Having things both ways

It all comes out of War and Peace? Well, Tolstoy makes a good starting-point anyway for such an adroit historian of place and people as Dr Figes. In an early chapter Natasha, the young Countess Rostov, is visiting ‘Uncle’, an old family friend and retired army officer who has gone native and lives in a wooden izba beside the forest with his peasant mistress. Some visiting locals start to dance, and without thinking or knowing the complicated rustic measure Natasha joins in and executes the steps correctly, to general applause.

Well, well. However unaware of it she may be Natasha lives in two worlds, and finds herself as much at home dancing among the peasants as she has come to be in a Moscow ballroom. At least so Tolstoy says, and the idea clearly gives him great satisfaction. Figes omits to make the further point, heavily emphasised by Tolstoy himself, that Natasha must be taught the artificial culture of the West, exemplified by the ballet, which at first seems to be merely absurd and silly, while she instinctively responds to and joins in the peasants’ dance.

Tolstoy in fact may be harking back to 1812, that annus mirabilis in Russian history, and the real centre of War and Peace, the great novel which he would never call a novel. For in 1812, as Figes demonstrates with a wealth of curious and delightful detail, the Russian upper class went Russian in a big way. A distant relative of Tolstoy’s, whose sumptuous mansion on the English Embankment in St Petersburg was decorated in French Empire style, even went to the trouble and expense of having the bedrooms lined with rough wooden logs to give them the look of an izba. Russian folk tales became no less popular than log huts and peasant dances, and Gogol scored a great success with his collection of Ukrainian stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, while some of Pushkin’s most haunting and charming lyrics are based on songs his old nanny sang him.