Natasha's Dance Quotes

“is generally supposed that Conservatives are old people, and that those in favour of change are the young. That is not quite correct. Usually Conservatives are young people: those who want to live but who do not think about how to live, and have not time to think, and therefore take as a model for themselves a way of life that they have seen. Thus it was with Eugene. Having settled in the village, his aim and ideal was to restore the form of life that had existed, not in his father’s time … but in his grandfather’s.173”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“For over three hundred years, the period of the Renaissance in the West, Russia was cut off from European civilization. The country which emerged from the Mongol period was far more inward-looking than it had been at the start of the thirteenth century, when Kievan Rus’, the loose confederation of principalities which constituted the first Russian state, had been intimately linked with Byzantium.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“armour, in emulation of Caesar. The famous opening lines of Pushkin’s epic poem The Bronze Horseman (1833) (which every Russian schoolchild knows by heart) crystallized the myth of Petersburg’s creation by a providential man: On a shore by the desolate waves He stood, with lofty thoughts, And gazed into the distance …5”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“The folk-like crafted goods of Sergei Maliutin, the principal artist at Talashkino, were pure invention. Maliutin was the creator of the first matrioshka, or Russian nesting doll, in 1891. At that time he was working at the Moscow zemstvo’s craft workshops at Sergiev Posad which specialized in making Russian toys. Contrary to the popular belief today, the matrioshka has no roots in Russian folk culture at all. It was dreamed up in response to a commission from the Mamontovs to make a Russian version of the Japanese nesting doll. Maliutin created a red-cheeked peasant girl in the shape of a barrel with a chicken underneath her arm. Each smaller doll portrayed a different aspect of peasant life; and at the core was a baby tightly swaddled in the Russian style. The design became immensely popular and by the end of the 1890s several million dolls were being manufactured every year. The myth was then established that the matrioshka was an ancient Russian toy.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“Extravagant spending was a peculiar weakness of the Russian aristocracy. It derived in part from foolishness, and in part from the habits of a class whose riches had arrived through little effort and at fantastic speed. Much of this wealth was in the form of Imperial grants designed to create a superb court that would compare with Versailles or Potsdam.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“the Sheremetevs acquired the beautiful estate of Ostankino on the outskirts of Moscow. With the immense fortune that was spent on it in the second half of the eighteenth century by their son Nikolai Petrovich, the first great impresario of the Russian theatre, Ostankino became the jewel in the Sheremetev crown.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“The richest dynasties of the aristocracy had all stood near the summit of the Tsarist state during its great territorial expansion between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries and had consequently been rewarded with lavish endowments of fertile land in the south of Russia and Ukraine. These were the Sheremetevs and the Stroganovs, the Demidovs and Davydovs, the Vorontsovs and Yusupovs.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“Little travelled or exposed to Europeans, who were forced to settle in a special suburb in Moscow, the nobleman mistrusted new or foreign ways. His life was regulated by the archaic rituals of the Church – its calendar arranged to count the years from the notional creation of the world (with the birth of Adam) in 5509 BC.*”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“The dominance of the Church hindered the development in Muscovy of the secular art forms that had taken shape in Europe since the Renaissance. Instead, the icon was the focal point of Muscovy’s religious way of life. It was an artefact of daily ritual as much as it was a creative work of art. Icons were encountered everywhere – not just in homes and churches but in shops and offices or in wayside shrines. There was next to nothing to connect the icon to the European tradition of secular”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“Unlike central Europe Muscovy had little exposure to the influence of the Renaissance or the Reformation. It took no part in the maritime discoveries or the scientific revolutions of the early modern era.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“Petersburg was more than a city. It was a vast, almost utopian, project of cultural engineering to reconstruct the Russian as a European man. In Notes from Underground (1864) Dostoevsky called it ‘the most abstract and intentional city in the whole round world’.17 Every aspect of its Petrine culture was intended as a negation of ‘medieval’ (seventeenth-century) Muscovy. As Peter conceived it, to become a citizen of Petersburg was to leave behind the ‘dark’ and ‘backward’ customs of the Russian past in Moscow and to enter, as a European Russian, the modern Western world of progress and enlightenment.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“Petersburg did not grow up like other towns. Neither commerce nor geopolitics can account for its development. Rather it was built as a work of art.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“the reader will find here that works of literature, like War and Peace, are intercut with episodes from daily life (childhood, marriage, religious life, responses to the landscape, food and drinking habits, attitudes to death) where the outlines of this national consciousness may be discerned. These are the episodes where we may find, in life, the unseen threads of a common Russian sensibility, such as Tolstoy had imagined in his celebrated dancing scene.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“We expect the Russians to be ‘Russian’ – their art easily distinguished by its use of folk motifs, by onion domes, the sound of bells, and full of ‘Russian soul’. Nothing has done more to obscure a proper understanding of Russia and its central place in European culture between 1812 and 1917. The great cultural figures of the Russian tradition (Karamzin, Pushkin, Glinka, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Repin, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Chagall and Kandinsky, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Nabokov, Pasternak, Meyerhold and Eisenstein) were not simply ‘Russians’, they were Europeans too, and the two identities were intertwined and mutually dependent in a variety of ways. However hard they might have tried, it was impossible for Russians such as these to suppress either part of their identity.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“Forced to become Europeans, the educated classes had become so alienated from the old Russia, they had so long forgotten how to speak and act in a Russian way, that when, in Tolstoy’s age, they struggled to define themselves as ‘Russians’ once again, they were obliged to reinvent that nation through historical and artistic myths. They rediscovered their own ‘Russianness’ through literature and art, just as Natasha found her ‘Russianness’ through the rituals of the dance.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“it was surely not so fanciful for Tolstoy to imagine that there was a common sense which linked the young countess to every Russian woman and every Russian man. For, as this book will seek to demonstrate, there is a Russian temperament, a set of native customs and beliefs, something visceral, emotional, instinctive, passed on down the generations, which has helped to shape the personality and bind together the community. This elusive temperament has proved more lasting and more meaningful than any Russian state: it gave the people the spirit to survive the darkest moments of their history,”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“Natasha’s dance is an emblem of the view to be taken in this book: there is no quintessential national culture, only mythic images of it, like Natasha’s version of the peasant dance.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“My aim is to explore Russian culture in the same way Tolstoy presents Natasha’s dance: as a series of encounters or creative social acts which were performed and understood in many different ways.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“Natasha’s dance is one such opening. At its heart is an encounter between two entirely different worlds: the European culture of the upper classes and the Russian culture of the peasantry.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“Alienated from official Russia by their politics, and from peasant Russia by their education, Russia’s artists took it upon themselves to create a national community of values and ideas through literature and art. What did it mean to be a Russian? What was Russia’s place and mission in the world? And where was the true Russia? In Europe or in Asia? St Petersburg or Moscow? The Tsar’s empire or the muddy one-street village where Natasha’s ‘Uncle’ lived? These were the ‘accursed questions’ that occupied the mind of every serious writer, literary critic and historian, painter and composer, theologian and philosopher in the golden age of Russian culture from Pushkin to Pasternak. They are the questions that lie beneath the surface of the art within this book. The works discussed here represent a history of ideas and attitudes – concepts of the nation through which Russia tried to understand itself. If we look carefully, they may become a window on to a nation’s inner life.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“The overarching subject of all these works was Russia – its character, its history, its customs and conventions, its spiritual essence and its destiny. In a way that was extraordinary, if not unique to Russia, the country’s artistic energy was almost wholly given to the quest to grasp the idea of its nationality.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“For the past two hundred years the arts in Russia have served as an arena for political, philosophical and religious debate in the absence of a parliament or a free press. As Tolstoy wrote in ‘A Few Words on War and Peace’ (1868), the great artistic prose works of the Russian tradition were not novels in the European sense.3 They were huge poetic structures for symbolic contemplation, not unlike icons, laboratories in which to test ideas; and, like a science or religion, they were animated by the search for truth.”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“I once stood at a shrine and gazed at a wonder-working icon of the Mother of God, thinking of the childlike faith of the people praying before it; some women and infirm old men knelt, crossing themselves and bowing down to the earth. With ardent hope I gazed at the holy features, and little by little the secret of their marvellous power began to grow clear to me. Yes, this was not just a painted board – for centuries it had absorbed these passions and these hopes, the prayers of the afflicted and unhappy; it was filled with the energy of all these prayers. It had become a living organism, a meeting place between the Lord and men. Thinking of this, I looked once more at the old men, at the women and the children prostrate in the dust, and at the holy icon – and then I too saw the animated features of the Mother of God,”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

“Well, what can we do? We must go on living! We shall go on living, Uncle Vanya. We shall live through a long, long succession of days and tedious evenings. We shall patiently suffer the trials which Fate imposes on us; we shall work for others, now and in our old age, and we shall have no rest. When our time comes we shall die submissively, and over there, in the other world, we shall say that we have suffered, that we’ve wept, that we’ve had a bitter life, and God will take pity on us. And then, Uncle dear, we shall both begin to know a life that is bright and beautiful, and lovely. We shall rejoice and look back at all our troubles with tender feelings, with a smile – and we shall have rest. I believe it, Uncle, I believe it fervently, passionately … We shall have rest!”
― Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia