NATASHA
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Pushkin's Bronze Horseman - subtitled a 'Tale of Petersburg' - was the founding text of this literary myth. The poem was inspired by Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter the Great which stands on Senate Square as the city's genus loci. Like the poem that would make it so famous, the statue symbolized the dangerous underpinning of the capital's imperial grandeur - on the one hand trumpeting Peter's dazzling achievements in surpassing nature and, on the other, leaving it unclear to what extent he actually controlled the horse. Was he about to fall or soar up into space? Was he urging his mount on or trying to restrain it in the face of some catastrophe? The horseman seemed to teeter on the edge of an abyss, held back only by the taut reins of his steed.21 The huge granite rock - so wild in its appearance - on which the statue stood, was itself an emblem of the tragic struggle between man and nature. The city hewn in stone is never wholly safe from the incursions of the watery chaos from which it was claimed, and this sense of living on the edge was wonderfully conveyed by Falconet.
In 1909 a technical commission inspected the statue. Engineers bored holes into the bronze. They had to pump out 1,500 litres of water from inside.22 Without protective dikes, flooding was a constant threat to Petersburg. Pushkin set his poem in 1824, the year of one
10. Etienne-Maurice Falconet: The Bronze Horseman. Monument to Peter the Great, 1782
such flood. The Bronze Horseman tells the story of the flood and a sad clerk called Eugene, who finds the house of his beloved, Parasha, washed away. Driven to the verge of madness, Eugene roams the city and, coming across Falconet's horseman, castigates the Tsar for having built a city at the mercy of the flood. The statue stirs in anger and chases the poor clerk, who runs all night in terror of its thundering brass hooves. Eugene's body is finally washed up on the little island where Parasha's house was taken by the flood. The poem can be read in many different ways - as a clash between the state and the individual, progress and tradition, the city and nature, the autocracy and the people - and it was the standard by which all those later writers, from Gogol to Bely, debated the significance of Russia's destiny:
Proud charger, whither art thou ridden? Where leapest thou? and where, on whom Wilt plant thy hoof?23
For the Slavophiles, Peter's city was a symbol of the catastrophic rupture with Holy Rus'; for the Westerners, a progressive sign of Russia's Europeanization. For some, it was the triumph of a civilization, the conquering of nature by order and reason; for others, it was a monstrous artifice, an empire built on human suffering that was tragically doomed.
More than anyone, it was Gogol who fixed the city's image as an alienating place. As a young 'Ukrainian writer' struggling to survive in the capital, Gogol lived among the petty clerks whose literary alter egos fill his Tales of Petersburg (1842). These are sad and lonely figures, crushed by the city's oppressive atmosphere and doomed, for the most part, to die untimely deaths, like Pushkin's Evgeny in The Bronze Horseman. Gogol's Petersburg is a city of illusions and deceit. 'Oh have no faith in this Nevsky Prospekt… It is all deception, a dream, nothing is what it seems!' he warns in 'Nevsky Prospekt', the first of the Tales of Petersburg. 'Nevsky Prospekt deceives at all hours of the day, but the worst time of all is night, when the entire city becomes a welter of noise and flashing lights… and when the Devil himself is abroad, kindling the street-lamps with one purpose only: to show everything in a false light.'24 Hidden in the shadows of this glittering parade, Gogol's 'little men' scuttle between their offices in vast ministerial buildings and the equally soulless tenement apartments in which they live - alone, of course. Gogol's Petersburg is a ghostly image of the real city, a nightmare vision of a world deprived of grace, where only human greed and vanity can thrive. In 'The Overcoat', the last of the Tales, the humble civil servant Akaky Akakievich is forced to scrimp and save to replace his threadbare overcoat that has long become the joke of his fashionable seniors in the ministry. The new coat restores his sense of pride and individual worth: it becomes a symbol of his acceptance by his peers, who throw a champagne party in celebration. But he is robbed of the prized fur while walking home across a dark and 'endless square'. His efforts to retrieve it by appealing to an important Personage' come to naught. He becomes ill and dies,
a tragic figure crushed by a cold and uncaring society. But Akaky's ghost walks the streets of Petersburg. One night it haunts the Important Personage and robs him of his coat.
Dostoevsky said that the whole of Russian literature 'came out from underneath Gogol's "Overcoat"',25 His own early tales, especially The Double (1846), are very Gogolesque, although in later works, such as Crime and Punishment (1866), he adds an important psychological dimension to the capital's topography. Dostoevsky creates his unreal city through the diseased mental world of his characters, so that it becomes 'fantastically real'.26 In the minds of dreamers like Raskol-nikov, fantasy becomes reality, and life becomes a game in which any action, even murder, can be justified. Here is a place where human feelings are perverted and destroyed by human isolation and rationality. Dostoevsky's Petersburg is full of dreamers, a fact which he explained by the city's cramped conditions, by the frequent mists and fog which came in from the sea, by the icy rain and drizzle which made people sick. This was a place of fevered dreams and weird hallucinations, of nerves worn thin by the sleepless White Nights of the northern summer when dreamland and the real world became blurred. Dostoevsky himself was not immune to such flights of fantasy. In 1861 he recalled a 'vision of the Neva' which he himself had had in the early 1840s and included in the short story 'A Weak Heart' (1841). Dostoevsky claimed that it was the precise moment of his artistic self-discovery:
I remember once on a wintry January evening I was hurrying home from the Vyborg side… When I reached the Neva, I stopped for a minute and threw a piercing glance along the river into the smoky, frostily dim distance, which had suddenly turned crimson with the last purple of a sunset… Frozen steam poured from tired horses, from running people. The taut air quivered at the slightest sound, and columns of smoke like giants rose from all the roofs on both embankments and rushed upward through the cold sky, twining and untwining on the way, so that it seemed new buildings were rising above the old ones, a new city was forming in the air… It seemed as if all that world, with all its inhabitants, strong and weak, with all their habitations, the refuges of the poor, or the gilded palaces for the comfort of the powerful of this world, was at that twilight hour like a fantastic vision of fairyland, like a
dream which in its turn would vanish and pass away like vapour in the dark blue sky.27
3
Moscow, by contrast, was a place of down-to-earth pursuits. With the rise of Petersburg in the eighteenth century, Moscow became the centre of the 'good life' for the nobility. Pushkin said that it attracted 'rascals and eccentrics' - independent noblemen who 'shunned the court and lived without a care, devoting all their passions to harmless scandal-mongering and hospitality'.28 Moscow was a capital without a court -and without a court to occupy themselves, its grandees gave themselves to sensual amusement. Moscow was famous for its restaurants and clubs, its sumptuous balls and entertainments - in sum, for everything that Petersburg was not. Petersburgers despised Moscow for its sinful idleness. 'Moscow is an abyss of hedonistic pleasure', wrote Nikolai Turgenev, a poet in the circle of the Decembrists. 'All its people do is eat, drink, sleep, go to parties and play cards - and all at the expense of the suffering of their serfs.'29 Yet no one could deny its Russian character. 'Moscow may be wild and dissolute', wrote F. F. Vigel, 'but there is no point in trying to change it. For there is a part of Moscow in us all, and no Russian can expunge Moscow.'30
Moscow was the food capital of Russia. No other city could boast such a range of restaurants. There were high-class dining clubs like the Angleterre, where Levin and Oblonsky have their famous lunch in the opening scene of Anna Karenina; business restaurants like the Slavic Bazaar, where merchants made huge deals; fashionable late-night places like the Strelna and the Yar (which Pushkin
often mentions in his poetry); coffee houses where women were allowed unaccompanied; eating houses (karchevnye) for the common people; and taverns so diverse that every taste was catered for. There were old-fashioned taverns, like the Testov, where parents took their children for a treat; taverns that were famous for their specialities, like Egorov's pancakes or Lopashev's pies; taverns that kept singing birds where hunters liked to meet; and taverns that were well known as places of revelry." Moscow was so rich in its restaurant culture that it even taught the
French a thing or two. When Napoleon's soldiers came to Moscow, they needed to eat fast. 'Bistro!' they would say, the Russian word for 'fast'.
Moscow was a city of gourmands. It had a rich folklore of the fabulously fat, upon which its own self-image, as the capital of plenty, had been fed. In the early nineteenth century Count Rakhmanov, for example, spent his whole inheritance - said to be in excess of 2 million roubles (?200,000) - in just 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 favourite fish, a particularly rare specimen which could be caught only in the Sosna river 300 kilometres away, delivered live to Moscow every day. Count Musin-Pushkin was just as profligate. He would fatten his calves with cream and keep them in cradles like newborn babies. His fowl were fed on walnuts and given wine to drink to enhance the flavour of their meat. Sumptuous banquets had a legendary status in the annals of Moscow. Count Stroganov (an early nineteenth-century ancestor of the one who gave his name to the beef dish) hosted famous 'Roman dinners', where his guests lay on couches and were served by naked boys. Caviare and fruits and herring cheeks were typical hors-d'oeuvres. Next came salmon lips, bear paws and roast lynx. These were followed by cuckoos roasted in honey, halibut liver and burbot roe; oysters, poultry and fresh figs; salted peaches and pineapples. After the guests had eaten they would go into the banya and start to drink, eating caviare to build up a real thirst.32
Moscow banquets were more notable for their fantastic size than for the refinement of their food. It was not unusual for 200 separate dishes to be presented at a meal. The menu for one banquet shows that guests were served up to 10 different kinds of soup, 24 pies and meat dishes, 64 small dishes (such as grouse or teal), several kinds of roast (lamb, beef, goat, hare and suckling pig), 12 different salads, 28 assorted tarts, cheeses and fresh fruits. When the guests had had enough they retired to a separate room for sweets and sugared fruit.33 In this society, where prestige meant promotion at court, princes vied with one another in their hospitality. Vast sums were paid for the best serf cooks. Count Sheremetev (Nikolai Petrovich) paid an annual salary of 850 roubles to his senior chef-a huge sum for a serf.34 Cooks
were regarded by their masters as the equals of artists, and no expense was spared to have them trained abroad. Princes attained fame for the dishes first created by their cooks. The illustrious Prince Potemkin, the most famous of them all, was well known for serving up whole pigs at his sumptuous feasts: all the innards were removed through the mouth, the carcass stuffed with sausage, and the whole beast cooked in pastry made with wine.35
It was not only courtiers who ate so well. Provincial families were just as prone to the consuming passion and, with little else to do on the estate, eating was, if nothing else, a way to pass the time. Lunch would last for several hours. First there were the zakuski (hors-d'oeuvres), the cold and then the hot, followed by the soups, the pies, the poultry dishes, the roast, and finally the fruit and sweets. By then it was nearly time for tea. There were gentry households where the whole day was (in Pushkin's words) 'a chain of meals'. The Brodnit-skys, a middling gentry family in the Ukraine, were typical. When they got up they had coffee and bread rolls, followed by mid-morning zakuski, a full six-course lunch, sugared loaves and jams in the afternoon with tea, then poppy seeds and nuts, coffee, rolls and biscuits as an early evening snack. After that would come the evening meal -mainly cold cuts from lunch - then tea before they went to bed.36
Sumptuous eating of this sort was a relatively new phenomenon. The food of seventeenth-century Muscovy had been plain and simple - the entire repertory consisting of fish, boiled meats and domestic fowl, pancakes, bread and pies, garlic, onion, cucumbers and radishes, cabbages and beetroot. Everything was cooked in hempseed oil, which made all the dishes taste much the same. Even the Tsar's table was relatively poor. The menu at the wedding feast in 1670 of Tsar Alexei consisted of roast swan with saffron, grouse with lemon, goose giblets, chicken with sour cabbage and (for the men) kvas.37It was not until the eighteenth century that more interesting foods and culinary techniques were imported from abroad: butter, cheese and sour cream, smoked meats and fish, pastry cooking, salads and green vegetables, tea and coffee, chocolates, ice cream, wines and liqueurs. Even the zakuski were a copy of the European custom of hors-d'oeuvres. Although seen as the most 'Russian' part of any meal (caviare, sturgeon, vodka and all that), the 'classic zakuski'. such as fish in aspic, were not in fact
invented until the early nineteenth century. The same was true of Russian cooking as a whole. The 'traditional specialities' that were served in Moscow's restaurants in the nineteenth century - national dishes such as kulebeika (a pie stuffed with several layers of fish or meat), carp with sour cream, or turkey with plum sauce - were in fact quite recent inventions: most of them created to appeal to the new taste for old-Russian fashions after 1812. The first Russian cookery book was published as late as 1816, in which it was stated that it was no longer possible to give a full description of Russian cooking: all one could do was try to re-create the ancient recipes from people's memories.38 Lenten dishes were the only traditional foods that had not yet been supplanted by the European culinary fashions of the eighteenth century. Muscovy had a rich tradition of fish and mushroom dishes, vegetable soups such as borshcbt (beetroot) and shchi (cabbage), recipes for Easter breads and pies, and dozens of varieties of porridges and pancakes (bliny) which were eaten during Lent.
Not just nourishment, foodstuffs had an iconic part to play in Russian popular culture. Bread, for example, had a religious and symbolic importance that went far beyond its role in daily life; its significance in Russian culture was far greater than it was in the other Christian cultures of the West. The word for bread (khleb) was used in Russian for 'wealth', 'health' and 'hospitality'. Bread played a central role in peasant rituals. Bird-shaped breads were baked in spring to symbolize the return of the migratory flocks. In the peasant wedding a special loaf was baked to symbolize the newly-weds' fertility. At peasant funerals it was the custom to make a ladder out of dough and put it in the grave beside the corpse to help the soul's ascent. For bread was a sacred link between this world and the next. It was connected with the folklore of the stove, where the spirits of the dead were said to live.39 Bread was often given as a gift, most importantly in the customary offering of bread and salt to visitors. All foodstuffs were used as gifts, in fact, and this was a custom shared by all classes. The eccentric Moscow nobleman Alexander Porius-Vizapursky (even his name was eccentric) made a habit of sending oysters to important dignitaries - and sometimes to people he didn't even know (Prince Dolgorukov once received a parcel of a dozen oysters with a letter from Porius-Vizapursky saying he had called on him to make his
acquaintance but had found him not at home). Wildfowl was also a common gift. The poet Derzhavin was well known for sending sandpipers. Once he sent an enormous pie to Princess Bebolsina. When it was cut open it revealed a dwarf who presented her with a truffle pie and a bunch of forget-me-nots.40 Festive gifts of food were also given to the people by the Tsars. To celebrate victory in the war against the Turks in 1791, Catherine the Great ordered two food mountains to be placed on Palace Square. Each was topped by fountains spouting wine. On her signal from the Winter Palace the general populace was allowed to feast on the cornucopia.41
Food also featured as a symbol in nineteenth-century literature. Memories of food were often summoned up in nostalgic scenes of childhood li
fe. Tolstoy's Ivan Ilich concludes on his deathbed that the only happy moments in his life had been when he was a child: all these memories he associates with food - particularly, for some reason, prunes. Gastronomic images were frequently used to paint a picture of the good old life. Gogol's Evenings on a Farm is filled with lyrical descriptions of Ukrainian gluttony; Goncharov's Oblomov is always gorging himself on old-fashioned Russian foods - a symbol of his sloth; and then (no doubt in a send-up of this literary tradition) there is Feers, the ancient butler in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904), who still recalls the cherries sent to Moscow from the estate more than fifty years before ('And the dried cherries in those days were soft, juicy, sweet, tasty… They knew how to do it then… they had a recipe…').42 Moscow itself had a mythical stature in this folklore about food. Ferapont, the butler in Chekhov's Three Sisters (1901), tells Andrei, who yearns to go to Moscow and eat at Testov's or some other busy restaurant:
The other day at the office, a contractor was telling me about some business men who were eating pancakes in Moscow. One of them ate forty pancakes and died. It was either forty or fifty, I can't remember exactly.43