Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia - Hardcover

Figes, Orlando

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9780713995176: Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713995173 ISBN 13: 9780713995176

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2002

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Natasha's Dance is Orlando Figes's epic, richly evocative and unparalleled exploration of Russia, its culture and people. Vast in scale and woven through with extraordinary stories and characters, it ranges from the splendor of eighteenth-century St. Petersburg to the power of Stalinist propaganda, from folk art to the magic rituals of Asiatic shamans, from the poetry of Pushkin to the music of Musorgsky and the films of Eisenstein, bringing to life an extraordinary cast of serf artists and aristocrats, revolutionaries and exiles, priests and libertines. Figes's book takes its title from a famous scene in War and Peace, where the young and beautiful Countess Natasha hears a popular melody and, instinctively aware of the peasant rhythm and steps, beings to dance to it. Tolstoy shows that however grand and foreign-educated they might be, at heart the Russians are Russians. Here Orlando Figes explores the meaning of Natasha's dance: the often contradictory impulses and shared sensibilities that have given rise to one of the world's most dazzling cultures. He shows how, perhaps more than any othehr country, Russia's sense of identity is embodied in its culture: not only its great poetry, music, books and paintings, but also in its common ideas, customs, habits and beliefs.

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About the Author:

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. His last book, A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY (Cape 1996), won the NCR Book Award, the Wolfson History Prize, the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award and the WH Smith Literary Award. He lives in Cambridge.

From Natasha's Dance:

"With the shift of political power to St. Petersburg, Moscow became the capital of the good life for the nobility. Its grandees gave themselves to sensual amusement. Count Rakhmanov, for example, spent his whole inheritance in eight years of gastronomy. He fed his poultry with truffles. He kept his crayfish in cream and parmesan instead of water. And he had his favorite fish, found only in the Sosna River a thousand miles away, delivered live to Moscow every day. Count Stroganov gave 'Roman dinners'—his guests lay on couches and were served by naked boys. Caviar and herring cheeks were typical hors d'oeuvres. Next came salmon lips, bear paws, and roast lynx. Then they had cuckoos roasted in honey, halibut liver, and burbot roe; oysters, poultry, and fresh figs; salted peaches and pineapples. Afterward, they would go into the banya and drink, eating caviar to build up a real thirst . . . Petersburgers despised Moscow for its sinful idleness, yet no one could deny its Russian character."

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