Natasha's Dance (94 page)

    On Lenin’s death in 1924, however, Gorky revised his attitude. He was overwhelmed with remorse for having broken off with the Bolshevik leader and convinced himself, as Berberova put it, ‘that Lenin’s death had left him orphaned with the whole of Russia’.
¹²⁰
His eulogistic
Memories of Lenin
was the first step towards his reconciliation with Lenin’s successors in the Kremlin. He began to think about the idea of returning to the Soviet Union but put off a decision, perhaps afraid of what he might find there. Meanwhile, his two epic novels,
The Artamonov Business
(1925) and
The Life of Klim Samgin
(1925-36) did poorly in the West, where his didactic style no longer found favour. The rise of fascism in his adopted homeland of Italy made Gorky question all his earlier ideals - ideals that had formed the basis

    of his opposition to the Bolsheviks - about Europe as a historic force of moral progress and civilization. The more disillusioned he became with fascist Europe the more he was inclined to extol Soviet Russia as a morally superior system. In 1928 Gorky returned on the first of five summer trips to the Soviet Union, settling there for good in 1931. The prodigal son was showered with honours; he was given as his residence the famous Riabushinsky mansion (built by Shekhtel) in Moscow; two large country
dachas;
private servants (who turned out to be Lubianka spies); and supplies of special foods from the same NKVD department that catered for Stalin. All of this was given with the aim of securing Gorky’s political support and of presenting him as a Soviet author to the Western world.
¹²¹
At that time opinion in the West was equally divided over whether Gorky or Bunin should win the Nobel Prize. Once the Kremlin took up Gorky’s cause, the competition between the two writers became a broader political struggle over who should have the right to speak in the name of the cultural tradition that went back to Pushkin and Tolstoy - Moscow or the Paris emigres?

    The Soviet regime to which Gorky had returned was deeply split between the Stalinists and the so-called Rightists, like Tomsky and Bukharin, who opposed Stalin’s murderous policies of collectivization and industrialization. To begin with, Gorky occupied a place somewhere between the two: he broadly supported Stalin’s goals while attempting to restrain his extremist policies. But increasingly he found himself in opposition to the Stalinist regime. Gorky had never been the sort of person who could remain silent when he did not like something. He had opposed Lenin and his reign of terror, now he was a thorn in Stalin’s side as well. He protested against the persecution of Zamyatin, Bulgakov and Pilnyak - though he failed to draw attention to the arrest of Mandelstam in 1934. He voiced his objections to the cult of Stalin’s personality and even refused a commission from the Kremlin to write a hagiographic essay about him. In his diaries of the 1930s - locked up in the NKVD archives on his death - Gorky compared Stalin to a ‘monstrous flea’ which propaganda and mass fear had ‘enlarged to incredible proportions’.
¹²²

    The NKVD placed Gorky under close surveillance. There is evidence that Gorky was involved in a plot against Stalin with Bukharin and Kirov, the Party boss of Leningrad who was assassinated, perhaps

    on Stalin’s orders, in 1934. Gorky’s death in 1936 may also have been a consequence of the plot. For some time he had been suffering from chronic influenza caused by lung and heart disease. During the Buk-harin show trial of 1938 Gorky’s doctors were found guilty of the writer’s ‘medical murder’. Perhaps Stalin used the writer’s natural death as a pretext to destroy his political enemies, but Gorky’s involvement with the opposition makes it just as likely that Stalin had him killed. It is almost certain that the NKVD murdered Gorky’s son, Maxim Peshkov, in 1934; and this may have been part of a plan to weaken Gorky.
¹²³
Certainly the writer’s death came at a highly convenient time for Stalin - just before the show trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev, which Gorky had intended to expose as a sham in the Western press. Gorky’s widow was adamant that her husband had been killed by Stalin’s agents when she was asked about this in 1963. But the truth will probably never be known.
¹²⁴

    Prokofiev was the other major figure to return to Stalin’s Russia -at the height of the Great Terror in 1936. The composer had never been known for his political acumen but the unhappy timing of his return was, even by his standards, the outcome of extraordinary naivety. Politics meant little to Prokofiev. He thought his music was above all that. He seemed to believe that he could return to the Soviet Union and remain unaffected by Stalin’s politics.

    Perhaps it was connected with his rise to fame as an infant prodigy in St Petersburg. The child of prosperous and doting parents, Prokofiev had had instilled in him from an early age an unshakeable belief in his own destiny. By the age of thirteen, when he entered the St Petersburg Conservatory, he already had four operas to his name. Here was the Russian Mozart. In 1917 he escaped the Revolution by travelling with his mother to the Caucasus and then emigrated via Vladivostok and Japan to the United States. Since Rachmaninov had recently arrived in America, the press inevitably made comparisons between the two. Prokofiev’s more experimental style made him second best in the view of the generally conservative American critics. Years later, Prokofiev recalled wandering through New York’s Central Park and

    chinking with a cold fury of the wonderful American orchestras that cared nothing for my music… I arrived here too early; this
enfant-
America - still

    had not matured to an understanding of new music. Should I have gone back
home
?
But how? Russia was surrounded on all sides by the forces of the Whites, and anyway, who wants to return
home
empty-handed?
¹²⁵

    According to Berberova, Prokofiev had been heard to say on more than one occasion: ‘There is no room for me here while Rachmaninov is alive, and he will live another ten or fifteen years. Europe is not enough for me and I do not wish to be second in America.’
¹²⁶

    In 1920 Prokofiev left New York and settled in Paris. But with Stravinsky already ensconced there, the French capital was even harder for Prokofiev to conquer. The patronage of Diaghilev was all-important in Paris - and Stravinsky was the impresario’s ‘favourite son’. Prokofiev liked to write for the opera, an interest that stemmed from his love for setting Russian novels to music:
War and Peace,
Dostoevsky’s
Gambler
and Briusov’s
Fiery Angel
were all turned into operas by him. But Diaghilev had famously declared that the opera was an art form that was ‘out of date’.
¹²⁷
The Ballets Russes had been founded on the search for a non-verbal synthesis of the arts - dance, mime and music and the visual arts but not literature. Stravinsky, by contrast, was committed to the ballet, an art form that enjoyed enormous kudos in the West as quintessentially ‘Russian’. Encouraged by Diaghilev, Prokofiev composed the music for three ballets in the 1920s.
The Buffoon
(1921) was a moderate success - though it rankled with Stravinsky, who subsequently plotted to turn the arbiters of musical taste in Paris (Nadia Boulanger, Poulenc and Les Six) against Prokofiev. The second,
The Steel Step
(1927), which handled Soviet themes, was denounced by the Paris emigres as ‘Kremlin propaganda’, though in fact its idea was Diaghilev’s. Only the last of Prokofiev’s ballets,
The Prodigal Son
(1929), was an unqualified success. Its theme was close to the composer’s heart.

    Prokofiev became a lonely figure in Paris. He had a small circle of Russian friends which included the composer Nicolas Nabokov, the conductor Sergei Koussevitsky and the poet Konstantin Balmont. For seven years he laboured on his opera
The Fiery Angel
(1927), a work he always thought of as his masterpiece but which he never saw performed. Its central theme - the unconquerable divide between two worlds - spoke in many ways of his own separation from Russia.

    Isolated from the emigre community in Paris, Prokofiev began to develop contacts with the Soviet musical establishment. In 1927 he accepted an invitation from the Kremlin to make a concert tour of the Soviet Union. On his return to Petersburg he was overcome by emotion. ‘I had somehow managed to forget what Petersburg was really like’, he recorded in his diary of the trip. ‘I had begun to think that its European charm would pale in comparison with the West and that, on the contrary, Moscow was something unique. Now, however, the grandeur of the city took my breath away.’
¹²⁸
The lavish production of his
Love for Three Oranges
(1919) in the Marinsky Theatre made him feel that he had at last been recognized as Russia’s greatest living composer. The Soviet authorities pulled out all the stops to lure him back for good. Lunacharsky, the commissar of culture who had allowed him to go abroad in 1917 (‘You are a revolutionary in music, we are revolutionaries in life… I shall not stop you’),
¹²⁹
now tried to persuade the composer to return to Soviet Russia by citing Mayakov-sky’s famous open ‘Letter-Poem’ to Gorky (1927), in which he had asked him why he lived in Italy when there was so much work to do in Russia. Mayakovsky was an old acquaintance of Prokofiev; on the eve of Prokofiev’s departure for America Mayakovsky had dedicated a volume of his poems ‘To the World President of Music from the World President of Poetry: to Prokofiev’. Another of his old friends, the avant-garde director Meyerhold, talked enthusiastically of new collaborations to realize the Russian classics on the stage. Missing these old allies was a crucial factor in Prokofiev’s decision to return. ‘Foreign company does not inspire me’, he confessed in 1933,

    because I am a Russian, and that is to say the least suited of men to be an exile, to remain myself in a psychological climate that isn’t of my race. My compatriots and I carry our country about with us. Not all of it, but just enough for it to be faintly painful at first, then increasingly so, until at last it breaks us down altogether… I’ve got to live myself back into the atmosphere of my homeland. I’ve got to see real winters again, and springs that burst into being from one moment to the next. I’ve got to hear the Russian language echoing in my ears. I’ve got to talk to people who are my own flesh and blood, so that they can give me something I lack here - their songs - my songs.
¹³⁰

    From 1932. Prokofiev began to spend half the year in Moscow; four years later he moved his wife and two sons there for good. He was afforded every luxury - a spacious apartment in Moscow with his own furniture imported from Paris and the freedom to travel to the West (at a time when Soviet citizens were despatched to the gulag for ever having spoken to a foreigner). With his uncanny talent for writing tunes, Prokofiev was commissioned to compose numerous scores for the Soviet stage and screen, including his
Lieutenant Kije
suite (1934) and
Romeo and Juliet
(1935-6). Prizes followed - he was awarded the prestigious Stalin Prize on no less than five occasions between 1942 and 1949 - and even though he knew that they were window-dressing, he was flattered by the recognition of his native land.

    Still, in spite of all the accolades, Prokofiev’s working life at home became steadily more difficult. Attacked as a ‘formalist’ in the campaign which began, in 1936, with the suppression of Shostakovich’s opera
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,
Prokofiev retreated by turning his attention to music for the young:
Peter and the Wolf
(1936) is a product (and perhaps an allegory) of the Terror years (the hunt for the wolf has overtones of the assault on the ‘enemies of the people’). Many of his more experimental works remained unperformed: the huge
Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution
(1937); the music for Meyerhold’s 1937 Pushkin centenary production of
Boris Godunov;
even the opera
War and Peace
was not staged in Russia (in its final version) until 1959. After 1948, when Zhdanov renewed the Stalinist assault against the ‘formalists’, nearly all the music which Prokofiev had written in Paris and New York was banned from the Soviet concert repertory.

    Prokofiev spent his last years in virtual seclusion. Like Shostakovich, he turned increasingly to the intimate domain of chamber music, where he could find expression for his private sadness. The most moving of all these works is the Violin Sonata in D Major (ironically awarded the Stalin Prize in 1947). Prokofiev told the violinist David Oistrakh that its haunting opening movement was meant to sound ‘like the wind in a graveyard’.
¹³¹
Oistrakh played the sonata at Prokofiev’s funeral, a sad affair that was scarcely noticed by the Soviet public. Stalin had died on the same day as Prokofiev, 5 March 1953. There were no flowers left to buy, so a single pine branch was placed on the composer’s grave.

    Tsvetaeva returned to live with Efron and their son and daughter in a
dacha
near Moscow in 1939. Having hoped to rediscover the sort of writers’ circles that she had left behind nearly twenty years before, it was a shock to find herself almost completely isolated on her return to Russia. As Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled, under Stalin ‘it had become a matter of second nature to ignore people who had returned from the West’.
¹³²
Everything about Tsvetaeva made her dangerous to know -or be seen to know. She seemed alien and outmoded, a figure of the past, from another world. Few people recalled her poetry.

    Two months after their return, Tsvetaeva’s daughter Alya was arrested and accused of spying for the Western powers in league with the Trotskyites. Shortly after, they arrested Efron as well. Tsvetaeva joined the women in the prison queues whose dreadful burden was recorded by Akhmatova. Tsvetaeva never saw her husband or daughter again. She did not even find out what had become of them. * With her son, she was taken in by Efron’s sister in Moscow. Thin and exhausted, her face grey and colourless, she scraped a living by translating poetry. Finally, after Pasternak had come to her aid, she moved to a village near the writers’ colony at Golitsyno, on the road between Moscow and Minsk, where she found a job as a dishwasher and was allowed to take her meals. Some of the older writers there still recalled her poetry and treated her with a respect bordering on awe. But from the viewpoint of official Soviet literature Tsvetaeva had ceased to exist long ago. Her last book in Russia had been published in 1922 - and in the climate of 1939 there was very little chance that her poems would be published there again. She submitted a collection of her verse to the state publishers in 1940, but instead of her more patriotic or civic verse she chose to include many of her poems from the period when Efron was fighting for the Whites. Unsurprisingly, the collection was turned down as anti-Soviet. It was typical of Tsvetaeva’s wilful refusal to compromise. She was incapable of reining herself in, even if at the risk of disaster for herself. She could not come to terms with the age in which she was compelled to live.