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What is Russia? |
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January 2001 |
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Without a real sense of nationhood,
Russians tried to make a homeland in their art. All Russian
art circles the question: "What is Russia?" |
Orlando
Figes | |
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If you spend much time in Russia and get to
know it through Russian friends, you are likely to conclude that the
most important cultural monument of that country is not the Kremlin
or the Winter Palace, nor the ancient monasteries and churches, nor
the grand estates which lure you out of Moscow on to Russia's bumpy
roads. In fact it is the kitchen of your friends. Cramped and dimly
lit, but warm and cosy, the kitchen is a shrine of intellectual
life-or perhaps we should say it was. Huddled round the kitchen
table, safe from prying ears, you were likely to engage in
passionate debates about the purpose of existence or the problem of
existence in Russia and (on a lighter note) the bits of Tolstoy you
prefer to Dostoevsky and the bits of Dostoevsky you prefer to
Tolstoy. The discussion was likely to continue into the small hours
of the morning, long after the last vodka bottle was emptied and the
tea was cold. And only sometimes did it seem-in those moments when
you thought you might be dreaming-that you had actually stepped into
the pages of a novel by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Weren't their novels
full of such scenes-perhaps in grander settings but in spirit just
the same?
In such circles the question "what is Russia?" has
always been the obsessive theme. What does it mean to be a Russian?
What is Russia's place and mission in the world? And where is the
true Russia? In Europe or in the east? St Petersburg or Moscow? The
tsar's domain or the free community? Is it a real place or a region
of the mind? These are the "accursed questions" which have occupied
Russians for the past 200 years. Indeed, if we find Russia difficult
to grasp, it is because the Russians themselves have never been
quite sure about who or where they are.
By and large, Russia
has been the subject of most Russian works of art. To answer what it
meant to be a Russian, to develop a distinctive national style, and
to state the nation's mission in the world, were the primary goals
of every serious writer, critic and historian, painter and composer,
theologian and philosopher, in the golden age from Pushkin to
Pasternak. We love the classic Russian novels, Chekhov's plays,
Chagall and Kandinsky, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Rachmaninov. They
speak to us in universal terms. Yet we rarely hear or try to
understand the inner national dialogue to which they also refer.
It is hard to conceive of any other nation's art being quite
so troubled by self-identity. Can you imagine Dickens or Brontë
stopping to discuss what England is or who the English are? To be
sure, other nations formed, as Russia was, in the Romantic age, were
for a while absorbed by the idea of themselves. There were periods
when the idea of Germany, of Italy or Poland, even Greece, was more
coherent than the place. But all these cultural nations became
nation states: the imaginary community was realised in national
laws, institutions and economies. First the tsars and then the
Bolsheviks, however, denied Russia the legal culture or civil
society of a liberal European state. As a result, the Russian nation
remained a thing of the imagination-of music, folklore, poems and
above all novels. The nation lived in the idea of Russia rather than
in the reality.
Geography is part of the problem. On the
whole, the English have a clear sense of their Englishness. The
English novel is remarkable for its sense of place: Brontë country
or the London of Dickens. But the Russians cannot visit some
Slavonic version of the Cotswolds and think of that as "Russia,"
although there are mythic winter forests or poetic Volga views which
could count as the quintessential locus patriae. The great cultural
figures of the 19th century knew little about provincial Russia.
Even Gogol, who rose to fame as Russia's first provincial satirist,
admitted that he "did not know the provinces at all." What they did
know about it-the bleak monotony of the steppe-drove Russia's
artists mostly to despair. Mandelstam called it "the watermelon
emptiness of Russia." Musorgsky called it "the all-Russian bog."
Alienated from the real Russia, its poets found a homeland
in an imaginary one. Indeed, the more the artist knew of the
reality, the more he was inclined to seek salvation in the ideal
Russia of his creation. Here is the root of that tradition which
marks out Russia's writers as religious prophets of the nation's
destiny.
Gogol was the first of these writer-prophets.
Thrown into despair by the grotesque Russia of his own satiric
fictions in the first part of Dead Souls, Gogol tried to paint an
ideal portrait in the second and third parts of what he called the
"beautiful Russia in my heart." But Gogol could not picture this
dream-space. He was torn apart by the contradiction between his
vision of what Russia should become and his knowledge of what Russia
really was. However hard he tried to paint a perfect image of the
Russian land and people, his acute observation was such that he
could not help but burden them with imperfections. Pushkin, when he
read the manuscript, said: "God, how sad our Russia is!" Sensing
that he had failed in his mission to make his readers aware of "Holy
Russia," Gogol took to his bed and told his servant to burn the
unfinished novel, three days before he died in 1852, a martyr to his
own impossible ideal.
The tension between these two Russias,
the real and the ideal, afflicted many Russian writers less inclined
to prophecy than poor Gogol. In fact, it is hard to name an
important 19th-century figure (Chekhov, possibly) who was not in
some way troubled or undone by the contradiction between them.
for many writers and painters, Russia's destiny lay in its
leadership of an eastern Christian empire which would renew and save
the fallen west. In its own defining myth of origin, Russia grew up
as a Christian civilisation of the east. Its national epic is the
story of the struggle by the Christian settlers of the forest lands
against the Tatar horsemen of the Asiatic steppe-Avars, Khazars,
Polovtsians and Mongols, Kazakhs, Kalmyks and other nomad tribes
which raided Russia from the earliest times. It is telling that the
word in Russian for a peasant, krest'ianin, which in all other
European languages stems from the idea of the country or the land,
is connected with the word for a Christian, khrest'ianin. Without a
clear territory or a boundary to protect them from the horsemen of
the steppe, Russians were defined by the call on their soul. Princes
killed in battle became saints. And from 1550 to 1917 the Russian
empire grew (at an average rate of 40,000 square miles every year)
as a holy crusade against the infidels.
But the empire
lacked the apparatus of modern nationhood; there were no real
parliamentary institutions until 1917. Nor did Russia even have much
ethnic unity. Despite its national myth, the Asiatic nomads and the
Finno-Ugric tribes, not to mention other peoples from the Baltic to
the Black Sea, had intermixed with Russians over many centuries.
Without the qualities of nationhood, Russia could be
conceived as a spiritual domain. For the church and state this
conception was contained in the doctrine of the third Rome-the idea
of Moscow as the sole surviving capital of orthodoxy (and thus the
saviour of humanity) after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks
in 1453. This was the official legitimisation of the empire's
expansion. But the same idea of Russia as a sacred sphere can
equally be seen in the counter-culture of the Old Believers; or in
the many folk legends of the true or sacred Russia hidden
underground and accessible only to true (Russian-Christian)
citizens. The best-known of these is the legend of the invisible
city of Kitezh-the subject of a splendid opera by Rimsky-Korsakov.
The reflection of the city on the surface of the lake caused the
invading Tatars to ride into it and drown. Such ideas were also
contained in the peasants' counter-culture of utopian myths-in their
dreams of a Kingdom of Opona, located somewhere on the edge of the
flat earth, where the people lived in truth, undisturbed by the
gentry or the state. As late as the 1900s, peasant groups set out
for Siberia and the Arctic Circle to find this ideal homeland.
This utopian view of the Russian state had a profound impact
on the world. In the understanding of the peasantry the words
pravitelstvo (government) and pravda (truth and justice) were
closely connected. As they saw it, the only true form of government
was the administration of pravda (meaning the giving of all the land
and freedom to the peasants). They saw the revolution in religious
terms. All the parties of the revolutionary underground played on
this idea in their propaganda, none more effectively than the
Bolsheviks. Their communism was to be the saviour of mankind. Moscow
would become the leader of the world. Bolshevism can be seen as a
continuation of the Russian messianic state tradition. A straight
line runs from Moscow the third Rome to Moscow the third
International.
the relationship between Russia and the west
has been the country's main source of insecurity. By the end of
Peter the Great's reign in 1725, Russia had become the mightiest
empire on the continent. This was a source of pride-pride in the
modern European values of the Petrine state-for the educated. As
Pushkin said, "we are all citizens of Tsarskoe Selo"-the imperial
court near St Petersburg.
But the Russians also bore the
insecurity of arrivistes. "Our attitude to Europe and the
Europeans," Alexander Herzen wrote in the 1850s, "is still that of
provincials towards the dwellers in a capital: we are servile and
apologetic, take every difference for a defect, blush for our
peculiarities and try to hide them." Conscious of the fact that
Russia was regarded as barbarian by Europe, the educated Russian who
wanted to be recognised as "European" was obliged to suppress his
heritage and re-attune his life to a foreign principle. Peter
ordered his noblemen to give up traditional dress and put on western
clothes, to shave their beards (a sign of holiness in orthodox
belief), to converse in French, to dance the minuet, and behave and
socialise in cultivated ways. Because these foreign manners were not
natural to him, the Russian had to learn them in a ritualised form,
rather as an actor learns his gestures and his lines.
So
from the start, the westernising project introduced divisions in the
Russian consciousness. There was a huge chasm between the educated
classes, with their European culture and their secular beliefs, and
the peasants or the merchants, with their old native customs and
religious ways. This was the main issue in the famous debates
between the westernisers and the Slavophiles: should Russia mark its
progress by the universal standards of the west or pursue its own
separate path in accordance with its native traditions? The debate
is still going on today.
European Russians had split
cultural personalities. On one level they performed their western
ways on a public stage: in the salons and ballrooms of St
Petersburg, at court or in the theatre, they were very comme il
faut. Yet on another level their private lives were influenced by
native Russian customs and sensibilities. How could it not be so
when the European parts of Russian culture-the court, St Petersburg,
the manor house and park-were but tiny islands floating in a sea of
peasant Russia?
Reading through the diaries, letters,
memoirs and account books of the Russian nobles, we can see this
Russianness at certain vital moments of the life cycle. Birth,
childhood, marriage and, above all, death were moments when the pull
of Russian principles, of orthodox beliefs and peasant custom, was
stronger than western conventions. Think of poor old Ivan Ilich,
Tolstoy's death-bedridden judge, who finds comfort only in the
presence of his servant Gerasim, with his honest and unfearing
peasant attitude to death. Diaries show that at such moments it was
quite common for the aristocracy to turn towards the peasants, whose
semi-pagan version of the orthodox belief was based on the notion
that the dead lived on as spirits among the living.
Childhood was another moment when the European noble bowed
to Russian peasant ways. It was a time spent by even the most
high-born in the company of serfs or, after emancipation, domestic
servants from the peasantry. It was from such contacts that they
learned their native tongue-for their mother's tongue was French.
And it was from their peasant nurse that they first heard Russian
folk tales and proverbs. This downstairs servant world was a place
of warmth and informality compared to the cold formality of the
parents' upstairs world. Pushkin was neglected by his parents and
brought up by his nurse. And we might suppose that his interest in
folk tales-which reached poetic form in Ruslan and Liudmilla and The
Golden Cockerel-was linked to the nostalgia which he, like many
Russians of his class, felt for these enchanted childhood memories.
We can also feel the pull of Russian ways in the rural
relaxations of the country house or dacha: a place where the
nobleman retreated from the public sphere and became "more himself"
in a Russian milieu. Like Tolstoy, he might live the peasant life.
He might go hunting or take up what Nabokov called the "very Russian
sport of looking for mushrooms." He might spend the day,
Oblomov-style, in a dressing gown and slippers. Or, as Stravinsky
loved to do on his estate at Ustilug, he might go swimming in the
lake. Such pursuits were more than the retrieval of a rural idyll.
They were an expression of Russianness. It is hard to think of three
more European noblemen than Tolstoy, Nabokov and Stravinsky. Each
was at home in the European culture of the aristocracy. Yet each
thought of Russia in these terms.
The great cultural figures
of Russia's golden age-Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky,
Chekhov, Repin, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky- combined European and
Russian identities in complicated and productive ways. We in the
west may want Russian works of art to be "authentically
Russian"-easily distinguished by their folk motifs, onion domes and
the sound of bells, and full of "Russian soul." But the Russians
look to Pushkin as their national poet because he puts them on a par
with European civilisation. They venerate Tchaikovsky as the Russian
Beethoven. Figures such as these give the Russians pride in their
European cultural identity.
Yet as a nation they were
painfully aware that Russia was not "Europe" and perhaps never could
be. It lacked Europe's individual rights, and its history. Peter
Chaadaev, fop, philosopher and friend of Pushkin, was the first to
voice this anguish. In his First Philosophical Letter, published in
1836, Chaadaev argued that Russia was a country overlooked by
history. It was a stranger to the family of European nations and as
a result there was "nothing durable" in it. It was a cultural void,
a place in which the Russians were forced to live like strangers in
their homes, with no sense of their own national heritage or
identity. Herzen said the Letter "was a shot that rang out in the
dark night... It forced us to awake." Although declared insane, and
imprisoned in his house on the orders of the tsar, Chaadaev had said
what every thinking Russian felt. He had voiced their fear that
Russia might never catch up with the west.
This fear had
been reinforced by the suppression of the Decembrist movement, and
along with it all liberal hopes for a constitution, in 1825. Once it
became clear that Russia would not follow the western path of
constitutionalism, as it had appeared that it might in the early
period of Alexander's reign, the Europhile elite was plunged into an
identity crisis. What was Russia if its destiny was different from
the west's? Thus began the quest to grasp the nation's special
character through folklore, archaeology, literature and art-a quest
which dominated Russian culture for the next 100 years.
The
ideas of the German Romantics offered sanctuary to the alienated or
"superfluous" young men of the 1830s and 1840s: men like Pechorin
(Lermontov's "hero of our times") or Turgenev's Rudin. The stress
placed by the Romantics on the organic evolution of national
cultures was particularly prized. In an era of political repression
it was a comfort to believe that the present situation was
transitional. Like everything organic, the real state of Russia
would emerge from underground, through the growth of a democratic
culture or revolt from below.
So the question "what is
Russia?" became "when is it?" Nobody believed in the Russia of the
present-the actual Russia of Nicholas I, with its oppressive serfdom
and police state, from which the intelligentsia felt so estranged.
The only Russia in which they could believe was the Russia that
existed in another realm. The battle for Russia was now articulated
in competing national myths.
First came the Slavophiles,
with their myth of the Russian soul: the fanciful idea, advanced by
Gogol in Dead Souls, of a spiritual simplicity and spontaneity, a
natural Christianity among the peasantry which, for later writers
such as Dostoevsky, distinguished Russia from the rationalistic west
and set it on a higher moral plane. We might be sceptical about such
claims. As the critic Belinsky put it to Gogol, the peasant "says of
the icon: 'It is good for praying-and you can cover the pots with it
as well.'" Yet the "Russian soul" has been a lasting source of
Russia's mystique and exotic fascination for the western public.
Indeed, for much of the past 100 years, from the moment when
Virginia Woolf declared that every Russian writer had "the features
of a saint" and poets such as Rilke spoke of the healing powers of
the Russian soul, western intellectuals have tended to look east for
spiritual renewal. Here, we might suppose, was the source of much
illusion and naïvety in western attitudes towards the Soviet regime:
the illusion that, for all its faults, life in Soviet Russia was at
least more "spiritual" than in the capitalist west.
Closely
allied to the Russian soul was the cult of old Moscow-Moscow as the
centre of medieval Holy Rus' with its spirit of community, broken by
the intrusion of European ways. Moscow the symbol of the nation's
rebirth after 1812, when the Muscovites burned it to deprive
Napoleon of victory. Moscow as the bearer of the "Russian style,"
with its icons and folk arts, which the nationalists deployed in the
city's reconstruction after 1812. The cult was symbolised in the
Church of the Spilt Blood in St Petersburg. Today tourists flock to
it, thinking that they are getting something of the "real" Russia so
lacking in the European city of St Petersburg. (In fact, the church
was not completed until 1907 and it represents a mythic reinvention
of the ancient style.)
Hot on the heels of the Slavophiles
came the westernisers, with their rival cult of Petersburg, that
"window on the west," with its classical ensembles built on land
reclaimed from the sea: a symbol of their ideals of progress and
enlightenment, of redrawing Russia on a European grid. As the
westernisers saw it, Russia could not become a European nation until
its citizens were granted civil rights and its peasants became
integrated in a national culture based on the values and creative
works of the intelligentsia.
It was only in the 1860s, in
the almost religious exaltation with which the emancipation of the
serfs was greeted in both Slavophile and westerniser circles, that
the quest for this ideal of nationhood was focused on the present-on
the gradual reform of the actual conditions in Russia at that time.
As a result of the liberal reforms of Alexander II, it appeared for
the first time that Russia might evolve into a European nation, with
civic institutions, public courts, an independent press and a
constitution. The crucial factor was the peasantry-the overwhelming
mass of people and Russia's newest citizens-who until the end of
serfdom had barely been recognised as human beings at all. All sides
now agreed that, for Russia to progress towards nationhood, the
educated classes had to reach out to the people; to educate and
integrate them in society. Populism, in its broadest cultural sense,
thus became something of a national creed. Suddenly the questions
everybody asked were directed at the peasant: was he good or bad?
could he be civilised? where did he come from? The old accursed
questions about Russia's destiny were bound up in the issue of the
peasant's true identity.
Yet here too there was only myth
and illusion. As Dostoevsky wrote: "We, the lovers of the people,
regard them as part of a theory, and it seems not one of us loves
them as they really are but only as each of us imagines them to be."
For the populists, the peasant was a natural socialist, the
embodiment of the collective spirit which distinguished Russia from
the bourgeois west. For Tolstoy he was the embodiment of intuitive
wisdom and a spiritual teacher of the true society. For Scythians
such as Blok, the peasant was an elemental force from the steppe who
threatened destruction and spiritual renewal. For Roerich, the
conceiver of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, he was a descendant of
primeval man, whose life was spent in harmonious communion with the
natural elements.
so is russia no more than a collection of
myths? Underneath the structures of its oppressive state, tsarist or
Soviet, was there really no public space or legal culture to
constitute a nation in the European sense? It seems not-although, to
be sure, a fledgling nation, with legal and parliamentary
institutions, and a national culture defined by a canon of great
works, was emerging in the final years of the imperial regime. The
February revolution of 1917 was in this sense a national movement, a
patriotic act against the dynasty, and it was perceived as such. But
soon after, the imperial tradition reimposed itself. The national
idea was forced back underground, like the legendary city of Kitezh.
And there it remained until 1991-a spiritual community of national
values and ideas which lived on in hearts and minds, on bookshelves,
in concert halls, or in all those kitchen-table conversations about
what Russia is.
The writer Korolenko once said: "My country
is not Russia, my country is Russian literature." In a sense he is
right. Russia's poets were its "unacknowledged legislators,"
guardians of the nation's values and ideas. Nowhere else did
Shelley's maxim ring so true. And in so far as its sense of
nationhood was embodied in these myths, Russia could be seen as a
meta-nation rather than a nation state in the European sense.
It is not my contention that Russia is not real. It is there
and rather large. Rather, it is my contention that because it is so
large, so unmeasurable by any ordinary yardstick, it has had to be
created as a region of the mind. This Russian genius for creativity
has itself been the nation's main strength. How else can we explain
the renaissance of the Russia which was forced abroad after 1917-the
Russia of Stravinsky and Rachmaninov, Tsvetaeva, Nabokov, Kandinsky
and Chagall-unless we understand that? As the exiled poet
Khodasevich put it, referring to the Pushkin he had packed in his
bags when he left for Berlin in 1922: "All I possess are eight slim
volumes/And they contain my native land." How can we explain that in
times of war and terror it is artists who speak for Russia-as
Shostakovich did with his Seventh Symphony, miraculously performed
in the siege of Leningrad, or Akhmatova with her Requiem for the
victims of Stalin?
What of Russia now? Now that this
extraordinary cultural tradition has been declared dead? Now that
the kitchen is no longer a shrine to intellectual life, but rather
to the gods of Neff and Bosch?
Solzhenitsyn is probably the
last in that line of writer-prophets which goes back to Gogol. After
his return to Yeltsin's Russia, he addressed the nation in his own
weekly television show. But Russians had grown tired of ideology,
even Solzhenitsyn's, and his sort of literature seemed out of date.
For lack of viewers, the programme was soon axed to clear more
air-time for western soap operas and rock videos. Perhaps it's just
as well that there are no writer-prophets in Russia any longer-the
artist is no longer saddled with the burden of speaking for the
conscience of the nation, as Russia becomes "normal," like
ourselves. The idea of oppression as a muse is offensive, after all,
and Russian writers should find a different way. But it's hard to
avoid feelings of nostalgia and regret-the feeling that whatever
comes from Russia now will not be quite the same as the
extraordinary cultural tradition which sustained it in the past, the
poems and the novels, the music and the paintings which have stirred
us for so long to ask what Russia is. |
Orlando Figes is author of "A Peopl's Tragedy" and
is writing a cultural history of Russia since the 18th
century. |
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