Playing with Fire

1

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

NEVEL’, PETROGRAD

I only know one way to God: through Art.

Maria Yudina

For what I have experienced and understood in Art, I must answer with my life, in order that such experience and understanding should not be rendered ineffective.

Mikhail Bakhtin¹

Maria Veniaminovna Yudina was born on 10 September 1899 (30 August in the old-style calendar), the fourth of five brothers and sisters in Nevel’, a small town in the Pale of Settlement, in the Vitebsk district.^* Her family came from the educated intelligentsia; as Jews they adhered to the social ideals rather than the religious traditions of their forebears.

Indeed, Nevel’s population was predominantly Jewish, while a quarter of its inhabitants were registered as Russian Orthodox. A few remaining Catholics testified to former times, when the town had been under Polish-Lithuanian control. The town boasted at least eight synagogues, but at the time of Yudina’s birth the main town square was distinguished by an architectural ensemble of churches, the Uspensky Orthodox Cathedral, various churches of the Spasopreobrazhensky Monastery and a Catholic chapel, built by the Radziwill family.

Little remains of the Nevel’ of these times; it suffered massive destruction during the German occupation of 1941–4, when its Jewish population was virtually exterminated. A few churches survived the ravages of the Second World War, while the remnants of the town’s religious buildings were torn down during the early 1960s, in a last surge of ideological zeal. In Yudina’s words, ‘Nevel’ was a place where Sholom-Aleikem, Chekhov, Platonov, and Mikhoels could find their heroes.’² And so, for that matter, could Marc Chagall, who started his career as a painter in nearby Vitebsk.

Maria’s mother, Raisa Yakovlevna Yudina, endeared herself to all and sundry as an unusually kind and gentle person. She was described by Maria’s much younger half-sister Vera, as ‘well-educated for those times and adored by her children’. In addition, there was a much-loved governess, Schvede, ‘an enormously stout woman, with an inexhaustible supply of games, shadow theatre, charades’.³

Veniamin Gavrilovich Yudin, Maria’s father, was a hard-working, upright man, totally dedicated to his work as senior doctor at the Nevel’ hospital. Like so many of the zemski doctors^* of Chekhov’s stories or Bulgakov’s A Country Doctor’s Notebook, he was an agnostic who took his social duties seriously. Vera, his daughter by his second marriage, left the following description of him:

Born into a large and very poor Jewish family, Father had to become independent at a very early age. He attended the gymnasium in Vitebsk and from the 4th class onwards he gave lessons to earn his keep and support the family. Despite his desperate poverty he managed to get to Moscow to study medicine with the most famous figures of his day. He returned to Nevel’ to discover a grim picture – the small and dirty hospital for the poor and homeless. Epidemics of typhoid fever constantly broke out in the town. And Father started from nothing, and for 50 years selflessly and untiringly carried out the routine work of the hospital. Much has been written of the good work of the Zemski doctors – not only did Father treat town dwellers and peasants from surrounding areas, but constantly (and successfully) petitioned for extensions and improvements to the hospital, for an outpatients’ department, the digging of artesian wells, the opening of schools [. . .] His energy was extraordinary. Family legend has it that Father shouted at the Governor and threw some visiting dignitary down the stairs. That was in his style.⁴

The Yudin family lived in a two-storey wooden house on Monastyrskaya Street, by the banks of the river Emenka, near its outflow into the large Lake Nevel’. It boasted a large garden and vegetable patch, a summerhouse and bathing hut. Contemporaries recall Dr Yudin walking down the garden path in his fox fur coat to his bathing hut – he swam even in the cold winter months.⁵ From her father Maria inherited a decisive character, courage and impulsiveness, and an incredible capacity for hard work. Her musical gifts came from her mother’s side of the family: her cousin, the distinguished pianist and conductor Ilya Slatin, founded the Kharkov branch of the Russian Musical Society, as well as the Kharkov Symphony Orchestra and Musical School.

Maria, or Marusya or Marila as she was known in the family, started studying the piano aged seven and was soon accepted by Frieda Teitelbaum-Levinson, a one-time pupil of Anton Rubinstein and winner of the gold medal at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. Having abandoned her performing career when she married, Teitelbaum-Levinson became a teacher of note in Vitebsk. Gavriil Yudin, Maria’s cousin, remembered how ‘her mother brought Marila to Vitebsk 2 or 3 times a month. The 100-km journey took some 3 and ½ hours by the fast train. After her piano lesson, they returned to Nevel’ the following day.’

Gavriil recalled Maria’s striking appearance:

. . . with her enormous forehead and eyes expressing great depth of thought and a concentration most unusual for a ten-year-old. Even then, her playing showed striking individuality, with those inimitable characteristics of her maturity: grandeur of scale, profundity, tautness of pulse and rhythm, and above all a great aesthetic quality – a sort of Beethovenian ‘Es Muss Sein’. Of the pieces she played then, I can never forget her performance of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, in B minor (Op. 30 no. 4) and in particular that in C minor (Op. 38 no. 2). No pianist I have heard since could convey such commitment and inner strength as this young girl, with her thick braid of hair down to her waist, stubbornly nodding her head at the piano, as if in agreement with her own playing.⁶

In the close family circle, Maria could be vivacious, and was the leader of the close-knit group of cousins in theatrical games, ‘inventing ingenious tricks and devising new subjects’.⁷

Yudina herself recalled her childhood as idyllic – the ‘paradise of the parental home’ with the subtle charm of the surrounding lush, water-studded countryside:

As a child I would sit on the spreading branches of the willow tree by the river in my parents’ garden and tried to write verse. I composed bad poems in German – in the manner of a traveller in the Steppes of Central Asia – eulogizing God’s world and the surrounding beauties. I described sunsets, stars, the splashing of waves, and the magic twilight hours. Later I realized that my poems were no good. I started reading real poetry, and dreamt of being able to study verse writing.⁸

Maria’s progress at the piano was so remarkable that at the age of thirteen she was taken to St Petersburg to play for the famous Anna Yesipova. An ‘international star’ of her day, Yesipova had been a favourite pupil (and one-time wife) of the great Polish pianist Theodor Leschetizky (Leszetycki).^* Initially Yudina started her studies with Yesipova’s assistant, Olga Kalantarova, in the junior department of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, but she was soon promoted to Yesipova’s own class. The Conservatoire director, the composer Alexander Glazunov, sat on the examination commission and assessed the young Maria as follows: ‘Excellent dexterity. A gifted virtuoso, but with a tendency to rush. Technical exam and concert programme – passed with excellence.’⁹

Her fellow classmate, Adriana Birmak, recalled Yudina as ‘large, somewhat heavy, and seemingly older than her thirteen years. Her face itself was not particularly remarkable, but her serious attentive grey eyes seemed to read the thoughts of those she talked to, lending her an austere expression way beyond her years. She dressed simply in a sailor suit [. . .] and had difficulty in making contact with the other girls. Her spare time was spent reading – she did not join in our fun and games.’¹⁰ As Birmak noted, Yesipova required her students to sit in on each other’s lessons. ‘Anna Nikolayevna never let pass any misreading or discrepancy in the dynamic markings, thereby instilling discipline and a sense of responsibility in her students. She never shouted or banged the music, in the manner of some teachers. But should Anna Nikolayevna, pronounce quietly, “My dear, that simply won’t do”, the pupil realized that a thunderstorm was imminent and tried to slip away unnoticed.’ Yesipova valued Maria for her calm thoughtfulness and her immediate reactions. ‘As Marusya played, Yesipova would smile and nod her head approvingly. Normally she was never generous with praise.’ Birmak noted Yudina’s large excellent pianistic hands, with their wide palms. Already at the age of thirteen she could stretch a tenth and had no problems with chord or octave technique. ‘Her sound was deep and powerful; lightness of touch and transparency didn’t come so easily to her.’¹¹

During the ten months Yesipova taught Yudina, she worked on sound, style, pedalling, adding brilliance to the touchée and generally refining her playing. Like her fellow students, Maria received free tickets for concerts, and heard in person the foremost artists of the day – the pianist-composer Ferruccio Busoni, the violinists Jacques Thibaud and the young Jascha Heifetz. She also attended Yesipova’s duo performances with the renowned violinist Leopold Auer. Yudina was also an avid reader and exchanged books and visited museums with Birmak. The range of her reading went far beyond the requirements of the Conservatoire curriculum; she devoured Plato, the Romantic writers, and the great nineteenth-century Russian authors.

In August 1914, when Yesipova died unexpectedly, Glazunov transferred Yudina to the class of a young professor, Vladimir Nikolayevich Drozdov, a favourite pupil of Yesipova’s and himself a fine composer and musicologist. Yudina, now the youngest student in Drozdov’s class, observed that ‘All his female students were madly in love with him, he was young and handsome, and a wonderful pianist.’ Yudina, either too young or too engrossed in music, kept aloof. ‘At one class concert, I played Liszt’s transcription of Bach’s Organ Fantasy and Fugue in G minor very brilliantly, and Vladimir Nikolayevich quipped “Such success with Bach! That’s worth more than a pound of raisins.”’¹² Drozdov extended Yudina’s repertoire, polished her piano technique and refined her sound, insisting that a powerful forte should never obscure the softness of touch.

Around 1916, Yudina started taking lessons from the renowned Polish pianist Felix Blumenfeld, while continuing her official studies with Drozdov – probably without the latter’s knowledge. An all-round musician, Blumenfeld had studied piano, conducting and composition at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. A pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, Blumenfeld did not share his vision, or adhere to the aspirations of ‘The Mighty Handful’.^* His piano compositions were harmonically reminiscent of Scriabin and stylistically of Karol Szymanowski, to whom he was incidentally related, as he was to the pianist Heinrich Neuhaus. Blumenfeld was not only renowned for his pianistic interpretations of Chopin, Schumann and Liszt, but for his performances of contemporary music, not least his own. The general opinion was that had he focused exclusively on the piano instead of branching out into conducting, he would have been the most brilliant pianist of his generation. However, Blumenfeld’s scope was much broader. He started to direct opera at the Mariinsky Theatre, and as a convinced Wagnerian he conducted the Russian premiere of Tristan and Isolde in 1909 in a provocative production by Vsevolod Meyerhold.

In the 1910s Blumenfeld’s health started to deteriorate and by 1917 he was partially paralysed (reputedly due to syphilis). Although he no longer performed, he continued teaching at his alma mater, the Petrograd Conservatoire. In 1918 he transferred his teaching to the Kiev Conservatoire where he counted Vladimir Horowitz amongst his students. From 1922 until his death in 1931 Blumenfeld continued his distinguished pedagogical career at the Moscow Conservatoire.

Blumenfeld did much to widen Yudina’s musical horizons. Like him, she did not want to be limited by the piano, and in 1915 she enrolled at the Petrograd Conservatoire’s composition and conducting faculties. She was particularly inspired by Nikolai Cherepnin’s conducting and percussion classes, and enjoyed playing timpani and tam-tam in the student orchestra. Yudina called his lessons ‘real Symphonies’ – they covered the orchestral repertoire from Haydn to Debussy, from Schubert to Richard Strauss. Cherepnin became her musical idol, admired as much for his immaculate musical taste as for the strictness and elegance of his bearing. Yudina summed him up in Goethe’s words: ‘In der Beschränkung kennt sich erst der Meister’ (It is through restraint that one recognizes the Master).¹³ Yudina was struck by the enormous erudition behind the restraint, and yet no less by his genuine modesty: ‘I cannot remember a single occasion when Cherepnin might have shown us one of his own scores, even for study purposes. I was in those days somewhat critical of his compositions, finding them impressionistic and effete.’¹⁴

Her professors of composition, Vasili Kalafati and Maximilian Steinberg, were amongst the best teachers in St Petersburg. Kalafati taught counterpoint to many generations of composers, Stravinsky and Prokofiev amongst them. Steinberg was no less esteemed, continuing the traditions of his father-in-law, Rimsky-Korsakov. His most famous pupil was to be Dmitri Shostakovich. Prompted by her love of polyphony and Bach’s music, Yudina also took organ lessons for a time with Professors Jacques Gandshin and Nikolajs Vanadziņš. Another formative influence on her Bach interpretations was Isai Braudo, who became the Soviet Union’s most renowned organist and Yudina’s close friend.

During the summers Maria returned to Nevel’. Her cousin, Gavriil, recalled how ‘in those years Marila was caught up with going to the people. This nearly ended in tragedy. She had set off to help the peasants harvest rye. An hour or two later Marila came home with her right hand bandaged in a handkerchief, blood pouring everywhere. Mother carefully unwound the handkerchief to reveal a terrible sight: the thumb was nearly severed from the hand – it was only attached by a tendon – the cut was that deep. Marila had been wielding a scythe, with next to no skill. [. . .] By some miracle the wound healed and her pianism did not suffer.’¹⁵

It was during her mid-teens that Yudina started to develop the enormous spiritual and intellectual resources which would determine the direction of her life. A diary – a gift from her parents for her seventeenth birthday – acted as a stimulus to record her thoughts. The first entry reads: ‘30 VIII 1916. Arrived in Petrograd to start living my life for ART.’ These words were followed by a no less lofty declaration: ‘I only know one way to God: through Art [. . .] All that is divine, that is spiritual, first came to me through Art, through one of its branches – Music. This is my Vocation.’¹⁶ Indeed, the so-called ‘Nevel’ Diary’, written in Petrograd and in her home town, testified to her intellectual and spiritual quests during this formative period.

As Maria entered her eighteenth year, she found herself caught up in the whirlwind of revolution and political change. Given her family background and the aspirations of the Russian intelligentsia in these last stifling years of Tsarism, it is hardly surprising that Yudina greeted the February Revolution of 1917 and the abdication of the Tsar with enthusiasm. She had recently enrolled in Petrograd’s Lesgaft Courses,^* which offered women free teacher-training courses. Because of their democratic social principles, the courses were associated with political ferment. Now, Yudina was swept up in the revolutionary fervour that overtook Petrograd as Russia gained its first short-lived taste of democracy.

The militia had taken over the Lesgaft Course building, and the courses were closed. Maria joined the streams of people thronging the streets:

In no time I reached the quarter of town where the Conservatoire and the Lesgaft Courses were situated [. . .] Everything was in commotion, some people were being given food, others were being bandaged or handed rifles [. . .] Arms were being given out to the prisoners who had just been released from the Litovsky fortress, and I gave rifles to whomsoever I was told. I obeyed orders unquestioningly, in a totally natural way – we had after all been commanded in ‘The name of the People’, and that surely meant ‘for the general good’ [. . .] I too was given a loaded rifle and was taught how to use it. But the wretched thing went off by itself! The bullet went through the ceilings of four storeys, and I was very lucky that I didn’t wound anybody on the fifth! I wasn’t punished or dismissed, but I was teased for the rest of the day – ‘What a warrior!’ And once again I was shown the basic rules of handling a gun.¹⁷

After this adventure Yudina called by her friend Yevgeniya Otten’ (her future godmother) and her sister Vera. They recalled Maria’s bemusement, as she recounted how ‘we have been giving out weapons to murderers and thieves.’¹⁸ Yudina then hurried home to Pushkin Street where she shared an apartment with her two elder sisters, Flora and Anna. Flora was studying at the Bekhterev Institute for Psycho-Neurology, while Anna was a student of natural sciences at the Lokhvitskaya-Skalon Courses. After reassuring them that she was still alive, Maria rushed back to her revolutionary work. This now involved the militia making a census of the population. ‘We all pinned red ribbons on our coats and went to people’s houses in groups of 2 or 3, to record the “makeup” of the population. We wore armbands, boarded the trams at the front saying “svoi” (“one of us”) with great pride.’ One day amidst this commotion Yudina happened to bump into her idol, Professor Cherepnin:

He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at me. ‘We’ve been worried stiff about you – we looked for you everywhere!’ he exclaimed. ‘And what’s this?’ He touched my militia armband. I was overcome by confusion. Suddenly Weber’s overtures, Schubert and Mozart’s symphonies, swept through my mind. I thought of my timpani playing in the student orchestra. I found nothing to say, mumbling words about ‘my duty to the people’ [. . .] At that moment the spontaneous revolutionary in me gave way to ‘symphonism’. I resumed my Conservatoire studies.¹⁹

Yudina had by now been appointed secretary to the Kolomenskaya branch of the People’s Militia in Petrograd. She would appear in class with files and registers swollen from the immense amount of paperwork after the overthrow of the Tsarist regime, and would plonk them down on the table together with her orchestral and piano scores. As her cousin Gavriil recalled, ‘Cherepnin would cry out in mock horror: “Maria Veniaminovna, where do you think you are? Is this a conductor’s classroom or a militia point?”’²⁰

By the summer of 1917 Yudina had relinquished her position with the militia, and she completed the academic year at the Conservatoire, as well as her training as pre-school teacher at the Lesgaft Courses. In mid-June she returned to her parents’ home, just a few months short of her eighteenth birthday. Her decision to move back to Nevel’ was due to the uncertain political situation in Petrograd, but her mother’s illness required her presence at home as well. Maria had also strained her hands, in what transpired to be a first attack of rheumatic fever, something which plagued her throughout her life and would periodically stop her from playing the piano.

Now was the ideal time for her to put her Lesgaft training into practice. Yudina combined forces with some of the town’s young teachers to open the first summer play-school in Nevel’. They were given permission to use the grounds of the town park. As Yudina later recalled: ‘It was ideal, full of shade, with its straight lines of outlandish trees, a wide sand pit useful for our games, and several ponds.’²¹ The forty children who attended were divided into two Russian-language groups and a larger Jewish group. ‘Our acknowledged leader was a Jewish woman, a professional instructor and wonderful teacher, thoughtful, affectionate, and responsible, with a kind heart, and a great love of children. Despite being petite and fragile she knew how to keep the group under rein. We all learnt from her.’²²

A commission created by the town council oversaw the group, providing encouragement and money as necessary. Yudina’s father served on it as an active member. Maria was thrilled by the children’s accomplishments over the summer months: ‘In the autumn, when the trees in the park shimmered with gold, we handed over our work to the commission. Everybody was happy – the children proud of their success and delighted at being the centre of attention. They all received small prizes and medals, and we teachers wept with joy.’²³

Not all the work was plain sailing, as Yudina discovered:

In my Russian-language group there was a small orphaned boy called Akinfa. He was about eight years old and lived with unloving and unloved relations. He tortured and teased everybody, mocked the Jewish children, imitating their accent, their gesticulations and whining voices, and got into fights. We all tried to correct him through word and example, and as I was responsible for him, I tried particularly hard. But one day Akinfa overstepped the limits of the permissible – he beat up a boy, was rude to a staff member, and stole something. It was voted that he should be expelled. And when the time came for the sentence to be imposed, at the hour of parting, I suddenly burst into tears. And my weeping was responsible for Akinfa’s ‘second birth’ – he too burst into tears and asked to be pardoned, and returned the stolen goods. Thereafter he followed me around like a devoted dog. He announced that ‘never in my long life’ had he ever witnessed a teacher cry over a pupil.²⁴

Her cousin Gavriil recalled that after her work, ‘Marila came back so exhausted that she would instantly fall asleep over lunch, unable even to wait for a bowl of soup to be put in front of her by her elder sister.’²⁵ Sometimes Maria and her siblings would swim in the river at the bottom of the garden, and on occasion they took a whole day’s boating expedition with their parents, rowing down the Emenka into nearby Lake Nevel’ and out of it down the gently winding river Plissa, whose grassy banks were strewn with white lilies, and which emerged into Lake Plisskoye, a spot of unparalleled beauty.

Yudina was intent on expanding her horizons, and mostly spent her spare time reading, studying philosophy, and learning orchestral and operatic repertoire. As she recovered the use of her hands, she would play through the great stage works of Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov for relatives and friends. She herself loved Parsifal best, but for cousin Gavriil, who much preferred Rimsky-Korsakov to Wagner, she often played through The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh.

By sheer coincidence some of the country’s best philosophical minds, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Matvei Kagan, Valentin Voloshinov and Boris Zubakin, found themselves in this small town in the Pale of Settlement around the time of the Revolution. The leading spirit amongst this circle of thinkers around Bakhtin was the literary critic, Lev Vasilyevich Pumpyansky. Born as Leib Meerovich Pumpyan into a Jewish family in Vilnius in 1891, he befriended Mikhail Bakhtin and his brother Nikolai while attending the First Vilenskaya gymnasium. In 1912 Pumpyansky enrolled at the German-Romance faculty of St Petersburg/Petrograd University, which he attended intermittently until 1919. His studies were interrupted in 1915 by military service. By chance Pumpyansky was stationed outside Nevel’, where his linguistic skills made him useful in military counter-espionage, and as an interpreter during the interrogations of German prisoners of war. When not on military duty, he taught at Nevel’s United Soviet School of Labour, and gave private coaching in Latin and modern languages.

In her diary entry on 24 June 1917 we find Yudina’s exalted declaration ‘to have exclusively meaningful thoughts leading to Light. Fichte, Schelling. Hegel – I want, I want, I want to study philosophy!’ In the same entry, Yudina mentions Pumpyansky for the first time, identifying him as one of the friends ‘helping me find the way to Light’.²⁶ The others included the literary critic and musician, Yevgeniya Oskarovna Tilicheyeva (née Otten’), and the extraordinary Boris Zubakin, poet, historian and Grand Master of the Rosicrucian Order.

A brilliant philologist, and polymath, Pumpyansky did much to stimulate Yudina’s literary and spiritual interests. He had converted to Orthodoxy in 1911 at a time when many Jewish intellectuals relinquished their ancestors’ religion, converted to Christianity, or renounced formal religion altogether. Or else, as in the case of the poet Osip Mandelstam, they adopted a world view shaped by Hellenism. Not to be forgotten were the socially conscious revolutionaries of Jewish origin, many of them fervent Bolsheviks, who rose to power during the Revolution, not least amongst them Leon Trotsky.

Although brought up in an agnostic family, Yudina related to her Judaic roots and knew the Yiddish traditions that were widely practised in Nevel’. Later in life she recalled a proud beggar, ‘an old Jew with dark grey curls, who would walk into our house each Friday morning, bang his stick threateningly, crying out, “Achtzehn Kopkes auf’n Tisch” (eighteen kopecks on the table) – he refused to take money from a woman’s hand, either mother’s or ours. He always demanded this sacramental sum. We children were frightened of him.’²⁷ Even after her conversion to Russian Orthodoxy, Yudina remained proud of her Jewish origins.

As a repository of her thoughts, feelings and evolving beliefs, her diary provides a detailed record of Yudina’s development between June 1917 and February 1918. Here she made careful note of her reading – the Gospels, the Church fathers, the German poets and philosophers – and scatters it with quotations from the great writers, her own verses and those of Pumpyansky. During the summer of 1917 she translated a large chunk of St Augustine’s Confessions from German into Russian, before asking herself why – there already existed a good translation into Russian from the original Latin.

Behind Yudina’s serious investigation into Christianity, one is constantly aware of Pumpyansky’s guiding influence. As she confessed in her diary, the affinity between mentor and student gradually developed into a mutually declared love. Yet her doubts as to the true nature of her feelings were still unresolved when the diary breaks off in February 1918. This first experience of love aroused tempestuous and bewildering sensations, undermined by a tortured inner debate on spiritual versus passionate love. Never for a moment did she doubt that their friendly union was divinely consecrated. On 1 August 1917 she writes: ‘Dear friend, today you shared your most precious thoughts with me [. . .] I was right in saying that His Light shines upon us, this is a God-given friendship.’²⁸ In the same entry we learn that Pumpyansky was leaving Nevel’ for a short trip to Petrograd: ‘Dear friend, your train is speeding its way to that beloved but cold city, and as you look up at the starry orbs, pure and serene thoughts permeate your spirit. Some of your thoughts are for me – and from me, for my yearning, turbulent spirit is surely dear to you!’ Translating these sentiments into musical terms, Yudina declared that ‘The lofty spirit of Beethoven soars above me – you too will be able to hear it.’²⁹

Perhaps inspired by Pumpyansky’s military duties, Yudina seriously considered leaving home to work as an auxiliary nurse. However, she abandoned this romantic vision of herself tending wounded soldiers at the front when she realized what suffering it would cause her parents. Interestingly enough, on the outbreak of the Second World War, Yudina’s instincts were exactly the same, although in 1941 she actually completed a first-aid course to acquire basic nursing skills.

As Yudina’s love for Pumpyansky grew, she felt she was no longer in control of the situation. ‘What have you done to me?’ she confided to her diary. ‘Where is my pride, my solitude? I had such faith in him, and I am dying without him. I never thought that my spirit was so filled by him, to see both the light and strife in this person.’ A fortnight later, love was replaced by the need for complete independence; perhaps Yudina realized that justifying love through its God-given aspect was self-deluding. ‘Yesterday it came to pass. A new stage in my spiritual development. I have turned away from him to whom I owe so infinitely much, who has shown me the way. A terrible fateful dilemma, but I am convinced I have made the right decision.’³⁰

Yet her doubts did not disappear: ‘I don’t know what he sees in me. When he is here, everything is easy and wonderful [. . .] And when he is not here then I am simply consumed by the flames of love. What is to become of me?’ Such uncertainties could lead to petty disagreements. ‘Why did I say those evil words to him! Forgive me! Understand I am searching for the light that illuminates the darkness.’ Within a week, peace was restored: ‘It was so extraordinary, wonderful, all barriers were overcome, all misunderstanding and hostility, once again his profound words spoke of spiritual closeness [. . .] And the golden autumn with the stealthy rustling of the forests, and at our feet the flow of splashing water, nature itself blessed our Union.’³¹

In mid-September Maria decided to return to Petrograd, to sound out the situation at the Conservatoire. The inflammation of her hands still hampered her piano playing, and with the uncertain political situation everything was up in the air. In the meantime Pumpyansky was being sent to the Eastern Front. The idea of parting produced a flurry of despair in Maria, not untouched by melodrama. ‘Suddenly everything seems dreadful and terrifying [. . .] Shells will be flying over his head – over him, and not over me, he will be facing fire and blood. I hadn’t understood this straight away, I hadn’t taken in that he might not come back – Oh Lord, please preserve him in storm and battle. He must not die now [. . .] It would be totally my fault.’ Accordingly she put off her own departure until his longed-for return. When Pumpyansky came back unharmed, Yudina wondered how he could be so cheerful, ‘as if he had never experienced the crossfire of battle and death. It’s very strange. This attachment to life and its good things does not accord with his fundamental depth of spirit. In reality he knows how to live life simultaneously at different levels; at the most basic level he forgets the existence of the other, much deeper level.’³²

Her arrival in Petrograd towards the end of September did little to appease her feelings. The city provoked a feeling of unease: ‘How it seethes with people, these soulless crowds, where each person is alienated one from the other [. . .] What a cold unpleasant town.’ In compensation there was the joy of attending Church: ‘Yesterday I went to divine service for the first time. It seems that I will definitely embrace Christianity!’³³

The decision to convert to Russian Orthodoxy was made gradually, and it was influenced by two friends in particular, Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva and Pumpyansky, who would become her godparents. Maria knew her conversion would go against her father’s wishes, for Veniamin Yudin was an outspoken atheist, although guided by a strong moral conscience. In contrast, at the age of eighteen Maria was an idealist, striving for a synthesis of Hellenistic culture, Russian symbolism and German-based philosophy, and still unsure as to whether to join the Church.

In Petrograd, Yudina found solace in devotional reading, and specifically in Solovyov’s The Spiritual Foundations of Life: ‘The chapter on prayer is a sacred book!’ She battled with St Augustine, ‘so difficult to read, mostly because of the language. But I want to and I can do it. I will persist and achieve illumination of the spirit! Achieve it? Oh, what pride on my part to think I can do so!’³⁴ Back in Nevel’ by mid-October, Yudina started studying aesthetics, the Greeks, Homer and Hesiod. She learned to distinguish Xenophon’s historic Socrates from the Platonic. Almost simultaneously she discovered the extraordinary figure of Father Pavel Florensky.^* A linguist, philosopher, religious thinker, art historian, physicist and mathematician, he had turned his back on a brilliant academic career to study theology and enter the priesthood. Yudina became acquainted with Florensky through reading his seminal work The Pillar and Ground of Truth, published in 1914. A treatise and speculative investigation into the theme of Christian love, it is written in the form of twelve letters to a brother – a symbolic friend in Christ. Yudina soon laid the book aside. For she had neither the time nor energy to comprehend its complexities. But she took note of Florensky’s fundamental belief that only in Orthodoxy can True Life be found. If other religions required testified proof of the nature of Divine Truth, then in Orthodoxy the manifestation of Truth is self-evident and self-perpetuating, a being in existence, and as such divine in character. Florensky summed it up best: ‘Truth is discursive intuition.’

Discussion with Pumpyansky on such themes provided stimulation, even as their relationship continued to be undermined by uncertainty. Yudina was tormented by conflict, her inability to confess her love, her longing to fulfil her passion, and her desperate feeling of being unworthy. Here she was already setting a pattern for the future, when she would write passionate letters to the current – and usually unattainable – object of her love, letters which often were never sent. Things were no longer as simple as they had seemed to start with: ‘The more I love him, the more I understand how large the distance is between us.’³⁵

In early December a mutual confession of love took place. ‘Who said it first?’ Yudina asked. ‘We both did [. . .] All night I couldn’t sleep and wept quietly. Oh, Lord, I am lost in such unknown, enormous happiness.’³⁶ But this happiness was in conflict with the desire for chastity – although like St Augustine she didn’t quite want it now. ‘Well, what of it. I will be stronger, but not now, when he is here, and I am dying from love [. . .] I’ll immerse myself in my Art and perhaps “at my sad sunset” faith and prayer will shine with a smile of farewell.’ Maria found solace in paraphrasing Pushkin; reading poetry calmed her, whereas music only made her ‘burn in an ecstasy of devotion’ and diminished her creativity.

In early January 1918, Yudina travelled with Pumpyansky to ‘Piter’ (Petrograd), where they decided not to see each other: ‘I need solitude, repose and peace. Only then can I be creative,’ she mused. She was now focused on conducting and her studies with her ‘idol’, Nikolai Cherepnin. ‘I have one aim in front of me. Conducting! This will cure me, and help me find my way back to reality. In the meantime I go around with a deep, festering wound. I must live through it and overcome.’ She confessed to her diary that ‘Today (24 January) my teacher [Cherepnin] was dissatisfied – that is hardly surprising. How can one work in this condition. No, enough of weeping and groaning!’³⁷ Cherepnin’s concerts devoted to Bach provided a welcome distraction: ‘Today’s was the best, a real celebration, which is what counts most in Art! Nikolai Nikolayevich was on top form in his volitional force and drive, although his gestures lack beauty.’³⁸

Creativity – or lack of it – was a frequently voiced theme in Yudina’s diary. She had already adopted Berdyaev’s idea of the artist being a co-creator with God, and shared his belief in the religious nature of creative genius, ‘for it involves resistance to the world by man’s whole spirit; it implies a universal assumption of another world and a universal impulse towards it’.³⁹ Berdyaev’s words, ‘the creative way of genius demands sacrifice – no less than the sacrifice demanded by sainthood’,⁴⁰ resonated with Yudina. If she had the potential for this form of ‘genius’, she would willingly embrace any sacrifices it might entail.

Yudina’s diary came to an abrupt halt in early February 1918. Learning of the rapid deterioration in her mother’s health, she rushed home. Raisa Yakovlevna Yudina was still relatively young when she died from apparent heart failure on 24 March. According to Maria’s childhood friend, Raisa Shapiro, Raisa Yudina had recently put on so much weight and grown so stout that she needed two chairs to sit down on. Many people – Shapiro amongst them – felt bereft after her death. Raisa Yudina was exceptionally good-natured, and loved not only her own children but all children. ‘Soon after, Marusya gave a concert at the local club of the Noblemen’s Assembly in Nevel’, where she dressed all in black, wearing her mother’s dress. I was overwhelmed by her playing.’⁴¹

Maria had already adopted an almost monastic simplicity of attire, which she never abandoned. It was all the more noticeable at a time when young women were beginning to wear short skirts and crop their hair. As Elga Linetskaya, another childhood friend, recalled, ‘(Maria) wore her hems down to the ground. She herself had extraordinarily upright posture, and looked straight ahead of her, never glancing to the side.’⁴²

Yudina decided to stay on in Nevel’ to help the family. She was particularly concerned about her younger brother Boris, a talented violinist with an unstable character, whose upbringing was being neglected in a house dominated by young women. She resolved to undertake responsibility for him, not just now but for the rest of his life. It was a thankless task, for Boris’s mental health was shaky, with intermittent periods of manic behaviour, making it difficult for him to stick to any one line of study or work.

In the early spring Yudina found distraction from her grief in the arrival of the young philosopher and theoretician of European culture and semantics, the twenty-three-year-old Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. A man of magnetism and natural authority, Bakhtin would dedicate his life to literary theory, and become best known for his studies of Dostoevsky and Rabelais. He had studied history and philosophy at the Novorossiisky University in Odessa from 1913, before enrolling at Petrograd University early in 1918. When in the wake of revolution educational institutions came to a near standstill, Bakhtin’s close friend Pumpyansky happened to come to Petrograd. As Bakhtin recalled, ‘there was nothing to eat in Petrograd, so Pumpyansky convinced me to join him in Nevel’ – There I could earn money, and in addition there was plenty of food.’⁴³

At the time of his arrival in Nevel’, Bakhtin had yet to publish any of his writings. The two years he spent there were fundamental as the time when he worked out his philosophical precepts orally, through lectures and in discussion, using a small circle of like-minded people as a sounding board to formulate his ideas. Initially, his interests focused on ethics and aesthetics, but from the mid-1920s and particularly after his encounter with the Russian Formalists, he developed his literary theories of dialogism and polyphonism, formulating diverse models of language within specific literary contexts.

While in Nevel’, Bakhtin, like Pumpyansky and the town’s neo-Kantian philosopher Matvei Kagan, taught at the ‘united School of Labour’, a brick building still extant on Ulyanov Street. Soon after his arrival in the spring of 1918, Bakhtin gave an introductory course of lectures for the local intelligentsia, organized by philosophical theme, rather than chronologically. ‘I paid most attention in my lectures to Kant and Kantian philosophy, which were to my mind of central importance. And neo-Kantian philosophy, and foremost of course Hermann Cohen, Rickert, Natorp and Cassirer.’⁴⁴ Amongst his most ardent listeners was Maria Yudina. Many years later Bakhtin recalled, ‘I noticed her straight away, a young girl, quite large, and dressed completely in black. She had the aspect of a nun [. . .] I was struck by the figure she made – there was this almost absurd contrast between her young, ruddy-cheeked face (she was robustly built), and her all-black clothing. I then got to know her better, and soon, you might say, became accepted as one of the family in her home.’⁴⁵ As Bakhtin observed, ‘Maria Veniaminovna was under [Pumpyansky’s] philosophical and literary influence [. . .] He was wonderfully erudite as far as literature was concerned, particularly in regard to foreign (non-Russian) literature. He knew many languages and was an extremely quick reader. He was capable of reading a large monographic work in one evening and could then sum it up very fully and accurately. In this sense he had quite exceptional ability.’⁴⁶

It would appear that by mid-1918, Yudina and Pumpyansky had reversed roles – she was now the rejecting and no longer the rejected party. As Bakhtin recalled, Pumpyansky had proposed marriage to Yudina sometime in the early summer of 1918, but she refused him. Yudina’s father and sisters were dead set against such a marriage, but assumed that they were living as a betrothed couple. They felt that Pumpyansky’s unworldliness made him totally unsuited to the role of husband. Bakhtin concurred; indeed, he was ‘far less of this world’ than Yudina herself. Pumpyansky suffered Yudina’s rejection very deeply during the summer of 1918, and furthermore felt so hostile to Maria’s father that he wanted to physically assault him, to give him the proverbial slap in the face. Bakhtin recalled, ‘I attempted to quieten him down. Afterwards they restored their friendship and all ended well.’⁴⁷ Other sources had it that Veniamin Yudin threw Pumpyansky down the stairs when Pumpyansky asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Certainly, Veniamin Yudin was intolerant of all religious people, but a Jew converted to Orthodoxy was a double affront.

The Bakhtin Circle^* came into being gradually over the summer of 1918. Later it was officially established as The Nevel’ Academic Association on 30 July 1919. Despite the small size of the town, from the early 1900s Nevel’ had enjoyed a rich intellectual and musical life, even having its own orchestra. As Bakhtin noted, its inhabitants were equipped to enter into discussion with the incoming philosophers.

Fundamental to the creation of the Circle was the local philosopher Matvei Kagan, who had recently returned from Leipzig, Berlin and Marburg, where he had been studying with the leading Neo-Kantian philosopher, Hermann Cohen. A striking and eccentric addition to the group was Boris Zubakin, who like Pumpyansky was in military service, currently stationed at Nevel’. A man of letters, talented poet, historian and archaeologist, the musically gifted Zubakin was a leading member of the secret Rosicrucian Order, and became Grand Master of the Petrograd Lodge shortly before 1917. Bakhtin classed him as a ‘mason’ in his reminiscences, and there are indeed signs that the whole Bakhtin Circle was given over to Masonic practice during its stay in Nevel’.

Zubakin in turn persuaded his ‘star’ friend, and Rosicrucian brother, Valentin Voloshinov, to move from Petrograd to Nevel’ to escape the hard conditions of the capital. A talented poet, Voloshinov was a pianist manqué, forced to give up playing because tuberculosis had deformed his hands. He became particularly close to Bakhtin after they both moved to Vitebsk in 1920, where they shared an apartment. While Kagan is credited with initiating the Circle on his return from Germany, Bakhtin was regarded as its central figure, and became Chairman of the Nevel’ Academic Association. His exceptional clarity as a thinker certainly earned him the mantle of its intellectual leader, while Pumpyansky remained the guiding spirit of the group. When the latter moved to Vitebsk in 1919, he encouraged the other members to follow. For a while the activities of the Association were shared between Nevel’ and Vitebsk, but by 1920 all participants had left Nevel’, and Vitebsk became the centre of ‘the Bakhtin Circle’. The Circle’s inner sanctum consisted of twelve active participants who met almost daily during 1918–19. Yudina was amongst them, and she joined in the night-long discussions, where members were sustained by strong tea until the early hours of morning. When their words were exhausted, Yudina would turn to the piano and perform for the philosophers. At this time she had given herself over to the study of Bach and polyphony, learning both volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which she presented in its entirety during her graduation exam at the Petrograd Conservatoire.

One wonders whether Bakhtin and Yudina discussed the application of musical polyphony and its rules to other disciplines. Bakhtin’s pivotal polyphonic theory was developed in his work on Dostoevsky, which he started writing in Vitebsk and eventually published in 1929. Bakhtin’s understanding of polyphony was based on Dostoevsky’s unique ability to present a gallery of personages, each independent, and self-reliant in thought, speech and actions, free to enact their roles and interact with others, ultimately constructing a unified, spiritual truth. The author’s objective descriptions, opinions or judgement could be dispensed with. In a diary entry from 1899, Lev Tolstoy, not known for being musically progressive, noted his thoughts on polyphony: ‘A voice ought to say something, but in this case, there are many voices and each one says nothing.’ Such a definition of polyphony would have seemed utterly absurd to Yudina and Bakhtin. It was a period when borrowings from musical terminology were in current usage in the visual arts; the titles of Kandinsky’s paintings referred to ‘Symphonies’ and ‘improvisations’, and later Filonov ‘painted’ Shostakovich’s First Symphony. Conversely the writer Andrei Bely created four poetic prose works entitled ‘Symphonies’, written between 1902 and 1908.

Originally the declared aim of the first Bakhtin Circle was to explore Neo-Kantianism, and ethical and moral problems reflecting the preoccupations of the Marburg School. Soon their themes extended to religion and problems of literary scholarship. The Circle took its social duties seriously, teaching those of ‘proletarian’ origin at the Nevel’ School of Labour, and travelling to nearby villages to hold workshops. Yudina for her part was actively involved in setting up the town’s first School of Music early in 1919, an achievement that she justly felt proud of.⁴⁸

Polemic debate was the order of the day, and at public meetings at the Karl Marx People’s Club in Nevel’, members of the Circle took on their principal opponents, the Marxists. Participants were differentiated between ‘Comrades’ and ‘Citizens’.⁴⁹ These disputes were advertised and reported in the local newspaper Molot (Hammer), whose chief editor Jan Gutman was a friend of the Circle, even if he rarely shared their points of view. On 3 December 1918 Molot reported the recent discussion where ‘Citizen’ Bakhtin spoke on the subject of ‘God and Socialism’, and like ‘Citizen’ Pumpyansky, came out in favour of religion, criticizing the immorality of socialism’s attitude towards the dead. His Bolshevik opponent, Comrade Jan Gutman, reputedly responded, ‘Since the dead will not come back to life, there is no need to care for them.’⁵⁰

Other meetings took place at the People’s Club on such themes as ‘Lev Tolstoy and his Work’ and ‘Culture and Revolution’. These debates were well attended, with up to 600 people in the audience, who actively participated in discussion and got involved in ferocious arguments. When Bakhtin gave a lecture on ‘The Meaning of Life’, discussion went on well past midnight, and had to be continued the next day. The artist Gurvich, a convinced Bolshevik, enjoyed polemic discussions with members of the Circle, although apparently he usually lost the argument. It is edifying to think that while the young Soviet Union was engaged in civil war, overcoming hardships, and fighting for survival, the citizens of Nevel’ were engaged in philosophical discussion.

While Bakhtin was the most revered thinker of the group, Pumpyansky and Kagan were no less in demand as speakers and lecturers. Kagan’s lectures on philosophy at Nevel’s Jewish Courses were particularly well attended, while Zubakin entertained his audiences with his dramatic talents and his ability to improvise poems on the spot. He must have made a strange impression on the Nevel’ population with his occult philosophical ideas, even if his concepts of united brotherly love and freedom were not so far away from the ideals of communism. Not that the Bolsheviks saw it like this – they dubbed him ‘an unprincipled poet’, while others criticized ‘his stagey tricks’.⁵¹ On the Day of the Working Red Army Man (12 October 1919) it was reported that ‘Comrade Zubakin recited the Marseillaise with great élan to the accompaniment of the local orchestra.’⁵²

It was an enormous tribute to Yudina’s intellect that she was included in Bakhtin’s Circle. We have no evidence of her actual participation in public debates, but in the more intimate meetings of the group she evidently participated in the discussions. Bakhtin himself had a great respect for Yudina’s mind, remarking that ‘it transpired she had a rather rare ability for philosophical thought. As you know [. . .] there are many who can philosophize in this world, but few who can become philosophers – Yudina was amongst that number. She could have become a philosopher, something which is even rarer in women.’⁵³ Bakhtin noted that her father was equally interested in philosophy. ‘Dr Yudin was an intelligent man with wide interests, despite his somewhat cynical world outlook, typical of the old Medical intelligentsia, a remnant of the 1860s and nihilism.’⁵⁴

On the other hand, Maria’s fascination with German Romanticism was largely due to Pumpyansky’s influence. She could read the literature in the original language; indeed, most families of the local Jewish intelligentsia knew and used German. Maria’s early love for the Jena Romantics remained a lifelong passion, and she counted amongst her favourite authors Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Schlegel, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Brentano and Fichte. In philosophic terms, Bakhtin dubbed Yudina ‘a follower of Schelling, and up to a point of Hegel. She was simply not interested in the theoretical, cognitive side of philosophy, neither was she interested in dialectics.’⁵⁵

In the summer and autumn months Yudina, Bakhtin and Pumpyansky took long walks together. As Bakhtin recalled, ‘Nevel’ and its surroundings are exceptionally beautiful, and the town itself is wonderful. It’s situated beside a whole area of lakes, which are absolutely marvellous – we had long discussions on these walks. I remember that I exposed the initial ideas of my moral philosophy, sitting on the banks of a lake some ten kilometres from Nevel’. We called it the “Lake of Moral Reality” – before that it bore no name.’⁵⁶

After moving back to Petrograd in 1919, Yudina would return to Nevel’ during the holidays. She also visited Vitebsk, where the Circle’s participants had transferred residence. The city was blossoming into a cultural centre of importance, dominated by the activities of the painter Marc Chagall, a native of the town. Chagall had initially seen the Revolution as an opportunity to achieve equality and to abolish the hated Pale of Settlement with all its injustices. In 1918 Anatoli Lunacharsky, newly designated head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, appointed him Commissar for Arts in Vitebsk. In founding a local People’s Arts School, Chagall not only fulfilled his educational aims, but created innovative projects, which attracted some of Russia’s best painters, including the relatively conservative Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, the avant-garde artist El Lissitzky, the suprematist Kazimir Malevich and his student, Yudina’s younger cousin Lev Yudin. While Chagall was the catalyst for the School’s activity, Malevich was responsible for the creation in 1920 of Unovis, the highly influential modern art department, where he formulated his theories of abstractionism as ‘Non-objectivity’. In Malevich’s visionary understanding, abstract painting should be illuminated by mystic spiritual qualities. Yudina knew Malevich and years later recalled seeing his iconic painting of 1915, The Black Square, while in Vitebsk.

A similar renaissance occurred in the theatrical and musical life of Vitebsk. In 1918 Lunacharsky sanctioned the opening of a People’s Conservatoire in Vitebsk, where Pumpyansky and Bakhtin were invited to lecture on aesthetics. Here Pumpyansky gained an exceptionally brilliant pupil in the seventeen-year-old Ivan Sollertinsky, an expert in Romance languages, and in theatre and art history, who eventually chose musicology as his path in life, ending his career as artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The brilliant young polymath got to know Yudina, when he came to Nevel’ to hear Bakhtin and Pumpyansky speak, even before they moved to Vitebsk. Sollertinsky enrolled at Petrograd University in the autumn of 1921, and six years later became Dmitri Shostakovich’s inseparable friend, confidant and equal in sardonic wit. He had a lasting influence on the composer through introducing him to Mahler.

At the same time Vitebsk acquired a symphony orchestra, put together by the conductor Nikolai Malko on his arrival from Petrograd in the spring of 1918. Over the next two and a half seasons he conducted some 250 concerts in and around Vitebsk before the orchestra was dissolved. In 1922 Malko returned to Petrograd to teach at the Conservatoire, where Yudina took the odd conducting lesson from him. As chief conductor of the Petrograd/Leningrad Philharmonic from 1924, he became influential in his support of new music, and was the first to perform Shostakovich’s early symphonic works.

Two years after Yudina returned to Petrograd, Pumpyansky relocated there from Vitebsk, followed in 1924 by Bakhtin, with his new wife Yelena (Alyona). As the Circle resumed its activity, Yudina was not merely a participant, but a host to many of its meetings. Petrograd was the town where she embraced Christianity, became active in Church matters, attended university courses, completed her Conservatoire studies and started her professional career. Nevel’ remained for her the town of ‘childhood paradise’, where her musical talents were fostered and her intellectual formation was initiated.

* Today Vitebsk lies in Belarus, while Nevel’ belongs to the Pskov region of the Russian Federation.

* Leschetizky (1830–1915) counted amongst his students Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Artur Schnabel, Mieczysław Horszowski and Ignaz Friedman.

* The name given by Vladimir Stasov in 1867 to a group of national composers. Five composers adhered to the group: Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin.

* Named after Pyotr Lesgaft (1837–1908), founder of modern physical education. In 1896 Lesgaft founded free courses for women to train as teachers of physical education.

* See Avril Pyman’s biography of Florensky for more detailed information.

* For more detailed information on the Bakhtin Circle, see Clark and Holquist’s exemplary biography of Mikhail Bakhtin.

* A zemski doctor, appointed by local administrations or zemstvos, typically came from the intelligentsia and fostered a high moral work ethos.