by Banine
Contents
Title Page
Foreword by the Translator
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
PART TWO
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Brief Summary of the History of Azerbaijan at the Start of the Twentieth Century
Photographs of Banine and Her Family
About the Publisher
Copyright
Foreword by the Translator
The Caucasus—a range of majestic mountains and gentler foothills where Europe meets Asia. The Black Sea laps at the western edge, the Caspian at the east. This natural barrier separates Russia from Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia and, farther south, Iran and Turkey. It was in the Azerbaijani city of Baku that the author of Days in the Caucasus, Banine, was born in 1905.
Ummulbanu Asadullayeva, to give Banine her full name, was the granddaughter of peasants who had become fabulously wealthy through oil. Her maternal grandfather, Musa Naghiyev, struck oil on his patch of land and became one of the richest men in the Russian Empire, while her paternal grandfather, Shamsi Asadullayev, built a flourishing oil business through shrewd investment.
Oil had turned Banine’s Baku from a sleepy port on the Caspian Sea into a bustling, booming city, bursting with ideas. This was an era of enlightenment, of social and political ferment, of growing self-awareness for the Muslim Azerbaijani population and for all workers, regardless of ethnicity. Education made huge strides—in 1901 the first secular school for Muslim girls opened in Baku, where Banine was so unhappy she ‘cried every day for two months’. Newspapers were published in Azerbaijani Turkish. The first opera in the Muslim world, a fusion of traditional mugham and European operatic style, was performed in Baku in 1908.
This was an era too of unrest and upheaval. The tsar was deposed and the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917. A year later the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was proclaimed, with universal suffrage, including for women, enshrined in its constitution. The Democratic Republic, in which Banine’s father was a government minister, was to be short-lived, however. She describes the arrival of Russian Bolshevik troops in Baku in 1920: ‘In a matter of moments, without a shot being fired, the Azerbaijani army had melted away. The Republic was dead and victorious Russia was reclaiming its subjects. With my own eyes I had seen the end of a world.’
Pogroms, revolutions and the end of empire are the backdrop to Banine’s coming-of-age tale. She dreams of romantic love and burns with idealism, even sporting a badge of Lenin. Banine escapes into the realm of the imagination and these escapes are mirrored in real life when she flees to Persia, Tiflis, Constantinople, Paris.
In Paris Banine worked as a model for several years, before becoming a writer. Her first book, a novel titled Nami, was published in 1942. But it was her second book, Jours caucasiens or Days in the Caucasus, that received critical acclaim. Published in the French capital in 1945, the memoir established Banine in literary and émigré circles. ‘I started to leaf through the book and was soon engrossed,’ the Russian émigré author Teffi wrote in a review in the journal Nouvelles russes. ‘So vividly and wittily does the author reveal to us an utterly unfamiliar world.’
Banine wrote a sequel to Days in the Caucasus, Days in Paris, published in 1947. The most successful of her later works was an account of her conversion to Christianity, I Chose Opium. She translated widely into French, including works by Dostoevsky, Tatyana Tolstaya and the German author Ernst Jünger, who became a good friend.
Banine died in Paris in 1992 at the age of eighty-six.
She came to public attention in her homeland only in the late 1980s, when the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta published an article about her friendship and correspondence with the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin. I first heard of Banine in 2000 when I lived in Baku and wondered about the fate of the oil barons who had left behind such remarkable buildings. Hamlet Qoca’s Azerbaijani translation of Days in the Caucasus was published in Baku in 2006, and was itself translated into Russian by Gulshan Tofiq Qizi. A translation from the original French into Russian by Ulviyya Akhundova came out in Baku in 2016.
Reading Banine’s gripping memoir, I was struck by similarities between Baku in the early twentieth century and the city in the early twenty-first. The excitement of the first years of the independent Azerbaijan Republic after the collapse of the Soviet Union mirrored the heady days of the Democratic Republic created in 1918 after the collapse of the Russian Empire. Though the highest hopes have yet to be fulfilled, the Azerbaijan Republic marks its twenty-eighth birthday in 2019.
The cultural tensions so vividly illustrated by Banine continue in Baku to this day, contributing to the city’s energy and verve. Russian language and culture still thrive in the capital, alongside the much more widespread Azerbaijani culture. Religion is regaining ground, though in the early twenty-first century it is more often the young who turn to Islam, their grandparents having grown up under the anti-religious Soviet system. Churches too are growing, and services are held in the Lutheran Church, whose Frauenverein (Women’s Union) the young Banine frequented with enthusiasm.
Banine slightly revised the text of Days in the Caucasus and republished it in France in 1985. It is the 1985 version that has been translated here. Banine wrote in French, though she spoke Russian fluently and grew up speaking Azerbaijani with her grandmother. Wherever Banine used an Azerbaijani, German or Russian expression in her memoir, I have preserved those words and added an English translation where needed.
The language of Azerbaijan is known as Azerbaijani, Azeri or Azerbaijani Turkish. Banine used the version Azéri, so in the translation I opted for the closest equivalent in English, Azeri.
Anne Thompson-Ahmadova
PART ONE
1
We all know families that are poor but ‘respectable’. Mine, in contrast, was extremely rich but not ‘respectable’ at all. At the time I was born they were outrageously wealthy, but those days are long gone. Sad for us, though quite right in the moral scheme of things. Anyone kind enough to show interest might ask in what way my family wasn’t ‘respectable’. Well, because on the one hand it could not trace its ancestral line further than my great-grandfather, who went by the fine name of Asadullah, meaning ‘loved by Allah’. This proved very apt: born a peasant, he died a millionaire, thanks to the oil gushing from his stony land, where sheep had once grazed on meagre pickings. On the other hand because my family included some extremely shady characters on whose activities it would be better not to dwell. If I get caught up in the story, I might reveal all, though my interest as an author is at odds with my concern to preserve the last shreds of family pride.
So, I was born into this odd, rich, exotic family one winter’s day in a turbulent year; like so many ‘historic’ years, this one was full of strikes, pogroms, massacres and other displays of human genius (especially inventive when it comes to social unrest of all kinds). In Baku, the majority of the population of Armenians and Azerbaijanis were busy massacring one another. In that year, it was the better-organized Armenians who were exterminating the Azerbaijanis in revenge for past massacres, while the Azerbaijanis made the best of it by storing up grounds for future slaughter. There was, therefore, something for everyone—except of course for the many who sadly lost their lives.*
No one would have considered me capable of taking part in the work of destruction, but I clearly was, since I killed my mother as I came into the world. To escape the bloodshed, she had chosen to give birth in an oil-producing area in the hope that it would be quieter there; but in the chaos of the time she ended up giving birth in dreadful conditions and contracted puerperal fever. In addition, the house was cut off from outside help by a violent storm, compounding the confusion into which we’d been plunged. Without the complex care that her condition required, my mother fought the illness in vain. She was lucid when she died, full of regret at leaving life so young and of anxiety at the fate of her loved ones.
My memories of conscious awareness begin with toys that my father brought from Berlin. It was through these that life was revealed to me: I first perceived the world through the purring stomach of a plush cat, the beautiful gleam of a maharajah astride a grey buckskin elephant, the bowing and scraping of a multicoloured clown. I perceived it all, felt it, marvelled and began to live.
My early years were the happiest; I was so young compared to my three older sisters that I enjoyed all kinds of privileges and knew how to make the most of them.
But, more than anything, my happiness was the result of my upbringing by a Baltic German governess—she was my governess, my mother and my guardian angel too. This saint (the noun is no exaggeration) gave us her health, and her life; she wore herself out for us, suffered all sorts of trouble because of us, and received little joy; she always sacrificed herself and asked for nothing in return. In a nutshell, she was one of those rare beings who are able to give without receiving.
Fräulein Anna had fair skin and flaxen hair, while the four of us had brown skin, black hair and a markedly oriental, hirsute appearance. We made a fine group when we surrounded her in photographs, all hook noses and close-set eyebrows, she completely Nordic. And I should say that in those days—despite the prohibition of the Prophet, enemy of the image—we often had our photograph taken, dressed in our finery and flanked by as many relatives as possible, all against the background of a painted park. A harmless obsession that can be explained by the novelty of the process for the near savages that we were; an obsession to which I owe several hilarious and touching pictures that I preserve with great care.
But back to Fräulein Anna. Surrounded by a fanatically Muslim family, in a city that was still very oriental, she managed to create and maintain an atmosphere of Vergissmeinnicht, of sweet songs for blonde children, of Christmas trees with pink angels, of cakes heavy with cream and sentimentality. All of which proves that she had character despite her sweetness, and willpower despite her gentleness. It’s true that in those days she had yet to be run ragged by us, and was better able to stand up for herself in an atmosphere that must have seemed, or even been, hostile towards her. Her influence was constantly counteracted by that of my paternal grandmother, who lived on the ground floor of our house. Grandmother was a large, fat, authoritarian woman, veiled and excessively fanatical, who preferred to sit on cushions on the floor, as every good Muslim did. She performed her ablutions and prayers with unfailing rigour and exulted in her abhorrence of Christians. If a plate had been touched by non-Muslim hands, my grandmother would refuse to use it, passing it to someone less discerning. If a white-skinned stranger walked by, she would often spit on the ground and shout insults, the mildest of which was ‘son of a dog’. In turn, we disgusted her a little too, being brought up by Christians: so many caresses, so much contact from profane hands had impregnated us with a subtle odour of impiety, and her kisses, though affectionate, were often accompanied by a grimace of disgust. It certainly could not have been Grandmother who entrusted us to Fräulein Anna, and I can imagine the painful battles my father must have fought to gain acceptance for this heretical education. But the Russians had long since colonized us; their influence was everywhere and with it the desire for culture, for Europeanization. For the younger generations freedom was gaining precedence over the veil, education over fanaticism.
Having deposited us in the white hands of Fräulein Anna, with a confidence he never regretted, my father no longer had much to do with us. Besides, he was always travelling. As the eldest son he ran our oil firm, visiting its depots and offices along the Caspian Sea and Volga River, its flourishing subsidiary in Moscow, and even its concerns in Warsaw. Having got that far, momentum meant my father could not stop, and as Berlin was close by for someone accustomed to Russian distances, he often popped over to the German capital.
Before the war of 1914 Germany enjoyed enormous prestige among my compatriots, who had barely awoken to civilization: automobiles, Kaiser Wilhelm moustaches, pale governesses, music, pianos—they all came from Germany. My father would return from there, weighed down with all these things, including the martial moustache, which became more vigorous every trip, growing longer and standing up straighter. It should not be forgotten that Kaiser Wilhelm styled himself protector of Islam and the Turks, hence his prestige among us cousins of the Turks.
I think those years before his second marriage must have been the best of my father’s life: young, rich, free, handsome, he excited considerable matrimonial interest and other, less honourable, desires. He had numerous affairs, but was in no hurry to get married, though he was encouraged to do so by all the family, who welcomed polygamy and disapproved of celibacy. Still, none of the suggested brides met with his approval: they were mediocre Muslims, barely educated, without elegance or charm, and my father would have none of them—he was firmly in favour of ‘culture’. Other women, whom he met during his travels abroad and might have liked, were, according to my grandmother’s definition, ‘daughters of dogs’, that is, Christians, and therefore not marriage material. The family had good reason to fear such marriages, and Grandmother a non-religious reason to hate them: her husband had rejected her to marry a Russian woman of dubious origin. After his marriage and until his death, when I was six, he lived in Moscow in a house cluttered with icons, mistreated by his wife and cut off from his family because of her. Did this example, so edifying for the faithful, make my father circumspect and prevent him marrying a Christian? In any case, he took a long time to choose a second wife.
We occupied the whole of the second floor in our town house, which compensated for the houses enclosing it on either side by stretching so far back that it reached the parallel street. This allowed for the creation of two identical apartments: twins with their backs to one another; twins separated by a courtyard but united by symmetrical passages running the length of the courtyard.
We girls lived with Fräulein Anna in the south-facing apartment that was always flooded with sunlight, while the other, north-facing, dark and quiet, was occupied by my father between his travels. It included what we proudly called the ‘reception rooms’, more simply the dining room and drawing room. Here was the grand piano on which, on holidays or when some governess too proud of her flock needed to be put in her place, Fräulein Anna would have my older sister Leyla perform a brilliant piece from her repertoire. A Negro draped in gold, with a lamp held in his hand, stood upon a structure best described as a hybrid of pillar and pedestal. It was lit only on great occasions so it never ceased to inspire my admiration. It was in fact this statue that gave me my first, pleasurable sensation of wealth.
Ordinarily we rarely went into the drawing room. We would spend almost the whole day in the large, bright schoolroom. It had a piano too, an instrument of torture that dominated our lives; there was hardly a moment when one of the four of us children was not bashing it with our rough, impatient hands. It rattled out scales or arpeggios, or, even worse, a Mozart sonata mutilated with the best of intentions. To the off-putting sounds of this music we would laugh, cry, rebel and grow up, too quickly for Fräulein Anna’s liking. She endeavoured to fight heredity, struggled against the prevailing atmosphere and had no fear of doing battle with nature itself, seeking to transmit to us her young German girl’s soul, artless and loving. She hoped to see us
turn into Gretchens with delicate figures and easy sighs. But our forebears were keeping watch. Under their guidance, our hips fleshed out, our noses grew longer, our breasts swelled beneath the sailor blouses that we wore in accordance with what was proper for ‘young girls of good family’; and down, soft at first but quietly turning into thick hair, covered us in a dark shadow. What could poor Fräulein Anna do but simply observe the inevitable march of progress? All was well, more or less, as long as this progress was evident only in our physical growth. But the heart soon got involved, and the day came when Leyla, having reached the fateful age of thirteen, began to give due appreciation to the charms of a cousin who had sparkling eyes and a nascent beard. Fräulein Anna was dismayed and henceforth lost her peace of mind for good. At the cost of her health, she managed through recriminations and discipline to keep us on something of a leash, but fell martyr to suspicion and anxiety. As we grew up, we became resentful and beastly towards her, so unbearable was the brake she put on our instincts. More violent perhaps in oriental girls than Europeans of the same age, those instincts may partly excuse our beastliness towards Fräulein Anna; but she didn’t suffer any the less as a result.
When we were small, we loved her unreservedly, at least I did. I don’t think that love for a mother is any different. I thought her beautiful. In the morning, open-mouthed, I would watch her brush her long, blonde hair: her white skin shone in the morning light; her blue gaze would often rest tenderly on me; I was happy. My aunts were brown, as were my cousins and sisters, my uncles and aunts and I myself, as was everyone and everything. Only Fräulein Anna had come from another world, and to me she shone with a strange, precious exoticism.
Almost all that was lovely in my childhood was connected with her, or, rather, originated with her. Hence that unforgettable Christmas morning when, waking in the half-darkness, I thought I saw something shining next to my bed. I leant over slightly; not only did it continue to shine, but I noticed a subtle scent too. I stretched out my hand—I touched something prickly and realized that it was a Christmas tree, the Christian children’s tree which, along with the frankfurters that Fräulein Anna would secretly buy us, was making a budding renegade out of me. It was perhaps the first time in Islamic history that such a heresy had shone so arrogantly in a Muslim child’s bedroom. This happiness had been denied us for years; but one year my father weakened, or Grandmother did, or they both did at the same time, and the tree came to shine in our house. Captivated, mute with admiration and joy, I walked around the tree, touching and sniffing it. Everything about it was beautiful: the rich sparkle of the silver threads and colourful baubles; the delicate pink and blue candles; the winged angels and the white snow at the base of the trunk. It was a happy day: there was no German homework with its Gothic letters, no verbs to conjugate, no Mozart to play; only beauty remained, and ugliness disappeared from the world for a magical moment. To crown it all, Fräulein Anna promised to take us soon to the Frauenverein (Women’s Union), an honourable, devout institution, where, in the company of a hundred German maidens, both young and old, we would devour superb sauerkraut washed down with beer. This would be followed with fitting psalms and hymns in praise of the Lord, songs that we four Muslims joined in with enthusiasm. We were delighted with this fine combination of earthly and spiritual nourishment. Prudently, nothing was said about this at home, as it was all forbidden by the Prophet. The honest Fräulein Anna was cheating; the poor woman didn’t have the strength to deprive us of these pleasures, which she reasonably considered innocent. But if she didn’t have the heart to refuse us some of the outward joys of Christianity, she took care not to influence us in her favour in a more subtle way. It would have been easy, though, as my father and the family, while holding firm to our religion, did nothing, or hardly anything, to explain it to us. I was never taught a single prayer and knew only one short verse from the Koran. I had been inculcated with so little religious feeling that my favourite time to play with my grandmother was when she was praying, sitting on the floor, the Koran open on a chair before her. That was when I would tease her: I would tug at her veil or her nose, jump around the chair shouting or pull terrifying faces; Grandmother would break off to cast a lazy insult in my direction, without a hint of malice, and then resume her mumbling.
