Natasha's Dance полностью

For years the grief-stricken count would leave the Fountain House and walk incognito through the streets of Petersburg distributing money to the poor.⁷⁷ He died in 1809, the richest nobleman in the whole of Russia, and no doubt the loneliest as well. In his testimony to his son he came close to rejecting root and branch the civilization embodied in his own life's work. 'My taste and passion for rare things,' he wrote,

was a form of vanity, like my desire to charm and surprise people's feelings with things they had never seen or heard… I came to realize that the brilliance of such work could only satisfy for a short time and vanished instantly in the eyes of my contemporaries. It did not leave the remotest impression on the soul. What is all this splendour for?⁷⁸

On Praskovya's death the count wrote to the new Emperor, Alexander I, to inform him of his marriage and appealed to him (successfully) to recognize the rights of Dmitry as his sole legitimate heir.⁷⁹ He claimed that his wife had only been the ward of the blacksmith Kuznetsov and that she was really the daughter of an ancient Polish noble family called the Kovalevskys, from the western provinces.⁸⁰ The fiction was in part to distinguish Dmitry's claim from that of all the older sons he had begotten with various serf women (there were six in all, as far as one can tell from the many claims).⁸¹ But it was also uncannily like the denouement of a comic opera - it was in fact the ending of Anyuta - where the servant girl in love with the nobleman is finally allowed to marry him, at which point it is revealed that she is, after all, of noble origins and had only been adopted by her humble parents as an orphaned little girl. The count, it seems, was attempting to tie up the ends of his own life as if it was a work of art.

Praskovya was blessed with a rare intelligence and strength of character. She was the finest singer in the Russia of her day, literate and conversant with several languages. Yet until a year before her death she remained a serf. What were her feelings? How did she respond to the prejudice she met? How did she reconcile her deep religious faith, her acceptance of the sin of sexual relations outside marriage, with her feelings for the count? It is very seldom that one gets the chance to hear the confession of a serf. But in 1863 a document was

found among the papers of the recently deceased Tatyana Shlykova, the opera singer (Sheremetev's 'Garnet') and Praskovya's lifelong friend, who had raised Dmitry, as if her own son, at the Fountain House after 1803. The document, in Praskovya's own neat hand, was written in the form of a 'prayer' to God, clearly in the knowledge that she was about to die. It was handed by Praskovya to her friend before her death with instructions not to let the count see it. The language of the prayer is disjointed and obscure, its mood delirious with guilt and repentance, but the intense cry for salvation is unmistakable:

… O merciful Lord, the source of all goodness and endless charity, I confess to you my sins and place before your eyes all my sinful and unlawful deeds. I have sinned, my Lord, and my illness, all these scabs upon my body, is a heavy punishment. I bear a heavy labour and my naked body is defiled. My body is defiled by sinful bonds and thoughts. I am bad. I am proud. I am ugly and lascivious. A devil is inside my body. Cry, my angel, my soul has died. It is in a coffin, lying unconscious and oppressed by bitterness, because, my Lord, my base and unlawful deeds have killed my soul. But compared with my sins the power of my Lord is very great, greater than the sand in all the seas, and from the depths of my despair I beg you, Lord Almighty, do not reject me. I am begging for your blessing. I am praying for your mercy. Punish me, my Lord, but please don't let me die.⁸²

The musical life of eighteenth-century Russia was dominated by the court and by small private theatres such as Sheremetev's. Public theatres, which were long-established in the towns of western Europe, did not really feature in the cultural life of Russia until the 1780s. The aristocracy preferred their own society and they rarely attended the public theatres, which catered mainly to the clerks and traders of the towns with vaudevilles and comic operas. 'In our day,' one Princess Yankova recalled, 'it was considered more refined to go [to the theatre] by the personal invitation of the host, and not to one where anyone could go in exchange for money. And who indeed among our intimate friends did not possess his own private theatre?'⁸³