I have long had an interest in Russian
history, Russian culture, Russian literature, and Russian music and, once upon a
time, I lived in Moscow so I suppose it was inevitable that at some point I
would get around to reading Natasha’s Dance (New York: Metropolitan, 2002). Natasha's Dance is yet another massive book from Birkbeck College (not Birbeck as the Metropolitan Books author bio on the inside of the
jacket sleeve has it) Russian historian Orlando Figes. It explores the cultural history--the selective cultural history--of Russian art, music, literature, architecture, and religion.
I have put off reading Figes’s book, I suppose, because of the controversies swirling around Natasha’s Dance, Figes’s 2007 book The Whisperers, and Figes's Amazon review posts written under a nom de plume. As Peter Reddaway and Stephen Cohen point out in their 2012 Nation essay several people have taken Figes to task for several failings. British Russian scholar Rachel Polonsky claimed, in a 2002 review of Natasha’s Dance in the Times Literary Supplement, that Figes’s book was characterised by various defects including Figes’s careless borrowing of words and ideas of other writers without adequate acknowledgment. Another British academic, T.J. Binyon, claimed that Natasha’s Dance was full of “[f]actual errors and mistaken assertions on many of its pages. American academic Priscilla Roosevelt asserted that Figes appropriated memoirs she had used in her book Life on the Russian Country Estate (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1995) while changing their content and messing up the references. Still others have taken Figes to task for his reviews as “Historian” on Amazon including one review giving Rachel Polonsky’s Molotov’s Magic Lantern (2011) one star, a review that seemed to some as payback for Polonsky’s negative review of Natasha’s Dance.
I have put off reading Figes’s book, I suppose, because of the controversies swirling around Natasha’s Dance, Figes’s 2007 book The Whisperers, and Figes's Amazon review posts written under a nom de plume. As Peter Reddaway and Stephen Cohen point out in their 2012 Nation essay several people have taken Figes to task for several failings. British Russian scholar Rachel Polonsky claimed, in a 2002 review of Natasha’s Dance in the Times Literary Supplement, that Figes’s book was characterised by various defects including Figes’s careless borrowing of words and ideas of other writers without adequate acknowledgment. Another British academic, T.J. Binyon, claimed that Natasha’s Dance was full of “[f]actual errors and mistaken assertions on many of its pages. American academic Priscilla Roosevelt asserted that Figes appropriated memoirs she had used in her book Life on the Russian Country Estate (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1995) while changing their content and messing up the references. Still others have taken Figes to task for his reviews as “Historian” on Amazon including one review giving Rachel Polonsky’s Molotov’s Magic Lantern (2011) one star, a review that seemed to some as payback for Polonsky’s negative review of Natasha’s Dance.
I have not had access to the Polonsky or
Binyon reviews of Natasha’s Dance, I am not a specialist in the area of Russian
history, and my Russian is barely passable, but I do want to make a few observations
on the controversy surrounding Figes and his books. Native Russian speakers
take non-native Russian speakers to task for their translations to such an
extent that such claims now constitute a genre. Figes, of course, is not the only academic
to have flubbed some of his citations and I am sure that Emile Durkheim would have appreciated the cultural rituals associated with deviance in modern and postmodern academic bureaucracies. In Figes's defence, he cites those who influenced him in the further reading section and in the endnotes of Natasha's Dance. I have no problem with people reviewing
books or CD’s as themselves or anonymously on Amazon. My problem with Figes’s
Amazon reviews was his attempt to cover up the fact that he was the reviewer
after he was outed by Polonsky. There has been a long history of academic concern
about those academics who aim at and sometimes get a wider readership. Natasha’s Dance was aimed at a broader audience than a few hundred academics and apparently Figes appears to make money from his books. I don't, by the way, intend these rejoinders to be the basis for a dismissal of the serious charges against Figes. I do intend them to be things that we must think about when we explore academic feuds.
Though it is hardly novel, I didn’t and don’t have a problem with the central interpretive thrust of Natasha’s Dance, the assertion that modern post-Peter the Great Russian national identity revolved around several "mythic" or invented discourses that sometimes interwove and intertwined: Russian Europhilism and Europhobism, Russia as Slavic, Russia as Scythian, Asian, or "oriental", Russia as European, and peasantophilism and peasantophobism. I didn’t and don’t have a problem with Figes’s emphasis on culture and its symbols and rituals and his use of Russian literature, Russian art, Russian architecture, Russian film, and Russian religion to argue for that thesis. What I did and do have a problem with, though this didn't entirely ruin the book for me, is the fact that Figes’s book, with its far too common, even in academic circles, confusion of the descriptive and the normative, its problematic romantic, dramatic, tragic, triumph of Russian soul, and use of personal vignettes, particularly in the introductory section of each chapter, modes of writing or narrative strategies which make Figes's book seem like the product of a nineteenth century historian who somehow got hold of Tardis and time travelled to 20th century where he picked up a bit of 20th century cultural studies culture and gave us a mash-up. But hey, we do live in a postmodern world.
Though it is hardly novel, I didn’t and don’t have a problem with the central interpretive thrust of Natasha’s Dance, the assertion that modern post-Peter the Great Russian national identity revolved around several "mythic" or invented discourses that sometimes interwove and intertwined: Russian Europhilism and Europhobism, Russia as Slavic, Russia as Scythian, Asian, or "oriental", Russia as European, and peasantophilism and peasantophobism. I didn’t and don’t have a problem with Figes’s emphasis on culture and its symbols and rituals and his use of Russian literature, Russian art, Russian architecture, Russian film, and Russian religion to argue for that thesis. What I did and do have a problem with, though this didn't entirely ruin the book for me, is the fact that Figes’s book, with its far too common, even in academic circles, confusion of the descriptive and the normative, its problematic romantic, dramatic, tragic, triumph of Russian soul, and use of personal vignettes, particularly in the introductory section of each chapter, modes of writing or narrative strategies which make Figes's book seem like the product of a nineteenth century historian who somehow got hold of Tardis and time travelled to 20th century where he picked up a bit of 20th century cultural studies culture and gave us a mash-up. But hey, we do live in a postmodern world.
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