Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

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St Petersburg symbolised Russia's eighteenth-century aspiration to make the best of the high European tradition immediately its own, in bravura style, according to Figes: 'St Petersburg was more than a city. It was a vast, almost utopian, project of cultural engineering to reconstruct the Russian as a European man. In December 2013, Figes wrote a long piece in the US journal Foreign Affairs on the Euromaidan demonstrations in Kyiv suggesting that a referendum on Ukraine's foreign policy and the country's possible partition might be a preferable alternative to the possibility of civil war and military intervention by Russia. [49] INTERVIEWER: You describe one of the characters in your book - the writer Simonov - as a 'good Stalinist'. Is such a thing possible? Isn't the idea of a 'good Stalinist' a contradiction in terms? Figes, Orlando (2019). The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. London: Allen Lane. pp.3–4. ISBN 978-0241004890.

Along with the novelists came the composers Glinka and Tchaikovsky and painters such as Repin. Their willingness to reconstruct the cultural forms of the day appealed to western readers and spectators.

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. As a schoolboy I wrote to Orlando Figes as part of the project to write my graduation paper. It was 1998 and the questions I asked did not make much sense, but ask I did before getting on with writing my piece. I had read the recently published 'A People's Tragedy' and Figes could do no wrong in my eyes. Although it is indeed believed that Zvyozdochkin and Malyutin were inspired by East Asian culture such as the Honshu doll (which is not nested), this is not definitive, and sources differ in the descriptions of the original doll that served as the alleged ‘inspiration’ ranging from a hollow daruma doll portraying a Buddhist monk to a Shichi-Fukujin doll (where the Japanese god of longevity and happiness, Fukurokuju, was the outermost doll, and could be taken apart to reveal six smaller wooden figures representing the other gods). Figes presents this as indisputable fact despite the reality that it is nothing of the sort. In 2023 Figes' debut play, The Oyster Problem, was produced by the Jermyn Street Theatre in London. The play is about the financial crisis of the writer Gustave Flaubert in the last years of his life and the attempts of his literary friends, George Sand, Emile Zola and Ivan Turgenev, to find him a sinecure. Bob Barrett played the part of Flaubert and Philip Wilson directed. [51] Everything Theatre described The Oyster Problem as "a remarkable pearl of a play; a patchwork of anecdotes that welcomes us into the private life of Gustave Flaubert and his literary contemporaries" [52] Film and television work [ edit ]

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. With Boris Kolonitskii: Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917, 1999, ISBN 0-300-08106-5 Avrupa’ya hayran olma durumu şeklen ve manen kendini değiştirerek Avrupalı olma ve bunu Avrupalılara kabul ettirme seviyesine gelmiş bu dönemde. Ancak Avrupa’nın Rusları benimsememesi de aynı şekilde hayal kırıklığına uğratmış Rusları. Yazar bu durumu kısaca; Robert Booth; Miriam Elder (23 May 2012). "Orlando Figes translation scrapped in Russia amid claims of inaccuracies". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 23 May 2012. ORLANDO FIGES: As a writer, no. I have fashioned my own style and I wouldn't say that I have been influenced by anyone in particular. But there are lots of writers I admire. Even historians. I think Simon Schama is a wonderful writer, although I wouldn't recommend anyone to try and write like him. I suppose my own ideal is simple and lucid. I tell my students to read Orwell and Chekhov.INTERVIEWER: Is there a particular book or author that has had a significant influence on you as a writer? Scammell, Michael. "Love Against All Odds by Michael Scammell | The New York Review of Books". Nybooks.com . Retrieved 24 July 2015. {{ cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= ( help) The book starts with an episode from War and Peace in which Natasha and her brother visit an retired army officer (their uncle) who lives in a cabin on the edge of the estate. During the visit Natasha unconsciously begins dancing to a peasant melody. The point is that she has the "soul of the Russian people" in her heart and even though she's the daughter of an aristocratic count she "understands" the culture of the Russian peasants. The book ends with an equally emotional scene: the return of Stravinsky to Russia in 1962 during the Khrushchev thaw. I remember that scene from US television coverage: Stravinsky arriving at the airport and also at a performance of The Rite of Spring at the Marisky Theatre in what was then Leningrad. Both episodes represent a deep-seated emotional attachment to the land--something that seems to pervade every Russian art and which some of us (like me) find both fantastic and strangely appealing.