Stunning Russian women; and War and Peace

Two pieces about Russia:
1. From the Wall Street Journal: The Other Russian Revolution:
All across the country, a plethora of beautiful girls has sprung up. By Edvard Radzinsky

For the greater part of the 20th century, Russia's population suffered from the nightmare of wars, repression and perpetual hunger. There was the famine of the Civil War, the famine of the years of collectivization, and the famine of the Second World War. It almost seems as if the relative prosperity of recent years has engendered a peculiar reaction of the flesh, something almost akin to gratitude. All across the country, a plethora of beautiful girls has sprung up.

With bared midriffs and piercings, they are outwardly very like one another. In fact, there is an immense gulf dividing this throng of beauties. One group is astoundingly uneducated; their lives consist of nightclubs, concerts and narcotics. The other (and these are many) is just the opposite. They are highly educated, and have plunged rapturously into the ocean of literature now being published in Russia--those famous books by which the world lived in the 20th century and which have only now come to us. These women study with merciless obstinacy, hours and hours every day. Each knows several languages. In spite of their youth, they have already visited the great capitals of Europe, as if realizing the dream (so recently unattainable) of their grandmothers and grandfathers.

There is yet another amazing group among our new youth. Their fate, as a rule, was chosen by their parents, themselves generally former athletes. Therefore, they correctly recognized the value of a very small ball which very quickly helped their Cinderella daughters turn into real princesses. The story of the father of the Williams sisters taught them a great deal. Our Russian parents entered this vicarious competition with gusto. Notwithstanding the difficulties, they brought their little girls to wherever the ace coaches lived, to those who could see the value of their "human material": little girls, hungry for success, ready to fight Russian-style--that is, to the death. Anna Kournikova was just a testing of the waters. She was the necessary sacrifice to intoxication. Maria Sharapova--who takes her athletic grace to the U.S. Open this week--is the next, and more impressive, stage. Watching her illuminate our lives, one can only think of what passed before in Russia.

"A chicken's hardly a bird, a woman's hardly a person." This is a common Russian saying and it reflects the Russian way of thinking. In spite of the complete absence of women's rights in 18th-century Russia, there were five empresses of Russia who presided over the lives and deaths of their subjects. This historical paradox would recur in an inverted form--with the attainment of equal rights in the 20th century, Russian women vanished from political power and from political life in general. The Bolshevik radicals who established holidays in honor of women's rights made their absence from politics a fixed tradition. There was not a woman to be found in Lenin's or Stalin's Politburo. Stalin himself (as his wife would later write sadly in her correspondence) tended to replace the word "woman" with the somewhat crude and common "baba."

After his own wife committed suicide, Stalin had the wives of many of his closest associates imprisoned. In the theater at the traditional state holiday concerts, only men sat in the Government Box. The sole aspect of the life of the country where women truly retained equality of rights was in labor. Women worked alongside men or even independently of men in the most taxing and unhealthy industries. Woman the Hero of Labor, Woman the Worker--this was a central image in prudish Soviet literature, from which sexual thematics were excluded.

Party leaders lived meekly with their ugly old wives who never appeared in public. Only under Khrushchev did the first woman appear in the Politburo--Ekaterina Furtseva, known as Catherine the Great. As Minister of Culture, she believed unquestioningly in the slogan: "There is no sex in the U.S.S.R.!" and fought mercilessly for morality in art. Yet the entire elite was well aware of her torrid affairs: scarred veins on her wrists bore witness to her ill-starred passion.

Amid all this, however, a covert sexual freedom coexisted with the complete Absence of Sex. We must not be surprised, then, at the stream of passionate Priestesses of Love pouring out into the world after the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. and at the thousands of prostitutes currently filling the cities of Russia. This state of affairs issues primarily from the prevailing moral condition, and only secondarily from the standard of living. It issues from the 70-year exile of God from the country, a land where only airplanes remained in the heavens.

The first shock of Gorbachev's new era was his appearance on the television screen together with . . . his wife! This was the true beginning of perestroika. For the first time, the wife of the General Secretary ceased to be "the Empress of the Dark Chambers." And this wife even dared to speak her mind on matters of politics! This was received with bewilderment by the majority of the populace, and in particular, by women. Immediately, there arose one of the most dangerous of Russian rumors: that the wife rules the husband. It was one of the main reasons for the decline of Gorbachev's popularity. The wives of subsequent presidents made their appearances on screen, but they took the experience of the Gorbachevs into account: First ladies now conducted themselves with extreme modesty. They remained what women were supposed to be in Russia--mere women.

A woman in Russia lived through her family. And she had to have a husband. The key role for women in the U.S.S.R. was to be a "warrior's holiday." "A man knows the happiness of one who receives; a woman knows the happiness of one who gives"--this was the dream and the rule.

With the advent of perestroika, all this began to change. The first Russian businesswomen came onto the scene. It was in business, not politics, that the road to true gender equality in Russia began to be laid. The first businesswomen were poor young girls when perestroika hit. Now they're over 30. They can be found in the most varied professions--from advertising firms to travel agencies, from computer companies to mass media agencies, from law firms to major commercial enterprises. And professional sport, too, one must remember, is foremost a business. They arrived speedily at a new slogan for the independent Russian woman: "If pants must be hanging in the closet, they might as well be mine!" They can have children without husbands, they can leave one husband for another--the important thing is to live as they like, not as he likes. They're finished with the "warrior's holiday" for good.

A prosperous businesswoman invited me to dinner. She owns a fashionable Moscow boutique. Five of her colleagues were also present at our late gathering. She had brought in a well-known chef from Paris for one night for this affair. Throughout the evening, I listened to their stories--about their youth, where they left their poverty and a good deal of humiliation. Readymade theater played itself out before me, and its central theme was entirely new for Russia: the path to independence from men.

Recently, I witnessed something now possible only in Russia. I completed a book on the great and enigmatic Russian emperor Alexander II and decided to speak about the book at one of Moscow's largest auditoriums, the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, seating 1,500 people. Orchestra tickets cost $50 apiece. This is a large sum of money in Russia, yet the hall was filled to bursting. Eighty percent of the public was young, for the most part young girls. The evening was recorded and replayed on TV over three days. The ecstatic cameraman repeatedly cut to the faces of the lovely young women in the audience who, for over three hours, listened in rapt silence to a tale of the history of their Fatherland. This new generation of women promises to become the most successful in Russia's history.

The role of the Tennis Lolita, of the Beauteous Champion, is but Russian womanhood's most public face. Miss Sharapova, or those new little beauties who are now to be found in every corner of boundless Russia, have discovered a road to the fairytale. The Russian Invasion of the tennis Klondike is in full swing. But there is a world beyond tennis, and they will have it, too. The Russian girls are coming. They don't want to change the world. They want to conquer it.

(Mr. Radzinsky, a playwright, is the author of "Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar," forthcoming in October from the Free Press.)

2. From the London Times: Birth, death, balls and battles:
It has no clear beginning, middle or end, but the first translation of War and Peace for 50 years reaffirms its greatness. Tolstoy brilliantly interweaves the historical and the personal, says Orlando Figes

In 1951, after reading War and Peace for the twelfth time, the Russian writer Mikhail Prishvin (1873- 1954) noted in his diary that he felt, at last, that he understood his life. Like all great works of art, Tolstoy’s masterpiece has the capacity, on each successive reading, to transform our understanding of the world.

On any first reading, War and Peace is bound to dazzle with its immense panorama of humanity. The whole of life appears to be contained in its pages. Tolstoy presents us with a cast of several hundred characters. Yet to each one he brings such profound understanding of the human condition, with all its frailties and contradictions, that we recognise and love these characters as reflections of our own identity.

Tolstoy has an extraordinary clarity of expression — a quality that A. D. P. Briggs has happily maintained in this superb translation. Tolstoy might write longer novels than anybody else, but no other writer can recreate emotion and experience with such precision and economy. There are scenes in War and Peace — the unforgettable depiction of the Battle of Austerlitz, for example, or the ball where Natasha Rostova meets Prince Andrei — in which Tolstoy manages in a few words to sketch the mental images which allow us to picture ourselves at the scene and seemingly to feel the emotions of the protagonists. There are passages, like the death scene of Prince Andrei, in which Tolstoy may give to his readers the extraordinary sensation that they too have felt the experience of death; and moments, like the wonderful description of the hunt, when Tolstoy lets them imagine what it is like to be a dog.

Tolstoy once said famously that War and Peace was not meant to be a novel at all. Like all great works of art, it certainly defies all conventions. Set against the historical events of the Napoleonic wars, its complex narrative development is a long way from the tidy plot structure of the European novel in its 19th-century form. Tolstoy’s novel does not even have a clear beginning, a middle and an end, though it does, in one sense, turn on a moment of epiphany, the year of 1812, when Russia’s liberation from Napoleon is made to coincide with the personal liberation of the novel’s central characters.

While clearly still a novel, War and Peace can be understood, at another level, as a novelist’s attempt to engage with the truth of history. Tolstoy’s interest in history developed long before his career as a novelist. But history-writing disappointed him. It seemed to reduce the richness of real life. For whereas the “real” history of lived experience was made up of an infinite number of factors and contingencies, historians selected just a few (eg, the political or the economic) to develop their historical theories and explanations. Tolstoy concluded that the histories of his day represented “perhaps only 0.001 per cent of the elements which actually constitute the real history of peoples”. He was particularly frustrated by the failure of historians to illuminate the “inner” life of a society — the private thoughts and relationships that make up the most real and immediate experience of human beings. Hence he turned to literature.

During the 1850s Tolstoy was obsessed with the idea of writing a historical novel which would contrast the real texture of historical experience, as lived by individuals and communities, with the distorted image of the past presented by historians. This is what he set out to achieve in War and Peace.

Through the novel’s central characters Tolstoy juxtaposes the immediate human experience of historical events with the historical memory of them. For example, when Pierre Bezukhov wanders as a spectator on to the battlefield of Borodino he expects to find the sort of neatly arranged battle scene that he has seen in paintings and read about in history books. Instead, he finds himself in the chaos of an actual battlefield:

“All that Pierre saw to right and left of him was so negative that no part of the scene before his eyes answered his expectations. Nowhere was there a field of battle such as his imagination had pictured: there were only fields, clearings, troops, woods, the smoke of camp-fires, villages, mounds and streams; and try as he would he could descry no military ‘position’ in this landscape teeming with life. He could not even distinguish our troops from the enemy’s.”

Having served as an officer in the Crimean War (1854-56), Tolstoy drew from his own experience to recreate the human truth of this celebrated battle, and to examine how its public memory could become distorted by the medium of written history. As Tolstoy shows, in the confusion of the battle nobody can understand or control what occurs. In such a situation, chance events, individual acts of bravery, or calm thinking by the officers can influence the morale of the troops en masse and thus change the course of the battle; and this in turn creates the illusion that what is happening is somehow the result of human agency. So when the military dispatches are later written up, they invariably ascribe the outcome of the battle to the commanders, although in reality they had less influence than the random actions of rank and file.

As a novelist, Tolstoy was interested most of all in the inner life of Russian society during the Napoleonic wars. In War and Peace he presents this period of history as a crucial watershed in the culture of the Russian aristocracy. The war of 1812 is portrayed as a national liberation from the cultural domination of the French — a moment when Russian noblemen such as the Rostovs and Bolkonskys struggled to break free from the foreign conventions of their society and began new lives on Russian principles. Tolstoy plots this transformation in a series of motifs. The novel opens, for example, in the French language of the St Petersburg salon — a language which Tolstoy gradually reveals to be false and artificial. Tolstoy shows the aristocracy renouncing haute cuisine for lunches of rye bread and cabbage soup, adopting national dress, settling as farmers on the land, and rediscovering native culture, as in the immortal scene when Natasha, a French-educated young countess, dances to a folk song in the Russian style.

On this reading, War and Peace appears as a national epic — the revelation of a “Russian consciousness” in the inner life of its characters. In narrating this drama, however, Tolstoy steps out of historical time and enters the time-space of cultural myth. He allows himself considerable artistic licence. For example, the aristocracy’s return to native forms of dress and recreations actually took place over several decades in the early 19th century, whereas Tolstoy has it happen almost overnight in 1812. But the literary creation of this mythical time-space was central to the role that War and Peace was set to play in the formation of the national consciousness.

When the novel first appeared, in 1865-66, educated Russia was engaged in a profound cultural and political quest to define the country’s national identity. The emancipation of the serfs, in 1861, had forced society to confront the humble peasant as a fellow citizen, and to seek new answers to the old accursed questions about Russia’s destiny in what one poet (Nekrasov) called the “rural depths where eternal silence reigns”. The liberal reforms of Tsar Alexander II

(1855-81), which included the introduction of jury trials and elected institutions of local government, gave rise to hopes that Russia, as a nation, would emerge and join the family of modern European states. Writing from this perspective, Tolstoy saw a parallel between the Russia of the 1860s and the Russia that had arisen in the wars against Napoleon.

War and Peace was originally conceived as a novel about the Decembrists, a group of liberal army officers who rose up in a failed attempt to impose a constitution on the Tsar in December 1825. In this original version of the novel the Decembrist hero returns after 30 years of exile in Siberia to the intellectual ferment of the early years of Alexander II’s reign. But the more Tolstoy researched into the Decembrists, the more he realised that their intellectual roots were to be found in the war of 1812. This was when these officers had first become acquainted with the patriotic virtues of the peasant soldiers in their ranks; when they had come to realise the potential of Russia’s democratic nationhood. Through this literary genesis War and Peace acquired several overlapping spheres of historical consciousness: the real-time of 1805-20 (the fictional setting of the novel); the living memory of this period (from which Tolstoy drew in the form of personal memoirs and historical accounts); and its reflection in the political consciousness of 1855-65. Thus the novel can and should be read, not just as an intimate portrait of Russian society in the age of the Napoleonic wars, but as a broader statement about Russia, its people and its history as a whole. That is why the Russians will always turn to War and Peace, as Mikhail Prishvin did, to find in it the keys to their identity.

English readers will learn more about the Russians by reading War and Peace than they will by reading perhaps any other book. But they will also find in it the inspiration to make them think about the world and their own place in it. For War and Peace is a universal work and, like all the great artistic prose works of the Russian tradition, it functions as a huge poetic structure for the contemplation of the fundamental questions of our existence.

Above all, War and Peace will move its readers by virtue of its beauty as a work of art. It is a triumphant affirmation of human life in all its richness and complexity. That is why one can return to it and always find new meanings and new truths in it.

(This is an edited version of an essay that is to appear in the Penguin Classics new edition of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Orlando Figes’s most recent book, Natasha’s Dance, is published by Penguin.)