Natasha's Dance (95 page)

    Shortly before she left France, Tsvetaeva had told a friend that, if she could not write in the Soviet Union, she would kill herself.

    * Alya served eight years in a labour camp. Efron was shot in 1941.

    Tsvetaeva was increasingly fixated on the idea of her suicide. She had often used it as a threat. After 1940 she wrote little verse, and the few lines that she wrote were full of death:

    It’s time to take off the amber, It’s time to change the language, It’s time to extinguish the lantern Above the door.
¹
”

    Her last poem, written in March 1941, was addressed to the young and handsome poet Arseny Tarkovsky (the father of the future film director), with whom she had been in love. It was a ghostly refrain which spoke about her own sense of abandonment, not just by Tarkovsky, but by all those unnamed friends whom she referred to here as the ‘six souls’:

    I am no one: not a brother, not a son, not a husband, Not a friend - and still I reproach you: You who set the table for six -
souls
But did not seat me at the table’s end.
¹³⁴

    Tsvetaeva’s son Mur was her last hope and emotional support. But the teenager was struggling to break free from his mother’s suffocating hold. In August 1941, as the Germans swept through Russia towards Moscow, the two were evacuated to the small town of Elabuga, in the Tatar republic near Kazan. They rented half a room in a little wooden house. Tsvetaeva had no means of support. On Sunday 30 August her landlords and her son went off fishing for the day. While they were away she hanged herself. She left a note for Mur:

    Murlyga! Forgive me, but to go on would be worse. I am gravely ill, this is not me anymore. I love you passionately. Do understand that I could not live anymore. Tell Papa and Alya, if you ever see them, that I loved them to the last moment and explain to them that I found myself in a trap.
¹³⁵

    Tsvetaeva was buried in an unmarked grave. Nobody attended her funeral, not even her son.

    In 1962 Stravinsky accepted a Soviet invitation to visit the country of his birth. It was exactly fifty years since he had left Russia and there was a complicated tangle of emotions behind his decision to return. As an emigre he had always given the impression of violently rejecting his own Russian past. He told his close friend and musical assistant, the conductor Robert Craft, that he thought about his childhood in St Petersburg as a ‘period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell’.
¹³⁶
Much of this antipathy was an emigre’s reaction to the Soviet regime, which had rejected his music and deprived the composer of his native land. The mere mention of the Soviet Union was enough to send him into a rage. In 1957, when a hapless German waiter came up to his table and asked if he was proud of the Russians because of the recent Sputnik breakthrough into space, Stravinsky became ‘furious in equal measure with the Russians for having done it and with the Americans for not having done it’.
¹³⁷

    He was particularly scathing about the Soviet musical academy, where the spirit of the Rimsky-Korsakovs and Glazunovs who had howled abuse at
The Rite of Spring
was still alive and kicking against the modernists. ‘The Soviet virtuoso has no literature beyond the nineteenth century,’ Stravinsky told a German interviewer in 1957. Soviet orchestras, if asked to perform the music of Stravinsky or ‘the three Viennese’ (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern) would be ‘unable to cope with the simplest problems of rhythmic execution that we introduced to music fifty years ago’.
¹³⁸
His own music had been banned from the Soviet concert repertory since the beginning of the 1930s, when Stravinsky was denounced by the Soviet musical establishment as ‘an artistic ideologist of the Imperialist bourgeoisie’.
¹³⁹
It was a sort of musical Cold War.

    But after Stalin’s death the climate changed. The Khrushchev ‘thaw’ had brought an end to the Zhdanovite campaign against the so-called ‘formalists’ and had restored Shostakovich to his rightful place at the head of the Soviet musical establishment. Young composers were emerging who took inspiration from Stravinsky’s work

    (Edison Denisov, Sofya Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke). A brilliant generation of Soviet musicians (Oistrakh, Richter, Rostropovich, the Beethoven Quartet) was becoming well known through recordings and tours in the West. Russia, in short, appeared to be returning to the centre of the European music world - the place it had occupied when Stravinsky had left in 1912.

    Despite his own denials, Stravinsky had always regretted the circumstances of his exile from Russia. He bore the severance from his past like an open wound. The fact that he turned eighty in 1962 must have played a part in his decision to return. As he grew older, he thought more of his own childhood. He often slipped into childish Russian phrases and diminutives. He re-read the books he had read in Russia - like Gorky’s
Mother.
‘I read it when it was first published [in 1906] and am trying again now,’ he told Craft, ‘probably because I want to go back into myself.’
¹⁴⁰
Stravinsky told the US press that his decision to go to the Soviet Union was ‘due primarily to the evidence I have received of a genuine desire or need for me by the younger generation of Russian musicians’.
¹⁴¹
Perhaps there was a desire on Stravinsky’s part to secure his legacy in the country of his birth. Yet, despite his claims that nostalgia played no role in his intended visit, that sentiment was surely at its heart. He wanted to see Russia before he died.

    On 21 September 1962, the Stravinskys landed in a Soviet plane at Sheremetevo. Straining to catch a glimpse of the forests turning yellow, the meadows, fields and lakes as the plane came in to land, Stravinsky was choking with excitement and emotion, according to Craft, who accompanied the couple throughout their trip. When the plane came to a halt and the hatch was opened, Stravinsky emerged and, standing at the top of the landing stairs, bowed down low in the Russian tradition. It was a gesture from another age, just as Stravinsky’s sunglasses, which now protected him from the television lights, symbolized another kind of life in Hollywood. As he descended, Stravinsky was surrounded by a large welcoming committee, out of which emerged Maria Yudina, a stout woman with Tatar eyes (or so it seemed to Craft) who introduced herself to the composer as his niece. Also there was the daughter of Konstantin Balmont, the poet who had introduced Stravinsky to the ancient pagan world of
The Firebird
and
The Rite of Spring.
She presented Craft with a ‘birch-bark basket containing a

    twig, a leaf, a blade of wheat, an acorn, some moss, and other souvenirs of the Russian earth’ which the young American did ‘not greatly need at that moment’. For these two women a lifelong dream was coming true. Craft compared the atmosphere to a child’s birthday party: ‘everyone, not least I.S. [Stravinsky] himself, is bursting with relief ‘.
¹⁴²

    The trip released a huge outpouring of emotion in Stravinsky. In the fifteen years that Robert Craft had known him he had never realized how important Russia was to the composer, or how much of it was still inside his heart. ‘Only two days ago, in Paris, I would have denied that I.S… could ever be at home here again… Now I see that half a century of expatriation can be, whether or not it has been, forgotten in a night.’
¹⁴³
It was not to the Soviet Union that Stravinsky had returned, but to Russia. When Khrennikov, the head of the Soviet Composers’ Union, met him at the airport, Stravinsky refused to shake hands with the old Stalinist and offered him his walking stick instead.
¹⁴⁴
The next day, the Stravinskys drove with Craft to the Sparrow Hills, from where Napoleon had first surveyed Moscow, and as they looked down on the city, they were, Craft thought, ‘silent and more moved than I have ever seen them’.
¹⁴⁵
At the Novodeviche monastery the Stravinskys were visibly ‘disturbed not for any religious or political reason but simply because the Novodeviche is the Russia that they knew, the Russia that is still a part of them’. Behind the ancient walls of the monastery was an island of old Russia. In the gardens women in black kerchiefs and worn-out coats and shoes were tending the graves, and in the church a priest was leading a service where, as it seemed to Craft, the ‘more fervent members [of the congregation] lie kow-tow, in the totally prostrate position that I.S. used to assume during his own devotions in the Russian Church in Hollywood’.
¹⁴⁶
Despite all the turmoil that the Soviet Union had gone through, there were still some Russian customs that remained unchanged.

    The same was true of the musical tradition, as Robert Craft found out when he rehearsed the Moscow National Orchestra in the Tchaikovsky Hall of the Conservatory for a performance of
The Rite of Spring.

    The orchestral ensemble is good, quick to adopt my alien demands of phrasing and articulation, and harder working than European orchestras in general.

    The
Sacre,
played with an emotion I can describe only as non-Gallic and un-Teutonic, is an entirely different piece. The sound does not glitter as it does with American orchestras, and it is less loud, though still deafening in this very live room… This sobriety is very much to I.S.’s taste… Another satisfying oddity is the bass drum, which is open on one side as if sawed in two; the clear,
secco
articulation from the single head makes the beginning of
Danse de la terre
sound like the stampede I.S. says he had in mind… I.S. notes that the bassoon timbre is different than in America, and that ‘The five
fagiotti
at the end of the
Evocation des ancetres
sound like the
cinq vieillards
I had imagined.’
¹⁴⁷

    Stravinsky took delight in this distinct orchestral sound. It brought his Russian ballets back to life.

    He also rejoiced in his rediscovery of spoken Russian. From the moment he arrived back on Russian soil he slipped easily into modes of speech and conversation, using terms and phrases, even long-forgotten childhood expressions, he had not employed for over fifty years. When he spoke in Russian, he had always seemed to Craft ‘a different person’; but now, ‘speaking it with musicians who call him “Igor Fedorovich” which quickly established that family feeling peculiar to Russians - he is more buoyant than I can remember him’.
¹⁴⁸
Craft was struck by the transformation in Stravinsky’s character. Asked whether he believed that he was now seeing ‘the true Stravinsky’, the American replied that ‘all I.S.s are true enough… but my picture of him is finally being given its background, which does wash out a great deal of what I had supposed to be “traits of character” or personal idiosyncrasies’.
¹⁴⁹
Craft wrote that, as a result of the visit to Russia, his ear became attuned to the Russian elements of Stravinsky’s music during the post-Russia years. The Russianness of Stravinsky’s later compositions is not immediately obvious. But it is there - in the rhythmic energy and the chant-like melodies. From the
Symphony of Psalms
to the
Requiem
(1966) his musical language retains a Russian core.
¹⁵⁰
As he himself explained to the Soviet press:

    I have spoken Russian all my life, I think in Russian, my way of expressing myself is Russian. Perhaps it may not be noticeable in my music on a first hearing, but it is inherent in my music and part of its hidden character.
¹⁵¹

    There was much of Russia in Stravinsky’s heart. It was made up of more than the icons in his house, the books he read, or the favourite childhood spoon from which he ate. He retained a physical sensation and memory of the land, Russian habits and customs, Russian ways of speech and social interaction, and all these feelings came flooding back to him from the moment he set foot on his native soil. A culture is more than a tradition. It cannot be contained in a library, let alone the ‘eight slim volumes’ which the exiles packed up in their bags. It is something visceral, emotional, instinctive, a sensibility that shapes the personality and binds that person to a people and a place. The Western public saw Stravinsky as an exile visiting the country of his birth. The Russians recognized him as a Russian coming home.

    Stravinsky barely knew Moscow. He had only been there once on a short day trip sixty years or so before.
¹⁵²
His return to Petersburg, the city of his birth, was even more emotional. At the airport the Stravinskys were welcomed by an elderly gentleman who began to weep. Craft recalls the encounter:

    It is Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov [the son of the composer], and I.S. has failed to recognize him, for the given reason that he has a moustache instead of, as when last seen (1910), a beard; but the real reason, I.S. tells me later, is that ‘He said “Igor Fedorovich” instead of “Gima”. He always called us, me and my brother, “Gury and Gima”.’
¹⁵³

    In the few days since arriving in Russia Stravinsky had stepped back some fifty years. His face rippled with pleasure on recognizing the Marinsky Theatre (at that time renamed the Kirov) where, as a boy, he had sat in his father’s box and watched the ballet. He remembered the winged cupids in the box, the ornate blue and gold decoration of the auditorium, the glittering chandeliers, the richly perfumed audience, and on one occasion, in 1892, as he had stepped out of the box into the foyer at a gala performance of Glinka’s
Ruslan and Liudmila
(in which his father had sung the role of Farlaf), catching sight of Tchaikovsky, all white-haired at the age of fifty-two.
¹⁵⁴
Stravinsky had practically grown up in the Marinsky Theatre. It was only a few yards from his family’s apartment on the Kryukov Canal. When they went to see the house where he had lived for the first twenty-four years of