Natasha's Dance (88 page)

    31.
Sergei Efron and Marina Tsvetaeva, 1911

    White Guards: white stars, Not to be crossed from the sky. White Guards: black nails In the ribs of the Antichrist.
¹⁵

    For the next five years, from 1918 to 1922, the young couple lived apart. Tsvetaeva pledged that, if both of them survived the civil war, she would follow Efron ‘like a dog’, living wherever he chose to live. While Efron was fighting for Denikin’s armies in the south, Tsvetaeva stayed in Moscow. She grew prematurely old in the daily struggle for bread and fuel. Prince Sergei Volkonsky, who became a close friend during those years, recalled her life in the ‘unheated house, sometimes without light, a bare apartment… little Alya sleeping behind a screen surrounded by her drawings… no fuel for the wretched stove, the electric light dim… The dark and cold came in from the street as though they owned the place.’
¹⁶
The desperate hunt for food exposed Tsvetaeva to the brutalizing effect of the Revolution. It seemed to her

    that the common people had lost all sense of human decency and tenderness. Despite her love of Russia, the revelation of this new reality made her think about emigrating. The death of her younger daughter, Irina, in 1920 was a catastrophic shock. ‘Mama could never put it out of her mind that children can die of hunger here’, her elder daughter, Alya, later wrote.
¹⁷
Irina’s death intensified Tsvetaeva’s need to be with Efron. There was no news of him after the autumn of 1920, when the defeated White armies retreated south through the Crimea and crowded on to ships to flee the Bolsheviks. She said she would kill herself if he was not alive. At last, Efron was located in Constantinople. She left Moscow to join him in Berlin.

    Tsvetaeva describes leaving Russia as a kind of death, a parting of the body from the soul, and she was afraid that, separated from the country of her native tongue, she would not be capable of writing poetry. ‘Here a broken shoe is unfortunate or heroic’, she wrote to Ehrenburg shortly before her departure from Moscow, ‘there it’s a disgrace. People will take me for a beggar and chase me back where I came from. If that happens I’ll hang myself.”
⁸

    The loss of Russia strengthened Tsvetaeva’s concern with national themes. During the 1920s she wrote a number of nostalgic poems. The best were collected in
After Russia
(1928), her last book to be published during her lifetime:

    My greetings to the Russian rye,

    To fields of corn higher than a woman.
¹⁹

    Increasingly she also turned to prose (‘emigration makes of me a prose writer’
²⁰
) in a series of intensely moving recollections of the Russia she had lost. ‘I want to resurrect that entire world’, she explained to a fellow emigree, ‘so that all of them should not have lived in vain, so that I should not have lived in vain.’
²¹
What she longed for, in essays like ‘My Pushkin’ (1937), was the cultural tradition that made up the old Russia in her heart. This was what she meant when she wrote in ‘Homesickness’ that she felt

    Stunned, like a log left

    Behind from an avenue of trees.
²²

    As an artist she felt she had been orphaned by her separation from the literary community founded by Pushkin.

    Hence her intense, almost daughterly, attraction to Sergei Volkon-sky, the eurhythmic theorist and former director of the Imperial Theatre who was forced to flee from Soviet Russia in 1921. In Paris Volkonsky became a prominent theatre critic in the emigre press. He lectured on the history of Russian culture in universities throughout Europe and the USA. But it was his link to the cultural tradition of the nineteenth century that made him so attractive to Tsvetaeva. The prince was the grandson of the famous Decembrist; his father had been a close friend of Pushkin. And he himself had met the poet Tiutchev in his mother’s drawing room. There was even a connection between the Volkonskys and the Tsvetaev family. As Ivan Tsvetaev mentioned in his speech at the opening of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1912., the idea of founding such a museum in Moscow had first been voiced by the prince’s great-aunt, Zinaida Volkonsky.
²³
Tsvetaeva fell in love with Volkonsky - not in a sexual way (Volkonsky was almost certainly homosexual) but in the heady fashion of her
amities litteraires.
After several barren years, lyric poetry began to flow from Tsvetaeva again. In the cycle of poems
The Disciple
(1921-2) she cast herself at the feet of a prophet (the ‘father’) who linked her with the wisdom and the values of the past. The poem ‘To the Fathers’ was dedicated to ‘the best friend of my life’, as she described Volkonsky to Evgenia Chiri-kova, ‘the most intelligent, fascinating, charming, old-fashioned, curious and - most brilliant person in the world. He is 63 years old. Yet when you see him you forget how old you are. You forget where you are living, the century, the date.’
²⁴

    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

    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 (Karamzinian) 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