Natasha's Dance полностью

Towards the end of his memoirs Volkonsky wrote a sentence which the censors cut from the first edition (not published until 1903). It could have served as his epitaph: 'The path I chose led me to Siberia, to exile from my homeland for thirty years, but my convictions have not changed, and I would do the same again.'¹⁸⁷

overleaf:

St Basil's Cathedral, Red Square, Moscow,

during the late nineteenth century

'There it is at last, this famous town,' Napoleon remarked as he surveyed Moscow from the Sparrow Hills. The city's palaces and golden cupolas, sparkling in the sun, were spread out spaciously across the plain, and on the far side he could just make out a long black column of people coiling out of the distant gates. 'Are they abandoning all this?' the Emperor exclaimed. 'It isn't possible!'¹

The French found Moscow empty, like a 'dying queenless hive'.² The mass exodus had begun in August, when news of the defeat at Smolensk had arrived in Moscow, and it reached fever pitch after Borodino, when Kutuzov fell back to the outskirts of the city and finally decided to abandon it. The rich (like the Rostovs in War and Peace) packed up their belongings and left by horse and cart for their country houses. The poor walked, carrying their children, their chickens crated on to carts, their cows following behind. One witness recalled that the roads as far as Riazan were blocked by refugees.³

As Napoleon took up residence in the Kremlin palace, incendiaries set fire to the trading stalls by its eastern wall. The fires had been ordered by Count Rostopchin, the city's governor, as an act of sacrifice to rob the French of supplies and force them to retreat. Soon the whole of Moscow was engulfed in flames. The novelist Stendhal (serving in the Quartermaster's section of Napoleon's staff) described it as a 'pyramid of copper coloured smoke' whose 'base is on the earth and whose spire rises towards the heavens'. By the third day, the Kremlin was surrounded by the flames, and Napoleon was forced to flee. He fought his way 'through a wall of fire', according to Segur, 'to the crash of collapsing floors and ceilings, falling rafters and melting iron roofs'. All the time he expressed his outrage, and his admiration, at the Russian sacrifice. 'What a people! They are Scythians! What resoluteness! The barbarians!'⁴ By the time the fires were burnt out, on 20 September 1812, four-fifths of the city had been destroyed. Re-entering Moscow, Segur 'found only a few scattered houses standing in the midst of the ruins'.

This stricken giant, scorched and blackened, exhaled a horrible stench. Heaps of ashes and an occasional section of a wall or a broken column alone indicated

the existence of streets. In the poorer quarters scattered groups of men and women, their clothes almost burnt off them, were wandering around like ghosts.⁵

All the city's churches and palaces were looted, if not already burned. Libraries and other national treasures were lost to the flames. In a fit of anger Napoleon instructed that the Kremlin be mined as an act of retribution for the fires that had robbed him of his greatest victory. The Arsenal was blown up and part of the medieval walls were destroyed. But the Kremlin churches all survived. Three weeks later, the first snow fell. Winter had come early and unexpectedly. Unable to survive without supplies in the ruined city, the French were forced to retreat.

Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace that every Russian felt Moscow to be a mother. There was a sense in which it was the nation's 'home', even for members of the most Europeanized elite of Petersburg. Moscow was a symbol of the old Russia, the place where ancient Russian customs were preserved. Its history went back to the twelfth century, when Prince Dolgoruky of Suzdal built a rough log fortress on the site of the Kremlin. At that time Kiev was the capital of Christian Rus'. But the Mongol occupation of the next two centuries crushed the Kievan states, leaving Moscow's princes to consolidate their wealth and power by collaboration with the khans. Moscow's rise was symbolized by the building of the Kremlin, which took shape in the fourteenth century, as impressive palaces and white-stoned cathedrals with golden onion domes began to appear within the fortress walls. Eventually, as the khanates weakened, Moscow led the nation's liberation, starting with the battle of Kulikovo Field against the Golden Horde in 1380 and ending in the defeat of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the 1550s, when it finally emerged as the capital of Russia's cultural life.