Natasha's Dance (96 page)

Authors: Orlando Figes

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BOOK: Natasha's Dance

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his life, Stravinsky displayed no emotion. But, as he explained to Craft, it was only because ‘I could not let myself’.
¹⁵⁵Every building was
‘chudno’
(magical) or
‘krasivo’
(beautiful). The queue for the concert in Stravinsky’s honour at the Great Hall of the Philharmonia was a living monument to the role of art in Russia and his own place in that sacred tradition: the queue had begun a year before and had developed as a complex social system, with people taking turns to stand in the line for a large block of seats. An 84-year-old cousin of Stravinsky was forced to watch the concert on the television because her number in the queue was 5001.
¹⁵⁶

’Where is Shostakovich?’ Stravinsky kept asking from the moment he arrived. While Stravinsky was in Moscow, Shostakovich was in Leningrad; and just as Stravinsky went to Leningrad, Shostakovich returned to Moscow. ‘What is the matter with this Shostakovich?’ Stravinsky asked Khachaturian. ‘Why does he keep running away from me?’
¹⁵⁷As an artist Shostakovich worshipped Stravinsky. He was his secret muse. Underneath the glass of his working desk Shostakovich kept two photographs: one of himself with the Beethoven Quartet; the other, a large portrait of Stravinsky.
¹⁵⁸Although he never expressed any public sympathy for Stravinsky’s music, its influence is clear on many of his works (such as the
Petrushka
motif in the Tenth Symphony, or the adagio of the Seventh Symphony, which is clearly reminiscent of Stravinsky’s
Symphony of Psalms).

The Khrushchev thaw was a huge release for Shostakovich. It enabled him to re-establish links with the classical tradition of St Petersburg where he and Stravinsky had been born. Not that his life was entirely trouble-free. The Thirteenth Symphony (1962), based on Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem
Babi Yar
(1961), was attacked by the Party (which tried to prevent its first performance) for supposedly belittling the suffering of the Russians in the war by focusing attention on the Nazi massacre of the Jews in Kiev. But otherwise the thaw was a creative spring for Shostakovich. He returned to his teaching post at the Leningrad Conservatory. His music was widely performed. He was honoured with official prizes and allowed to travel abroad extensively. Some of his most sublime music was composed in the last years of his life - the last three string quartets and the Viola Sonata, a personal requiem and artistic summing-up of his own life which was completed

a month before his death on 9 August 1975. He even managed to find time to write two film scores -
Hamlet
(1964) and
King Lear
(1971) -commissioned by his old friend, the film director Grigory Kozintsev, for whom Shostakovich had written his first film score in 1929. Much of the music he composed in these years found its inspiration in the European heritage of Petersburg which had been lost in 1917. In his private world Shostakovich lived in literature. His conversation was full of literary allusions and expressions from the classic Russian novels of the nineteenth century. He loved the satires of Gogol and the stories of Chekhov. He felt a particularly close affinity for Dostoevsky which he was careful to conceal - until the final years, when he composed a song cycle based on the ‘Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin’ from
The Devils.
Shostakovich once confessed that he had always dreamed of composing work on Dostoevsky’s themes, but that he had always been ‘too frightened’ to do so. ‘I love him and admire him as a great artist’, Shostakovich wrote. ‘I admire his love for the Russian people, for the humiliated and the wretched.’
¹⁵⁹

Shostakovich and Stravinsky met at last in Moscow, at the Metro-pole Hotel, where a banquet for Stravinsky was being laid on by the Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva (whom Shostakovich called ‘Catherine the Third’). The meeting was neither a reunion nor a reconciliation of the two Russias that had gone their separate ways in 1917. But it was a symbol of a cultural unity which in the end would triumph over politics. The two composers lived in separate worlds but their music kept a single Russian beat. ‘It was a very tense meeting’, Khachaturian recalls:

They were placed next to each other and sat in complete silence. I sat opposite them. Finally Shostakovich plucked up the courage and opened the conversation:

’What do you think of Puccini?’

’I can’t stand him,’ Stravinsky replied.

’Oh, and neither can I, neither can I,’ said Shostakovich.
¹⁶⁰

That was virtually all the two men said. But at a second banquet at the Metropole, the
evening before Stravinsky left, they resumed their conversation and a dialogue of sorts was established. It was a

memorable occasion - one or those quintessentially Russian events which are punctuated by a regular succession of increasingly expansive vodka toasts - and soon, as Craft recalled, the room was turned into a ‘Finnish bath, in whose vapours everyone, proclaiming and acclaiming each other’s Russianness, says almost the same thing… Again and again, each one abases himself before the mystery of their Russianness, and so, I realize with a shock, does I.S., whose replies are soon overtaking the toasts.’ In a perfectly sober speech - he was the least alcoholically elevated of anyone in the room - Stravinsky proclaimed:

’The smell of the Russian earth is different, and such things are impossible to forget… A man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country - he
can
have only one country - and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life. I regret that circumstances separated me from my fatherland, that I did not give birth to my works here and, above all, that I was not here to help the new Soviet Union create its new music. I did not leave Russia of my own will, even though I disliked much in my Russia and in Russia generally. Yet the right to criticize Russia is mine, because Russia is mine and because I love it, and I do not give any foreigner that right.’
¹⁶¹

He meant every word.

THE END

Table of Contents

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Unknown

Orlando Figes

NATASHA’S DANCE

A Cultural History of Russia

ISBN: 08050-5783-8

For Lydia and Alice

Contents

List of Illustrations and Photographic Acknowledgements - ix

Notes on the Maps and Text - xv

Maps - xviii

Introduction - xxv

1 EUROPEAN RUSSIA - I

2. CHILDREN OF I 8 I 2. - 69

3. MOSCOW! MOSCOW! - 147

4. THE PEASANT MARRIAGE - 217

5. IN SEARCH OF THE RUSSIAN SOUL - 289

6. DESCENDANTS OF GENGHIZ KHAN - 355

7. RUSSIA THROUGH THE SOVIET LENS - 431

8. RUSSIA ABROAD - 523

List of Illustrations

and Photographic

Acknowledgements

Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be happy to

CHAPTER OPENERS

1. Benjamin Paterssen: Vue de la grande parade au Palais de l’Empereur

Vue de la grande parade au Palais de l’Empereur

Alexandre 1er a St Petersburg, c. 1803. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Alexandre 1er a St Petersburg, c.

2. Adolphe Ladurnier: View of the White Hall in the Winter Palace,

View of the White Hall in the Winter Palace,

St Petersburg, 1838. State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg/

St Petersburg,

Petrushka, Moscow

3. St Basil’s Cathedral, Red Square, Moscow, during the late nineteenth

century (photo: David King Collection, London)

4. A typical one-street village in central Russia, c. 1910. Photograph

by Netta Peacock. Victoria Albert Museum Picture Library,

London

5. Natalia Goncharova: backdrop design for The Firebird (1916)

The Firebird (1916)

Victoria Albert Museum Picture Library, London

6. Scvthian figures: late nineteenth-centurv archaeological engraving

List of Illustrations and Photographic Acknowledgements

8. Igor and Vera Stravinsky arriving at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow, 21 September 1962

Photograph Album 1921-1971

TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS

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