NATASHA

by Orlando Figes

  In the world which roars: 'Glory to those who are to come!' Something in me whispers: 'Glory to those who have been!'25

  Volkonsky dedicated his own Memoirs (1923) to Tsvetaeva - recompense, perhaps, for the fact that she had typed out its two thick volumes for the publisher. She saw his recollections as a sacred testament to the nineteenth-century tradition that had been broken in 191 7.

  To mark their publication she wrote an essay called 'Cedar: An Apology'. The title had been taken from the Prince's nickname, given to him because he had planted cedars on his favourite patch of land (today it is a forest of 12,000 hectares) at the family estate in Borisoglebsk, Tambov province.

  The cedar is the tallest of trees, the straightest too, and it comes from the North (the Siberian cedar) and the South as well (the Lebanese). This is the dual nature of the Volkonsky clan: Siberia and Rome [where Zinaida settled as an emigree]!26

  In the preface to his memoirs Volkonsky voiced the exile's agony:

  Motherland! What a complex idea, and how difficult to catch. We love our motherland - who does not? But what is it we love? Something that existed? Or something that will be? We love our country. But where is our country? Is it any more than a patch of land? And if we are separated from that land, and yet in our imagination we can re-create it, can we really say that there is a motherland; and can we really say that there is exile?27

  2

  Russian emigre communities were compact colonies held together by their cultural heritage. The first generation of Russian exiles after 1917 was basically united by the hope and conviction that the Soviet Union would not last and that they would eventually return to Russia. They compared their situation to that of the nineteenth-century political exiles who had gone abroad to fight the Tsarist regime from the relative freedom of Europe and then returned to their native land. Living as they did in constant readiness for their own return, they never really unpacked their suitcases. They refused to admit that they were any-thing but temporary exiles. They saw it as their task to preserve the old traditions of the Russian way of life - to educate their children in Russian-language schools, to keep alive the liturgy of the Russian Church, and to uphold the values and achievements of Russian cul-ture in the nineteenth century - so that they could restore all these

  institutions when they returned home. They saw themselves as the guardians of the true Russian way of life which was being undermined by the Soviet regime.

  In the 'Little Russias' of Berlin, Paris and New York the emigres created their own mythic versions of the 'good Russian life' before 1917. They returned to a past that never was - a past, in fact, that had never been as good, or as 'Russian', as that now recalled by the emigres. Nabokov described the first generation of exiles from Soviet Russia as 'hardly palpable people who imitated in foreign cities a dead civilization, the remote, almost legendary, almost Sumerian mirages of St Petersburg and Moscow, 1900-1916 (which even then, in the twenties and thirties, sounded like 1916-1900 bc)'.28 There were literary soirees in private rooms and hired halls, where faded actresses provided nostalgic echoes of the Moscow Arts Theatre and mediocre authors 'trudged through a fog of rhythmic prose'.29 There were midnight Easter masses in the Russian church; summer trips to Biarritz ('as before'); and weekend parties at Chekhovian houses in the south of France which recalled a long-gone era of the 'gentry idyll' in the Russian countryside. Russians who before the Revolution had assumed foreign ways, or had never gone to church, now, as exiles, clung to their native customs and Orthodox beliefs. There was a revival of the Russian faith abroad, with much talk among the emigres of how the Revolution had been brought about by European secular beliefs, and a level of religious observance which they had never shown before 1917. The exiles stuck to their native language as if to their personality. Nabokov, who had learned to read English before he could read Russian, became so afraid of losing his command of the Russian language when he was at Cambridge University in the early 1920s that he resolved to read ten pages of Dahl's Russian Dictionary every day.

  This accentuation of their Russianness was reinforced by a mutual animosity between the exiles and their hosts. The French and the Germans, in particular, looked upon the Russians as barbaric parasites on their own war-torn economies; while the Russians, who were destitute but on the whole much better read than either the French or the Germans, thought themselves a cut above such 'petty bourgeois' types (according to Nabokov, the Russians of Berlin mixed only with the Jews). In a passage of Speak, Memory that still smacks of such

  attitudes Nabokov claims that the only German in Berlin he ever got to know was a university student,

  well-bred, quiet, bespectacled, whose hobby was capital punishment… Although I have lost track of Dietrich long ago, I can well imagine the look of calm satisfaction in his fish-blue eyes as he shows nowadays (perhaps at the very minute I am writing this) a never-expected profusion of treasures to his thigh-clapping, guffawing co-veterans - the absolutely wunderbar pictures he took during Hitler's reign.30

  The sheer volume of artistic talent in the emigre communities was bound to divide them from the societies in which they found themselves. 'The ghetto of emigration was actually an environment imbued with a greater concentration of culture and a deeper freedom of thought than we saw in this or that country around us,' Nabokov reminisced in an interview in 1966. 'Who would want to leave this inner freedom in order to enter the outer unfamiliar world?'31 There was, moreover, a political division between the mainly left-wing intellectuals of the West and those Russians who had fled the Bolsheviks. Berberova maintained that there was 'not one single writer of renown who would have been for us [the emigres]' - and it is hard to disagree. H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, Stefan Zweig all declared their support for the Soviet regime; while others, such as Hemingway or the Bloomsbury set, were basically indifferent to what was going on inside the Soviet Union.

  Isolated in this way, the emigres united around the symbols of Russian culture as the focus of their national identity. Culture was the one stable element they had in a world of chaos and destruction - the only thing that remained for them of the old Russia - and for all their political squabbles, the thing that gave the emigres a sense of common purpose was the preservation of their cultural heritage. The 'Little Russias' of the emigration were intellectual homelands. They were not defined by attachment to the soil or even to the history of the real Russia (there was no period of Russian history around which they could agree to unite: for the emigre community contained both monarchists and anti-monarchists, socialists and anti-socialists).

  In these societies literature became the locus patriae, with the 'thick'

  literary journal as its central institution. Combining literature with social commentary and politics, these journals organized their readers in societies of thought, as they had done in Russia before 1917. Every major centre of the emigration had its thick journals, and each journal was in turn associated with the literary clubs and cafes which represented the different shades of political opinion. The biggest-selling journal was published in Paris - Sovremenny zapiski (Contemporary Annals), a title which was meant as a reference to the two most prestigious liberal journals of the nineteenth century: Sovremennik (The Contemporary) and Otechestvennye zapiski (Annals of the Fatherland). Its stated mission was the preservation of Russia's cultural heritage. This meant keeping to the well-tried names that had been established before 1917 -writers such as Ivan Bunin, Aleksei Remizov and (the queen of literary Paris) Zinaida Gippius - which made it very hard for younger or more experimental writers such as Nabokov and Tsvetaeva. There was enough demand for the reassuring presence of the Russian classics to sustain a score of publishers.32

  Pushkin became a sort of figurehead of Russia Abroad. His birthday was celebrated as a national holiday in the absence of any other historical event the emigres could agree to commemorate. There was much in Pushkin with which the emigres could identify: his liberal-conservative (Kar
amzinian) approach to Russian history; his cautious support of the monarchy as a bulwark against the anarchistic violence of the revolutionary mob; his uncompromising individualism and belief in artistic liberty; and his 'exile' from Russia (in his case, from Moscow and St Petersburg). It is perhaps no coincidence that the emigration spawned some of the most brilliant Pushkin scholars of the twentieth century - among them Nabokov, with his 4-volume annotated English translation of Eugene Onegin.33

  Among the Parisian emigres Bunin was revered as the heir to this literary heritage, a living affirmation that the realist tradition of Turg-enev and Tolstoy continued on in the diaspora. As Bunin himself put it in a celebrated speech of 1924, it was 'The Mission of the Emigration' to act for the 'True Russia' by protecting this inheritance from the modernist corruptions of left-wing and Soviet art. The mantle of national leadership had been conferred on Bunin, as a writer, only after 1917. Before the Revolution he had not been placed by many in

  the highest class: his prose style was heavy and conventional compared to the favoured writers of the avant-garde. But after 1917 there was a revolution in the artistic values of the emigres. They came to reject the literary avant-garde, which they associated with the revolutionaries, and, once they found themselves abroad, they took great comfort in the old-fashioned 'Russian virtues' of Bunin's prose. As one critic put it, Bunin's works were the 'repository of a covenant', a 'sacred link' between the emigration and the Russia that was lost. Even Gorky, in Berlin, would abandon everything and lock himself away to read the latest volume of Bunin's stories as soon as it arrived in the mail from Paris. As an heir to the realist tradition, Gorky thought of Bunin as the last great Russian writer in the broken line of Chekhov and Tolstoy.34 In 1933 Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize, the first Russian writer to be honoured in this way. Coming as it did at a time when Stalin was putting Soviet culture into chains, the award was perceived by the emigres as a recognition of the fact that the True Russia (as defined by culture) was abroad. Gippius, who was somewhat prone to hero-worship, called Bunin 'Russia's prime minister in exile'. Others hailed him as the 'Russian Moses' who would lead the exiles back to their promised land.35

  The Russia Bunin re-creates in his stories is a dreamland. In 'The Mowers' (1923) and 'Unhurried Spring' (1924) he conjures up a vision of the old rural Russia that had never been - a sunny happy land of virgin forests and boundless steppes where the peasants were hardworking and happy in their work, in harmony with nature and their fellow farmers - the nobility. There could not have been a starker contrast with Bunin's dark portrayal of provincial rot in The Village, the novel that had first brought him to fame in 1910, nor a more ironic one. For Bunin was now escaping to precisely the sort of rural fantasy which he himself had done so much to puncture in his earlier work. In exile, his literary mission was to contrast the idyll he imagined in the Russian countryside with the evil of the cities where Bolshevism had corrupted the good old Russian ways. But the land he portrayed was, in his own admission, 'an Elysium of the Past', a shift 'into a kind of dream',36 and not an actual place to which the exiles could return. Retreating into a legendary past is perhaps a natural response of the artist who is dislocated from his native land. Nabokov even took artistic

  inspiration from the experience of exile. But for Bunin it must have been particularly difficult to write when he was cut off from his own country. How could a realist write about a Russia that no longer was?

  Emigration tends to breed conservatives in art. Retrospection and nostalgia are its moods. Even Stravinsky found himself moving away from the ultra-modernism of The Rite of Spring, the last major work of his 'Russian period', to the neoclassicism of the Bach-like works of his Parisian exile. Others became stuck in the style they had developed in their native land - unable to move on in the new world. This was true of Rachmaninov. Like Bunin's writing, his music remained trapped in the late Romantic mode of the nineteenth century.

  Sergei Rachmaninov had learned composition at the Moscow Conservatory at a time when Tchaikovsky was its musical hero, and it was Tchaikovsky who had made the deepest impact on his life and art. In exile in New York after 1917, Rachmaninov remained untouched by the avant-garde - the last of the Romantics in the modern age. In a revealing interview in 1939, which the composer forbade to be published in his own lifetime, he explained to Leonard Liebling of The Musical Courier his feelings of estrangement from the world of modernism. His musical philosophy was rooted in the Russian spiritual tradition, where the role of the artist was to create beauty and to speak the truth from the depths of his heart.

  I felt like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense efforts to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me… I always feel that my own music and my reactions to all music remain spiritually the same, unendingly obedient in trying to create beauty… The new kind of music seems to come not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they mediate, protest, analyse, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.'7

  In his last major interview, in 1941, Rachmaninov revealed the spiritual connection between this outpouring of emotion and his Russianness.

  I am a Russian composer, and the land of my birth has influenced my temperament and outlook. My music is a product of the temperament, and so it is

  Russian music. I never consciously attempt to write Russian music, or any other kind of music. What I try to do when writing down my music is to say simply and directly what is in my heart.38

  The 'Russianness' of Rachmaninov's music, a kind of lyrical nostalgia, became the emotional source of his musical conservatism in exile.

  Being out of step had always been a part of his persona. Born in 1873 to an ancient noble family from Novgorod province, Rachmaninov had been an unhappy child. His father had walked out on the family and left his mother penniless when he was only six. Two years later the young boy was sent to study music in St Petersburg. He invested his emotions in his music. He came to view himself as an outsider, and that Romantic sense of alienation became fused with his identity as an artist and later as an emigre. Exile and isolation as a theme figured in his music from an early stage. It was even there in his graduation piece from the Conservatory, a one-act opera called Aleko (1892), based on Pushkin's 'Gypsies', in which the Russian hero of the poem is rejected by the gypsies and banished to the life of a lonely fugitive. Rachmaninov's best-known music before 1917 was already marked by a precocious nostalgia for his native land: the Vespers (1915), with their conscious imitation of the ancient church plainchants; The Bells (1912), which allowed him to explore that Russian sound; and above all the piano concertos. The haunting opening theme of the Third Piano Concerto (1909) is liturgical in manner and very similar to the Orthodox chant from the vesper service used at the Pechersk monastery in Kiev, although Rachmaninov himself denied that it had any religious source. Rachmaninov had never been a regular churchgoer and after his marriage to his first cousin, Natalia Satina, a marriage forbidden by the Russian Church, he ceased to go at all. Yet he felt a deep attachment to the rituals and the music of the Church, especially the sound of Russian bells, which reminded him of his childhood in Moscow. This became a source of his nostalgia after 1917.

  The other source of Rachmaninov's nostalgia was his longing for the Russian land. He yearned for one patch of land in particular: his wife's estate at Ivanovka, five hundred kilometres south-east of Moscow, where he had spent his summers from the age of eight, when the Rachmaninovs were forced to sell their own estate. Ivanovka

  contained his childhood and romantic memories. In 1910, the estate became his own through marriage and he moved there with Natalia. Ivanovka was the place where he composed nearly all his works before 1917. 'It had no special wonders - no mountains, ravines or ocean views', Rachmaninov remembered in 1931. 'It was on the steppe, and instead of the boundless ocean there
were endless fields of wheat and rye stretching to the horizon.'39 This is the landscape whose spirit is expressed in Rachmaninov's music. 'The Russians', he explained to an American magazine (and he was clearly thinking mainly of himself), 'feel a stronger tie to the soil than any other nationality. It comes from an instinctive inclination towards quietude, tranquillity, admiration of nature, and perhaps a quest for solitude. It seems to me that every Russian is something of a hermit.'40 In 1917 the Ivanovka peasants forced Rachmaninov to abandon his home. 'They often got drunk and ran round the estate with flaming torches,' recalled one of the villagers. 'They stole the cattle and broke into the stores.' After his departure -first for Sweden and then for the USA - the house was looted and burned down.41 For Rachmaninov, the loss of Ivanovka was equated with the loss of his homeland, and the intense pain of exile which he always felt was mingled with its memory.