"Orlando Figes's 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, this internationally renowned historian does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together.". "Beginning in the eighteenth century with the building of St. Petersburg - a "window on the West" - and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself - its, character, spiritual essence, history, and destiny. What did it mean to be Russian - an illiterate serf or an imperial courtier? And where was the true Russia - in Europe or in Asia?…
"And another brilliant work. He repeats many of the devices I mentioned in the first book. This is an extensive picture of Russian culture, putting culture in its place as inseparable from society. He shows the Russian mind, the cosmology of belief, daily life on a cultural basis. It’s enchanting. I don’t want to say it isn’t upbeat…but, then again, a third of Shakespeare’s plays are tragedies and we’re still reading them. Well, this one is culturally fascinating, all the intimacies of Russian culture. He’s such a graceful writer. He talks about the significance of icons, dance, music, the various brands of Russian Orthodoxy and the way they impinge on the lives of the Russian villages or towns, the way the Russians give meaning to their lives through ceremonies. I read this before I wrote my book and understood that the Russian landscape is a God-struck landscape. Even the atheists are haunted. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Figes touches on aspects of the sentimental agrarian socialists, the well-meaning intellectuals from cities who believed that the village commune was a social model out of which a greater social model could be made. They were greatly disillusioned, of course, when people started chucking sticks of dynamite at them. He shows the weddings, baptisms, burials, festivals, end of winter festivals, harvests and he shows them all with references to individuals, the salient detail all firmly rooted in specific characters. Wonderful."
