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Natasha's Dance A Cultural History Of Russia

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In Natasha 's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2002), Orlando Figes sweeps us up with enormous assurance but a very light touch to whirl us round and round through the last 300 years of Russia 's cultural history. Unlike two earlier general surveys, W. Bruce Lincoln 's Between Heaven and Hell (1998) and James H. Billington 's The Icon and the Axe (1966), Natasha 's Dance doesn 't begin with the conversion to Christianity of Prince Vladimir of Kiev and then trudge chronologically through the intervening thousand years to the present. Instead, Figes examines what he considers to be certain defining themes in Russian culture. His book opens when Peter the Great founds his new capital, St. Petersburg, in 1703, the moment, according to Figes,

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