Of Russia with Love

...In any event, the author insists that "the great cultural figures of the Russian tradition (Karamzin, Pushkin, Glinka, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Repin, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Chagall and Kandinsky, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Nabokov, Pasternak, Meyerhold, and Eisenstein) were not simply 'Russians,' they were Europeans too, and the two identities were intertwined and mutually dependent in a variety of ways...

...He ends in the era of Leonid I. Brezhnev, with references to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, Solaris) and the "untimely thoughts' of Andrei Siny avsky, as well as to the "village writers" and nationalists grouped around the journal Molodaya Gvardia...

...The book focuses primarily on certifiably brilliant men and women, of whom, miraculously, there were many...

...Finally Shostakovich plucked up the courage and opened the conversation: "'What do you think of Puccini?' "'Ican'tstandhim,' Stravinsky replied...

...But in general political discussion is minimized: Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Lenin's favorite didact, rates less than a paragraph...

...Despite the ongoing search among some for a Russian identity divergent from that of the West, Figes believes that "nothing has done more to obscure a proper understanding of Russia and its central place in European culture between 1812 and 1917" than the inclination in the West "to consign Russia's artists, writers and composers to the cultural ghetto of a 'national school' and to judge them, not as individuals, but by how far they conform" to stereotypes (the "Russian soul," etc...

...With a huge cast of characters (the Index occupies 38 pages) reflecting the unique cultural ferment of three centuries, Figes has performed a real feat of selection and compression-reminiscent of the multivolume universal histories by Will and Ariel Durant, and of Jacques Barzun's more recent From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life...

...Rather originally, he began his narrative not with the usual landmarks (1825, 1881, 1905) but with the Volga valley famine of 1891...

...One wonders: Since Natasha was modeled directly on Tatiana Behrs, his wife'syounger sister, had the real Tatiana actually danced in such a scene, or was it-like Pierre's dialogue with the peasant Platon Karataev-purely a product of Tolstoy's imagination...

...it also demonstrated the society's ability (led by Count Leo Tolstoy in person) to organize voluntary relief efforts...

...But the text actually concludes with an event in September 1962 that is symbolic of "a cultural unity which in the end would triumph over politics": Igor Stravinsky's visit to Russia, after 40 years in exile, and his encounter with Dmitri Shostakovich at a banquet in Moscow's Metropole Hotel...

...That event dramatized for Russian society the incompetence of the Tsarist regime...

...Figes' title, Natasha's Dance, evokes a scene in War and Peace: The young countess Natasha Rostova, visiting a hunting lodge and hearing a balalaika play a folk tune, breaks into a peasant dance...

...In the aftermath of 1812 Pushkin remained true to the Enlightenment, but fornearly a century other Russians sought in numerous determined ways to rediscover the roots of their "Russianness"-a quest that soon became intertwined with religious aspirations...

...Figes seems reluctant to say so without qualification, yet he leaves little doubt that to his mind the central drama of Russian cultural history has been the challenge of "Europeanization" posed by Peter the Great, and the reaction to it after 1812 when the ideals of the Enlightenment were besmirched by Napoleonic aggression (the experience of Pierre Bezukhov in Tolstoy's War and Peace depicts the disillusion...

...However hard they might have tried, it was impossible for Russians such as these to suppress either part of their identity...

...Petersburg in 1703...

...At a subsequent banquet in the same hotel the night before Stravinsky left, though, they did talk at some length...

...Petersburg and Moscow, the rise of a merchant class, changing perceptions of the peasantry, etc...

...As time went on, however, more people read it as what it seems to be: namely, a scathing satire of Russian society...

...These ideologists do get some attention...

...Gogol, and traditional Gogol scholars, insisted that Dead Souls and the two never-finished volumes that were to follow constituted a single religious work of moral instruction...

...The author maintains in his Introduction that he is not attached to any single theory or explanation of the vitality and variety of Russian culture...

...Figes' 586 pages of text are complemented by useful maps, very good illustrations (27 of them in color), a chronology, a glossary, and 56 pages of scholarly notes...

...the "serf harems" maintained by preEmancipation landowners...

...Indeed...

...Figes' new cultural history of Russia is a joyous work, clearly inspired by admiration and affection for the diverse figures-writers, thinkers, artists, and musicians-who for all their contradictions and self-deluding myths, helped create one of the world's most vibrant cultures: one that not only withstood Napoleon's Grand Armée and Hitler's Wehrmacht but survived 70 years of Communist oppression...

...Many "strands," he says, have gone into its evolution-the specific Byzantine and broader Orthodox Christian influence, the "Tatar yoke," the rivalry between St...

...Oh, and neither can I, neither can I,' said Shostakovich...

...Figes' attention to music, art and literature, and occasionally to racy gossip (e.g...

...For example, Figes does explain how the posthumous changes wrought in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov altered its ideological thrust...

...Recently, some Russians and some foreign scholars have seen in it a prophetic vision ?f perestroika and its consequences...

...The result is largely a thematic exploration of these and other strandssome substantive, some largely mythical...

...Although later in the book there are flashbacks to the Mongol occupation and Russia's medieval "time of troubles" that describe how those periods were viewed by 19th- and 20th-century Russians (Boris Godunov as seen by Aleksandr Pushkin and Modest Mussorgsky...

...In the cases of Gogol and Tolstoy, their art was diminished as their religious pursuit intensified...

...The book was aptly entitled A People's Tragedy, for while its scholarship was impressively undogmatic, the story is inherently depressing...

...Vladimir Nabokov once scornfully remarked that there is not a single normal human being among those characters...

...Sergei Eisenstein's film, Ivan the Terrible), the author begins his narrative with Peter the Great's founding St...

...Nothing more passed between them...

...the revolutionists Mikhail Bakunin and Sergei Nechayev are not mentioned at all...

...The composer Aram Khachaturian, who observed the "tense meeting," recalled: "They were placed next to each other and sat in complete silence...

...While dealing expertly with the Russian Olympians, Figes also enjoys recalling less celebrated figures, such as Praskovya Sheremeteva, the serf mistress of Russia's richest man, who became the country's first operatic diva...

...Where, when and how," Tolstoy marvels, "had this young countess, educated by an èmigrèe French governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit, and obtained that manner which the pas de châle would, one would have supposed, long ago have effaced...

...In contrast...

...He singles out Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf among those who identified the whole of Russian culture with the characters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novels...

...Stravinsky's affair with Coco Chanel and her redressing him as a dandy) enliven what might otherwise have been a heavy intellectual history, weighed down by the polemics of "Slavophiles" and "Westemizers...

...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Former Moscow correspondent and State Department Russian opinion analyst Five years ago Orlando Figes, a professor at London University, published a much-praised history of the Russian Revolution...

...Anton Chekhov's predilection for brothels...