'Natasha's Dance': On the Struggle for Russia's Soul

I once received a letter from Richard Nixon in response to a story I'd written about a Soviet collective farm, in which he related how he had developed an early interest in Russia while reading Lev Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" in college. In particular, he recalled the passages about the resistance of the peasants to all the innovations that Levin, the liberal landowner who embodied many of Tolstoy's own beliefs, tried to introduce. His readings, Nixon said in later conversations, played a central role in the way he approached Nikita Khrushchev in their celebrated kitchen debate, and in his subsequent policies toward Moscow.

That encounter confirmed me in the belief that Russia is best approached through its culture, rather than the more common avenues of politics or economics. The great and endless debates that have absorbed the country's intelligentsia from the time Peter the Great first opened Russia to the West have reflected and shaped its history to a degree that is difficult to overstate. The heart of the controversy has been the elemental tug of Russia's opposing poles, defined variously as East and West, Asia and Europe, Moscow and St. Petersburg, the village and the city, the Russian peasant and the Westernized nobleman. The debates often had a near-messianic dimension, a conviction that Russia -- the third Rome, the new Jerusalem, the brave new world -- had a unique destiny and almost sacred mission.

One consequence of this debate was to endow Russia's artists, and especially its writers, with enormous moral authority, which the tsars and general secretaries correctly perceived as one of the greatest threats to their rule. "Nowhere," Orlando Figes writes in the introduction to his sweeping cultural history of Russia, "Natasha's Dance," "has the artist been more burdened with the task of moral leadership and national prophecy, nor more feared and persecuted by the state." Many of his most fascinating stories describe how individual artists shouldered this huge burden. There is Tolstoy, vacillating between the lure of an idealized peasant life and the fact of his hereditary nobility; there is Ilya Repin, spending months with Volga barge haulers to create his devastatingly powerful painting of these human beasts of burden; there is Anna Akhmatova, who saw it as her poet's duty to share Russia's suffering after the revolution: "I am not with those who abandoned their land."

The clash of artist and tyrant became especially acute in the Soviet era. Figes quotes a celebrated line from Osip Mandelstam, the poet who perished in the gulag for a poem denouncing Josef Stalin. "Poetry is respected only in this country," he told friends in the 1930s. "There's no place where more people are killed for it." When I worked in Moscow as a correspondent in the last years of the Soviet state, almost every writer of any literary merit -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Vassily Aksyonov, Vladimir Voinovich, Georgi Vladimov -- was in exile, and those who were not were locked in endless struggles with the cultural watchdogs.

"Natasha's Dance" is a most welcome sequel to Figes' much-praised history of the Russian Revolution, "A People's Tragedy" (Penguin, 1998). It is aimed more at the well-informed general reader than the expert, and one welcome feature is that it draws much of its material directly from original Russian sources, giving a firsthand taste of the richness and variety of art that scholarly works often exclude. It was not his intention, Figes writes in his introduction, to define a single national culture, but rather "to rejoice in the sheer diversity of Russia's cultural forms."

The title of the book, for example, refers to a scene in Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in which the young, aristocratic heroine, Natasha Rostov, enters a rural hut and almost instinctively breaks into a peasant dance. In contrast to this idealized notion of the peasant as a bearer of a pure Russianness, Figes recounts the enormous shock that greeted the publication of Anton Chekhov's short story "Peasants," in which the muzhik, or male, is presented as a coarse, brutalized drunk.

In this fashion, "Natasha's Dance" covers enormous ground, from the impact of the Mongol occupation and the influence of Russian Orthodoxy, to the Russians in exile and the ravages of Stalinism and its attempt to harness art to its ideological agenda. Much of the story is told through biographical sketches, from the story of Count Nikolai Sheremetev, who shocked society by marrying a serf, to the poet Marina Tsvetayeva, who returned from exile in France at the height of Stalinism only to kill herself in the obscure town of Yelabuga, where she was buried in an unmarked grave after a funeral attended by no one.

This approach sometimes proves more confusing than compelling, as anecdotes and sketches follow one another, at times without sufficient connective tissue, explanation or analysis. A reader who is not familiar with Russia will undoubtedly become tangled in the profusion of names and places, and may lose track of what they are supposed to illustrate. Perhaps this is Figes' intention when he speaks of rejoicing in the diversity of Russian culture. But the very scope and import of the debates he chronicles, and the terrible fates of so many artists he portrays, simply cry for more context and discussion.

It is not that the work lacks observations. On the contrary, Figes is liberal in his use of colorful and sometimes pithy conclusions: "St. Petersburg was all deceit and vanity, a narcissistic dandy constantly observing its own reflection in the Neva River." Or "the Russian church is contained entirely in its liturgy, and to understand it there is no point reading books: one has to go and see the church at prayer." But these comments often beg for more substantiation. St. Petersburg, after all, is also the tyrant of Alexander Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman," and the church at prayer is hardly the sum total of Russian Orthodoxy. The section on the church is perhaps the least satisfactory part of the book, alternating among descriptions of an almost pagan faith, literary searches for the "Russian soul" and long digressions on Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, but without a unifying thought that would explain, or at least describe, the sources of this spiritual longing.

A lesser, but nagging, problem with the book is the number of minor errors. At one point, Tolstoy's Levin is called Prince Levin, though he is not. Similarly, the word "bistro" is said to originate from Napoleonic troops in Russian cafes using the Russian word for "quick," though the common explanation holds that Cossack troops used the word in Paris.

In his native England, where Figes is professor of history at the University of London, "Natasha's Dance" has stirred some controversy, particularly over a sharply critical review in The Times Literary Supplement. That may be the inevitable fate of an academic who undertakes a popular history, and especially one who tries to tackle so grand a subject. Any work that presumes to cover the range of culture from medieval folk tales to the complex films of Andrei Tarkovsky, in a nation straddling two continents and savaged by revolution and war, is certain to run into accusations of oversimplifying.

Yet on balance Figes succeeds in describing the extraordinary scope and power of Russian culture -- and in outlining its great themes and issues -- in a way that gives the reader a far better understanding of Russia than any history focusing solely on the progression of autocrats, wars and conquests. And it is good to hear the Russians speak for themselves as they struggle with the "Russian Question," search into their Asian roots, explore the riddle of the peasants, suffer the violence of war and tyranny and in the process nurture some of the greatest writers, poets, artists and composers in modern history.

Figes' joy in Russian culture comes through clearly, as does his profound respect for those who shaped it, especially the artists who fell victim to the state or were forced into exile. He gives the final word to Igor Stravinsky, who returned to Moscow for a visit in 1962, after exactly 50 years of exile. Raising a glass of vodka at a banquet, Stravinsky declared: "I did not leave Russia of my own will, even though I disliked much in my Russia and in Russia generally. Yet the right to criticize Russia is mine, because Russia is mine and because I love it, and I do not give any foreigners that right." It is perhaps a measure of Figes' respect for Russia that he does not presume to take it.

Serge Schmemann is a senior writer at The New York Times.

"Natasha's Dance. By Orlando Figes. Metropolitan Books. 544 pages. $35.