NATASHA

by Orlando Figes

  But attitudes like this were not just literary invention. They were documented in the memoir sources, medical reports and ethnographic studies of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.140 Some put down the peasants' resignation to a serf-like fatalism in which death was viewed as a release from suffering. When they talked about their lot, the peasants often referred to the afterlife as a 'kingdom of liberty' where their ancestors lived in 'God's freedom'.141 This was the idea behind Turgenev's Sketches, in the story 'Living Relic', where a sick peasant woman yearns for death to end her suffering. Like many of her class, she believes that she will be rewarded for her suffering in Heaven and this makes her unafraid to die. Others explained such peasant fatalism as a form of self-defence. Death was such a common fact of village life that, to a degree, the peasant must have become hardened towards it. In a society where nearly half the children died before the age of five there had to be some way of coping with the grief. Doctors often noted that the parents of a village child would not react emotionally to its death, and in many of the poorest regions, where there were too many mouths to feed, women would even thank

  God for taking it away.142 There were peasant proverbs to advance the view that 'It's a good day when a child dies'.143 Infanticide was not uncommon, especially at times of economic hardship, and with children who were illegitimate it was practically the norm.144

  The desperate peasant woman in The Brothers Karamazov who has lost her boy is told by Zosima that God has taken him and given him the rank of an angel. In peasant Russia it was generally believed, in the words of a villager from Riazan province, that 'the souls of little children go straight up to heaven'.145 Such thoughts must have been of real comfort. For the peasantry believed in a universe where the earth and spirit worlds were intimately linked in one continuum. The spirit world was a constant presence in their daily lives, with demons and angels at every turn. The fortunes of the souls of their kin were a matter of the highest importance. There were good and bad spirits in the Russian peasant world, and how a person died determined whether his spirit would also be good or bad. The peasant thought it was essential to prepare for death, to make the dying comfortable, to pray for them, to end all arguments with them, to dispose properly of their property, and to give them a Christian burial (sometimes with a candle and a bread ladder to help them on their way) in order that their souls could rise up peacefully to the spirit world.146 Those who died dissatisfied would return to haunt the living as demons or diseases. Hence, in many places it became the custom to bury murder victims, those who died by suicide or poisoning, deformed people and sorcerers and witches outside the boundaries of the cemetery.

  During a severe harvest failure it was even known for the peasants to exhume the corpses of those whose evil spirits were thought to be to blame.147 In the peasant belief system the spirits of the dead led an active life. Their souls ate and slept, they felt cold and pain, and they often came back to the family household, where by custom they took up residence behind the stove. It was important to feed the dead. All sorts of food would be left around the house where the spirit of the dead was believed to remain for forty days. Water and honey were mandatory, in popular belief, but vodka, too, was often left out to prepare the soul for its long journey to the other world. In some places they left money out, or placed it in the grave, so that the spirit of the dead person could buy land in the next world to feed itself.148

  At set times of the year, but especially at Easter and Pentecost, it was important for the family to give remembrance to the dead and feed their souls, in graveside picnics, with ritual breads and pies and decorated eggs. Breadcrumbs would be scattered on the graves to feed the birds - symbols of the souls that rose up from the ground and flew around the village during Easter time - and if the birds arrived it was taken as a sign that the spirits of the dead were alive and well.149 Dostoevsky was borrowing from this ancient custom in The Brothers Karamazov when he made Ilyusha, the dying little boy, ask his father to scatter bread around his grave 'so that the sparrows may fly down, and I shall hear and it will cheer me up not to be lying alone'.150 The Russian grave was much more than a place of burial. It was a sacred site of social interchange between the living and the dead.

  One of the last utterances Tolstoy made, as he lay dying in the stationmaster's little house at Astapovo, was 'What about the peasants? How do peasants die?' He had thought a lot about the question, and had long believed that the peasants died in a different way from the educated classes, a way that showed they knew the meaning of their lives. The peasants died accepting death, and this was the proof of their religious faith. Tolstoy meant to die in that way, too.151 Many years before, he had written in his diary: 'When I am dying I should like to be asked whether I still see life as before, as a progression towards God, an increase of love. If I should not have the strength to speak, and the answer is yes, I shall close my eyes; if it is no, I shall look up.'152 No one thought of asking him the question at the moment of his death, so we shall never know how he crossed the frontier which had brought him so much agony and so much doubt. There was no reconciliation with the Church, despite Tolstoy's flight to Optina. The Holy Synod tried to win him back and even sent one of the Optina monks to Astapovo, where Tolstoy became stranded, too ill to go on, after he had left the monastery. But the mission failed - none of Tolstoy's family would even let the monk see the dying man - and so in the end the writer was denied a Christian burial.153

  But if the Church refused to say a mass for the dead man, the people said one for him in another way. Despite the attempts of the police to stop them, thousands of mourners made their way to Yasnaya Polyana, where amid scenes of national grief that were not to be found on the

  death of any Tsar, Tolstoy was buried in his favourite childhood spot. It was a place in the woods where, many years before, his brother Nikolai had buried in the ground a magic stick on which he had written the secret about how eternal peace would come and evil would be banished from the world. As Tolstoy's coffin was lowered into the ground, the mourners started singing an ancient Russian chant, and someone shouted, in defiance of the police who had been instructed to impose the Church's excommunication of the writer to the end, 'On your knees! Take off your hats!'154 Everyone obeyed the Christian ritual and, after hesitating for a moment, the police kneeled down too and removed their caps.

  overleaf: Scythian figures: late nineteenth-century archaeological engraving

  1

  Before he turned to art Kandinsky thought he might become an anthropologist. As a student reading law at Moscow University, he had fallen ill in his final year, and to recuperate he had set off on a trip to the remote Komi region, 800 kilometres north-east of Moscow, to study the beliefs of its Finno-Ugric tribes. Travelling by train as far as Vologda, where the railway stopped, he then sailed east along the Sukhona river, entering the forests of 'another world', as he recalled, where the people still believed in demons and spirits. Anthropologists had long marked out the Komi region as a meeting point between Christianity and the old shamanic paganism of the Asiatic tribes. It was a 'wonderland' where 'the people's every action is accompanied by secret magic rituals'.1 The trip left an indelible impression on Kandinsky. The shamanism he discovered there became one of the major inspirations for his abstract art.2 'Here I learned how to look at art', he would later write - 'how to turn oneself around within a painting and how to live in it.'3

  Kandinsky's journey east was a journey back in time. He was looking for the remnants of the paganism which Russian missionaries had described in that region from medieval times. There were ancient records of the Komi people worshipping the sun, the river and the trees; of frenzied whirling dances to summon up their spirits; and there were legendary tales about the Komi shamans who beat their drums and flew off on their horse-sticks to the spirit world. Six hundred years of church-building had given no more than a gloss of Christianity to this Eurasian culture. The Komi people had been forcibly converted to the Christian faith b
y St Stephan in the fourteenth century. The area had been colonized by Russian settlers for several hundreds years, and the culture of the Komi, from their language to their dress, bore a close resemblance to the Russian way of life.

  Ust-Sysolsk, the region's capital, where Kandinsky lived for three summer months in 1889, looked much like any Russian town. It consisted of a small classical ensemble of administrative buildings in the centre of a sprawling settlement of log-built peasant huts. As Kandinsky did his fieldwork, recording the beliefs of the old people

  21. Group of Komi people in typical clothing, c. 1912

  and looking for motifs of shamanistic cults in their folk art, he soon found traces of this ancient pagan culture concealed underneath the Russian one. None of the Komi would describe themselves as anything but Orthodox (at least not to someone from Moscow), and in their public rituals they had a Christian priest. But in their private lives, as Kandinsky ascertained, they still looked to the old shamans. The Komi

  people believed in a forest monster called 'Vorsa'. They had a 'living soul' they called an 'ort', which shadowed people through their lives and appeared before them at the moment of their death. They prayed to the spirits of the water and the wind; they spoke to the fire as if they were speaking to a living thing; and their folk art still showed signs of worshipping the sun. Some of the Komi people told Kandinsky that the stars were nailed on to the sky.4

  Scratching the surface of Komi life Kandinsky had revealed its Asian origins. For centuries the Finno-Ugric tribes had intermingled with the Turkic peoples of northern Asia and the Central Asian steppe. Nineteenth-century archaeologists in the Komi region had unearthed large amounts of ceramic pottery with Mongolian ornament. Kandinsky found a chapel with a Mongolian roof, which he sketched in his journal of the trip.5 Nineteenth-century philologists subscribed to the theory of a Ural-Altaic family of languages that united the Finns with the Ostiaks, the Voguls, Samoyeds and Mongols in a single culture stretching from Finland to Manchuria. The idea was advanced in the 1850s by the Finnish explorer M. A. Castren, whose journeys to the east of the Urals had uncovered many things he recognized from home.6 Castren's observations were borne out by later scholarship. There are shamanistic motifs, for example, in the Kalevala, or 'Land of Heroes', the Finnish national epic poem, which may suggest a historical connection to the peoples of the East, although the Finns themselves regard their poem as a Baltic Odyssey in the purest folk traditions of Karelia, the region where Finland and Russia meet.7 Like a shaman with his horse-stick and drum, its hero Vainamoinen journeys with his kantele (a sort of zither) to a magic underworld inhabited by spirits of the dead. One-fifth of the Kalevala is composed in magic charms. Not written down until 1822, it was usually sung to tunes in the pentatonic ('Indo-Chinese') scale corresponding to the five strings of the kantele, which, like its predecessor, the five-stringed Russian gusli, was tuned to that scale.8

  Kandinsky's exploration of the Komi region was not just a scientific quest. It was a personal one as well. The Kandinskys took their name from the Konda river near Tobolsk in Siberia, where they had settled in the eighteenth century. The family was descended from the Tungus tribe, who lived along the Amur river in Mongolia. Kandinsky was

  proud of his Mongol looks and he liked to boast that he was a descendant of the seventeenth-century Tungus chieftain Gantimur. During the eighteenth century the Tungus had moved north-west to the Ob and Konda rivers. They intermingled with the Ostiaks and the Voguls, who traded with the Komi and with other Finnic peoples on the Urals' western side. Kandinsky's ancestors were among these traders, who would have intermarried with the Komi people, so it is possible that he had Komi blood as well.9

  Many Russian families had Mongol origins. 'Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar,' Napoleon once said. The coats of arms of Russian families - where Muslim motifs such as sabres, arrows, crescent moons and the 8-pointed star are much in evidence - bear witness to this Mongol legacy. There were four main groups of Mongol descendants. First there were those descended from the Turkic-speaking nomads who had swept in with the armies of Genghiz Khan in the thirteenth century and settled down in Russia following the break-up of the 'Golden Horde', the Russian name for the Mongol host with its gleaming tent encampment on the Volga river, in the fifteenth century. Among these were some of the most famous names in Russian history: writers like Karamzin, Turgenev, Bulgakov and Akhmatova; philosophers like Chaadaev, Kireevsky, Berdiaev; statesmen like Godunov, Bukharin, Tukhachevsky; and composers like Rimsky-Korsakov. * Next were the families of Turkic origin who came to Russia from the west: the Tiutchevs and Chicherins, who came from Italy; or the Rachmaninovs, who had arrived from Poland in the eighteenth century. Even the Kutuzovs were of Tatar origin (qutuz is the Turkic word for 'furious' or 'mad') - an irony in view of the great general Mikhail Kutuzov's status as a hero made of purely Russian

  * The name Turgenev derives from the Mongol word for 'swift' (tiirgen); Bulgakov from the Turkic word 'to wave' (bulgaq); Godunov from the Mongol word godon ('a stupid person'); and Korsakov from the Turkic word qorsaq, a type of steppeland fox. Akhmatova was born Anna Gorenko. She changed her name to Akhmatova (said to be the name of her Tatar great-grandmother) when her father said he did not want a poet in his family. Akhmatova claimed descent from Khan Akhmat, a direct descendant of Genghiz Khan and the last Tatar khan to receive tribute from the Russian princes the was assassinated in 14X1). Nadezhda Mandelstam believed that Akhmatova had invented the Tatar origins of her great-grandmother (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned (London,1989), p. 449).

  22. (opposite) Vastly Kandinsky: sketches of buildings in the Komi region, including a church with a Mongolian-type roof. From the Vologda

  Diary of 1889

  stuff. Families of mixed Slav and Tatar ancestry made up a third category. Among these were some of Russia's grandest dynasties - the Sheremetevs, Stroganovs and Rostopchins - although there were many at a lower level, too. Gogol's family, for instance, was of mixed Polish and Ukrainian descent but it shared a common ancestry with the Turkic Gogels, who derived their surname from the Chuvash word gogul-a type of steppeland bird (Gogol was renowned for his bird-like features, especially his beaky nose). The final group were Russian families who changed their names to make them sound more Turkic, either because they had married into a Tatar family, or because they had bought land in the east and wanted smooth relations with the native tribes. The Russian Veliaminovs, for example, changed their name to the Turkic Aksak (from aqsaq, meaning 'lame') to facilitate their purchase of enormous tracts of steppeland from the Bashkir tribes near Orenburg: and so the greatest family of Slavophiles, the Aksakovs, was founded.10

  Adopting Turkic names became the height of fashion at the court of Moscow between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Tatar influence from the Golden Horde remained very strong and many noble dynasties were established. During the eighteenth century, when Peter's nobles were obliged to look westwards, the fashion fell into decline. But it was revived in the nineteenth century - to the point where many pure-bred Russian families invented legendary Tatar ancestors to make themselves appear more exotic. Nabokov, for example, claimed (perhaps with tongue in cheek) that his family was descended from no less a personage than Genghiz Khan himself, who 'is said to have fathered the Nabok, a petty Tatar prince in the twelfth century who married a Russian damsel in an era of intensely artistic Russian culture'.11

  After Kandinsky had returned from the Komi region he gave a lecture on the findings of his trip to the Imperial Ethnographic Society in St Petersburg. The auditorium was full. The shamanistic beliefs of the Eurasian tribes held an exotic fascination for the Russian public at

  23. Masked Buriat shaman with drum, drumstick and horse-sticks. Note the iron on his robe. Early 1900s

  this time, when the culture of the West was widely seen as spiritually dead and intellectuals were looking towards the East for spiritual renewal. But this sudden interest in Eurasia was also at the heart of an urgent
new debate about the roots of Russia's folk culture.

  In its defining myth Russia had evolved as a Christian civilization,

  Its culture was a product of the combined influence of Scandinavia and Byzantium. The national epic which the Russians liked to tell about themselves was the story of a struggle by the agriculturalists of the northern forest lands against the horsemen of the Asiatic steppe -the Avars and Khazars, Polovtsians and Mongols, Kazakhs, Kalmyks and all the other bow-and-arrow tribes that had raided Russia from the earliest times. This national myth had become so fundamental to the Russians' European self-identity that even to suggest an Asiatic influence on Russia's culture was to invite charges of treason.

  In the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, cultural attitudes shifted. As the empire spread across the Asian steppe, there was a growing movement to embrace its cultures as a part of Russia's own. The first important sign of this cultural shift had come in the 1860s, when Stasov tried to show that much of Russia's folk culture, its ornament and folk epics (byliny), had antecedents in the East. Stasov was denounced by the Slavophiles and other patriots. Yet by the end of the 1880s, when Kandinsky made his trip, there was an explosion of research into the Asiatic origins of Russia's folk culture. Archaeologists such as D. N. Anuchin and N. I. Veselovsky had exposed the depth of the Tatar influence on the Stone Age culture of Russia. They had equally revealed, or at least suggested, the Asiatic origins of many folk beliefs among the Russian peasants of the steppe.12 Anthropologists had found shamanic practices in Russian peasant sacred rituals.13 Others pointed out the ritual use of totems by the Russian peasantry in Siberia.14 The anthropologist Dmitry Zelenin maintained that the peasants' animistic beliefs had been handed down to them from the Mongol tribes. Like the Bashkirs and the Chuvash (tribes of Finnish stock with a strong Tatar strain), the Russian peasants used a snakelike leather charm to draw a fever; and like the Komi, or the Ostiaks and the Buriats in the Far East, they were known to hang the carcass of an ermine or a fox from the portal of their house to ward away the