Natasha's Dance (93 page)

    These canons are as true for the composition of an orchestra as they are for the life of an individual. They are the only place where order is practised to the full: not a speculative, artificial order, but the divine order which is given to us and which must reveal itself as much in the inner life as in its exteriorization in painting, music, etc. It’s the struggle against anarchy, not so much disorder as the absence of order. I’m an advocate of architecture in art, since architecture is the embodiment of order; creative work is a protest against anarchy and nonexistence.
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    Stravinsky became a regular attender at services in the Russian church in the Rue Daru. He surrounded himself with the paraphernalia of Orthodox worship - his homes in Nice and Paris were filled with icons and crosses. He dated his musical sketches by the Orthodox calendar. He corresponded with Russian priests in all the major centres of the emigration, and the Russian priest in Nice became ‘practically a member’ of his household there.
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Stravinsky claimed that the strongest pull of the Russian Church was ‘linguistic’: he liked the sound of the Slavonic liturgy.” It comes across in his Slavonic chants for the Russian church.*

    This desire to return to the religion of his birth was connected to a profound love of Russia, too. Throughout his life Stravinsky adhered to the Russian customs of his childhood in pre-revolutionary Petersburg. Even in Los Angeles, his home remained an outpost of the old Russia.

    * Before switching to Latin he had intended to set the
Symphony of Psalms
in Slavonic,

    too.

    The living room was filled with Russian books and ornaments, pictures and icons. The Stravinskys mixed with Russian friends. They employed Russian servants. They spoke Russian in their home. Stravinsky spoke in English or in French only if he had to, and then in a thick accent. He drank tea in the Russian way - in a glass with jam. He ate his soup from the same spoon with which as a child he had been fed by his
babushka.
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    Chagall was another Artist of the World who concealed a Russian heart. Like Stravinsky, he invented his own image as a cosmopolitan. He liked to claim that the questions of identity which critics always asked (‘Are you a Jewish artist? A Russian? Or a French?’) did not actually bother him. ‘You talk, I will work,’ he used to say.
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But such statements cannot be taken at face value. Chagall made up his own biography - and he frequently changed it. The major decisions of his life were taken, he claimed, on the basis of his own convenience as a practising artist. In 1912 he emigrated from Soviet Russia because conditions there made it hard for him to work. In western Europe, by contrast, he was already famous and he knew that he could become rich. There is no evidence to suggest that he was affected by the Bolshevik destruction of the synagogues and a good deal of the Jewish quarter in his home town of Vitebsk.
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In 1941, when Chagall fled Paris for America, the danger from the Nazis was real enough - though here again he justified the move in terms of personal convenience. Throughout his life Chagall remained a wanderer, never settling down in any land, or calling it his own. Like the subjects of his paintings, he lived with his feet off the ground.

    None the less, the unanswered question of his nationality was central to the painter’s life and art. Of the diverse elements that were fused together in his personality (Jewish, Russian, French, American and international), it was the Russian that meant the most to him. ‘The title “A Russian Painter”’, Chagall once remarked, ‘means more to me than any international fame. In my pictures there is not one centimetre free from nostalgia for my native land.’
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Chagall’s homesickness was focused on Vitebsk, the half-Jewish half-Russian town on the border between Russia and Belarus, where he had grown up, the son of a petty trader, in the 1890s. In 1941 it was overrun by the Nazis and all its Jewish inhabitants were killed. Three years later Chagall

    wrote a moving lamentation ‘To My Native Town, Vitebsk’ that was published as a letter in
The New York Times.

    It is a long time since I last saw you, and found myself among your fenced streets. You didn’t ask in pain, why I left you for so many years when I loved you. No, you thought: the lad’s gone off somewhere in search of brilliant unusual colours to shower like snow or stars on our roofs. But where will he get them from? Why can’t he find them nearer to hand? In your ground I left the graves of my ancestors and scattered stones. I did not live with you and yet there was not a single one of my pictures in which your joys and sorrows were not reflected. All through these years I had one constant worry: does my native town understand me?
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    Vitebsk was the world Chagall idealized. It was not so much a place as a mythical ideal, the artistic site of his childhood memories. In his fanciful paintings he re-created Vitebsk as a world of dreams. The muddy streets of the real town were magically transformed into colours reminiscent of a festive set for Mother Goose. Such was the demand for his Vitebsk theme, and the ruthlessness with which Chagall exploited it, that critics accused him of merchandizing his own exotica as art. Picasso said he was a businessman. The painter Boris Aronson complained that Chagall was ‘always doing a
Fiddler on the Roof’.
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Yet, however much he might have traded on the Vitebsk theme, his homesickness was genuine enough.

    Jews in Israel could not understand how Chagall could be so nostalgic about life in Russia. Wasn’t it a country of pogroms? But Vitebsk was a town where the Jews had not just co-existed with the Russians; they were beneficiaries of Russian culture, as well. Like Mandelstam, a Polish-Russian Jew, Chagall had identified with the Russian tradition: it was the means of entry to the culture and values of Europe. Russia was a big, cosmopolitan civilization before 1917. It had absorbed the whole of Western culture, just as Chagall, as a Jew, had absorbed the culture of Russia. Russia liberated Jews like Chagall from the provincial attitudes of their home towns and connected them with the wider world.
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Only Russia could inspire feelings such as these. None of the other East European civilizations was large enough to provide the Jews with a cultural homeland.

    When Tsvetaeva moved to Paris in 1925 it had been in the hope that she would find a broader readership for her verse. In Prague she had struggled to keep ‘body and pen together’, as Nabokov would so memorably describe the predicament of the emigre writers.
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She scraped by through translation work and hand-outs from her friends. But the constant struggle put a strain on her relations with Efron, a perpetual student who could not find a job, and with her daughter and her newborn son.

    Efron began to drift away from her - no doubt losing patience with her constant love affairs - and became involved in politics. In Paris he immediately threw himself into the Eurasian movement, whose conception of Russia as a separate Asiatic or Turanian continent had already taken hold of Stravinsky. By the middle of the 192Os the movement had begun to split. Its right wing flirted with the fascists, while its left wing, towards which Efron veered, favoured an alliance with the Soviet regime as champion of their imperial ideals for Russia as the leader of a separate Eurasian civilization in hostile opposition to the West. They put aside their old opposition to the Bolshevik regime, recognizing it (mistakenly perhaps) as the popular, and therefore rightful, victor of the civil war, and espoused its cause as the only hope for the resurrection of a Great Russia. Efron was a vocal advocate of a return to the motherland. He wanted to expiate his ‘guilt’ for having fought on the White side in the civil war by laying down his life for the Soviet (read: the Russian) people’s cause. In 1931 Efron applied to return to Stalin’s Russia. His well-known feelings of homesickness for Russia turned him into an obvious target for the NKVD, which had a policy of playing on such weaknesses to infiltrate the emigre community. Efron was recruited as an NKVD agent on the promise that eventually he would be allowed to return to Soviet Russia. During the 1930s he became the leading organizer of the Parisian Union for a Return to the Motherland. It was a front for the NKVD.

    Efron’s politics placed enormous strain on his relationship with Tsvetaeva. She understood his need to return home but she was equally aware of what was happening in Stalin’s Russia. She accused her

    husband of naivety: he closed his eyes to what he did not want to see. They argued constantly - she warning him that if he went back to the Soviet Union he would end up in Siberia, or worse, and he retorting that he would ‘go wherever they send me’.
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Yet Tsvetaeva knew that, if he went, she would follow her husband, as ever, ‘like a dog’.

    Efron’s activities made Tsvetaeva’s own position in emigre society untenable. It was assumed that she herself was a Bolshevik, not least because of her continued links with ‘Soviet writers’ such as Pasternak and Bely, who like her had their roots in the pre-revolutionary avant-garde. She found herself ever more alone in a community that increasingly shunned any contact with the Soviet world. ‘I feel that I have no place here’, she wrote to the Czech writer Anna Teskova. The French were ‘sociable but superficial’ and ‘interested only in themselves’, while ‘from the Russians I am separated by my poetry, which nobody understands; by my personal views, which some take for Bolshevism, others for monarchism or anarchism; and then again - by all of me’.
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Berberova described Tsvetaeva as an ‘outcast’ in Paris: ‘she had no readers’ and there was ‘no reaction to what she wrote’.
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After Russia,
the last collection of her poetry to be published during her lifetime, appeared in Paris in 1928. Only twenty-five of its hundred numbered copies were bought by subscription.
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In these final years of life abroad Tsvetaeva’s poetry shows signs of her growing estrangement and solitude.

    Just say: enough of torment - take A garden - lonesome like myself. (But do not stand near by, Yourself!) A garden, lonesome, like Myself.
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    ’Everything is forcing me towards Russia’, she wrote to Anna Teskova in 1931. ‘Here I am unnecessary. There I am impossible.’
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Tsvetaeva became increasingly frustrated with the editors of the emigre periodicals - professors and politicians like Miliukov who failed to understand her prose and hacked it into pieces to conform to the neat, clean style of their journals. Her frustration drove her to form an over-rosy view of literary life in the Soviet Union. She talked herself into believing that she was ‘needed’ there, that she would be able to be published

    once again, and that she could find a new circle of writer friends who would ‘look on me as one of their own’.
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“With every passing year she felt the ‘milky call’ of her native tongue, which she knew was so essential, not just to her art but to her very identity. This physical longing for Russia was far stronger and more immediate than any intellectual rationalization for her continued exile: that Russia was contained inside herself and, like a suitcase filled with Pushkin’s works, could be taken anywhere. ‘The poet’, she concluded, ‘cannot survive in emigration: there is no ground on which to stand - no medium or language. There are - no roots.’
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Like the rowanberry tree, her art needed to be rooted in the soil.

    In 1937 Efron was exposed as a Soviet agent and implicated in the assassination of a Soviet spy who had refused to return to the Soviet Union. Pursued by the French police, Efron fled to the Soviet Union, where Alya had already settled earlier that year. Now Tsvetaeva could not remain in France. Shunned by everyone, her life there became impossible. Berberova saw her for the last time in the autumn of 1938. It was the funeral of Prince Sergei Volkonsky - at the moment when his coffin was carried out of the church on the Rue Francois Gerard. ‘She stood at the entrance, her eyes full of tears, aged, almost grey, hands crossed on her bosom… She stood as if infected with plague: no one approached her. Like everyone else I walked by her.’
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On 12 June 1939, Tsvetaeva and her son left by boat from Le Havre for the Soviet Union. The evening before her departure she wrote to Teskova: ‘Goodbye! What comes now is no longer difficult, what comes now is fate.’
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    Pasternak had warned Tsvetaeva: ‘Don’t come back to Russia - it’s cold, there is a constant draught.’ It was an echo of her own prophetic fear

    That the Russian draught should blow away my soul!
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    But she was like her husband: she did not hear what she did not want to hear.

    Many of the exiles who returned to Stalin’s Russia did so in the knowledge, or with the intuition, that they were going back to a life of slavery. It was a mark of their desperate situation in the West, of their longing

    for a social context in which they could work, that they were prepared to close their eyes to the harsh realities of the ‘new life’ in the Soviet Union. Homesickness overcame their basic instinct of survival.

    Maxim Gorky was the first major cultural figure to discover the perils of return. The writer, who had championed the Revolution’s cause in his early novels like
Mother,
became disillusioned by its violence and chaos during 1917. He had looked to socialism as a force of cultural progress and enlightenment bringing Russia closer to the ideals of the West. But instead of heralding a new civilization, the street fighting that brought Lenin into power also brought the country, as Gorky had warned, to the brink of a ‘dark age’ of ‘Asiatic barbarism’. The people’s class hatred and desire for revenge, stoked up by the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks, threatened to destroy all that was good. The savage terror of the civil war, followed by the famine in which millions perished, seemed a gruesome proof of Gorky’s prophecy. Bravely, he spoke out against the Leninist regime between 1917 and 1921, when, profoundly shaken by everything he had seen in those years, he left Russia for Berlin. Unable to live in Soviet Russia, neither could Gorky bear to live abroad. For several years, he wavered in this schizophrenic state, homesick for Russia and yet too sick of it to return home. From Berlin, he wandered restlessly through the spa towns of Germany and Czechoslovakia before settling in the Italian resort of Sorrento. ‘No, I cannot go to Russia’, he wrote to Romain Rolland in 1924. ‘In Russia I would be the enemy of everything and everyone, it would be like banging my head against a wall.’
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