Journey Into the Mind's Eye

by Lesley Blanch

  Once I sat beside the Traveller when Rachmaninov was persuaded to play for his friends. He was always surrounded by compatriots. I cannot breathe without them, he would say. In his house at Rambouillet he had recreated the pattern of Russian country-house life. Here, when he was not shut away with his music, he would melt, play tennis and eat quantities of Russian delicacies, as a circle of friends and family gathered round the eternal pivot-point – a samovar. When he played, the strange stone mask never softened, never moved a muscle, as he stormed a Chopin étude, evoked some sad song from the Black Sea, or a Bach toccata.

  In a more frivolous vein there was Nikita Balieff, whose family life was quite as stylized as his Chauve-Souris theatre, and Vertinsky, who was then enthralling the boîtes de nuit of Berlin and Paris with his cracking voice and air of a disillusioned pierrot. And then there was Ivan Mosjukhine – the arch seductor of his moment, Mosjukhine of the silent screen – of countless heroes, Kean, Casanova, or the Courier of the Tzar. I only saw his films much later. But the Seducer, in the flesh, I once saw at close quarters. He was in Paris to make a film there and, in the Traveller’s rooms, I sat watching the drama – the melodrama, rather, these two Slavs conjured up. Both their faces were perfectly expressionless, yet both produced an overwhelming climate of emotion. The Traveller, with his flat-planed yellow face and slit eyes; Mosjukhine, paper-white, with his long nose, enormous, almond shaped eyes, and his air at once dissipated and tragic, as if taunted by his own Casanova legend. They were flung back on the low Turkish divans which ran round the room; beside them, the samovar, humming comfortably; above them, one of the many glittering, silver-cased ikons which studded the walls. Tradition, superstition and religious observance were all things against which the Traveller railed, yet he remained captive to them.

  Together he and Mosjukhine were partial to discussing the state of the French theatre – pourri, they said furiously – rotten through and through. After which they would turn to the hopelessness of life in general. They usually talked in French, so I was able to follow their almost voluptuous indulgence in the pure misery of existence . . . Then there was tosca, spleen, something which cropped up regularly in conversations between Russians, I noticed, like dousha, the soul. After which, it was the body’s turn, and they went on to compare their respective livers and other organs, all of which, they agreed, were complètement pourris.

  I thought the Traveller’s rooms the most extraordinary I had ever seen. Now for the first time I saw him in a frame of his own choosing: the dark, yet burning blue or crimson walls (like those of an old Russian traktir, or wayside inn, he explained) were hung with primitive prints of peasants hunting bears, or falling drunk from troikas plunging over the snows. The furniture was a mixture of Turkish and austere Russian Empire pieces in pale golden Karelian birch, while the squat little Turkish coffee-tables were encrusted with mother-of-pearl. The floor was padded with rugs, criss-crossed, and overlapping each other in that lavish manner I was later to associate with mosques.

  The Traveller was never moderate in his tastes: it was a lot, or nothing. ‘What’s the matter with a lot?’ he would say, jibing at my father’s rather austere sense of decoration – one Persian rug and one Chinese bowl at a time. Some of his finest rugs continued up from the floor to surge across the divans in waves of colour. His favourite corner was massed with Daghestani carpets, upon which he had boldly imposed gros-point cushions of riotous Victorian roses, parrots and bead-work spaniels. Beside the samovar was a bronze and enamel Chinese opium pipe. This never failed to upset Mademoiselle Lavisse, who would purse her lips every time she saw it.

  ‘Aspirin for you – opium for me, it’s all one and the same really,’ the Traveller would remark mockingly, at which she would take her revenge by saying it was time for us to leave: La Sainte Chapelle must be visited without further delay. She hurried me off before the Traveller could enlarge on his suggestion to visit the Musée Cluny, ‘where all those mediaeval ceintures de chasteté are not to be missed . . . Come back for tea, and I’ll tell you some amusing stories about them’ was his passing shot.

  •

  In Paris, on that first unforgettable visit, the Traveller was to fulfil a long-held promise to take me to the midnight Russian Easter Mass. So, warming-up, on the last two Sundays before the Russian Easter which fell, that year, eighteen days after ours, the Traveller took me with him to the Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevski in the Rue Daru. ‘Not that I hold with any of this white magic,’ he said, as he bent to kiss the ikons. Each time he gave me a candle to light, and carried three himself; for whom, or what, I never knew. Together we would watch them flickering among the forest of other little flames lit by love and faith. Then, transported into the very heart of my longings, of the Traveller’s Tales, I would stand beside him, rapt, listening for the first time, to the sombre chants of Bortniansky or Turchaninov as they rolled upwards into the golden cupolas, piercing the bluish, incense-laden air, sung by voices as veiled, as smoky as the air itself. Here there were no mighty thunders of organ music, no disembodied flutings of boy choristers, but something simpler, warmer, the voices of men and women, earthly beings aspiring to their God with that mystical yet intimate fervour possessed by Orthodox worshippers.

  Such veiled, yet vital tones only issue from Slav throats. Or rather from Slav bellies. For while the French seem to sing through their noses, and the English through their teeth (the Italians, it must be admitted, singing straight from their lungs), only Russian voices issue directly from their guts – from their bellies and their hearts – like some centrifugal life-force, springing from the earth itself. Turgeniev has written of this quality of nationalism in Russian voices, describing the village singer Yakov, in a tavern competition:

  ‘He sang, and each note breathed an inexpressible quality of nationality, of vast spaces; it was as if the steppe unfolded before us in all its infinity . . . A true, ardent Russian soul sounded there, and went straight to your heart . . .

  So they sang in the Cathedral, their melancholy eyes fixed on some remembered past, crossing themselves in a strangely urgent fashion, their fingers closed, as if plucking out their own hearts; and while the incense thickened headily, the candles guttered before the miraculous ikons, and the exiles prostrated themselves in supplication and acceptance.

  For me, it was the affirmation of all my longings, the body and soul of Russia, and when we emerged into the emptied Sunday streets I felt myself an exile, too. The Traveller lingered to talk with the priests, sinister-looking figures, with their long hair and pepper-and-salt beards, or the black-wimpled nuns in their high kloba or headpieces, who might all have issued from some low-vaulted chapel of Ivan the Terrible’s Kremlin. As he moved among the little groups of shabby, worn-faced men who gathered in the courtyard of the church, they all seemed to know him; I thought, perhaps, to fear him too; it was difficult to penetrate the Slav mask – his, or theirs. Even among these massed faces, so unmistakably un-European in both their ugliness and beauty, his seemed more quintessentially Asiatic.

  In my nursery he had appeared the strangest looking person I had ever seen, and, in memory, he remains so. I associated him with the illustrations to my Arabian Nights. The Chinaman’s traditional pig-tail and long wispy moustaches were missing but otherwise he resembled the djinn who vanished in a puff of smoke. Indeed his comings and goings always had a quality of magic about them.

  But that Easter in the Rue Daru, watching him among the flotsam of strangeness washed up on this narrow Russian strand, I was suddenly aware of him as a person, a man, rather than the Djinn of my childhood. Was it that I had grown older – or did he seem younger? In my nursery he had appeared a remote, even ancient figure, by reason of his egg-bald skull. In London, baldness had seemed a symbol of age. Yet here I saw numbers of bald or shaven pates having no connection with the years, but being rather the mark of many military men, or even some Asiatic religious organizations. For while all Orthodox priests wore their hair and beards flowing,
there were, at that moment, a group of Russians who had arrived from Outer Mongolia, where they had been part of a militant-monastic order which imposed shaven heads. Some of these men were known to the Traveller, and watching him among them I now saw him truly, for the first time: a man in his forties, with something taut in his bearing. This I had not sensed before, for at home or in my nursery, he was always sprawling on sofas or lounging in my rocking-chair in boneless abandon. Seeing the way the émigrés treated him, with this mixture of deference and perhaps even something of fear – seeing the way the men spoke to him, and the manner in which the women looked at him, I now became aware of him as a stranger – as a man. It was most disturbing.

  I felt that I had spied on him unawares, catching the man, beneath the Traveller’s mask, and with a sense of impropriety, or intrusion, I turned away, to stare, once again, avidly, at the curves of the bulbous cupolas and the golden crosses high above me, trying to imprint them, for ever, on my mind’s eye. I could not tell then that I should come to know them later, in their true setting, soaring above Rastrelli’s churches, reflected in the still waters of the Don, or rising, lonely, from the steppes. Lovingly, I traced the swell of the domes, finding them indescribably beautiful; they rose up, like the fabulous fire-bird of Slav legend, confounding the bourgeois desolation of Baron Haussmann’s Paris, which at once, and for ever, chilled me by its immutable French logic. Then, suddenly, the Traveller was at my side.

  ‘Enough talking – eating now, although according to the Church we ought to be fasting.’ And he took me off to some tiny overcrowded Russian bistro for cabbage soup and poppy-seed cakes.

  ‘The word bistro is Russian – it means hurry – quick’ – he explained. ‘Our troops brought it with them when we occupied Paris.’ Once again, a tinge of unmistakable pride sounded in the smoky voice.

  Although he was international in his way of life and Tartar in his remote ancestry, he was, in essence, the most supremely Slav being imaginable. I use the word Slav rather than Russian, for how define or pin down the prototype of this race which is the blend of a hundred different peoples from the Arctic to the Black Sea, from Poland to China? And just as he seemed a conglomerate of all these peoples, belonging wholly to no one of them, so he was impossible to place in any one milieu; too luxurious for a revolutionary – too cynical, also. Too active for an intellectual; too realistic, too openly in revolt, too free of all conventions for an aristocrat; and far too adventurous for a bourgeois. He was impossible to classify. There was something of each in him, besides an inertia recalling, at its worst, Goncharov’s Oblomov, who rotted on a sofa; at its best, his immobile moods recalled the withdrawals of a Buddhist priest. Each aspect of his character contradicted or constrained the other.

  Constraint is perhaps not a word to be applied to him, for he was entirely free. But secretive to a theatrical degree. Secrecy, with him, was a fine art, something he enjoyed practising for its own sake. The most devious motives of the Asiatic mind were understood by him and he attributed them to everyone else, adducing cunning labyrinths of behaviour to the simplest of his Anglo-Saxon friends: this they could not grasp and were often hurt by his seeming mistrust. But to take anybody on their face value would have been, for him, an insult to both his own intellect and the nature of his opponent – for he saw everybody, except perhaps myself and my mother, as a real or potential adversary. On the whole it was a mark of respect. English simplicity always baffled him. ‘They’re fools or hypocrites – there’s no other explanation,’ he would say.

  He was proud of his Tartar blood. Tartarskaya krov was, it seemed, particularly recherché (like Red Indian blood in America). The Tartars had gradually become the rulers, the new aristocracy of Russia, he said. They had brought the power instinct – and a touch of perfidy besides, to the simpler Russian character. The Tartar princes were forcibly converted to Orthodoxy, but bided their time. Gradually, the great Boyar families intermarried with them, becoming Yussoupovs, Ourousoffs, Tchegodaievs and such. The Tartar strain was all-powerful; it is still to be traced in those high-cheek-boned, flat-nosed, slant-eyed features so often regarded as typically Russian, by the west.

  All this I found infinitely romantic. It fitted in with my snow-storm vision of an archetypal landscape, where Pushkin’s Dubrovsky, and the Tzar Saltan, the nuns of the Novodievitchi Convent, the Hetman Platoff, and Yermak the Conqueror of Siberia were massed together beside Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei on the steps of the Kremlin, chanting something from Boris Goudenov. Then, in a perverse mood, the Traveller would bait me, quoting the Marquis de Custine’s Voyage en Russie en 1839, of which I possessed an early copy, but seldom read, detesting its carping tone: ‘Savez-vous ce que c’est de voyager en Russie? Pour un esprit leger, c’est de se nourrir d’illusions . . .’

  ‘You have those illusions, Pussinka, though your esprit is not really léger as regards Russia . . . but you are wilfully romantic. I don’t know how you are going to reconcile the lot when you do get there. You must realize that what you choose to imagine and what is, are far apart. You see yourself driving about the countryside in one of those old-fashioned back-to-back carriages – a dolgoushka – or dashing from one golden-domed city to another in Tchitchikov’s britchka, scarcely drawing rein, because you have an Imperial padoroshna – that’s an equally out-of-date laissez-passer for fresh relays of horses. Let me tell you, only something as remote as a padoroshna could transport you to the realms you imagine. Today’s visas – when you get them – will only show you today. And that won’t tally with your mind’s eye, Miss.’

  And he would quote de Custine again, maddeningly apposite – ‘ces deux nations . . . la Russie telle qu’elle est, la Russie telle qu’on voudrait la montrer – in your case, telle que vous voulez la voir.’

  There was nothing to be said to that, even if I had been so tactless as to remind him that he too seemed to wish to see Russia in his own, or rather, our manner – telle que nous voulons la voir.

  •

  Sometimes, sternly realistic, he took me with him to one of the many unpretentious little clubs run by the exiled White Army officers. These were the remnants of General Wrangel’s forces, who lived and worked together in units, keeping much of their military discipline. Their morale remained high. This was a strange and now forgotten milieu I knew briefly. They preserved their regimental emblems, caressing them, carving them, painting them, even working them out in pebbles whenever they set up their camps. Sometimes they contrived a little church, or a modest popote, where memories of the old ways of life and thought were kept green. At the time of which I write, when I first encountered them, their lot seemed hard enough, but at that time they still hoped they would return to their own country; that is, to the country they had known. They were not, generally, endowed with political acumen. Few were trained to view political and international horizons in depth. So they still believed in a Holy Russia, a Mother Russia, which would, one day, shelter them again.

  Few of the army in exile ever saw better times again. These were not the minority of princely opportunists, the dashing Georgians who stamped through their wild dances at the night-clubs of Pigalle, sometimes spring-boarding off into the arms of besotted heiresses. These were simpler men who, if they knew languages, generally found work in banks or commerce; those who did not usually turned taxi-drivers, and this unmistakable legion were for many years part of the Paris street scene. I write of them now in retrospect, knowing their ultimate decline; but even when I first encountered them, I sensed something of their tragedy. General Wrangel might have been composing their epitaph, when he wrote in his Memoirs that at the Unknown Soldier’s Grave – the Memorial to the First World War – only the Russian Army was forgotten.

  •

  The Traveller had many friends among these men, as well as among the more eclectic circle of Russian artists and musicians. He had known them in those first days of exile, in Turkey, and had never lost touch. Now, working their way through plates of stchee together, they
would recall old times and hold post-mortems on lost battles. ‘Listen carefully,’ the Traveller admonished me, seeing my attention wander. ‘Listen to those men, they are telling history as few will choose to remember it.’ So I listened, watching their faces leap to life, listening to their voices deepen with emotion. Unlike the voices of Western races, which tend to grow shrill under stress, Russian voices deepen to further, smokier depths. Always, they returned in indignation to those hushed-up pressures which, in the fateful year of 1919, were applied by the Allies, closing in on a decimated Russia.

  While three separate White Russian Armies were opposing the Bolshevik forces, it seemed the Allies had been cynically planning their individual coups, north and south, to obtain ascendancy over the exhausted country. As the internal strife deepened they had watched it through spectacles tinted golden by greed. The British, who had been fighting the Turks in Persia moved north, landed in Baku and took over the fabulously rich oil districts. Batoum was pronounced a ‘free’ city under a British protectorate which supervised the shipping of oil and raw materials – to Britain. And who was there to stop them? The bewildered, exhausted country appeared to have no means of fighting back. The French sent two divisions to occupy the vital port of Odessa, while their battleships patrolled the Black Sea. The vultures were closing in.

  Italians arrived in Tiflis, ‘assisting at the formation of an Independent State of Georgia’ as this manœuvre was airily described by their High Command, but no doubt the proximity of the magnesium mines in the North Caucasus was not overlooked. Two Greek divisions next arrived, while there were Roumanians – ‘even Roumanians’ as the Traveller said witheringly, occupying Bessarabia and the Ukraine. A British fleet dominated the Baltic ports where the states of Latvia and Esthonia were proclaimed, while American and Japanese troops landed in Vladivostok to ‘run’ the north.