Natasha’s Dance

"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."