Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
Where shall we start?
I’ve chosen five books that let an English reader form an idea of what a Russian is like, all of which are packaged in an entertaining way. The first is called Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, or Notes on Russia in English, and it’s 1556, the days of Basil the Dark One. If you speak of Russia altogether I think one has to start somewhere, and you can’t start at the age of Enlightenment. So, the author is called Sigismund von Herberstein, and he was an Austrian ambassador to Venice. Quite enlightened for his times – it’s the Renaissance – he’s a free spirit, and he ends up being Hapsburg ambassador to Moscow, which is a rarity already. He travels through Poland or whatever was the geography of the time, and he comes to Moscow. At the time it’s not even called Russia – it’s called Muscovy – and Herberstein spends years and years there and writes this book. Also he has agents travelling all over Russia and all the way up to Siberia, and he tells you all the history and geographics of the country. I think the book is brilliant. First of all it gives you complete, colourful, Western insight on living in Moscow. And he gives you, very probably, the best picture of 16th-century Russia.
Was it a memoir or was it a report to send home?
I’m sure he sent reports home like any ambassador but his notes became this book, which became an instantaneous bestseller, because Russia was very little known in those days. Actually, if you talk of the 16th century, most of the books were ‘how to do’, you know: how to tend your garden, look after the cow or whatever; there was great curiosity about the world. So he published it in 1549 in Vienna and it was one of the first historico-geographical bestsellers in Europe, with reprints in every language possible: Latin, German, Italian. And it’s wonderful. On top of it he is quite neutral and friendly – he doesn’t take sides, it’s not like a diplomatic book. And in order to understand the Russian national character, I think it’s a key book. Because when you read it you have an impression that the days of Basil the Dark One were just how Russia is now.
What sort of insights does he have into the national character?
I can give you an example: he has some neighbouring friend, a Russian nobleman, who is an enlightened man by Russian standards of that time. The neighbour even travelled once to Lithuania, so he’s full of wonderful ideas and ‘democratic’, as you would call it now. And he dies, this neighbour. And he had three or four hundred people working as his household staff. They were all serfs, they were enslaved – these are the real peak days of enslavement in Russia. And this neighbour lets his slaves go in his will, says that they are all free people, and that it’s his gift, and they get money too. And then Herberstein says: you know, the most amazing thing happened. They celebrated, and drank for one week non-stop, 24 hours a day, and then they all collectively went and voluntarily sold themselves to someone else. They sold themselves one week later, got more money and got drunk. And he says: that, I cannot understand. Because Herberstein is a free spirit – he’s very friendly towards Russia but he can’t understand how people prefer to be slaves. Anyway, if you have to start somewhere, this is a fantastic book. It’s not hard to read and it’s highly entertaining. You get the flavour of it: the ambience of Muscovite, pre-modern Russia. Which is the root of whatever comes out later.
Your next book?
We move to the age of Enlightenment: a very nice, well-written book by Simon Sebag Montefiore, and it’s called The Life of Potemkin. So what do we have? We’ve had the reforms of Peter the Great, cutting his ‘window on to Europe’, then we had – and the 18th century is a crucial one – Russia meeting the Enlightenment. Catherine the Great comes to power, and that’s where the biggest revolution I think takes place, from the point of view of civilising the country. She has a great court, of which Voltaire was a part, as well as Potemkin, and this is a wonderful book about these times and days: highly entertaining, informative, pleasant and it’s a very important period, it’s when Russia became a great power. The book is a biography of Prince Potemkin, one of the great characters of the Enlightenment altogether, internationally recognised. You meet all the most interesting people of that era: from the Austrian Emperor Josef, to the Prince de Ligne – they’re all characters in this book and this is already not Muscovite Russia, it’s something transformed.
Who was Potemkin? Where did he come from?
He was one of Catherine’s Praetorian Guard, I think, and he became a favourite. Actually he was a husband of Catherine. They most likely married secretly, and he became a minister and the man who ruled Russia together with her: who expanded Russia all the way East – Ukraine, Crimea – and built 140 cities I think, and made Russia great and glorious and the Russia we know already. The 19th century with its great literature –Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol – it all comes out of these liberal days, liberal in a certain way, of Potemkin, Catherine, Voltaire, and the Enlightenment, so definitely worth reading. The book is about a great cocktail of Russia and the Enlightenment, with Catherine the Great as the bartender, mixing.
Next?
Next we move to War and Peace.
Andrei Maylunas is an eminent historian on pre-Soviet Russia with unique access to the Moscow archives. He has edited and compiled several books on the Romanoffs. He says Dostoevsky’s book Demons is about Russia’s future. ‘It’s about what has happened, and what’s going to happen to Russia’s intelligentsia and nobility. It gives you a flavour of the nascent 20th-century Russia with all its ups and downs: the literature, horrors, terrors, revolutions, bloodshed, the peaks, the depths – you already feel it. You smell it and you taste it in Demons.’
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