Orlando Figes - Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

Orlando Figes

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NATASHAS DANCE

A Cultural History of Russia

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First published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2002

Published in Penguin Books 2003

Copyright Orlando Figes, 2002

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-98959-4

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He was born in London in 1959 and studied History at Cambridge. Before moving to Birkbeck he was a University Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of Peasant Russia, Civil War and A Peoples Tragedy, which in 1997 was the winner of the Wolfson History Prize, the WH Smith Literary Award, the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award, the NCR Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

For Lydia and Alice

An awesome achievement Iain Finlayson, The Times, Books of the Year

A wonderfully rich read, packed with illumination and insight into an artistically rich civilization at once brilliant and savage, a raw tangled mix of the rational and the mystical, Eastern and European

Lisa Jardine, Observer

Splendid a gripping panorama of Russian art and life

George Walden, Independent

A rivetingly compendious rumination on how painting, poetry, plays and music reflect Russias perennial tug-of-war between peasant and aristocratic cultures

Michael Church, Evening Standard, Books of the Year

Remarkable I know of no parallel to compare with the tapestry that this Professor of History has been able to weave Professor Figes has achieved the impossible with a portrait that is hugely entertaining and, astonishingly, actually gives the reader that smell of Russian earth he has painted the vast Russian landscape in terms of its cultural roots, its absurdities, its genius, its humanity as well as its cruelty. A formidable achievement Geoffrey Goodman, Tribune

Richly informative and marvellously entertaining. It is full of sparkling vignettes and sharp, sometimes funny, often moving pen portraits Figes gives an incomparable insight into the nature of the beast

Piers Brendon, Oldie, Books of the Year

Just as all things Russian require the hyperbolic superlative, so do Figess Russian histories: he has done it again. Written beautifully with striking wit, joie de vivre and learning worn lightly, magnificently and broadly researched from aristocratic letters to Stalins archives, with brilliant yet simple analysis, this superb, flamboyant and masterful tour dhorizon is fun, anecdotal and fascinating, colourful and playful

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Financial Times

Brilliant leaves one awed by the societys twin legacies of beauty and suffering Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year

Figes is unlike anyone else in the vast range of information he draws on, in the vigour and intensity of his writing, in his eye for the dramatic detail, and most of all in the use he makes of private lives to illustrate his themes Joseph Frank, London Review of Books

Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be happy to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

Ivan Bilibin: set design for Grad Kitezh, 1928. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

. Benjamin Paterssen: Vue de la grande parade au Palais de lEmpereur Alexandre Ier St Petersburg, c. 1803. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

. Adolphe Ladurnier: View of the White Hall in the Winter Palace, St Petersburg, 1838. State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg/Petrushka, Moscow

. St Basils Cathedral, Red Square, Moscow, during the late nineteenth century (photo: David King Collection, London)

. A typical one-street village in central Russia, c. 1910. Photograph by Netta Peacock. Victoria & Albert Museum Picture Library, London

. Natalia Goncharova: backdrop design for The Firebird (1926) Victoria & Albert Museum Picture Library, London

. Scythian figures: late nineteenth-century archaeological engraving

. Anna Akhmatova at the Fountain House. Copyright Museum of Anna Akhmatova in the Fountain House, St Petersburg

. Igor and Vera Stravinsky arriving at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow, 21 September 1962. Reproduced from Igor and Vera Stravinsky, A Photograph Album 1921 1971 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982)

. Shifting the huge granite rock for the pedestal of The Bronze Horseman. Engraving after a drawing by A. P. Davydov, 1782

. Seventeenth-century Muscovite costumes. Engraving from Adam Olearius, Travels to Muscovy and Persia (Hamburg: Schleswig, 1669)

. The Sheremetev theatre at Ostankino. Photograph copyright William C. Brumfield.

. Grard de la Barthe: A Cure Bath in Moscow, 1790. Pushkin Museum, Moscow (photo: AKG London)

. The peasant prince: Sergei Volkonsky in Irkutsk. Daguerreotype by A. Lavignon, 1845 (photo: Novosti, London)

. Alexei Venetsianov: Cleaning Beetroot, 1820. Copyright 2002, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg/Petrushka, Moscow

. A wet nurse in traditional Russian dress. Early-twentieth-century photograph. Private collection. Reproduced from Chloe Oblensky, The Russian Empire: A Portrait in Photographs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979)

. Monument to the millennium of Russia in the square in front of St Sophias Cathedral, Novgorod. Photograph by Mikhail Mikeshin, early 1910s

. Maria Volkonsky and her son Misha. Daguerreotype, 1862. Reproduced from Christine Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia: The Story of Maria Volkonsky and the Decembrist Exiles (London: Methuen, 1984)

. Etienne-Maurice Falconet: The Bronze Horseman. Monument to Peter the Great, 1782 (photo: Hulton Archive, London)