Natasha's Dance полностью

The alienation felt by these young men from their parents' generation and society was common to all 'children of 1812', poets and philosophers as well as officers. It left a profound imprint on the cultural life of Russia in the nineteenth century. The 'men of the last century' were defined by the service ethic of the Petrine state. They set great store by rank and hierarchy, order and conformity to rational rules. Alexander Herzen - who was actually born in 1812 - recalled how his father disapproved of all emotional display. 'My father disliked every sort of abandon, every sort of frankness; all this he called familiarity, just as he called every feeling sentimentality.'²⁰ But the children who grew up in Herzen's age were all impulsiveness and familiarity. They rebelled against the old disciplinarianism, blaming it for 'Russia's slave mentality', and they looked instead to advance their principles through literature and art.²¹ Many withdrew from the military or civil service with the aim of leading a more honest life. As Chatsky put it, in Griboedov's drama Woe from Wit, 'I'd love to serve, but I am sickened by servility.'

It is hard to overstate the extent to which the Russian cultural renaissance of the nineteenth century entailed a revolt against the service ethic of the eighteenth century. In the established view, rank quite literally defined the nobleman: unlike all other languages, the word in Russian for an official (chinovnik) derived from that for rank (chin). To be a nobleman was to take one's place in the service of the state, either as a civil servant or as an officer; and to leave that service, even to become a poet or an artist, was regarded as a fall from grace. 'Service now in Russia is the same as life', wrote one official in the 1810s: 'we leave our offices as if we are going to our graves.'²² It was inconceivable for a nobleman to be an artist or a poet, except in his spare time after office work, or as a gentleman enthusiast on his estate. Even the great eighteenth-century

poet Gavril Derzhavin combined his writing with a military career, followed by appointments as a senator and provincial governor, before ending up as Minister of Justice in 1802-3.

During the early nineteenth century, as the market for books and painting grew, it became possible, if not easy, for the independent writer or artist to survive. Pushkin was one of the first noblemen to shun the service and take up writing as a 'trade'; his decision was seen as derogation or breaking of ranks. The writer N. I. Grech' was accused of bringing shame upon his noble family when he left the civil service to become a literary critic in the 1810s.²³ Music too was thought unsuitable as a profession for the nobleman. Rimsky-Korsakov was pushed into the naval service by his parents, who looked upon his music 'as a prank'.²⁴ Musorgsky was sent to the Cadet School in Petersburg and was then enrolled in the Preobrazhensky Guards. Tchaikovsky went to the School of Jurisprudence where his family expected him to graduate to the civil service and not forget but put away his childish passion for music. For the nobleman to become an artist, then, was to reject the traditions of his class. He had, in effect, to reinvent himself as an 'intelligent' - a member of the intelligentsia - whose duty was defined as service to 'the nation' rather than to the state.

Only two of the great nineteenth-century Russian writers (Gonch-arov and Saltykov-Shchedrin) ever held high rank in the government service, although nearly all of them were noblemen. Goncharov was a censor. But Saltykov-Shchedrin was a tireless critic of the government, and as a vice-governor and a writer he always took the side of the 'little man'. It was axiomatic to this literary tradition that the writer should stand up for human values against the service ethic based on rank. Thus in Gogol's 'The Diary of a Madman' (1835), the literary lunatic, a humble councillor, ridicules a senior official: 'And what if he is a gentleman of the court? It's only a kind of distinction conferred on you, not something that you can see, or touch with your hands. A court chamberlain doesn't have a third eye in the middle of his forehead.' Similarly, in Chekhov's story 'Abolished!' (1891) we are meant to laugh at the retired major (Izhits) who is thrown into confusion by the abolition of his former rank: 'God knows who I am,' the old major says. 'They abolished all the majors a year ago!'²⁵

Unwilling to conform to their fathers' rules and bored by the