Natasha's Dance полностью

Like slaves, obeying and abhorred, We were the shield between the breeds Of Europe and the raging Mongol horde.

But now the time had come for the 'old world' of Europe to 'halt before the Sphinx':

Yes, Russia is a Sphinx. Exulting, grieving, And sweating blood, she cannot sate Her eyes that gaze and gaze and gaze At you with stone-lipped love and hate.

Russia still had what Europe had long lost - 'a love that burns like fire' - a violence that renews by laying waste. By joining the Russian Revolution, the West would experience a spiritual renaissance through peaceful reconciliation with the East.

Come to us from the horrors of war,

Come to our peaceful arms and rest.

Comrades, before it is too late,

Sheathe the old sword, may brotherhood be blest.

But if the West refused to embrace this 'Russian spirit', Russia would unleash the Asiatic hordes against it:

Know that we will no longer be your shield But, careless of the battle cries, We shall look on as the battle rages Aloof, with indurate and narrow eyes

We shall not move when the savage Hun

Despoils the corpse and leaves it bare,

Burns towns, herds the cattle in the church,

And the smell of white flesh roasting fills the air.¹⁵¹

The inspiration of Blok's apocalyptic vision (and of much else besides in the Russian avant-garde) was the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. The opening lines of his memorable poem 'Pan-Mongolism' (1894) were used by Blok for the epigraph of The Scythians. They perfectly expressed the ambivalent unease, the fear and fascination, which Blok's generation felt about the East:

Pan-Mongolism! What a savage name! Yet it is music to my ears.¹⁵²

In his last major essay, Three Conversations on War, Progress and the End of History (1900), Soloviev described a vast Asiatic invasion of Europe under the banner of the Antichrist. For Soloviev this 'yellow peril' was an awesome threat. But for the Scythians it represented renewal. Mixed with Russia's European culture, the elemental spirit of the Asiatic steppe would reunite the world.

Andrei Bely was another disciple of Soloviev. In Petersburg Bely maps a city living on the edge of a huge catastrophe. Set in the midst of the 1905 Revolution, when Russia was at war with Japan, its Petersburg is swept by howling winds from the Asiatic steppe that almost blow the city back into the sea. The novel builds on the nineteenth-century vision of an all-destroying flood, which was a constant theme in the literary myth of the Russian capital. Built in defiance of the natural order, on land stolen from the sea, Peter's stone creation was, it seemed, an invitation to Nature's revenge. Pushkin was the first of many Russian writers to develop the diluvial theme, in The Bronze Horseman. Odoevsky used it, too, as the basis of his story 'A Joker from the Dead' in Russian Nights.*

By the middle of the nineteenth century the notion of the flood had become so integral to the city's own imagined destiny that even Karl Bruillov's famous painting The Last Days of Pompeii (1833) was

* The story of a beautiful princess who abandons her young lover to marry a middle-aged official. One stormy autumn night they attend a ball in St Petersburg, where she has a fainting fit. In her dreams the Neva breaks its banks. Its waters flood the ballroom, bringing in a coffin whose lid flies open to reveal her dead lover. The palace walls come crashing down, and Petersburg is swept into the sea.

viewed as a warning to St Petersburg.* Slavophiles like Gogol, a close friend of Bruillov, saw it as a prophecy of divine retribution against Western decadence. 'The lightning poured out and flooded everything', commented Gogol, as if to underline that the city on the Neva lived in constant danger of a similar catastrophe.¹⁵³ But Westernists like Herzen drew the parallel as well: 'Pompeii is the Muse of Petersburg!'¹⁵⁴ As the year 1917 approached, the flood became a revolutionary storm. Everybody was aware of imminent destruction. This was expressed in all the arts - from Benois' illustrations for The Bronze Horseman (1905-18), which seemed to presage the impending revolution in the swirling sea and sky, to the violent ('Scythian') rhythms of The Rite of Spring and the poetry of Blok:

And over Russia I see a quiet Far-spreading fire consume all.¹⁵⁵

Bely portrays Petersburg as a fragile Western civilization precariously balanced on the top of the savage 'Eastern' culture of the peasantry. Peter the Great - in the form of the Bronze Horseman - is recast as the Antichrist, the apocalyptic rider spiralling towards the end of time and dragging Russia into his vortex. The bomb which structures the thin plot (a student is persuaded by the revolutionaries to assassin-ate his father, a high-ranking bureaucrat) is a symbol of this imminent catastrophe.