Natasha's Dance

Orlando Figes offers a thematic cultural history of Russia spanning roughly three centuries, from Peter the Great's founding of St Petersburg in 1703 to the mid-1960s. Organized into eight chapters that move loosely from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the book traces how Russia's writers, composers, painters, and thinkers wrestled with a single overarching question: What does it mean to be Russian? Figes argues that the arts in Russia have served as an arena for political, philosophical, and religious debate in the absence of a free press or parliament, and that the country's artistic energy has been devoted to defining its national identity.

Figes opens with a scene from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace in which the young countess Natasha Rostov, raised by a French governess, instinctively performs a Russian peasant dance in her "Uncle's" rural cabin. This image of a noblewoman channeling a culture entirely foreign to her social class becomes the book's central emblem, introducing the argument that Russian culture is not a single organic tradition but a series of encounters between the European civilization of the educated elites and the native folk culture of the peasantry. Figes warns against the Western myth of "exotic Russia," insisting that the country's greatest cultural figures were Europeans as well as Russians, their identities intertwined.

The first chapter examines St Petersburg's construction as a project of cultural engineering. Peter the Great built his new capital on inhospitable marshland, intending it as a negation of medieval Muscovy, whose insular religious civilization had developed without the Renaissance or the secular art forms of western Europe. Peter forced his nobility to adopt European dress, manners, and tastes, creating a split identity: On the public stage the nobleman performed European conventions, while in private native Russian habits persisted. Figes traces this duality through the Sheremetev palace on the Fontanka (the Fountain House), whose reception rooms embodied European splendor while its private quarters preserved Russian stoves, carpets, and icons. The story of the serf singer Praskovya Sheremeteva, who became Count Nikolai Sheremetev's secret wife, dramatizes the tensions between European ideals and Russia's rigid class system.

The second chapter centers on the 1812 war against Napoleon. Prince Sergei Volkonsky, an aide-de-camp to Emperor Alexander I, discovered during the invasion that the peasant soldiers were the nation's true patriots, a revelation that led him into the Decembrist conspiracy, a secret movement of liberal officers who sought a constitution and the abolition of serfdom. The failed uprising of December 1825 resulted in the leaders' exile to Siberia, where Volkonsky and his wife Maria adopted peasant ways, forming labor collectives and learning vernacular Russian. The chapter traces the broader Russification of aristocratic culture: Alexander Pushkin created a literary language rooted in common speech, Mikhail Glinka elevated folk melody to operatic grandeur in A Life for the Tsar, and Alexei Venetsianov painted peasants as dignified individuals, marking the birth of a distinctively Russian artistic tradition.

The third chapter turns to Moscow as a symbol of national identity, contrasting it with St Petersburg's European artificiality. Figes presents Moscow as the nation's "mother," rooted in ancient Orthodox traditions. A mid-nineteenth-century cultural renaissance produced Modest Musorgsky's Boris Godunov; the critic Vladimir Stasov championed a national school in all the arts; and the Mighty Handful of nationalist composers developed a distinctive Russian musical language based on folk song. Moscow's rise as a commercial center brought merchant dynasties like the Tretiakovs and Mamontovs into prominence as arts patrons. The chapter follows Moscow through Anton Chekhov's plays at the Moscow Arts Theatre and the avant-garde movements of the early 1900s, when the Jack of Diamonds exhibitions, poets like Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the composer Alexander Scriabin made the city a major center of innovation.

The fourth chapter examines the Populist movement of the 1870s, when thousands of students left their universities to "go to the people," hoping to find natural socialism among the peasantry. Their idealized vision collapsed upon encountering actual peasant suspicion and hostility. Figes traces the obsession with the "peasant question" through Ilya Repin's painting The Volga Barge Haulers, Leo Tolstoy's struggle to live as a peasant, and Chekhov's story "Peasants," which punctures the myth of rural virtue. He draws a line from the Populist movement through the arts and crafts colonies to Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the pioneering Russian ballet company based in Paris. Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring are analyzed as successive stages in the assimilation of folk music into a revolutionary modern style, while Les Noces re-creates the collective voice of the Russian peasant community.

The fifth chapter explores the spiritual dimensions of Russian culture, centering on the monastery of Optina Pustyn, a refuge of the hermitic tradition that drew Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Figes examines Russian Orthodoxy's emphasis on mystical experience over rational theology, its liturgical beauty, and its entanglement with national identity, while documenting the thin coat of Christianity painted over the peasantry's ancient pagan beliefs. Dostoevsky's novels are read as discourses between reason and belief, culminating in his vision of a Church founded on Christian brotherhood. Tolstoy's spiritual quest led through his moral crisis of the 1870s to his Christian anarchism and excommunication. Chekhov's conviction that faith in a better world is necessary to endure Russian reality completes the chapter.

The sixth chapter addresses Russia's Asiatic heritage, beginning with Wassily Kandinsky's 1889 expedition to the Komi region, where the painter discovered shamanistic beliefs beneath Orthodox Christianity, inspiring his turn to abstract art. The Mongol occupation (c. 1237–1480) left a profound mark on Russian political culture, language, and customs, though the national myth insists the Mongols departed without a trace. Figes documents the Mongol ancestry of prominent Russian families and traces the ambivalent Russian relationship with Asia through military conquest, romantic literature, and Stasov's controversial theories about the Asiatic origins of Russian ornament. The "Scythian" poets Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely embraced the ancient steppe nomads as symbols of revolutionary renewal, while the Eurasianist émigrés of the 1920s reinterpreted Russia as a unique Turanian civilization, one rooted in the Asiatic steppe rather than in Europe.

The seventh chapter examines Russian culture under the Soviet regime, with the poet Anna Akhmatova's life at the Fountain House framing the narrative. The Bolsheviks' ambition to engineer a new human being is traced through Constructivist architects, the Proletkult movement's attempt to build a proletarian culture from scratch, and Sergei Eisenstein's revolutionary cinema. Under Stalin, Socialist Realism forced artists to portray life not as it was but as it should become. The poet Osip Mandelstam, persecuted for anti-Stalin verse, was arrested and died in the gulag, the Soviet system of forced-labor camps, while Akhmatova's Requiem memorializes the victims of the Terror. The Second World War brought relative creative freedom, producing Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, before the postwar Zhdanovshchina, an ideological crackdown, renewed the assault on artistic liberty. The chapter closes with Andrei Tarkovsky's films as icons of spiritual resistance and Akhmatova's 1966 funeral procession through Petersburg, affirming that the cultural tradition she embodied outlasted the regime.

The final chapter traces Russian culture in emigration. Three million Russians fled after 1917, creating communities in Berlin, Paris, and New York. Figes follows the poet Marina Tsvetaeva through Prague and Paris before her return to Stalin's Russia and her suicide in 1941. The composer Sergei Rachmaninov's conservatism in American exile reflects his longing for Russia, while Vladimir Nabokov's novels, written first in Russian and then in English, revolve around exile and the irrecoverability of the past. The fates of those who return, including the writer Maxim Gorky and the composer Sergei Prokofiev, demonstrate the perils of homecoming under Stalin. The book reaches its emotional climax with Stravinsky's 1962 visit to the Soviet Union, where the aged composer was overwhelmed by the rediscovery of his native language. His meeting with Shostakovich at the Metropole Hotel, two composers from separate worlds whose music kept a single Russian beat, symbolizes a cultural unity that transcends political division.