NATASHA

by Orlando Figes

  'A lamb decked for the slaughter' is perhaps not how Kitty felt - her love affair with Levin was a true romance - but, if Sonya's own experience is anything to go by, she might have found some points of contact with these women from the street.

  Sonya was eighteen when she married Tolstoy - rather young by European standards but not by Russian ones. Eighteen was in fact the average age of marriage for women in nineteenth-century Russia - far younger than even in those pre-industrial parts of western Europe where women tended to marry relatively early (around the age of twenty-five).65 (For the past 300 years no other European country has

  had an average female age at first marriage as low as twenty years -and in this respect Russian marriage more closely fits the Asiatic pattern.)66 Tatiana's nurse was, therefore, not exceptional in marrying so young, even though thirteen was the youngest she could marry under Russian canon law. Serf owners liked their peasant girls to marry young, so that they could breed more serfs for them; the burden of taxation could be easily arranged so that peasant elders took the same opinion. Sometimes the serf owners enforced early marriages -their bailiffs lining up the marriageable girls and boys in two separate rows and casting lots to decide who would marry whom.67 Among the upper classes (though not the merchantry) girls married at an older age, although in the provinces it was not unusual for a noble bride to be barely older than a child. Sonya Tolstoy would have sympathized with Princess Raevskaya, who became a widow at the age of thirty-five

  – by which time she had given birth to seventeen children, the first at the age of just sixteen.68

  The arranged marriage was the norm in peasant Russia until the beginning of the twentieth century. The peasant wedding was not a love match between individuals ('We'd never heard of love,' recalls Tatiana's nurse). It was a collective rite intended to bind the couple and the new household to the patriarchal culture of the village and the Church. Strict communal norms determined the selection of a spouse

  – sobriety and diligence, health and child-rearing qualities being more important than good looks or personality. By custom throughout Russia, the parents of the groom would appoint a matchmaker in the autumn courting season who would find a bride in one of the nearby villages and arrange for her inspection at a smotrinie. If that was successful the two families would begin negotiations over the bride price, the cost of her trousseau, the exchange of household property and the expenses of the wedding feast. When all this was agreed a formal marriage contract would be sealed by the drinking of a toast which was witnessed by the whole community and marked by the singing of a ceremonial song and a kborovod.69Judging from the plaintive nature of these songs, the bride did not look forward to her wedding day. There was a whole series of prenuptial songs - most of them laments in which the bride would 'wail', as the nineteenth-century folklorist Dahl described it, 'to mourn the loss of maidenhood'.70 The

  prenuptial khorovod, which was sung and danced by the village girls in spring, was a sad and bitter song about the life to come in their husband's home:

  They are making me marry a lout

  With no small family.

  Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh dear me!

  With a father, and a mother

  And four brothers

  And sisters three.

  Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh dear me!

  Says my father-in-law,

  'Here comes a bear!'

  Says my mother-in-law,

  'Here comes a slut!'

  My sisters-in-law cry,

  'Here comes a do-nothing!'

  My brothers-in-law cry,

  'Here comes a mischief-maker!'

  Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh dear me!71

  The bride and groom played a largely passive role in the peasant wedding rituals, which were enacted by the whole community in a highly formalized dramatic performance. The night before the wedding the bride was stripped of the customary belt that protected her maid enly purity and was washed by village girls in the bath house. The bridal shower (devichnik) had an important symbolic significance. It was accompanied by ritual songs to summon up the magic spirits of the bath house which were believed to protect the bride and her children. The water from the towel with which the bride was dried was then wrung out and used to leaven dough for the ritual dumplings served to the guests at the wedding feast. The climax of this bath-house rite was the unplaiting of the maiden's single braid, which was then replaited as two braids to symbolize her entry into married life. As in Eastern cultures, the display of female hair was seen as a sexual enticement, and all married Russian peasant women kept their plaited hair hidden underneath a kerchief or head-dress. The bride's virginity

  was a matter of communal importance and, until it had been confirmed, either by the finger of the matchmaker or by the presence of bloodstains on the sheets, the honour of her household would remain in doubt. At the wedding feast it was not unusual for the guests to act as witnesses to the bride's deflowering - sometimes even for guests to strip the couple and tie their legs together with embroidered towels.

  Among the upper classes there were still traces of these patriarchal customs in the nineteenth century, and among the merchants, as anyone familiar with Ostrovsky's plays will know, this peasant culture was very much alive. In the aristocracy arranged marriages remained the norm in Russia long after they had been replaced in Europe by romantic ones; and although romantic love became more influential in the nineteenth century, it never really became the guiding principle. Even among the most educated families, parents nearly always had the final say over the choice of a spouse, and the memoir literature of the time is filled with accounts of love affairs that crashed against their opposition. By the end of the nineteenth century a father would rarely refuse to sanction his child's marriage; yet, in deference to the old custom, it remained accepted practice for the suitor to approach the parents first and ask for their permission to propose.

  In the provinces, where the gentry was generally closer to the culture of the peasants, noble families were even slower to assimilate the European notion of romantic love. The marriage proposals were usually handled by the parents of the suitor and the prospective bride. Sergei Aksakov's father was married in this way, his parents having made the proposal to his bride's father.72 The peasant custom of appointing a matchmaker was also retained by many gentry families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as was the inspection of the bride - albeit as a customary dinner where the nobleman could get to know the daughter of the house and, if he approved, propose a marriage contract to her parents there and then.73 Marriage contracts, too, were commonly agreed between the families of a noble bride and groom. When Sergei Aksakov's parents were engaged, in the 1780s, they sealed the marriage contract with a feast that was attended by the whole community - much as was the custom among the peasantry.74 The noble marriage contract was a complicated thing, recalled Elizaveta Rimsky-Korsakov, who became engaged in the 1790s. It

  took several weeks of careful preparation while 'the people who knew prices arranged everything', and it needed to be sealed at a large betrothal party, attended by the relatives from both the families, where prayers were said, precious gifts were given as a token of intention and pictures of the bride and groom were swapped.75

  Moscow was the centre of the marriage market for the gentry from the provinces. The autumn balls in Moscow were a conscious translation of the autumn courtship rituals played out by the peasants and their matchmakers. Hence the advice given to Tatiana's mother in Eugene Onegin:

  To Moscow and the marriage mart! They've vacancies galore… take heart!76

  Pushkin himself met his wife, Natalia Goncharova, who was then aged just sixteen, at a Moscow autumn ball. In Moscow, according to the early nineteenth-century memoirist F. F. Vigel, there was a

  whole class of matchmakers to whom noble suitors could apply, giving them the age of their prospective bride and the various conditions of their proposal. These matchmakers would make their business known in the Nobles' Assembly, particularl
y in the autumn season when noblemen would come from the provinces to find themselves a bride.77

  In War and Peace Levin comes to Moscow to court Kitty. The rituals of their wedding draw in equal measure from the Church's sacraments and the pagan customs of the peasantry. Kitty leaves her parents' house and travels with the family icon to the church to meet Levin (who is late, as Tolstoy was at his own wedding, because his man servant had misplaced his shirt). The parents of the bride and groom are absent from the service, as demanded by custom, for the wedding was perceived as the moment when the bridal couple leave their earthly homes and join together in the family of the Church. Like all Russian brides, Kitty is accompanied by her godparents, whose customary role is to help the priest administer this rite of passage by offering the bride and groom the sacred wedding loaf, blessing them with icons and placing on their heads the 'wedding crowns'.

  'Put it right on!' was the advice heard from all sides when the priest brought forward the crowns and Shcherbatsky, his hand shaking in its three-button glove, held the crown high above Kitty's head.

  'Put it on!' she whispered, smiling.

  Levin looked round at her and was struck by her beatific expression. He could not help being infected by her feeling and becoming as glad and happy as she was.

  With light hearts they listened to the reading of the Epistle and heard the head-deacon thunder out one last verse, awaited with such impatience by the outside public. With light hearts they drank the warm red wine and water from the shallow cup, and their spirits rose still higher when the priest, flinging back his stole and taking their hands in his, led them round the lectern while a bass voice rang out 'Rejoice, O Isaiah!' Shcherbatsky and Tchirikov, who were supporting the crowns and getting entangled in the bride's train, smiled too, and were inexplicably happy. They either lagged behind or stumbled on the bride and bridegroom every time the priest came to a halt. The spark of joy glowing in Kitty's heart seemed to have spread to everyone in church. Levin fancied that the priest and deacon wanted to smile as much as he did.

  Lifting the crowns from their heads, the priest read the last prayer and congratulated the young couple. Levin glanced at Kitty and thought he had never seen her look like that before, so lovely with the new light of happiness shining in her face. Levin longed to say something to her but did not know whether the ceremony was over yet. The priest came to his aid, saying softly, a smile on his kindly mouth, 'Kiss your wife, and you, kiss your husband,' and took the candles from their hands.78

  The 'coronation' (venchane), as the wedding ceremony was called in Russia, symbolized the grace that the bridal couple received from the Holy Spirit as they founded a new family or domestic church. The crowns were usually made of leaves and flowers. They were crowns of joy and martyrdom, for every Christian marriage involved sacrifice by either side. Yet the crowns had a more secular significance as well: for among the common people the bridal pair were called the 'Tsar' and 'Tsarina', and proverbs said the wedding feast was meant to be 'potsarskii' - a banquet fit for kings.79

  The traditional Russian marriage was a patriarchal one. The husband's rights were reinforced by the teachings of the Church, by custom,

  by canon and by civil laws. According to the 1835 Digest of Laws, a wife's main duty was to 'submit to the will of her husband' and to reside with him in all circumstances, unless he was exiled to Siberia.80 State and Church conceived the husband as an autocrat - his absolute authority over wife and family a part of the divine and natural order. 'The husband and the wife are one body,' declared Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the arch-reactionary Procurator-General of the Holy Synod and personal tutor to the last two Tsars. 'The husband is the head of the wife. The wife is not distinguished from her husband. Those are the basic principles from which the provisions of our law proceed.'81 In fact, Russian women had the legal right to control their property - a right, it seems, that was established in the eighteenth century, and in some respects to do with property they were better off than women in the rest of Europe or America.82 But women were at a severe disadvantage when it came to inheriting family property; they had no legal right to request a separation or to challenge the authority of their husband; and, short of a severe injury, they had no protection against physical abuse.

  'Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh dear me!' The bridal lament was not unwarranted. The peasant wife was destined for a life of suffering - so much so, indeed, that her life became a symbol of the peasant's misery, used by nineteenth-century writers to highlight the worst aspects of Russian life. The traditional peasant household was much larger than its European counterpart, often containing more than a dozen members, with the wives and families of two or three brothers living under the same roof as their parents. The young bride who arrived in this household was likely to be burdened with the meanest chores, the fetching and the cooking, the washing and the childcare, and generally treated like a serf. She would have to put up with the sexual advances of not just her husband, but his father, too, for the ancient peasant custom of snokbachestvo gave the household elder rights of access to her body in the absence of his son. Then there were the wife-beatings. For centuries the peasants had claimed the right to beat their wives. Russian proverbs were full of advice on the wisdom of such violence:

  'Hit your wife with the butt of the axe, get down and see if she's breathing. If she is, she's shamming and wants some more.'

  'The more you beat the old woman, the tastier the soup will be.'

  'Beat your wife like a fur coat, then there'll be less noise.'

  'A wife is nice twice: when she's brought into the house [as a bride] and when she's carried out of it to her grave.'83

  For those who saw the peasant as a natural Christian (that is, practically the whole of the intelligentsia) such barbaric customs presented a problem. Dostoevsky tried to get around it by claiming that the people should be judged by the 'sacred things for which they yearn' rather than 'their frequent acts of bestiality', which were no more than surface covering, the 'slime of centuries of oppression'. Yet even Dostoevsky stumbled when it came to wife-beating:

  Have you ever seen how a peasant beats his wife? I have. He begins with a rope or a strap. Peasant life is devoid of aesthetic pleasures - music, theatres, magazines; naturally this gap has to be filled somehow. Tying up his wife or thrusting her legs into the opening of a floorboard, our good little peasant would begin, probably, methodically, cold-bloodedly, even sleepily, with measured blows, without listening to her screams and entreaties. Or rather he does listen - and listens with delight: or what pleasure would there be in beating her?… The blows rain down faster and faster, harder and harder -countless blows. He begins to get excited and finds it to his taste. The animal cries of his tortured victim go to his head like vodka… Finally, she grows quiet; she stops shrieking and only groans, her breath catching violently. And now the blows come even faster and more furiously. Suddenly he throws away the strap; like a madman he grabs a stick or branch, anything, and breaks it on her back with three final terrifying blows. Enough! He stops, sits down at the table, heaves a sigh, and has another drink.84

  Wife-beating was a rare phenomenon in the gentry class, but the patriarchal customs of the Domostroi, the sixteenth-century manual of the Muscovite household, were still very much in evidence. Alexandra Labzina, the daughter of a minor gentry family, was married off on her thirteenth birthday, in 1771, to a man she only met on her wedding day. Her father having died, and her mother being gravely ill, she was

  given to her husband with instructions from her mother 'to obey in all things'. It turned out that her husband was a beast, and he treated her with cruelty. He locked her in her room for days on end, while he slept with his niece, or went out for days on drinking-whoring binges with his friends. He forbade her to attend her mother's funeral, or to see her nanny when she became ill. Eventually, like so many of his type, her husband was sent out to administer the mines at Petrozavodsk and later at Nerchinsk, the Siberian penal colony where Volkonsky was exiled. Away
from any social censure, his treatment of his wife became increasingly sadistic. One freezing night he locked her naked in the barn while he carried on with prostitutes inside the house. She bore it all with Christian meekness, until he died from syphilis and she returned to Russia, where eventually she married the vice-president of the Academy of Arts.85

  Labzina's treatment was exceptionally cruel, but the patriarchal culture that had produced it was pretty universal in the provinces until the latter half of the nineteenth century. The landowner Maria Adam, for example, had an aunt in Tambov province who had married a neighbouring landowner in the 1850s. Her husband, it transpired, had only married her to gain possession of her property and, as soon as they were wed, he made her life unbearable. The aunt ran away and sought shelter at her niece's house, but the husband came and found her, threatened to 'skin her alive' and, when his wife's maid intervened, he beat her with his whip. Eventually, after dreadful scenes, Maria took her aunt and the badly beaten maid to appeal for help at the house of the provincial governor, but the governor would not accept the women's evidence and sent them away. For three months they lived at Maria's house, barricaded inside to protect themselves from the husband who came and abused them there every day, until finally, in the liberal atmosphere of 1855, a new governor was appointed who secured the Senate's permission for Maria's aunt to live apart from her husband.86 Such divorces were very rare indeed - about fifty a year for the whole of Russia in the 1850s, rising to no more than a few hundred in the final decades of the nineteenth century87 - much fewer than in Europe at the time. Until 1917 the Russian Church retained control of marriage and divorce, and it stubbornly resisted the European trend to relax the divorce laws.

  Near the end of Kitty's wedding in Anna Karenina the priest motions the bridal pair to a rose silk carpet where they are to perform the sacraments.

  Often as they had both heard the saying that the one who steps first on the carpet will be the head of the house, neither Levin nor Kitty could think of that as they took those few steps towards it. They did not even hear the loud remarks and disputes that followed, some maintaining that Levin was first and others insisting that they had both stepped on together.88