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Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
Key Metrics
- Orlando Figes
- Audible Studios on Brilliance
- Audio
- 9781721372058
- -
- -
- History > Russia & the Former Soviet Union
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
History on a grand scale - an enchanting masterpiece that explores the making of one of the world's most vibrant civilizations.
A People's Tragedy, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, did 'more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know'.
Now, in Natasha's Dance, internationally renowned historian Orlando Figes does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together.
Beginning in the 18th century with the building of St. Petersburg - a 'window on the West' - and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself - its character, spiritual essence and destiny.
He skillfully interweaves the great works - by Dostoevsky, Stravinsky, and Chagall - with folk embroidery, peasant songs, religious icons and all the customs of daily life, from food and drink to bathing habits to beliefs about the spirit world.
Figes' characters range high and low: the revered Tolstoy, who left his deathbed to search for the kingdom of God, as well as the serf girl Praskovya, who became Russian opera's first superstar and shocked society by becoming her owner's wife.
Like the European-schooled countess Natasha performing an impromptu folk dance in Tolstoy's War and Peace, the spirit of 'Russianness' is revealed by Figes as rich and uplifting, complex and contradictory - a powerful force that unified a vast country and proved more lasting than any Russian ruler or state.
Author Bio
Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Born in London in 1959, he graduated with a Double-Starred First from Cambridge University, where he was a Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College from 1984 to 1999.
He is the author of seven books on Russian history, including A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, which in 1997 received the Wolfson Prize, the NCR Book Award, the W.H. Smith Literary Award, the Longman/History Today Book Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2002) was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (2007) was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, the Prix Médicis and the Premio Roma.
His agent is Rogers, Coleridge and White. His books have been translated into 32 languages. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.
Source: orlandofiges.co.uk
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