CULTURAL HISTORY: A few years ago, I watched a curious piece of history unfold. It was in Enontekio, in the Finnish Arctic, where a major festival for Saami (reindeer herders) was being held and where, for the first time in many years, a group of Saami from northern Russia had been allowed to cross the border to participate.
Dressed in traditional Russian peasant clothes, they formed a circle with their Saami cousins from Finland, Norway and Sweden, but when they tried to join the dance they found they couldn't quite get the steps right: their Saami identity had been overlaid by a Russian one. In his exhaustive book, Orlando Figis investigates this search for a lost identity, but angles in on it from the Russian side.
The Natasha of the title is Natasha in War and Peace, who, listening to a folk tune being played, feels moved to cast aside her silks, velvets and expensive upbringing in order to respond to the music by dancing like any village girl. By so doing, Tolstoy tells us, she is locking into Russia's lost past that is deeply rooted in the soil.
The land of Russia, stretching from Europe across to Asia and encompassing steppe, desert and tundra, was a pot whose rich contents never truly melted into each other, despite the best - or worst - intentions of sovietisation. Apart from the reindeer herding lands of the Komi, which reached across the snowy wastes of the north, there were the Mongols, who occupied Russia for 400 years and brought with them Muslim emblems of sabres and crescent moons. There were people of Turkic origin who arrived from the west and there were the Slavic tribes who occupied the south.
To show the way in which these various threads have intertwined to make an uncertain whole, Figis weaves into his narrative the story of Fountain House, built in St Petersburg in 1750 by the influential Sheremetev family and home to the poet Anna Akhmatova from 1926 to 1952. At the height of its splendour, the mansion had 340 servants, but post-1917 it was partitioned off to make homes for the masses with Akhmatova, her lover and her lover's wife forced into unwelcome intimacy by having to share the same three rooms.
Because this is a cultural history, Figis tells us what peasants ate on Shrove Tuesday, how Stalin flew into a rage when he realised Eisenstein, the film-maker, had likened him to Ivan the Terrible, how the people of the steppes were animists, engaging in shamanistic practices, this last leading Russian anthropologists to raise the disturbing question: were these people truly Russian or were they polluted by the blood of Genghis Khan? We learn the origin of the many Mongol words that have entered the Russian language and the fact that Moscow was, in its day, far more homely than St Petersburg, for it nurtured the old peasant qualities of comfort and domesticity whereas St Petersburg's foreign elegance was stiff and showy.
But trying to find the essence of Russian-ness is a monumental task, evidenced in this doorstop of a book, 729 pages long and four years in the making. Buildings, religious customs, wars, the conduct of love affairs, the layout of a palace, the sweep of a paintbrush - together these things made up something called the Russian soul, the depths of which writers, musicians and composers all tried to reach and sometimes had to abandon.
"When I left Russia," said Rachmaninov, "I left behind the desire to compose: losing my country, I lost myself also." Anna Akhmatova, bound to her beloved city of Leningrad, refused to leave. She took her inspiration from the Russian language. Without it, she said, she would not be able to write. She stayed - to be ridiculed by Trotsky.
Figis is in love with Russia. He dedicates his book to his two children, hoping that when they are old enough to read it, they will understand why, after their mother, Russia is his other love. Love, of course, is blind, which is why, perhaps, he chooses not to entertain the idea that Serghei Efron, husband of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, was almost certainly a double agent or why he refers to Efron senior, a supporter of the revolution, as an underground "terrorist". Nor does he mention Pasternak's rejection of Tsvetaeva's plea for help, following which she hanged herself. And while we hear much about the love affairs of the nobility, we hear little about the fiery relationship between Mayakovsky and Lila Brik and their exuberant and innovative poster campaign which brought news and art to the people, a vibrant form of mass communication never seen before and which Figis dismisses as mere propaganda.
However, these are small criticisms of a large-hearted book and nothing to those voiced by a former academic colleague of Figis's at Cambridge, now based in Moscow. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Rachel Polonsky implied that the book is populist, accused Figis of many unacknowledged borrowings, and found fault with his incorrect naming of streets. Figis, interviewed on BBC Radio Four, brushed these criticisms aside, pointing to the fact that far from concealing his various sources he had included 28 pages of references, adding that he wasn't even sure if his academic critic could be deemed an academic. Ouch!
• Mary Russell's book, Journeys of a Lifetime, was published earlier this year by TownHouse
Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. By Orlando Figis.
Allen Lane, 729pp. £25