NATASHA

by Orlando Figes

  their minds did not in fact exist - it was no more than a theory and a myth - and that they were cut off from the actual peasants by a cultural, social and intellectual abyss that they could not hope to bridge. Like an unsolved riddle, the peasant remained unknown and perhaps unknowable.

  2

  In the summer of 1870 Ilia Repin left St Petersburg for 'an undiscovered land'.25 Together with his brother and a fellow student painter called Fedor Vasilev, he travelled by steamer down the Volga river as far as the town of Stavropol, about 700 kilometres east of Moscow. The young artist's aim was to make a study of the peasants for a painting he had planned of the Volga barge haulers. The idea of the picture had first come to him in the summer of 1868, when he had observed a team of haulers trudging wearily along a river bank near St Petersburg. Repin had originally thought to contrast these sad figures with a well-groomed group of happy picnickers. It would have been a typical example of the sort of expository genre painting favoured by most Russian realists at the time. But he was dissuaded from this propagandist picture by his friend Vasilev, a gifted landscape painter from the Wanderers' school, who persuaded him to depict the haulers on their own.

  It took two years to obtain the finance and the permits for their trip - the Tsarist authorities being naturally suspicious of the art students and fearing that they might have revolutionary aims. For three months Repin lived among the former serfs of Shiriayevo, a village overlooking the Volga near Samara. He filled his sketchbooks with ethnographic details of their fishing boats and nets, their household utensils and rag-made shoes and clothes. The villagers did not want to be drawn. They believed that the Devil stole a person's soul when his image was depicted on the page. One day they discovered Repin trying to persuade a group of village girls to pose for him. They accused the painter of the Devil's work and demanded his 'passport', threatening to hand him over to the local constable. The only document which Repin had on him was a letter from the Academy of Arts. The impressive Imperial

  insignia on the letterhead was enough to restore calm. 'See,' said the village scribe who scrutinized the 'passport', 'he comes to us from the Tsar.'26

  Eventually the painter found a team of haulers who, for a fee, allowed him to sketch them. For several weeks he lived with these human beasts of burden. As he got to know them, he came to see their individual personalities. One had been an icon painter; another a soldier; and a third, named Kanin, was formerly a priest. Repin was struck by the sheer waste of talent in their bestial servitude. Strapped into their riggings, their noble faces weathered, the haulers were for him 'like Greek philosophers, sold as slaves to the barbarians'.27 Their bondage was a symbol of the Russian people's oppressed creativity. Kanin, Repin thought, had 'the character of Russia on his face':

  There was something eastern and ancient about it… the face of a Scyth… And what eyes! What depth of vision!… And his brow, so large and wise… He seemed to me a colossal mystery, and for that reason I loved him. Kanin, with a rag around his head, his clothes in patches made by himself and then worn out, appeared none the less as a man of dignity: he was like a saint.28

  In the final painting of The Volga Barge Haulers (1873) (plate n) it is this human dignity that stands out above all. The image at the time was extraordinary and revolutionary. Hitherto, even in the paintings of a democratic artist such as Alexei Venetsianov, the image of the peasant had been idealized or sentimentalized. But each of Repin's boatmen had been drawn from life and each face told its own story of private suffering. Stasov saw the painting as a comment on the latent force of social protest in the Russian people, a spirit symbolized in the gesture of one young man readjusting his shoulder strap. But Dostoevsky praised the painting for its lack of crude tendentiousness,

  seeing it instead as an epic portrait of the Russian character. What Repin meant, however, is more difficult to judge. For his whole life was a struggle between politics and art.

  Repin was a 'man of the sixties'-a decade of rebellious questioning in the arts as well as in society. In the democratic circles in which he moved it was generally agreed that the duty of the artist was to focus

  13. Ilia Repin: sketches for The Volga Barge Haulers, 1870

  the attention of society on the need for social justice by showing how the common people really lived. There was a national purpose in this, too: for, if art was to be true and meaningful, if it was to teach the people how to feel and live, it needed to be national in the sense that it had its roots in the people's daily lives. This was the argument of Stasov, the domineering mentor of the national school in all the arts.

  Russian painters, he maintained, should give up imitating European art and look to their own people for artistic styles and themes. Instead of classical or biblical subjects they should depict 'scenes from the village and the city, remote corners of the provinces, the god-forsaken life of the lonely clerk, the corner of a lonely cemetery, the confusion of a market place, every joy and sorrow which grows and lives in peasant huts and opulent mansions'.29 Vladimir Stasov was the self-appointed champion of civic realist art. He took up the cause of the Wanderers in art, and the kuchkists in music, praising each in turn for their break from the European style of the Academy, and pushing each in their own way to become more 'Russian'. Virtually every artist and composer of the 1860s and 1870s found himself at some point in Stasov's tight embrace. The critic saw himself as the driver of a troika that would soon bring Russian culture on to the world stage. Repin, Musorgsky and the sculptor Antokolsky were its three horses.30

  Mark Antokolsky was a poor Jewish boy from Vilna who had entered the Academy at the same time as Repin and had been among fourteen students who left it in protest against its formal rules of classicism, to set up an artel, or commune of free artists, in 1863. Antokolsky quickly rose to fame for a series of sculptures of daily life in the Jewish ghetto which were hailed as the first real triumph of democratic art by all the enemies of the Academy. Stasov placed himself as Antokolsky's mentor, publicized his work and badgered him, as only Stasov could, to produce more sculptures on national themes. The critic was particularly enthusiastic about The Persecution of the Jews in the Spanish Inquisition (first exhibited in 1867), a work which Antokolsky never really finished but for which he did a series of studies. Stasov saw it as an allegory of political and national oppression - a subject as important to the Russians as to the Jews.31

  Repin identified with Antokolsky. He, too, had come from a poor provincial family - the son of a military settler (a type of state-owned peasant) from a small town called Chuguev in the Ukraine. He had learned his trade as an icon painter before entering the Academy and, like the sculptor, he felt out of place in the elite social milieu of Petersburg. Both men were inspired by an older student, Ivan Kram-skoi, who led the protest in 1863. Kramskoi was important as a portraitist. He painted lending figures such as Tolstoy and Nekrasov,

  but he also painted unknown peasants. Earlier painters such as Venetsi-anov had portrayed the peasant as an agriculturalist. But Kramskoi painted him against a plain background, and he focused on the face, drawing viewers in towards the eyes and forcing them to enter the inner world of people they had only yesterday treated as slaves. There were no implements or scenic landscapes, no thatched huts or ethnographic details to distract the viewer from the peasant's gaze or reduce the tension of this encounter. This psychological concentration was without precedent in the history of art, not just in Russia but in Europe, too, where even artists such as Courbet and Millet were still depicting peasants in the fields.

  It was through Kramskoi and Antokolsky that Repin came into the circle of Stasov in 1869, at the very moment the painter was preparing his own portrait of the peasantry in The Volga Barge Haulers. Stasov encouraged him to paint provincial themes, which were favoured at that time by patrons such as Tretiakov and the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, the Tsar's younger son, who, of all people, had commissioned the Barge Haulers and eventually put these starving peasants in his sumptuous
dining room. Under Stasov's domineering influence, Repin produced a series of provincial scenes following the success of the Barge Haulers in 1873. They were all essentially populist - not so much politically but in the general sense of the 1870s, when everybody thought the way ahead for Russia was to get a better knowledge of the people and their lives. For Repin, having just returned from his first trip to Europe in 1873-6, this goal was connected to his cultural rediscovery of the Russian provinces - 'that huge forsaken territory that interests nobody', as he wrote to Stasov in 1876, 'and about which people speak with derision or contempt; and yet it is here that the simple people live, and do so more authentically than we'.32

  Musorgsky was roughly the same age as Repin and Antokolsky but he had joined Stasov's stable a decade earlier, in 1858, when he was aged just nineteen. As the most historically minded and musically original of Balakirev's students, the young composer was patronized by Stasov and pushed in the direction of national themes. Stasov never let up in his efforts to direct his protege's interests and musical approach. He cast himself in loco parentis, visiting the 'youngster' Musorgsky (then thirty-two) when he shared a room with Rimsky-

  Korsakov (then twenty-seven) in St Petersburg. Stasov would arrive early in the morning, help the men get out of bed and wash, fetch their clothes, prepare tea and sandwiches for them, and then, as he put it, when 'we [got] down to our business [my emphasis - O. F.]', he would listen to the music they had just composed or give them new historical materials and ideas for their works.33 The Populist conception of Boris Godunov (in its revised version with the Kromy scene) is certainly in line with Stasov's influence. In a general sense all Musorgsky's operas are 'about the people' - if one understands that as the nation as a whole. Even Kbovanshchina - which drove Stasov mad with all its 'princely spawn'34 - carried the subtitle 'A national [people's] music history' ('narodnaya muzikal'naya drama'). Musorgsky explained his Populist approach in a letter to Repin, written in August 1873, congratulating him on his Barge Haulers:

  It is the people I want to depict: when I sleep I see them, when I eat I think of them, when I drink I can see them rise before me in all their reality, huge, unvarnished, and without tinsel trappings! And what an awful (in the true sense of that word) richness there is for the composer in the people's speech -as long as there's a corner of our land that hasn't been ripped open by the railway.35

  And yet there were tensions between Musorgsky and the Populist agenda set out for him by Stasov - tensions which have been lost in the cultural politics that have always been attached to the composer's name.36 Stasov was crucially important in Musorgsky's life: he dis-

  covered him; he gave him the material for much of his greatest work; and he championed his music, which had been unknown in Europe in his lifetime and would surely have been forgotten after his death, had

  it not been for Stasov. But the critic's politics were not entirely shared by the composer, whose feeling for 'the people', as he had explained to Repin, was primarily a musical response. Musorgsky's populism

  was not political or philosophical - it was artistic. He loved folk songs

  and incorporated many of them in his works. The distinctive aspects

  of the Russian peasant song - its choral heterophony, its tonal shifts,

  drawn out melismatic passages which make it sound like a chant

  or a lament - became part of his own musical language. Above all, the

  folk song was the model for a new technique of choral writing which Musorgsky first developed in Boris Godunov. building up the different voices one by one, or in discordant groups, to create the sort of choral heterophony which he achieved, with such brilliant success, in the Kromy scene.

  Musorgsky was obsessed with the craft of rendering human speech in musical sound. That is what he meant when he said that music should be a way of 'talking with the people' - it was not a declaration of political intent.* Following the mimetic theories of the German literary historian Georg Gervinus, Musorgsky believed that human speech was governed by musical laws - that a speaker conveys emotions and meaning by musical components such as rhythm, cadence, intonation, timbre, volume, tone, etc. 'The aim of musical art', he wrote in 1880, 'is the reproduction in social sounds not only of modes of feeling but of modes of human speech.'37 Many of his most important compositions, such as the song cycle Savishna or the unfinished opera based on Gogol's 'Sorochintsy Fair', represent an attempt to transpose into sound the distinctive qualities of Russian peasant speech. Listen to the music in Gogol's tale:

  I expect you will have heard at some time the noise of a distant waterfall, when the agitated environs are filled with tumult and a chaotic whirl of weird, indistinct sounds swirls before you. Do you not agree that the very same effect is produced the instant you enter the whirlpool of a village fair? All the assembled populace merges into a single monstrous creature, whose massive body stirs about the market-place and snakes down the narrow side-streets, shrieking, bellowing, blaring. The clamour, the cursing, mooing, bleating, roaring - all this blends into a single cacophonous din. Oxen, sacks, hay, gypsies, pots, wives, gingerbread, caps - everything is ablaze with clashing colours, and dances before your eyes. The voices drown one another and it is impossible to distinguish one word, to rescue any meaning from this babble; not a single exclamation can be understood with any clarity. The ears are

  * It is telling, in this context, that the word he used for 'people' was 'liudi' - a word which has the meaning of individuals - although it has usually been translated to mean a collective mass (the sense of the other word for people - the 'narod'). J. Leyda and S. Bertensson (eds.), The Musorgsky Reader: A Life of Modeste Petrovich Musorgsky in Letters and Documents (New York, 1947), pp. 84-5.

  assailed on every side by the loud hand-clapping of traders all over the market-place. A cart collapses, the clang of metal rings in the air, wooden planks come crashing to the ground and the observer grows dizzy, as he turns his head this way and that.38

  In Musorgsky's final years tensions with his mentor became more acute. He withdrew from Stasov's circle, pouring scorn on civic artists such as Nekrasov, and spending all his time in the alcoholic company of fellow aristocrats such as the salon poet Count Golenishchev-Kutuzov and the arch-reactionary T. I. Filipov. It was not that he became politically right-wing - now, as before, Musorgsky paid little attention to politics. Rather, he saw in their 'art for art's sake' views a creative liberation from Stasov's rigid dogma of politically engaged and idea-driven art. There was something in Musorgsky - his lack of formal schooling or his wayward, almost childlike character - that made him both depend on yet strive to break away from mentors like Stasov. We can feel this tension in the letter to Repin:

  So, that's it, glorious lead horse! The troika, if in disarray, bears what it has to bear. It doesn't stop pulling… What a picture of the Master [Stasov] you have made! He seems to crawl out of the canvas and into the room. What will happen when it has been varnished? Life, power - pull, lead horse! Don't get tired! I am just the side horse and I pull only now and then to escape disgrace. I am afraid of the whip!39

  Antokolsky felt the same artistic impulse pulling him away from Stasov's direction. He gave up working on the Inquisition, saying he was tired of civic art, and travelled throughout Europe in the 1870s, when he turned increasingly to pure artistic themes in sculptures like The Death of Socrates (1875-7) and Jesus Christ (1878). Stasov was irate. 'You have ceased to be an artist of the dark masses, the unknown figure in the crowd', he wrote to Antokolsky in 1883. 'Your subjects have become the "aristocracy of man" - Moses, Christ, Spinoza, Socrates.'40

  Even Repin, the 'lead horse', began to pull away from Stasov's harnesses: he would no longer haul his Volga barge. He travelled to the West, fell in love with the Impressionists, and turned out French-styled

  portraits and pretty cafe scenes which could not have been farther from the Russian national school of utilitarian and thought-provoking art. 'I have forgotten how to reflect and pass ju
dgement on a work of art', Repin wrote to Kramskoi from Paris, 'and I don't regret the loss of this faculty which used to eat me up; on the contrary, I would rather it never return, though I feel that back in my native land it will reclaim its right over me - that is the way things are there.'41 Stasov condemned Repin for his defection, charging him with the neglect of his artistic duty to the Russian people and his native land. Relations became strained to breaking point in the early 1890s, when Repin rejoined the Academy and reassessed his views of the classical tradition - effectively denying the whole national school. 'Stasov loved his barbarian art, his small, fat, ugly, half-baked artists who screamed their profound human truths', Repin wrote in 1892…42 For a while the artist even flirted with the World of Art - Benois and Diaghilev, or the 'decadents' as Stasov liked to call them - and their ideal of pure art. But the pull of 'Russia' was too strong - and in the end he patched up his relations with Stasov. However much he loved the light of France, Repin knew that he could not be an artist who was disengaged from the old accursed questions of his native land.

  3

  In 1855 Tolstoy lost his favourite house in a game of cards. For two days and nights he played shtoss with his fellow officers in the Crimea, losing all the time, until at last he confessed to his diary 'the loss of everything - the Yasnaya Polyana house. I think there's no point writing - I'm so disgusted with myself that I'd like to forget about my existence.'43 Much of Tolstoy's life can be explained by that game of cards. This, after all, was no ordinary house, but the place where he was born, the home where he had spent his first nine years, and the sacred legacy of his beloved mother which had been passed down to him. Not that the old Volkonsky house was particularly impressive when Tolstoy, aged just nineteen, inherited the estate, with its 2,000 acres and 200 serfs, on his father's death in 1847. The paint on the house had begun to flake, there was a leaky roof and a rotten verandah,