Natasha's Dance (92 page)

    * The Russian passports of the emigres were no longer valid after the formation of the Soviet Union: Russia as a country had ceased to exist. In place of their old papers the emigres and other stateless persons were issued with temporary ‘Nansen’ passports (named after the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). The carriers of these flimsy passports suffered long delays and hostile questioning by functionaries throughout the West whenever they travelled or registered for work.

    Registration Cards, landowners’ sons like Stravinsky and Nabokov resented being treated by the Western states as ‘second-class citizens’.
⁸²

    The Ballets Russes was the centre of Russian cultural life in Paris. It was a sort of Parisian embassy of the Petersburg renaissance headed by Ambassador Diaghilev. After its wartime tours of America he had brought the company to France in the hope of reuniting his winning team of artists and of ending its perpetual cash flow crises by tapping the French market for the Russian arts that had done so well for it before the war. Fokine having settled in America, Diaghilev needed a new choreographer to carry on that distinctive Russian balletic tradition that went back to the school of Petipa. He found it in Georges Balanchine (ne Georgy Balanchivadze). Born in 1904 in St Petersburg, the son of a Georgian composer, Balanchine had trained at Petipa’s Imperial Ballet Academy and worked in the troupe of the Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg before going on tour to Europe in 1924. Diaghilev perceived Balanchine as a vital link with the Petersburg traditions, and the first thing he asked him after Balanchine’s dancers had run through a few routines they had brought with them from Russia was whether he could transfer them to the stage.
⁸³
Balanchine’s affinity for the music of Stravinsky made him the ideal choice for Diaghilev, whose plans for Paris had Stravinsky’s ballets centre stage. The first collaboration between Stravinsky and Balanchine,
Apollon Musagete
(1928), was the start of a lifelong partnership between composer and choreographer. It was a partnership that would ensure the survival of the modern ballet - Diaghilev’s invention - as an art form.

    The Ballets Russes of the 1920s was defined by the principles of neoclassicism. In dance this entailed a return to the Apollonian rigour of the classical academy: an abstract, almost architectural, design in the manoeuvres of the ensemble; the rehabilitation of the male dancer in heroic mode; and the sacrifice of plot to the sensual connections between music, colour and movement. In music it entailed a renunciation of the Russian nationalist school and a stylized imitation of the classical (and predominantly Italian) traditions of Petersburg - as, for example, in Stravinsky’s
commedia dell’arte Pulci-nella
(1920) and his
one-act opera bouffe
entitled
Mavra
(1922), which was dedicated to the memory of Pushkin, Glinka and Tchaikovsky.

    This re-engagement with the classical tradition was an obvious reaction by the emigres. After the chaos and destruction of the revolutionary period, they longed for some sense of order. They looked back to the European values and inheritance of Petersburg to redefine themselves as Europeans and to shift their ‘Russia’ west. They wanted to recover the old certainties from underneath the rubble of St Petersburg.

    With the death of Diaghilev, in 1929, the Ballets Russes split up. The impresario had always been the inspiration of the group. He possessed the sort of presence that gave people a feeling of anticlimax when he left the room. So when he left the world it was almost bound to happen that his stars should go their separate ways. Many worked in the various ‘Ballet Russes’ touring companies that inherited the repertoire and glamour of the original Diaghilev organization: Fokine, Massine, Benois, Nijinska, Balanchine. Others, like Anna Pavlova, struck out on their own, establishing small companies that carried on Diaghilev’s experimentalist tradition. In England his alumni laid the foundations of the British ballet: Ninette de Valois and the Vic-Wells Ballet (which later became the Royal Ballet), the Ballet Rambert and the Markova-Dolin Ballet were all descendants of the Ballets Russes. Balanchine transported the Diaghilev tradition to America, where he set up the New York City Ballet in 1933.

    Paris was an outlet to the West, a door through which exiled Russians reached a new homeland. Most of those who made their home in Paris in the 1920s ended up by fleeing to America as the threat of war approached in the 1930s. The main attraction of America was its freedom and security. Artists like Stravinsky and Chagall escaped from Hitler’s Europe to work in peace in the United States. For Stravinsky, this was not a question of politics: he publicly supported the Italian fascists (‘I have an overpowering urge to render homage to your Duce. He is the saviour of Italy and - let us hope of Europe’, he had told an Italian newspaper in the early 1930s);
⁸⁴
and although he loathed the Nazis (they attacked his music), he was careful to put space between himself and his German-Jewish contacts after 1933. It was more a question of his own convenience: he loved order and needed it to work.

    The composer Nicolas Nabokov (a cousin of the writer) recalls a

    revealing incident. Shortly after his arrival in America, Stravinsky became worried by the possibility of revolution there. He asked an acquaintance whether this was likely and, when he was told that it was possible, he asked in ‘an appalled and indignant tone’: ‘But where will I go?’
⁸⁵
Having lived through the Russian Revolution, Stravinsky’s deepest political instinct was a fear of disorder.

    After teaching for a year at Harvard University, he found his refuge in Los Angeles, where he purchased his first house, a small suburban villa in West Hollywood which would remain his home for the next thirty years. Los Angeles had attracted many artists from Europe, largely on account of its film industry; the German writer Thomas Mann described wartime Hollywood as a ‘more intellectually stimulating and cosmopolitan city than Paris or Munich had ever been’.
⁸⁶
Among the Stravinskys’ friends were Bertolt Brecht and Charlie Chaplin, Rene Clair and Greta Garbo, Max Reinhardt and Alma Mahler (married to Franz Werfel), Lion Feuchtwanger and Erich Maria Remarque. Such cosmopolitanism made the United States a natural home for many of the Russian emigres. Its ‘melting pot’ of nations, in New York and Los Angeles especially, was reminiscent of the cultural milieu in which they had lived in Petersburg. America enabled them to develop as international artists not troubled, as they had been in Europe, by irksome questions of national identity.

    This sense of wanting to be rid of Russia - of wanting to break free to a new identity - was expressed by Nabokov in his poem ‘To Russia’ (1939), written just before his own departure from Paris for the USA.

    Will you leave me alone? I implore you! Dusk is ghastly. Life’s noises subside. I am helpless. And I am dying Of the blind touch of your whelming tide.

    He who freely abandons his country on the heights to bewail it is free. But now I am down in the valley and now do not come close to me.

    I’m prepared to lie hidden forever and to live without a name. I’m prepared, lest we only in dreams come together, all conceivable dreams to forswear;

    to be drained of my blood, to be crippled, to have done with the books I most love, for the first available idiom to exchange all I have: my own tongue.

    But for that, through the tears, oh, Russia, through the grass of two far-parted tombs, through the birch tree’s tremulous macules, through all that sustained me since youth,

    with your blind eyes, your dear eyes, cease looking

    at me, oh, pity my soul,

    do not rummage around in the coalpit,

    do not grope for my life in this hole

    because years have gone by and centuries, and for sufferings, sorrow, and shame, too late - there is no one to pardon and no one to carry the blame.
⁸⁷

    Stravinsky’s exodus to America followed a similar emotional path. He wanted to forget about the past and move on. His childhood was a painful memory. He had lost his father, two brothers and a daughter before he ‘lost’ Russia in 1917. He needed to put Russia behind him. But it would not let him be. As an emigre in France, Stravinsky tried to deny his own Russianness. He adopted a sort of European cosmopolitanism which at times became synonymous, as it had once been in St Petersburg itself, with an aristocratic hauteur and contempt for what was thought of as ‘Russia’ in the West (that is, the version of peasant culture which he had imitated in
The Firebird
and
The Rite of Spring).
‘I don’t think of myself as particularly Russian,’ he told a Swiss journalist in 1928. ‘I am a cosmopolitan.’
⁸⁸
In Paris

    Stravinsky mixed in the fashionable circles of Cocteau and Proust, Poulenc and Ravel, Picasso and Coco Chanel. Chanel became his lover and transformed him from the rather unattractive and self-effacing man who had arrived in Paris in 1920 into the
homme dur et monocle,
elegantly dressed in finely tailored suits and drawn (with Asiatic eyes) by Picasso.

    Stravinsky made a very public show of distancing himself from the peasant Russia that had inspired his earlier works. It had turned into the Red Russia he despised - the Russia which had betrayed him. He denied the influence of folklore on his work. He claimed (mendaciously) that the ancient Russian setting of
The Rite of Spring
was an incidental choice that followed from the music, which he had composed first, without regard for the folklore.
⁸⁹
He similarly denied the Russian roots of
The Peasant Wedding -
a work entirely based on musical folklore. ‘I borrowed nothing from folk pieces’, he wrote in his
Chronique de ma vie
in 1935. ‘The recreation of a country wedding ritual, which in any case I had never seen, did not enter my mind. Ethnographic questions were of very little interest to me.’
⁹⁰
Perhaps he was trying to distinguish his own music from the ersatz folklore (one should really call it ‘fakelore’) of the Stalinist regime, with its pseudo folk-dance troupes and
balalaika
orchestras, its Red Army choirs which dressed up in generic ‘folk’ costumes and played the role of happy peasants while the real peasants starved or languished in the gulags in the wake of Stalin’s war to force them all into collective farms. But the lengths to which he went to erase his Russian roots suggest a more violent, personal reaction.

    The music of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period was an expression of his ‘cosmopolitan’ identity. There is almost nothing evidently ‘Russian’ - and certainly no musical folklore - in jazz-inspired works such as the Octet for Wind (1923), or in classically formed works like the Piano Concerto (1924); and even less in later works like
Dumbarton Oaks
(1937) or the Symphony in C (1938). The fact that he chose Latin - rather than his native Russian or adopted French - as the language of his ‘opera-oratorio’
Oedipus Rex
(1927) lends further weight to this idea. Nicolas Nabokov, who spent the Christmas of 1947 with the Stravinskys in Hollywood, was struck by the apparent

    thoroughness of the composer’s break with his native land. ‘For

    Stravinsky, Russia is a language which he uses with superb, gourmandlike dexterity; it is a few books; Glinka and Tchaikovsky. The rest either leaves him indifferent or arouses his anger, contempt and violent dislike.’
⁹¹
Stravinsky had an amazing chameleon-like capacity to adapt and make himself at home in foreign habitats. This, too, was perhaps a product of his Petersburg background. His son recalled that ‘every time we moved house for a few weeks my father always managed to give an air of permanence to what was in fact very temporary… All his life, wherever he might be, he always managed to surround himself with his own atmosphere.’
⁹²

    In 1934 the composer became a citizen of France - a decision he explained by claiming he had found his ‘intellectual climate’ in Paris, and by what he called ‘a kind of shame towards my motherland’.
⁹³
Yet despite his French passport and his orchestrated image as an Artist of the World, Stravinsky harboured deeply felt emotions for the country of his birth. He was far more rooted in his native culture than he readily acknowledged; and these feelings were expressed in a concealed way within his works. Stravinsky felt profound nostalgia for St Petersburg - a city that was ‘so much a part of my life’, he wrote in 1959, ‘that I am almost afraid to look further into myself, lest I discover how much of me is still joined to it’.
⁹⁴
So painful was its memory that in 1955 the composer refused an invitation to Helsinki on the grounds that it was ‘too near a certain city that I have no desire to see again’.
⁹⁵
Yet he loved Rome, and Venice too, because they reminded him of Petersburg. Stravinsky’s sublimated nostalgia for the city of his birth is clearly audible in his Tchaikovskian ballet
The Fairy’s Kiss
(1928). He was equally nostalgic about Ustilug, the family’s estate in Volhynia, where he had composed
The Rite of Spring.
Ustilug was a subject he would not discuss with anyone.
⁹⁶
It was an immeasurable source of pain to him that he did not know what had happened to the house where he had spent his happiest childhood days. Yet the fact that he laboured longer on
The Peasant Wedding
than on any other score is an indication of his feelings for the place. The work was based on sources he had retrieved from the house on his final visit there.

    Throughout his life in exile Stravinsky remained emotionally attached to the rituals and the culture of the Russian Church - even if

    in France he became attracted intellectually to the Catholic tradition, which he celebrated in his
Symphony of Psalms
(1930). In the mid-1920s, after nearly thirty years of non-observance, Stravinsky resumed an active life in the Orthodox community, in part under the influence of his wife Katya, who became increasingly devout during the long illness from which she eventually died in 1939. As an artist and as an emigre, Stravinsky found solace in the discipline and order of the Russian Church. ‘The more you cut yourself off from the canons of the Christian Church,’ he told an interviewer while at work on the
Symphony of Psalms,
‘the more you cut yourself off from the truth.’