Natasha's Dance полностью

late eighteenth century and the defence of the old gentry culture of Moscow and its provinces against the Europeanizing Petrine state. The landed gentry, it was said, were closer to the customs and religion of the people than Peter's courtiers and career bureaucrats. The writer Mikhail Shcherbatov was the most vocal spokesman of the old nobility. In his Journey to the Land of Ophir (1784) he portrays a northern country ruled by the king Perega from his newly founded city of Peregrab. Like St Petersburg, the intended object of Shcherbatov's satire, Peregrab is cosmopolitan and sophisticated but it is alien to the national traditions of Ophir, whose people still adhere to the moral virtues of Kvamo (read: Moscow), their former capital. At last the people of Peregrab rise up, the city falls and Ophir is returned to Kvamo's simple way of life. Such idyllic views of the unspoilt past were commonplace in Rousseau's age. Even Karamzin, a Westernist who was certainly not nostalgic for the old nobility, idealized the 'virtuous and simple life of our ancestors', when 'the Russians were real Russians', in his story Natalia (1792).

For others, Russia's virtues were preserved in the traditions of the countryside. Fonvizin found them in the Christian principles of the 'old thinker' Starodum, the homespun village mystic in his satire The Minor (1782). 'Have a heart, have a soul, and you'll always be a man,' advises Starodum. 'Everything else is fashion.'¹²⁹ The idea of a truly Russian self that had been concealed and suppressed by the alien conventions of Petersburg society became commonplace. It had its origins in the sentimental cult of rural innocence - a cult epitomized by Karamzin's tearful tale of Poor Liza (1792). Karamzin tells the story of a simple flower girl who is deceived in love by a dandy from St Petersburg and kills herself by drowning in a lake. The tale contained all the elements of this vision of a new community: the myth of the wholesome Russian village from which Liza is ejected by her poverty; the corruption of the city with its foreign ways; the tragic and true-hearted Russian heroine; and the universal ideal of marriage based on love.

Poets like Pyotr Viazemsky idealized the village as a haven of natural simplicity:

Here there are no chains,

Here there is no tyranny of vanity.¹³⁰

Writers like Nikolai Novikov pointed to the village as the place where native customs had survived. The Russian was at home, he behaved more like himself, when he lived close to the land.¹³¹ For Nikolai Lvov, poet, engineer, architect, folklorist, the main Russian trait was spontaneity.

In foreign lands all goes to a plan, Words are weighed, steps measured. But among us Russians there is fiery life, Our speech is thunder and sparks fly.¹³²

Lvov contrasted the convention-ridden life of the European Russians with the spontaneous behaviour and creativity of the Russian peasantry. He called on Russia's poets to liberate themselves from the constraints of the classical canon and find inspiration from the free rhythms of folk song and verse.

Central to this cult of simple peasant life was the notion of its moral purity. The radical satirist Alexander Radishchev was the first to argue that the nation's highest virtues were contained in the culture of its humblest folk. His proof for this was teeth. In his Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (1790) Radishchev recalls an encounter with a group of village women dressed up in their traditional costumes for a holiday - their broad smiles 'revealing rows of teeth whiter than the purest ivory'. The ladies of the aristocracy, who all had rotten teeth, would 'be driven mad by teeth like these':

Come hither, my dear Moscow and Petersburg ladies, look at their teeth and learn from them how they keep them white. They have no dentists. They do not scrape their teeth with brushes and powders every day. Stand mouth to mouth with any one of them you choose: not one of them will infect your lungs with her breath. While yours, yes yours may infect them with the germ - of a disease… I am afraid to say what disease.¹³³

In eighteenth-century panoramas of St Petersburg the open sky and space connect the city with a broader universe. Straight lines stretch to the distant horizon, beyond which, we are asked to imagine, lies the rest of Europe within easy reach. The projection of Russia into Europe had always been the raison d'etre of St Petersburg. It was not simply Peter's 'window on to Europe' - as Pushkin once described the capital - but an open doorway through which Europe entered Russia and the Russians made their entry to the world.