov later wrote, 'was both sides of the war - the military conquest and the human suffering. His paintings were the first to sound a loud protest against the barbarism of the Imperial war.'¹³¹

There was a huge storm of controversy. Liberals praised the artist for his stance against all war.* Conservatives denounced him as a 'traitor to Russia', and mounted a campaign to strip him of his Order of St George.¹³² General Kaufman became so enraged when he saw the artist's pictures that he began to shout and swear at Vereshchagin and

* Even Kaiser Wilhelm II, the most militarist of the German Emperors, told Vereshchagin at his Berlin exhibition in 1897:' Vos tableaux sont la meilleure assurance contre la guerre' (F. I. Bulgakov, V. V. Vereshchagin i ego proizvedeniia (St Petersburg, 1905), P. 11).