Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes Read Free Book Online

was bought by the Volkonsky family in the 1760s and eventually passed down through his mother to the novelist Tolstoy. 28 Because of this constant state of flux there was little real investment by the nobles in the land, no general movement to develop estates or erect palaces, and none of what took place in Western Europe from medieval times: the gradual concentration of a family domain in one locality, with property passed down from one generation to the next, and ties built up with the community.
        The cultural advancement of the Muscovite
boyars
was well behind that of the European nobles in the seventeenth century. Olearius considered them ‘among the barbarians… [with] crude opinions about the elevated natural sciences and arts’. 29 Dr Collins complained that ‘they know not how to eat peas and carrots boiled but, like swine, eat them shells and all’. 30 This backwardness was in part the result of the Mongol occupation of Russia from about 1230 to the middle of the fifteenth century. The Tatars left a profound trace on
boyar
customs
        and habits. For over three hundred years, the period of the Renaissance in the West, Russia was cut off from European civilization. The country which emerged from the Mongol period was far more inward-looking than it had been at the start of the thirteenth century, when Kievan Rus’, the loose confederation of principalities which constituted the first Russian state, had been intimately linked with Byzantium. The old princely families were undermined and made more servile to the state of Muscovy, whose economic and military power provided the key to Russia’s liberation from the Mongol khans. The Russian nobleman of the Muscovite era
(c.
15 50-1700) was not a landed lord in the European sense. He was a servant of the Crown. In his material culture there was little to distinguish him from the common folk. He dressed like the merchant in the semi-oriental
kaftan
and fur coat. He ruled his family, like the merchant and the peasant, via the patriarchal customs of the
Domostroi
- the sixteenth-century manual that instructed Russians how to discipline their households with the Bible and the birch. The manners of the Russian nobleman were proverbially boorish. Even magnates such as Boris Sheremetev could behave at times like drunken louts. During Tsar Peter’s trip to England his entourage resided at the villa of the diarist John Evelyn at Sayes Court, Kent. The damage which they caused in their three-month stay was so extensive - lawns dug up, curtains torn, furniture destroyed, and family portraits used for target practice by the visitors - that Evelyn was obliged to present the Russian court with a large bill. 31 The majority of the nobility could not read and many of them could not even add up simple sums. 32 Little travelled or exposed to Europeans, who were forced to settle in a special suburb in Moscow, the nobleman mistrusted new or foreign ways. His life was regulated by the archaic rituals of the Church - its calendar arranged to count the years from the notional creation of the world (with the birth of Adam) in 5509 bc* With Peter’s reformation of society, the nobleman became the agency, and his palace the arena, of Russia’s introduction to European
        * Peter the Great introduced the Western (Julian) calendar in 1700. But by 1752 the rest of Europe had changed to the Gregorian calendar - thirteen days ahead of the Julian calendar (which remained in force in Russia until 1918). In terms of time, Imperial Russia always lagged behind the West.
        ways. His palace was much more than a noble residence, and his estate was far more than a noble pleasure ground or economic entity: it became its locality’s centre of civilization.
        Peter laid the basis of the modern absolutist (European) state when he turned all the nobles into servants of the Crown. The old
boyar
class had enjoyed certain rights and privileges that stemmed from its guardianship