Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

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In an interview with Andrew Marr in 1997, Figes described himself as "a Labour Party supporter and 'a bit of a Tony Blair man', though he confessed, when it came to the Russian revolution, to being mildly pro- Menshevik." [8] I'm tempted to say that this is a great book because like Russian art it has a soul, but that sounds presumptuous since I've not an expert on any Russian art and I've never been to Russia. But I've been a fan of Russian literature--especially the great novels of the 19th century, and of Russian music and particularly of the Russian ballet and its offshoots in the West. ORLANDO FIGES: With enormous difficulty! Working on Natasha's Dance was a labour of love; but it was also a tempestuous affair, which nearly ended in divorce. I threw away two versions of the book - literally threw away! The major problem was trying to work out what a 'cultural history' should be trying to achieve. 'Culture' can mean anything and everything these days. I spent three years simply reading and taking general notes without a clear plan. It was at this point that I made my mind up; the 'thing' that I was after was a temperament, a sensibility that held the Russians together and, perhaps more than any state or church, defined them as a nation. And this temperament was embodied in their 'culture': not just in their books and paintings but their customs and beliefs, their social habits and attitudes to childhood, marriage, death, the landscape, and so on. My aim was to tease out a 'Russian temperament', a common set of habits, ideas and attitudes, that could be related in a meaningful way to the works of high culture; like books and painting, poetry and music, operas and films, which form the central subject of Natasha's Dance. Orlando Figes gana el Premio Antonio Delgado a la Divulgación de la Propiedad Intelectual". Sgae.es. 3 December 2018 . Retrieved 13 May 2022.

Under Gorbachev this tendency was allowed extraordinary freedom. At the moment the labour movement is moribund and the writers and painters are no longer the political force they were under tsars and commissars. Disrespect for politicians is pervasive. But a vivacity remains in Russian society despite the discouragements of poverty and lawlessness. He is at his exciting best on the 19th and early 20th century. But what about after 1917? Figes traces the careers of Stravinsky, Chagall, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Akhmatova. All his heroes, moreover, suffered under the Soviet system to a greater or lesser extent. But as his book reaches beyond the October Revolution, he ceases to be interested in the influences exerted by "the people" on the cultural elites. I found this a great, wide net for Russian culture--I read it before a trip to Russia, and despite Figes continuing to be controversial figure in Russian scholarship, no one ever questioned his thoroughness. A great great introduction to Russian history and culture. Figes published The Story of Russia in September 2022. [10] The book is a general history of Russia from the earliest times to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It focuses on the ideas and myths that have structured the Russians' understanding of their history, and explores what Figes calls the "structural continuities" of Russian history, such as the sacralisation of power and patrimonial autocracy. The Guardian described it as "An indispensable survey of more than 1,000 years of history [which] shows how myth and fact mix dangerously in the tales this crucial country tells about itself" [42] A reviewer in The Spectator called it "a saga of multi-millennial identity politics"; Figes argues that no other country has so often changed its origin story, [43] its "[h]istories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future". [44] Views on Russian politics [ edit ]

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. Natasha's Dance was short-listed for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2003. It has been translated into over twenty languages. It was awarded the prestigious Przeglad Wschodni Award for the best foreign book on East European history in Poland in 2009. Yeni başkentteki her şey Rusları daha Avrupalı bir yaşam tarzı benimsemeye zorlamıştı. Petro soylularına nerede yaşayacaklarını, evlerini nasıl inşa edeceklerini, şehir içinde nasıl dolaşacaklarını,kilisede nerede duracaklarını, ne kadar hizmetçilerinin olacağını, balolarda nasıl yemek yiyeceklerini, nasıl giyinip saçlarını nasıl kestireceklerini, sarayda kendilerini nasıl taşıyacaklarını ve kibar bir toplumda nasıl sohbet edeceklerini söyledi. Baskı altındaki şehirde hiçbir şey şansa bırakılmamıştı. Bu saplantılı düzenleme St. Petersburg'a düşmanca ve bunaltıcı bir şehir imajını vermişti" LINGUISTIC MISHAPSThis was the biggest issue I personally had with Figes’s book, although I recognise this is almost certainly a result of my own biases, having extensively studied languages and having more than a little interest in the Russian language. Governmental censorship made it difficult for critics to function: not only novels and poems but even opera librettos had to be cautiously phrased. Yet generally, by using Aesopian language, artists could let their followers know what they thought - and they had more freedom than under the Soviet regime founded in October 1917.

One day, Daantje’s mother tells him there will be a girl waiting for him, someone who dances beautifully. After being abandoned by both parents, Daantje grows up ( Willem Voogd) in an orphanage run by the Church, an experience which leaves him even more distraught and alienated. The turning point occurs when he meets Natasha ( Anastasia Weinmar), an older Russian ballerina, and in an attempt to protect her from one of her previous partners, accidentally kills him. The two go on the run together, and up until this point Jos Stelling’s bold aesthetic and narrative approach works, at least to some extent. This first part is gripping enough and while deeply tragic, the events unfolding on screen are also ‘softened’ by some pleasant light-hearted touches. Gillinson, Miriam (15 February 2023). "The Oyster Problem review – the struggle to save Flaubert from himself". The Guardian. Robert Booth; Miriam Elder (23 May 2012). "Orlando Figes translation scrapped in Russia amid claims of inaccuracies". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 23 May 2012. 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.” Ruslar Avrupa içerisinde bir aşağılık kompleksi yaşıyorlar” diyerek özetlemiş. Kendini kabul ettiremeyen Rusların saldırgan ve milliyetçi bir tutuma geçmesinde kırılma noktası bu sanırım.

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The Whisperers includes a detailed study of the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov, who became a leading figure in the Soviet Writers' Union and a propagandist in the "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign during Stalin's final years. Figes drew on the closed sections of Simonov's archive in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and on the archives of the poet's wife and son to produce his study of this major Soviet establishment figure. [29] Just Send Me Word [ edit ] 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 ] Bury, Liz (1 October 2013). "David Bowie's top 100 must-read books". Theguardian.com . Retrieved 8 October 2017. 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, Orlando (16 December 2013). "Is There One Ukraine?". Foreign Affairs . Retrieved 24 July 2015.

Translated into more than twenty languages, [25] The Whisperers was described by Andrey Kurkov as "one of the best literary monuments to the Soviet people" [26] In it Figes underlined the importance of oral testimonies for the recovery of the history of repression in the former Soviet Union. While conceding that, "like all memory, the testimony given in an interview is unreliable", he said that oral testimony "can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence". [27] Figes, Orlando (2019). The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. London: Allen Lane. pp.3–4. ISBN 978-0241004890.

An immensely learned, ambitious effort to view Russian history through the lens of its arts, music, and literature. Makers of their own tragedy". The Independent. 23 October 2011. Archived from the original on 24 May 2022. 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. A tour de force by the great storyteller of modern Russian historians…Figes mobilizes a cast of serf harems, dynasties, politburos, libertines, filmmakers, novelists, composers, poets, tsars and tyrants…superb, flamboyant and masterful.'