In _our Russian Europe_ everything done in _European Europe_ has been
repeated on a smaller scale as to quantity and on a greater or distorted
scale as to quality.
We have had our Orthodox ultra-catholics, our titled liberal-bourgeois,
our imperial Royalists, our democrat-officials, our Preobrazhensky
Buonapartist horseguards and lifeguards. It is no wonder that among the
ladies too we have not escaped our _chic_ and _chienne_ types: with this
difference, that our _demi-monde_ was a whole world and a little over.
Our Traviatas and Camélias, for the most part titular, that is honorary
ones, grow on quite a different soil and flourish in different spheres
from their Parisian prototypes. They must be sought, not in the valley
but on the heights; they do not rise up like mist, but drop like dew
from above. The Princess Camélia or the Traviata with an estate in the
province of Tambov or Voronezh is a purely Russian phenomenon, and I
think there is a good deal to be said for it.
As for our non-European Russia, its morals have been to a great extent
saved by serfdom, which is now so much maligned. Love was a melancholy
thing in the village; it called its sweetheart ‘my heart’s yearning,’ as
though feeling that it was stolen from the master, who might at any time
miss his property and take it back. The village furnished the master’s
house with wood, hay, sheep, and its daughters, as part of its duties.
It was a consecrated duty, the Crown service which could not be refused
without a crime against morality and religion, which would provoke
the landowner’s rod and the knout of the whole empire. Here it was no
question of _chic_, but sometimes of the axe, more often of the river, in
which a Palashka or Lushka perished unnoticed.
What has happened since the Emancipation we hardly know, and therefore
we cling the more to our ladies. They certainly do in masterly style and
with extraordinary rapidity and adroitness assimilate abroad all the
ways, all the _habitus_ of the _lorettes_. It is only on careful scrutiny
that it can be discerned that something is lacking. And what is lacking
is the very simplest thing—being a _lorette_. It is just like Peter the
Great working with hammer and mallet at Saardam, fancying he was doing
real work. From cleverness and idleness, from superfluity and boredom,
our ladies _play_ at the trade, as their husbands play with a carpenter’s
lathe.
This absence of necessity, this character of artificiality, changes
the whole thing. On the Russian side there is the feeling of a superb
_mise-en-scène_; on the French, of reality and inevitability. Hence the
vast differences. One is often genuinely sorry for the Traviata _tout
de bon_, for the _dame aux perles_ hardly ever; over the first one
sometimes wants to weep, at the other always to laugh. A woman who has
inherited two or three thousand souls of peasants, at first perpetually
but now only temporarily ruined, can do a great deal—intrigue at the
gambling Spas, dress eccentrically, loll in a carriage, whistle and
make a row, get up scenes in restaurants, make men blush, change her
lovers, go with them to _parties fines_ and to all sorts of ‘calisthenic
exercises and conversations,’ drink champagne, smoke Havana cigars, and
stake pots of gold on the _rouge et noir_.... She can be a Messalina and
a Catherine—but, as we have said already, she cannot be a _lorette_,
although _lorettes_ are not, like poets, born, but made. Every _lorette_
has her story, her initiation induced by circumstances. As a rule, the
poor girl drifts, not knowing whither, and is brought low by coarse
deception, coarse ill-treatment. From outraged love, from outraged shame,
she develops _dépit_, resentment, a sort of thirst of vengeance and
at the same time a craving for excitement, for gaiety, for dress—with
poverty all about her and money only to be gained in _one_ way, and
so _vogue la galère_. The deceived child with no training steps into
the fray; her triumphs spoil her, spur her on (of those who have had
no triumphs we know nothing, they are lost and never heard of); she
remembers her Marengo and her Arcole; the habit of domination and of
luxury is absorbed into her blood; she owes everything to herself alone.
Beginning with nothing but her body, she too acquires ‘souls,’ and she
too ruins the rich men who are temporarily devoted to her, as our great
ladies ruin their poor peasants.
But in that also lies the whole impassable gulf between the _lorette_
by profession and the amateur Camélia. That gulf and that opposition
are vividly expressed in the fact that the _lorette_, supping in some
stuffy room of the Maison d’Or, dreams of her future drawing-room, while
the Russian lady, sitting in her sumptuous drawing-room, dreams of the
restaurant.
The serious side of the question is to determine what has given rise in
our ladies to this craving for dissipation and debauchery, this need
to brag of their emancipation, to trample insolently, capriciously, on
public opinion, and to fling off every veil and mask, while the chaste
and patriarchal mothers and grandmothers of our lionesses blushed
till they were forty at an indiscreet word, and with stealthy modesty
contented themselves with a lover like the one in Turgenev’s _The Bread
of Others_, or, lacking him, a coachman or a butler.
Note that our aristocratic Camélias go no further back than the beginning
of the ’forties.
And all the modern movement, all the stirring of thought, the groping,
the dissatisfaction, the discontent, date from the same period.
Therein lies revealed the human, the historical aspect of our
aristocratic ladies’ debauchery. It is a half-conscious protest of a
sort against the old-fashioned family that weighed upon them like lead,
against the brutal debauchery of the men. The oppressed woman, the woman
deserted at home, had leisure for reading, and as soon as she felt that
the family maxims were incongruous with George Sand, and had heard too
many enthusiastic descriptions of Blanches and Célestines, her patience
broke down, and she took the bit between her teeth. Her protest was
savage, but her position too was savage.
Her opposition was not clearly formulated, but was vague and instinctive;
she felt outraged, she was conscious of being humiliated, of being
oppressed, but had no conception of independent freedom apart from
debauchery and dissipation. She protested by her behaviour: her revolt
was full of self-indulgence and bad manners, of caprice, of sloppiness,
of coquetry, sometimes of injustice; she was unbridled without becoming
free. She retained a secret fear and diffidence, but longed to show her
resentment and to try _that other_ life. Against the narrow self-will of
the oppressors she set the narrow self-will of patience strained till it
snapped, with no firm guiding idea but the conceited bravado of youth.
Like a rocket she flared up, went off into sparks and fell with a splash,
but not very deep. There you have the history of our titled Camélias, our
Traviatas in pearls.
Of course, in this case too we may recall the bilious Rastoptchin, who
on his deathbed said of the tragedy of the Fourteenth of December:
‘Everything is inside out with us: in France _la roture_ tried to climb
into the nobility—well, that one can understand; our nobility tried to
become _canaille_, and that’s silly!’
But it is just that side of it which to us does not seem silly at all.
It follows very consistently from two primary facts: the alien character
of the culture which is for us not inevitable, and the fundamental note
of another social order to which consciously or unconsciously we are
striving.
However, that forms part of our catechism, and I am afraid of being drawn
into repetition.
In the history of our development our Traviatas will not disappear
without a trace; they have their value and significance, and form the
bold and reckless legion of the advance guard, the volunteers and
singers, who, whistling and striking their tambourines, dancing and
showing off, go first to face the fire, screening the more serious
phalanx who have no lack of thought nor daring nor of sharpened weapons.