Natasha's Dance полностью

It is hard to say exactly what was in Maria's mind. When she made her choice she did not realize that she would be stripped of the right to return to Russia if she followed Sergei - she was told only when she reached Irkutsk, on the border between Russia and the penal region of Siberia - so it is possible that she was expecting to return to Petersburg. That indeed was what her father thought. But would she have turned back if she had known?

Maria acted out of her sense of duty as a wife. Sergei appealed to this when he wrote to her from the Peter and Paul Fortress on the eve of his departure for Siberia. 'You yourself must decide what to do. I am placing you in a cruel situation, but chere amie, I cannot bear the sentence of eternal separation from my lawful wife.'⁶⁰ Such a sense of duty was ingrained in Maria by her noble upbringing. Romantic love, though by no means uncommon, was not a high priority in the conjugal relations of the early nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy. And nor does it seem to have played a major role in Maria's decision. In this sense she was very different from Alexandra Muraviev, the wife of the Decembrist Nikita Muraviev, who came from a rather less aristocratic background than Maria Volkonsky. It was romantic love that compelled Alexandra to give up everything for a life of penal exile in Siberia - she even claimed that it was her 'sin' to 'love my Nikitishchina more than I love God'.⁶¹ Maria's conduct, by contrast, was conditioned by the cultural norms of a society in which it was not unusual for a noblewoman to follow her husband to Siberia. Convoys of prisoners were frequently accompanied by carts carrying their wives and children into voluntary exile.⁶² There was a custom, moreover, for the families of officers to go along with them on military campaigns. Wives would speak about 'our regiment' or 'our brigade' and, in the words of one contemporary, 'they were always ready to share in all the dangers of their husbands, and lay down their lives'.⁶³ Maria's father, General Raevsky, took his wife and children on his main campaigns - until his young son was injured when a bullet pierced his breeches as he gathered berries near the battlefield.⁶⁴

It has also been suggested that Maria was responding to the literary cult of heroic sacrifice.⁶⁵ She had read Ryleev's poem 'Natalia Dolgoru-kaya' (1821-3), which may indeed have served as the moral inspiration for her own behaviour. The poem was based on the true story of a young princess, the favourite daughter of Field Marshal Boris Shereme-

tev, who had followed her husband, Prince Ivan Dolgoruky, to Siberia when he was banished there by the Empress Anna in 1730.*

I have forgotten my native city, Wealth, honours, and family name To share with him Siberia's cold And endure the inconstancy of fate.⁶⁶

Maria's doting father was convinced that the reason she followed Sergei to Siberia was not because she was 'a wife in love' but because she was 'in love with the idea of herself as a heroine'.⁶⁷ The old general never stopped suffering over his beloved daughter's voluntary exile - he blamed Sergei for it- and this led to a tragic break in their relationship. Maria felt her father's disapproval in his infrequent letters to Siberia. No longer able to suppress her anguish, she wrote to him (in the last letter he received before his death) in 1829:

I know that you have ceased to love me for some time, though I know not what I have done to merit your displeasure. To suffer is my lot in this world - but to make others suffer is more than I can bear… How can I be happy for a moment if the blessing which you give me in your letters is not given also to Sergei?⁶⁸

On Christmas Eve Maria said farewell to her son and family and left for Moscow on the first leg of her journey to Siberia. In the old capital she stopped at the house of her sister-in-law Princess Zinaida Volkonsky, a famous beauty and close friend of the late Emperor Alexander, called by Pushkin the 'Tsarina of the arts'. Zinaida was the hostess of a dazzling literary salon where, unusually for that time, no Fench verses were declaimed. Pushkin and Zhukovsky, Viazemsky and Delvig, Baratynsky, Tiutchev, the Kireevsky brothers and the Polish poet Mickiewicz were all habitues. On the eve of Maria's departure there was a special evening where Pushkin read his 'Message to Siberia' (1827):

*Allowed to return to St Petersburg in the 1730s, Natalia Dolgorukaya became the first woman in Russian history to write her memoirs.

In deep Siberian mines retain A proud and patient resignation; Your grievous toil is not in vain Nor yet your thought's high aspiration. Grief's constant sister, hope, is nigh, Shines out in dungeons black and dreary To cheer the weak, revive the weary; The hour will come for which you sigh,

When love and friendship reaching through Will penetrate the bars of anguish, The convict warrens where you languish, As my free voice now reaches you.