NATASHA

by Orlando Figes

  Distant fathers were, of course, the norm in nineteenth-century Europe, but there were few cultures where the mother was as remote as

  she tended to be in the Russian noble family. It was the custom for a noble child to be put into the care of a wet nurse almost from the day they were born. Even as the child grew up there were many noble mothers who were just too busy with their social life, or with other babies, to give them the attention that they must have surely craved. 'Mother was extremely kind, but we hardly ever saw her' is a phrase that crops up often in nineteenth-century memoirs about gentry life.131 Anna Karenina, although not a model parent, was not exceptional in her ignorance of the routines of her children's nursery ('I'm so useless here').132

  It was not unusual, then, for the noble child to grow up without any direct parental discipline. Parents often left their children to the care of relatives (typically a spinster aunt or grandmother) or to the supervision of their nannies and the maids and the rest of the domestic staff. Yet the servants were naturally afraid to discipline their master's children (the 'little masters' and the 'little mistresses'), so they tended to indulge them and let them have their way. Boys, in particular, were prone to misbehave ('little monsters'), knowing very well that their parents would defend them if their nanny, a mere serf, dared to complain. Critics of the social system, like the writer Saltykov-Shchedrin, argued that this latitude encouraged noble children to be cruel to serfs; in their adult lives they carried on in the belief that they could lord it over all their serfs and treat them as they liked. It is certainly conceivable that the selfishness and cruelty towards the serfs that ran right through the governing elites of Tsarist Russia went back in some cases to the formative experiences of childhood. For example, if a noble child was sent to the local parish school (a practice that was common in the provinces), he would go with a serf boy, whose sole purpose was to take the whipping for his master's misdemeanours in the class. How could this develop any sense of justice in the noble child?

  Yet there were bonds of affection and respect between many noble children and their serfs. Herzen argued that children liked to be with the servants 'because they were bored in the drawing-room and happy in the pantry' and because they shared a common temperament.

  This resemblance between servants and children accounts for their mutual attraction. Children hate the aristocratic ideas of the grown-ups and their benevolently condescending manners, because they are clever and understand

  that in the eyes of grown-up people they are children, while in the eyes of servants they are people. Consequently they are much fonder of playing cards or lotto with the maids than with visitors. Visitors play for the children's benefit with condescension. They give way to them, tease them, and stop playing whenever they feel like it; the maids, as a rule, play as much for their own sakes as for the children's, and that gives the game interest. Servants are extremely devoted to children, and this is not the devotion of a slave, but the mutual affection of the weak and the simple.133

  Writing as a socialist, Herzen put down his 'hatred of oppression' to the 'mutual alliance' he had formed with the servants as a child against the senior members of the house. He recalled: 'At times, when I was a child, Vera Artamonovna [his nanny] would say by way of the greatest rebuke for some naughtiness: "Wait a bit, you will grow up and turn into just such another master as the rest." I felt this a horrible insult. The old woman need not have worried herself - just such another as the rest, anyway, I have not become.'1'4 Much of this, of course, was written for effect; it made for a good story. Yet other writers similarly claimed that their populist convictions had been formed by their childhood contacts with the serfs.135

  The high-born Russian boy spent his childhood in the downstairs servants' world. He was cared for by his serf nanny, who slept by his side in the nursery, held him when he cried, and in many cases became like a mother to him. Everywhere he went he was accompanied by his serf 'uncle'. Even when he went to school or enrolled in the army this trusted servant would act as his guardian. Young girls, too, were chaperoned by a 'shaggy footman' - so-called on account of the fur coat he wore over the top of his livery - like the one imagined as 'a huge and matted bear' in Tatiana's dream in Eugene Onegin:

  She dare not look to see behind her, And ever faster on she reels; At every turn he seems to find her, The shaggy footman at her heels!…136

  By necessity the children of the servants were the playmates of the high-born child - for in the countryside there would not be other

  children of a similar social class for miles around. Like many nineteenth-century memoirists, Anna Lelong had fond memories of the games she played with the village girls and boys: throwing games with blocks of wood (gorodki); bat-and-ball games played with bones and bits of scrap metal (babki and its many variants); clapping-singing-dancing games; and divination games. In the summer she would go swimming with the village children in the river, or she would be taken by her nanny to the villages to play with the younger children as their mothers threshed the rye. Later, in the autumn, she would join the village girls to pick whortleberries and make jam. She loved these moments when she was allowed to enter the peasant world. The fact that it was forbidden by her parents, and that her nanny made her promise not to tell, made it even more exciting for the girl. In the pantry was an atmosphere of warmth and intimacy that was missing in her parents' drawing room. 'I would get up very early and go into the maids' room where they were already at their spinning wheels, and nanny would be knitting socks. I would listen to the stories about peasants being sold, about young boys sent to Moscow or girls married off. There was nothing like this in my parents' house.' Listening to such stories, she 'began to understand what serfdom meant and it made me wish that life was different'.137

  Herzen wrote that there existed 'a feudal bond of affection' between the noble family and its household serfs.138 We have lost sight of this bond in the histories of oppression that have shaped our views of serfdom since 1917. But it can be found in the childhood memoirs of the aristocracy; it lives on in every page of nineteenth-century literature; and its spirit can be felt in Russian paintings - none more lyrical than Venetsianov's Morning of the Lady of the Manor (1823) (plate 3).

  Of all the household servants, those associated with childcare (the maid, the wet nurse and the nanny) were the closest to the family. They formed a special caste that died out suddenly after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. They were set apart from the other serfs by their fierce devotion and, hard though it may be to understand today, many of them derived all their joy from serving the family. Given special rooms in the main house and treated, on the whole, with kindness and respect, such women became part of the family and many were kept on and provided for long after they had ceased to work. The nostalgia

  7. A wet nurse in traditional Russian dress. Early-twentieth-century photograph

  of the nobleman for his childhood was associated with the warmth and tenderness of his relationship with these people.

  The wet nurse was a particularly important figure in the Russian noble family. Russians continued to employ a peasant wet nurse long after it had become the conventional wisdom in the rest of Europe for mothers to breastfeed their own infants. Child-rearing handbooks of the early nineteenth century were overtly nationalist in their defence

  of this habit, claiming that the 'milk of a peasant girl can give lifelong health and moral purity to the noble child'.139 It was common for the wet nurse to be dressed, and sometimes even painted, in traditional Russian dress - a custom that continued in many families until the revolution of 1917.* Ivan Argunov, the Sheremetevs' artist, depicted several 'unknown peasant girls' who were most probably wet nurses. The fact that a girl like this should become the subject of a portrait painting, commissioned for display in her owner's house, in itself speaks volumes about her position in the culture of the Russian aristocracy. Pavel Sumarokov, recalling daily life among the nobility in the eighteenth century, said that the wet nurse was g
iven pride of place among all the domestic staff. The family would call her by her name and patronymic rather than by the nickname that was given to most serfs. She was also the only servant who was allowed to remain seated in the presence of the mistress or the master of the house.140 Noble memoirs from the nineteenth century are filled with descriptions of the family's affection for their old wet nurse, who was likely to be treated as a much-loved member of the family and provided with living quarters until she died. Anna Lelong loved her nurse Vasilisia 'more than anyone', and parting from her, as she had to do when she left home to get married, caused her 'dreadful grief. The intimacy of their relationship, which was 'like that of a mother and a daughter', stemmed from the death of the nurse's infant son. Because of her duties to nurse Anna, she had been obliged to abandon him. Guilt and surrogacy became intertwined, for both Anna and her nurse. Later on, when Anna's husband died, she took it upon herself to care for her old nurse, who came to live with her at the family estate.141

  But it was the nanny who was closest to the heart of the noble child.

  " The artist Dobuzhinsky described the spectacular appearance of the traditional wet nurse on the streets of Petersburg before 1917: 'She had a kind of "parade uniform", a pseudo-peasant costume, theatrically designed, which was worn right up to the outbreak of the war in 1914. One often saw a fat, red-cheeked wet nurse walking beside her fashionably dressed mistress. She would be dressed in a brocade blouse and cape, and a pink head-dress if the baby was a girl, or a blue one if it was a boy. In the

  summer the wet nurses used to wear coloured sarafans with lots of small gold or glass

  buttons and muslin balloon sleeves'. (M. V. Dobuzhinskii vospominaniia (New York, 1976, p. 34.)

  The stereotype of the old-fashioned nanny - the sort that appears in countless works of art from Eugene Onegin to Boris Godunov -was a simple and kind-hearted Russian peasant woman who got the children up, supervised their play, took them out for walks, fed them, washed them, told them fairy tales, sang them songs and comforted them at night when they woke up with nightmares. More than a surrogate mother, the nanny was the child's main source of love and emotional security. 'Simply and unthinkingly,' reminisced one woman of her noble childhood, 'I imbibed the life-giving fluids of love from my nanny, and they keep me going even now. How many loyal and loving Russian nannies have guarded and inspired the lives of their children, leaving an indelible impression upon them.'142

  Such indeed was the lasting influence of the nanny's tender care that many nineteenth-century memoirists became obsessed with the nostalgic topic of their nursery years. This was not some arrested development. Rather it was a reflection of the fact that their primary emotions were locked up in that distant chamber of their past. Time and time again these memoirists stress that it was their nanny who taught them how to love and how to live. For some, the key was their nanny's innate kindness, which awoke their moral sensibilities; for others, it was her religious faith, which brought them into contact with the spiritual world. 'How wonderful was our nanny!' Lelong recalled. 'She was intelligent and always serious, and she was very devout; I would often wake up in the nursery at night and see nanny praying by the door of our room, from where she could see the votive lamp. What fantastic fairy tales she told us when we went for a walk in the woods. They made me see the forest world anew, to love nature from a poetic point of view.'143 The lost idyll of 'a Russian childhood', if ever it existed, was contained in these emotions, which remained associated with the image of the nanny in the adult memory. 'It may seem strange', wrote A. K. Chertkova (the wife of Tolstoy's secretary), 'but forty years have passed since our childhood, and our nanny still remains alive in my memory. The older I become, the clearer is the memory of childhood in my mind, and these recollections are so vivid that the past becomes the present and everything connected in my heart to the memory of my dear good little nanny becomes all the more precious.'144

  At the age of six or seven the noble child was transferred from the

  care of a nanny to the supervision of a French or German tutor and then sent off to school. To be separated from one's nanny was to undergo a painful rite of passage from the world of childhood to that of youth and adulthood, as Guards officer Anatoly Vereshchagin recalled. When at the age of six he was told that he would be sent to school, he was 'frightened most of all by the thought of being separated from my nanny. I was so scared that I woke up crying in the night; I would call out for my nanny, and would plead with her not to leave me'.145 The trauma was compounded by the fact that it entailed a transition from the female-regulated sphere of childhood play to the strict male domain of the tutor and the boarding school; from the Russian-speaking nursery to a house of discipline where the child was forced to speak French. The young and innocent would no longer be protected from the harsh rules of the adult world; he would suddenly be forced to put aside the language that had expressed his childhood feelings and adopt an alien one. To lose nanny was, in short, to be wrenched from one's own emotions as a child. But the separation could be just as difficult on the nanny's side:

  Because Fevronia Stepanovna had always spoiled me endlessly, I became a cry-baby, and a proper coward, which I came to regret later when I joined the army. My nanny's influence paralysed the attempts of all my tutors to harden me and so I had to be sent away to boarding school. She found it difficult when I started to grow up and entered into the world of adult men. After cosseting me my whole childhood, she cried when I went swimming in the river with my elder brother and our tutor, or when I went riding, or when I first shot my father's gun. When, years later, as a young officer, I returned home, she got ready two rooms in the house for my return, but they looked like a nursery. Every day she would place two apples by my bed. It hurt her feelings that I had brought my batman home, since she thought it was her duty to serve me. She was shocked to discover that I smoked, and I did not have the heart to tell her that I drank as well. But the greatest shock was when I went to war to fight the Serbs. She tried to dissuade me from going and then, one evening, she said that she would come with me. We would live together in a little cottage and while I went to war she would clean the house and prepare the supper for the evening. Then on holidays we would spend the day together baking pies, as we had always done, and when the war was over we

  would come back home with medals on my chest. I went to sleep peacefully that night, imagining that war was just as idyllic as she thought it was… Yet I needed nanny more than I had thought. When I was nine and our Swiss tutor first arrived, my father said that I had to share a room with my elder brother and this Mr Kaderli, moving out of the room I had shared with my nanny. It turned out that I was completely unable to undress or wash myself or even go to bed without my nanny's help. I did not know how to go to sleep without calling out for her, at least six times, to check that she was there. Getting dressed was just as hard. I had never put my own socks on.146

  It was not at all unusual for grown men and women to remain in frequent contact with their former nannies; indeed, for them to provide for them in their old age. Pushkin remained close to his old nanny, and he put her image into many of his works. In some ways she was his muse - a fact recognized by many of his friends, so that Prince Viazemsky, for example, signed off his letters to the poet with 'a deep bow of respect and gratitude to Rodionova!'147 Pushkin loved his nanny more than anyone. Estranged from his own parents, he always called her 'Mama' and when she died, his was the grief of a son:

  My friend in days devoid of good, My ageing and decrepit dove! Abandoned in a far-off wood, You still await me with your love. Beside the window in the hall, As if on watch, you sit and mourn, At times your knitting needles stall In hands now wrinkled and forlorn. Through long-deserted gates you peer Upon the dark and distant way: Forebodings, anguish, cares and fear Constrict your weary breast today.148

  Diaghilev, as well, was famously attached to his nanny. He had never known his mother, who had died when he was born. Nanny Dunia had been born a
serf on the Yevreinov estate of his mother's family. She had nursed Diaghilev's mother before coming as part of