Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

Product Information

Figes, Orlando (2019). The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. London: Allen Lane. pp.3–4. ISBN 978-0241004890. History is a statement of facts, that is those that have not been suppressed in the archives. Writing history is uncomplicated but writing about the culture of Russia without being Russian is infinitely more difficult. Figes facts are impressive but I felt a certain underlying antipathy for Russia. These sorts of errors would be forgivable perhaps in a self-published novel, but not in a nonfiction book that surely went through multiple rounds of serious editing. Orlando Figes' enthralling, richly evocative history has been heralded as a literary masterpiece on Russia, the lives of those who have shaped its culture, and the enduring spirit of a people.

Born in Islington, London in 1959, Figes is the son of John George Figes and the feminist writer Eva Figes, whose Jewish family fled Nazi Germany in 1939. The author and editor Kate Figes was his elder sister. [5] [6] He attended William Ellis School in north London (1971–78) and studied History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating with a double-starred first in 1982. He completed his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge. Published in 2002, Natasha's Dance is a broad cultural history of Russia from the building of St. Petersburg during the reign of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. Taking its title from a scene in Tolstoy's War and Peace, where the young countess Natasha Rostova intuitively dances a peasant dance, it explores the tensions between the European and folk elements of Russian culture, and examines how the myth of the "Russian soul" and the idea of "Russianness" itself have been expressed by Russian writers, artists, composers and philosophers. Figes’ epic work gives the reader an invaluable insight into the cultural heritage of Russia from the heights of autocracy to the depths of the Soviet Union. Published first in 2002, the book takes its name from a scene in a giant of Russian literature, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in which Natasha Rostova’s innate Russian-ness breaks through the veneer of enlightened European thinking she has acquired, highlighting the dual-nature of Tsarist Russian society. The complexities of Russian culture are not to be taken on lightly, but Figes successfully guides the reader through the forest of the great Pantheon of music, literature, poetry, art, and much more which form the cultural heritage of the world’s largest country. Without a clear introduction to the subject, it is more than easy to get lost in the openly contradictory world of a nation that sits simultaneously in Europe and Asia, but with the aid of this book, it becomes not only simple but thoroughly enjoyable. Figes encourages the reader to sample Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Tolstoy and Gogol, all as part of one seemingly impossibly homogenous cultural tapestry. If not complicated enough sitting in two wildly different continents, the cultural history of Russia is again further complicated by the October Revolution and the impact of the subsequent dramatic regime change on the arts, and yet again the penetrating eye of the author enables one to slip effortlessly between the two without losing sight of the immense change it caused. Yet he does not encourage the reader to simply read his book as a beginning and an end of an involvement with Russian culture. Instead, Natasha’s Dance whets the appetite of the reader and encourages them to dive headfirst into the incredible, multi-faceted milieu that is the immense Russian cultural heritage. I began this book not knowing much more than what I had been taught in a Russian history module at A-Level, which also meant I brought with me what could be described as a moderate amount of confusion about Russia, its practices, and people. However, upon finishing this book I realised I had not only come to appreciate the apparent contradictions which had caused my confusion but that I had also, quite by accident, fallen in love with a culture that was so dramatically different to the one I knew and had grown up in. I reference encouragement to immerse oneself into Russian culture because, for me, that is the second key lesson I took from this book, and have since discovered books that have shaped my current view on life and the world as a whole. If you want an introduction to what is unarguably one of the most contradictory, confusing, yet fascinating cultures the world over then Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figes is a wonderful place to start. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

Natasha’s Dance

In spite of all the difficulties, and perhaps in part because of them, I had the time of my life during those two years at Moscow University. I met some wonderful people who became lasting friends. Now I travel to Russia at least once or twice a year, normally only for a week or ten days, but I still see those old friends. BASIC ERRORSWhen discussing Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Figes refers to Sonya Marmeladova as Raskolnikov’s lover, which is incorrect. He also confuses the characters of War and Peace with those of Anna Karenina. Furthermore, Figes incorrectly states which organs were transplanted into which body in Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. Orlando Figes gana el Premio Antonio Delgado a la Divulgación de la Propiedad Intelectual". Sgae.es. 3 December 2018 . Retrieved 13 May 2022. I don't believe Figes understood the significance of Orthodoxy on the lives of ordinary Russian Christians throughout the ages including during Soviet times when so many were martyred for their faith. Russian tradition, food, music, entertainment, literature and the elusive Russian Soul all follow the church calendar, its many feasts and fasts. It is so much fun to read that I hesitate to write too much, for fear of spoiling the pleasures and surprises of the book.'

While wrestling with universal questions, as Orlando Figes's magnificent book reveals, these intellectuals were also exercised by the "Russian question". Theirs was a multisided debate. Contrary to the conventional historical image, not every intellectual objected to the imperial monarchy or to the social system. But most were indeed anti-monarchists. In any case Russia's upper classes oscillated between sympathy and hatred for the peasantry. Many landlords were brutes. Turgenev's own mother had her serfs whipped and sent into Siberian penal servitude for trivial instances of alleged disobedience. Intrigante, divertente, scritto magnificamente, ricco di aneddoti interessanti e commoventi, questo saggio, che si legge come un romanzo, è stato un compagno di viaggio impagabile. Il coinvolgimento che suscita per la materia trattata a tale da spingere a un sempre maggiore approfondimento delle proprie conoscenze.

Select a format:

Book Genre: Art, Cultural, European History, Historical, History, Literature, Music, Nonfiction, Russia, Russian History, Russian Literature History on a grand scale-an enchanting masterpiece that explores the making of one of the world's most vibrant civilizations

Bury, Liz (1 October 2013). "David Bowie's top 100 must-read books". Theguardian.com . Retrieved 8 October 2017. A People's Tragedy, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, did "more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know." Now, in Natasha's Dance, internationally renowned historian Orlando Figes does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together. The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture, New York: Henry Holt and Co. 2019, ISBN 9781627792141 Kitap 8 ana bölümden oluşan bir kültürel tarih incelemesi. Salt bilgi içerikli olduğu için bir kurgu romandan beklenilen akıcılık bu eserden beklenmemeli ancak muadillerine göre kolay okunuşunun bu kitabı popüler yaptığını düşünüyorum. Dediğim gibi salt bilgi içerikli olmasından dolayı kitap hakkındaki düşüncelerimi bölümler halinde spoiler korkusu olmadan vermek istiyorum, bütününe yorum yapmak zor çünkü bölümden bölüme yazarın tutumunun değiştiğini fark ettim. Bu dengesizlik ve yer yer taraflı anlatım yüzünden de 5 yerine 4 yıldız verdim.

Need Help?

Nataşa’nın dansı ismini Tolstoy’un "Savaş ve Barış" isimli eserindeki Nataşa karakterinin bir soylu olmasına rağmen bir köy müziği eşliğindeki dansından alıyor. Yazar burada karakterin farklı öğretilerle büyütülmüş olmasına rağmen içindeki Rus ruhunu her daim korumasından etkilenerek bu tarih kitabına bu ismi vermiş. A skilled practitioner of both narrative and intellectual history, Figes (History/Univ. of London; A People’s Tragedy, 1997, etc.) takes his title from a scene in War and Peace in which the highly cultured Natasha Rostov forgetting the French-influenced mores of the court to perform, enthusiastically and precisely, a Russian peasant dance. Natasha has never performed that dance, but she somehow knows it in her bones—just as, Russian intellectuals have long insisted, there is something genetic, something inborn, about “Russianness.” Figes charts the growth of this sense of difference over generations, as Russians eventually shed the Western-imitating ways of Peter the Great (whose capital, Petersburg, “differs from all other European cities by being like them all,” according to Alexander Herzen) to create their own sense of identity. This Russianness borrowed from many traditions; there is no single authentic Russian culture, Figes insists, any more than there is a single American one, “no quintessential national culture, only mythic images of it.” Natasha’s dance, for instance, takes in Mongol, Persian, Kazakh, ethnic Russian, and other cultures, just as Petersburg was built of stone from Finland, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries alongside Russian limestone. Just so, Soviet culture was an amalgam of traditions, continuous with its predecessors though with a peculiar purpose: to “train the human mind to see the world in a more socialistic way through new art forms.” A high level of seriousness pervades this excellent study, but Figes still has great fun with his subject, as when he recounts a testy meeting between Stravinsky and Shostakovich, both of them sitting in complete silence until Shostakovich asked, “ ‘What do you think of Puccini?’ ‘I can’t stand him,’ Stravinsky replied. ‘Oh, and neither can I, neither can I,’ said Shostakovich.” When students went out into the countryside in the mid-1870s to talk with "the people", they were not greeted with enthusiasm. Peasants decided that many socialists among them were police spies and turned them over to the authorities for fear of being thought disloyal to the monarchy. Revolutionary Russia: 1891–1991, is a short introduction to the subject published as part of the relaunch of Pelican Books in the United Kingdom in 2014. [18] In it Figes argues for the need to see the Russian Revolution in a longer time-frame than most historians have allowed. He states that his aim is 'to chart one hundred years of history as a single revolutionary cycle. In this telling the Revolution starts in the nineteenth century (and more specifically in 1891, when the public's reaction to the famine crisis set it for the first time on a collision course with the autocracy) and ends with the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.' [19] Natasha's Dance and Russian cultural history [ edit ] Russian History". Brill Publishers. Archived from the original on 6 October 2014 . Retrieved 31 August 2011.