"Russia is like a girl of twelve, wild and awkward, who has been dressed up in a fashionable Parisian hat. We are living here in the fourteenth or fifteenth century."
"There is so much space in Russia that everything becomes lost, even the chateaux, even the inhabitants. One would imagine one was crossing a country which had been abandoned by its people. The lack of birds intensified the silence; herds of cattle are rare, or at least they
graze a long way from the road. The spaces make everything disappear except space itself, which haunts one's imagination like certain metaphysical ideas of which the mind cannot rid itself
once it has been gripped."
There were few roads in Russia. Only St. Petersburg, Moscow, Smolensk, Kiev, and
Kazan could be considered cities, Most of the land was broken up into huge estates,
the largest of which was about twice the size of the state of Connecticut. In 1777
only three Russians in ten lived in a town. Parkinson writes that "the aristocracy dwelt in an artificial, honeycombed structure, conforming to iigid social rules, riddled with scandal and intrigue, and members of this hierarchy displayed a peculiar mix of naivety, sophistication,
Asiatic emotions and European culture."
The strange individuals who occupied the Russian throne just before the Napoleonic period and after Peter the Great included Elizabeth, who died in 1761 owning 15,000 dresses, Peter, the Emperor buffoon who reigned for six months before being murdered by his wife and successor; Catherine, (nicknamed 'Figgy') a royal nymphomaniac who favored Kutuzov and who employed a special lady-in-waiting as essayeuse to sift through the lovers waiting at her bedroom door; and finally "mad" Czar Paul, murdered only an hour or so after he had entertained Kutuzov to dinner. If his son Alexander (our Borodino Czar), would always be affected by the guilty feeling of patricide-and by dislike of Kutuzov, whose regiment had taken over from the regular imperial bodyguard duties, just before a gang of royals had beaten and strangled his father to death in his own palace.
Well, nobody's perfect! For Europeans, the Russia of Napoleonic days was a wild, mysterious realm where fantasy met reality. For the Russians themselves, Russia was the only true, pure land. To them it combined the virtues of the simple peasant fife with the opportunity for the nobles to live it up on a grand scale. There are many videos now available, some only in Russian, which showcase their patriotic feelings. They range from mythical fantasies about Russian heroes fighting the Mongols, to WWII made for TV movies.
A related work on Eastern Europe, which I highly recommend, is With Fire And Sword--both video and book (by Henryk Sienkiewicz) are available in translation. This is the Polish national epic, actually the first and best part of a trilogy. The author based some of his wilder landscape passages on his travels through the nineteenth century American fronrtier. Sienkiewicz actually shows up as a character in a recent novel set during his visit to America (by a well known woman author reviewed this year in the NY Times; I've forgotten who ... might be Susan Sontag) His volume features, among other memorable unusual Eastern European things, a Cossack revolt in the Seventeenth Century. (See Thirty Years War German technology vs. the Cossacks! See the proud nobles vs. the "barbaric" Cossacks! Meet Pan Zagloba, the memorable Falstaffian character who jovially lifts a stein on the label of Polish 'OKOCIM' beer in my collection.)
Another fun film, from the Cossack point of view and set a bit later in Poland is of course Taras Bulba, as played by Yul Brynner. Along with whom we Russians of the Napoleonic era say: "Put your faith in your sword, and your sword in the Poles!"
But we cannot allow the BBC to be insulting our Motherland. Therefore, I have written the following ditty, in the spirit of defiance.
EVERYTHING'S UP TO DATE IN CZARIST RUSSIA
(To the tune of Everything's Up To Date In Kansas City)
Everything's up to date In Czarist Russia
They've gone about as far as they can go
The palace in St. Petersburg has fifteen hundred rooms
Running through them daily you could see young Figgy chasing grooms
Everything's up to date In Czarist Russia
Canals make us the Venice of the North
Our rulers now can call up luxury with ev'ry breath
And if they fail to do their job we just beat them to death
Everything's up to date in Czarist Russia
We've got English powder now for every gun
So if the Grand Armee
Thinks that they have come to stay
We've got grave stones ready for every one
Hah--take that, BBC!
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