Customer Reviews
Excellent Book - By: Uncle Vodka, 21 Jul 2008 
I have a "thing" for Russia & love to read books about it. This is one of the very best. I have lived in Russia for a year & have some command of the language & I find that Figes more than any other writer squares with how I feel about the place. Added to which his writing is highly readable & jam packed with info.
One little correction, his claim that the Russian word for peasant is unique in being cognate with Christian would seem a little inaccurate. The same occurs in a rare form of Greek spoken in a few villages in Southern Italy (Grecanico). Just a gap in my ignorance I can't resist showing off, I hope you'll forgive my intellectual vanity on that point.
But joking aside this is an incredible book, it defies comprehension how someone can keep alll that information in their head & then produce it in a truly readable form. I could happily spend the rest of my life chasing up some of his primary sources for extra information. I'd give the book six stars if I could.
Amazing Russia - By: demola, 31 Mar 2008 Let There Be A City & there was St Petersburg. Thus starts this incredible story & the next 600 pages (take heed) carry you on a breathtaking journey through Russia, its people & culture as spoken forth by her most brilliant artistes - from Pushkin to Dostoyevsky, Akhmatova to Nabokov, Tolstoy to Gogol, Tchaikovsky to Stravinsky, Balllets Russes to Kandinsky. The first few chapters give an engrossing purview of St Petersburg (where the nobility spoke french before russian) & Moscow (where counts fed their pets on truffles & then went bankrupt).
Holy Russia - the new christian Rome after Constantinople, the land of icons & the Old Believers. Gay Russia & the mazurka & alll night ballls. Peasant Russia & the battle for food, liberty & vodka. Whence comes the passion & spirit of the descendants of Genghiz Khan & the Vikings? Who would have thought the land of Stalin could once have been so dazzling (see Sukurov's film Russian Ark for visual stimulus). Wonders never cease.
Please, please don't read this rich book if you have a beggarly knowledge of russian literature & history. Lest you declaim this treasure. Go read first & then come back. You'll cry for joy.
Fine, imaginative piece of historical writing - By: Dr Gautam Sen, 27 Dec 2007 A very imaginative, richly informative piece of scholarship & a pleasure to read. A great book by one of the great historians of his generation.
A unique and brilliant book, a must read if you want to understand Russia - By: Petrolhead, 08 May 2007 Natasha's Dance is in a class of its own. It is the only book that takes in the whole sweep of Russian culture & history, linking literature, theatre, dance, opera & more. Although I studied Russian language, literature & history & I was living in Moscow, there were many things that I just couldn't understand: why were Russians like they were? How did they be so boorish one moment but so cultured & romantic the next? What reallly happened when the Mongols invaded? Where did those matrioshka dolls come from? Why does Russian music sound different to western European music? What was life like in feudal peasant Russia? or in Siberian exile? How did one country produce peasants, communists, oligarchs, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky & a whole lot of spies? In Russian literature, why was there so much about wet-nurses, religion, name days, icons, duelling, Decembrists, noble serfs & mystic fools? Who were the Cossacks? Did the entire Russian noble class reallly speak French to each other? Why didn't the peasants revolt earlier? And why did exiles harbour such a longing for their homeland, even though it was full of communists, corruption & subzero temperatures?
Natasha's Dance tells you alll this & far more, much more than I can recalll in one go. The name of the book, which is rather offputtingly esoteric, refers to a scene from War & Peace, which indicates what level of reader it is pitched at.
This book is not a light read. There is so much information, you may find you need to stop to take a thinking break after every page just to take it alll in. It is so rich that you may be overwhelmed if you haven't got at least a passing knowledge of Russia. If you're not vaguely familiar with at least a handful of names such as Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov, Stravinsky or Akhmatova, you might find Natasha's Dance is a bit of an uphill struggle, & it might be better to start with a gentler climb, like Anna Karenina or Doctor Zhivago.
But for those who know something about Russia & want to supercharge their understanding of the place & its people, this book is undeniably, uniquely, wonderful: a treasure trove.
Figes is one of the most accessible and intelligent historians around - By: Sam J. Ruddock, 12 Apr 2007 
This is a cultural history of Russia over the past three centuries. Somehow Orlando Figes manages to draw together disparate concepts & unite them into a coherent view of a wonderfully unique culture. From peasant music & dance to classic literature & the affairs of the state, Figes delves into the heart of Russian culture to produce a work of supreme importance, both for students of Russian history, & those who wish to know more about the vivid, breathing entity that is culture. This is a readable but powerful work which seeks to create a lucid history of one of the biggest & most diverse countries in the world.
