Natasha's Dance полностью

At the heart of all these satires was the notion of the West as a negation of Russian principles. The moral lesson was simple: through their slavish imitation of Western principles, the aristocrats had lost all sense of their own nationality. Striving to make themselves at home with foreigners, they had become foreigners at home.

The nobleman who worships France - and thus despises Russia -was a stock character in all these comedies. 'Why was I born a Russian?' laments Diulezh in Sumarokov's The Monsters (1750). 'O Nature! Are you not ashamed to have given me a Russian father?' Such was his contempt for his fellow countrymen that in a sequel to the play, Diulezh even challenges an acquaintance to a duel because he had dared to call him a 'fellow Russian and a brother'.¹¹⁵ Fonvizin's Ivan, in The Brigadier, considers France his 'spiritual homeland' for the simple reason that he was once taught by a French coachman. Returning from a trip to France, Ivan proclaims that 'anyone who has ever been in Paris has the right not to count himself a Russian any more'.¹¹⁶

This literary type continued as a mainstay of the nineteenth-century stage. Alexander Griboedov's Chatsky in Woefrom Wit (1822-4) becomes so immersed in European culture on his travels that he cannot bear to live in Moscow on his return. He departs again for Paris, claiming there is no longer any place for him in Russian life. Chatsky was a prototype of those 'superfluous men' who inhabit nineteenth-century Russian literature: Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Lermontov's Pechorin (the Hero of Our Times (1840)), Turgenev's Rudin (1856); the root of all their troubles a sense of alienation from their native land.

There were many Chatskys in real life. Dostoevsky encountered some of them in the Russian emigre communities of Germany and France in the 1870s:

[T]here have been all sorts of people [who have emigrated] but the vast majority, if not all of them, have more or less hated Russia, some of them on moral grounds, on the conviction that 'in Russia there's nothing to do for such decent and intelligent people as they', others simply hating her without any convictions - naturally, one might say, physically: for her climate, her fields, her forests, her ways, her liberated peasants, her Russian history: in short, hating her for absolutely everything.¹¹⁷

But it was not just the emigres - or the almost permanent encampment of wealthy Russians in the spa and sea resorts of Germany and France - who became divorced from their native land. The whole idea of a European education was to make the Russian feel as much at home in Paris as in Petersburg. This education made for a certain cosmopolitanism, which was one of Russia's most enduring cultural strengths. It gave the educated classes a sense that they belonged to a broader European civilization, and this was the key to the supreme achievements of their national culture in the nineteenth century. Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Tchaikovsky, Diaghilev and Stravinsky - they all combined their Russianness with a European cultural identity. Writing from the summit of the 1870s, Tolstoy evoked the almost magic charm of this European world as seen through the eyes of Levin as he falls in love with the Shcherbatsky household in Anna Karenina (1873-6):

Strange as it may seem, Levin was in love with the whole family - especially the feminine half of it. He could not remember his mother, and his only sister was older than himself, so that in the Shcherbatskys' house he encountered for the first time the home life of a cultured, honourable family of the old aristocracy, of which he had been deprived by the death of his own father and mother. All the members of the family, in particular the feminine half, appeared to him as though wrapped in some mysterious, poetic veil, and he not only saw no defects in them but imagined behind that poetic veil the loftiest sentiments and every possible perfection. Why the three young ladies had to speak French one day and English the next; why they had, at definite times and each in her turn, to practise the piano (the sound of which reached their brothers' room upstairs, where the boys were studying); why those masters of French literature, music, drawing, and dancing came to the house; why at certain hours the three young ladies accompanied by Mademoiselle Linon were driven in a barouche to the Tverskoy boulevard wearing satin pelisses - long for Dolly, shorter for Natalie, and so short for Kitty that her shapely little legs in the tightly pulled-up red stockings were quite exposed; why they had to walk up and down the Tverskoy boulevard accompanied by a footman with a gold cockade in his hat - all this and much more that happened in their mysterious world he did not understand; but he knew that everything was perfect, and he was in love with the mystery of it all.¹¹⁸