Playing with Fire

5

1933–1936

MOSCOW

Then only the dead smiled

Glad to be at rest.

And over its prisons, Leningrad,

Like a useless pendant swayed bereft.

Anna Akhmatova¹

Yudina’s dramatic arrival in Moscow resulted in a prolonged stay at Baumanskaya Hospital. The typhoid fever came on top of a series of debilitating health problems, which had weakened her heart. The doctors barely managed to save her life. Six weeks after admission, Yudina confessed to Lyosha Skrzhinskaya: ‘I crawl along the corridors, clinging to chairs, tables and the walls. My legs give way, and when I lie down again my heart is thumping. My wounded finger is getting better, but that gives new cause for chatter, because I am now the object of the senior surgeon’s attentions: he [. . .] visits me twice a day. The whole hospital smiles ironically when my finger is bandaged by him – a task which could be performed by any nurse, if not the patient herself.’² She told Skrzhinskaya she hoped to be discharged in a week’s time and sent to a sanatorium to convalesce.

Certainly Yudina’s resistance to physical pain was remarkable. As Mikhail Bakhtin later recalled, ‘she would have gone to the stake and not have felt the fire burning around her. Indeed she dreamed – at least metaphorically – of such a destiny, to be burnt alive like the Old Believer and martyr Avvakum.’³ Just now, however, Yudina needed consolation and support rather than martyrdom. Her friends’ hospital visits were tiring; even Skrzhinskaya, who arrived in Moscow to see her radiologist sister Irina, seemed unaware of just how vulnerable Yudina was.

Before being discharged Yudina wrote to Boba Zalesky pleading for him to come from Leningrad. Zalesky was not just a source of moral support, but of generous financial loans – he earned good money as a petro-geologist. Yudina did not disguise her fragile state: ‘Like a drowning man clutching at straws, I need to cling to all those who are well disposed to me, because my strength has completely evaporated. I am aware of my bad habit of being demanding, of my need to be spoilt [. . .] Could you not come to Moscow for a few days, perhaps a field expedition will bring you this way? [. . .] There is nobody I can turn to here, except Mikhail Gnesin, who himself is depressed – his wife is ill, and his son brings him little joy. The other person dear to me is far away and won’t be back for a long time.’⁴ This was an oblique reference to Florensky, who was beginning a ten-year sentence in Siberia.

From 10 October 1933, Yudina spent a fortnight convalescing at the sanatorium of Uzkoye, which occupied the old manor house and estate of the Princes Trubetskoy south-west of Moscow. Yudina will have been aware that the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, whom she so greatly admired, had died there in 1900. Writing to Skrzhinskaya, Yudina described Uzkoye’s charms: ‘It’s very beautiful here, the trees still retain their golden foliage. It’s quiet and one somehow doesn’t notice the other inmates, whose faces lack “brilliance”. [. . .] It delays the return to the burdens of life – being able to forget them does me good.’⁵

Yudina was able to start practising and to consider how to relaunch her professional career. Moscow provided better opportunities than Leningrad, although her artistic connections were deeply rooted in Leningrad. While still in hospital Yudina wrote to Alexander Ossovsky, the new director of the Leningrad Philharmonia, proposing four programmes for the forthcoming season: the second piano concertos of Prokofiev and Brahms, recitals with both volumes of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and new repertoire. She asked Ossovsky whether the Philharmonia would advance her 600 roubles, and informed him she would be ready to start giving concerts from late October.⁶

Yudina also contacted Alexander Gauk, who was currently chief conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic (1930–4) and worked regularly with the Radio Orchestra^* in Moscow. He was shortly to be appointed director of the newly founded USSR State Orchestra in Moscow. Yudina had played Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 with him in Leningrad in February 1931, and they had met recently in Tiflis. She now relied on his considerable influence to find work for her at the Moscow Radio. The Radio Orchestra was the first newly created orchestra in the USSR, whose primary aim was to make studio recordings. Alexander Orlov was appointed chief conductor, but the conductors Georges Sébastian and Gauk also directed it frequently. Yudina was assumed as a ‘soloist’ of the Radio, a position that facilitated her official transfer to Moscow.

By the end of October, Yudina felt strong enough to return to concert life. Her head had been completely shaved because of typhoid fever, so she now wore a wig. Before her first concert, scheduled on 25 October in Kiev with Jascha Horenstein, Yudina contacted Boleslav Yavorsky:

Our lively musical meetings started very dramatically in the autumn of 1933, when I was first to perform Prokofiev’s 2nd concerto [. . .] I asked Boleslav Leopoldovich to listen to me, according to the principle ‘Live and Learn’ – He was glad to do so – after all Maria Veniaminovna had come on her own initiative, humbly ‘bowing’ before him. I played as best I could – I was well prepared. But, oh God, how he scolded me, telling me with such irony – not like this, not like that! He himself didn’t illustrate any of this marvellous work, but words streamed forth, corroborating his eloquence. I said farewell to the Maitre in the dark entrance hall, probably in tears. Nevertheless [. . .] my rational side inexplicably protected me from giving in to depression. Boleslav Leopoldovich suggested I come back in a few days. [. . .] I imagine that I played almost as I had the previous visit. But this time I was showered with compliments and given full approval. ‘How is this?’ I asked. ‘I was just testing you,’ he replied with a sly smile. ‘It proves you are a convinced artist.’ I was delighted!⁷

Dating from 1913, Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto was substantially reworked in 1923, when the composer was reconstructing the score after the original manuscript had been destroyed. As Yudina declared, ‘the concerto’s enormous complexities and monumental concept makes it one of the most difficult works even for the best-equipped pianist’. She was the first pianist to perform the work in Soviet Russia after Prokofiev himself. Even in the West the only other pianist to play it was the Latvian Sergei Tager, who was to lose his life in the Riga Ghetto in 1941.

We have no record of how Yudina got on with Horenstein – she was amused at the use of the diminutive ‘Jascha’ (instead of the full name Jakov), which seemed more appropriate to a wunderkind violinist than a respected conductor and assistant to Wilhelm Furtwängler. As Nazi Germany was closing its doors to Jews, Horenstein was forced to relinquish his position as music director of the Düsseldorf Opera; in compensation, he took advantage of opportunities on offer in the Soviet Union until 1937.

Just a few days after her Kiev concert, on 30 October, Yudina made her first appearance with the All-Union Radio Orchestra playing Mozart’s concerto K.488 under Georges Sébastian at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. Her main concern beforehand had been to find a suitable cadenza, as she found Mozart’s ‘very plain’. She had implored Skrzhinskaya to track down in Leningrad’s ‘Publichka’ (National Library) a ‘possible worthy cadenza, by Busoni, D’Albert, Von Bülow, or Schnabel’.⁸ We do not know which one she chose in the end. She enjoyed working with Sébastian, a French conductor of Hungarian origin, who had started his international career as Bruno Walter’s assistant. Now director of the Städtische Oper in Berlin, Sébastian’s collaboration with the Radio Orchestra between 1931 and 1937 included highly acclaimed performances of Mozart’s operas and Beethoven’s Fidelio.

Few written descriptions of Yudina’s playing have survived. All the more precious, then, is this published review by the musicologist Grigori Kogan of her Mozart performance with Sébastian:

The force and significance of expression to be found in Yudina’s pianism has hardly any equals on the contemporary concert platform. It is difficult to think of another performer whose art leaves such a powerful, lasting impression on the listener as Yudina does in the second movement of Mozart’s A major concerto. In Yudina’s fingers the mythical calm of Mozart’s music acquires the outlines of tragic sculpture. Particular features of her performance are comparable to trends in the contemporary scenic arts: her ‘multi-faceted’ thought processes, and her extreme tempi (the slow tempi are slower – the fast – faster!), which extend far beyond an arbitrary romantic approach. Yudina’s playing achieves an almost antique perfection in its expressive flexibility.⁹

Yudina wrote to Skrzhinskaya saying that the Mozart concerto had gone ‘ideally’. She proceeded to list her performances over the last month:

On 6 November I played some trifles on the Radio; on the 14th Shaporin’s sonata and some Myaskovsky pieces at the Moscow TseKUBU;^* on the 21st I performed Ravel at the Radio (the Sonatina, the Pavane, and Ziloti’s arrangement of Kaddish – this last very well). On the 22nd [at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire] I played Borodin’s quintet and some of his piano pieces (ideally!). Yesterday, 1 December, my Klavierabend at the Grand Hall took place – it was sold out. Some things went marvellously, others less so, a mixed bag! All of this while living as a vagrant in completely unsettled circumstances. But gradually I am beginning to sort out my life, and now see money coming in and my debts starting to vanish. Soon I will get round to paying back both you and Boba [Zalesky].’¹⁰

Yudina set great store by this ‘Klavierabend’ as a manifestation not merely of her musicianship, but of her status as a virtuoso. The programme vaunted three pieces that were new to her – Mozart’s A major sonata K.331, Brahms’ F minor Sonata no. 3, and that warhorse of Romantic virtuosity, Balakirev’s Islamey, an Oriental Fantasy. While studio or concert recordings of most of her repertoire exist, this is not true of Islamey. It appears that she never played it again. In general Yudina chose her music carefully, putting ‘the highest’ masterpieces of the classics as centrepieces in her programmes, while usually including contemporary composers.

‘At last – in Leningrad!’ Yudina now exclaimed to Skrzhinskaya; her next concerts would take her back there in December. She needed to find Brahms’ cadenza to Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto,^** which she had programmed at the end of the month. ‘It’s almost better than the concerto itself! Last time I played the cadenza, it created a furore,’ she told Skrzhinskaya. Yudina was tired but optimistic, declaring, ‘Life has great meaning – it is brilliant, sad and full of responsibilities! [. . .] The strong frosts here are torturing me. The legend about my getting married is complete nonsense of course. Many people appear backstage and then accompany me home, this no doubt is where the rumours originate.’¹¹ There were certainly several contenders for the rumoured ‘fiancé’, from the philosopher Alexei Losev to the architect Vyacheslav Vladimirov, both of whom would become important in her life.

Yudina’s long-awaited return to Leningrad ended up being the briefest of visits. After performing in an exclusive concert of Gnesin’s work at the Philharmonia’s Small Hall on 4 December, she took the night train back to Moscow. Here she was to perform Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (presumably with the Brahms cadenza) at the Grand Hall of the Conservatoire on 11 and 13 December, with a repeat performance at the Leningrad Philharmonia on 20 December. The concerts were to be directed by the German conductor, Hermann Scherchen, whom Yudina admired for his dedication to contemporary music and for his anti-Nazi stance – only recently he had escaped to Switzerland from Germany.

For the next weeks Yudina shuttled back and forth between Leningrad and Moscow. On New Year’s Day 1934 she participated in a concert in Moscow dedicated to Soviet composers, travelling the next day to Leningrad, for her big ‘comeback’ recital on 3 January at the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonia, originally planned for early December, immediately following her triumphant Moscow concert. She repeated the programme, but as was her wont, she added a new element – performances of two novelties, Karol Szymanowski’s ‘Tantris the Fool’ from Masques Op. 34 no. 2 and ‘Nausikaa’ from Mètopes Op. 29 no. 3. Now at last Yudina had time for her old Leningrad friends. Lyubov Shaporina organized a reunion with Alexei Tolstoy, the Shaporin and the Starchakov families, recorded thus in her diary: ‘On 4 January Yudina visited us – I got our Detskoye Selo residents to come and hear her play. Starchakov’s mot – to me today: “I like Yudina much more now than the times I met her earlier. She seems simple and kind, whereas before she seemed very affected – a crazy salon type, just like Pasternak.”’ Shaporina was indignant: ‘PASTERNAK – a crazy salon type?’¹² She described Yudina as ‘very young in spirit, younger than her 33 years, pure, naïve and inexperienced. But her playing has changed. She evidently has made colossal progress in her technique, and appears elated by her unlimited technical resources. I asked her to play Schubert, but she didn’t want to. Whereas earlier her preference lay with the German Romantics.’¹³

Back in Moscow by mid-January 1934, Yudina performed a curiosity for Russian audiences – John Ireland’s piano concerto of 1930 with the Radio Orchestra under the baton of Edward Clark. Clark had probably chosen the concerto as a condition following his invitation to conduct in Moscow – it had only recently created a furore at its Albert Hall premiere in London. The proposal came from VOKS,^* which was responsible for contacts with foreign musicians. Known for her remarkable speed in learning new music, Yudina was the ideal pianist for the job. Clark was not only a champion of his countrymen’s music, but as Schoenberg’s only English composition student he actively promoted the New Viennese School to British audiences and acted as president of the ISCM^** during the 1930s and 1940s.

Yudina described the Ireland concerto as ‘charming, jolly, fresh, elegant, lyrical, energetic and faultless as a composition’.¹⁴ Later in life she toned down her praise, calling the work ‘pleasant, if old-fashioned’.¹⁵ Now she wrote to Ossovsky suggesting a performance of the Ireland concerto in Leningrad – the score and orchestral material could be borrowed from Moscow Radio. Gauk could easily conduct the concerto, given that ‘even Mr Clark managed to do so. Oh Lord, what kind of a conductor is this Clark? One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.’¹⁶

Yudina’s next project was a large recital programme devoted to ‘The Dance in Piano Literature from the 16th century to our days’. She wrote to Ossovsky saying, ‘I am immersed in the galliards and pavanes of “Merry Old England” and the incomparably beautiful music of “Padre” Martini, Nicola Porpora and Salamone Rossi. I forget about time and deadlines and that the concert is round the corner. I am playing 16 hours a day – choosing new works and repeating old ones.’¹⁷ The concert ‘round the corner’ was too close for comfort, and with the excuse of extreme fatigue Yudina implored Ossovsky to postpone the ‘Dance’ programme from 9 February to a date in April. When the organizers at the Leningrad Philharmonia resisted such a postponement, Yudina protested: ‘When I broke my shoulder and lay at death’s door with typhus, nothing frightened me – except the colossal precariousness of my present situation. When I was discharged from hospital, the doctor gave me a stern “farewell” warning: “If you don’t get sufficient rest, you will become an invalid for life.” The concerts I played so far this season reassured me that I have regained my working ability [. . .] But I have bitten off more than I can chew! Just now I cannot play at all, and can only return to work after some days of complete rest, otherwise my head simply won’t function.’¹⁸ Ossovsky was basically sympathetic to her situation – his colleagues obviously less so. Yudina was adamant: ‘the inner concept of a concert, the idea behind it and its content is more important to me than money. I am ready for anything if you postpone this concert, but on 9 February I am unable to play.’¹⁹ She offered to pay the cancellation penalties.

By the end of the month Yudina had recovered enough to play Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto at Moscow’s ‘House of Scientists’ conducted by ‘Sébastianchik’.²⁰ In April she performed her esoteric programme of some forty dance pieces, ‘each of them a masterpiece’,²¹ first at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire on 2 April, and ten days later at the Leningrad Philharmonia. The composers ranged from Gibbons to Couperin, from Rameau to Ravel, while the second half of the concert was devoted predominantly to Russian composers. Yudina’s interest in baroque music led her to devise another programme, entitled ‘Toccatas and Passacaglias’, although she never performed it.

Another landmark concert for Yudina was her performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto on 13 May, at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire with the Greek conductor, Dimitri Mitropoulos. She was particularly in awe of him as a former student of Busoni’s and treasured the photo he had inscribed to her with the words: ‘An Freundin Maria Yudina, l’excellente artiste en souvenir de notre collaboration à Moscou.’^* She would always speak with pride of her performances with Mitropoulos.

The ups and downs of Yudina’s concert career ran parallel to her swings in and out of official favour. From late May 1934, her concerts in the country’s two musical capitals dried up. Her relationship with the Leningrad Philharmonia soured because of her frequent ‘postponements’ – it was assumed she was capricious and difficult. Apart from her genuine health problems, Yudina lacked stability in her life, and lived from pillar to post with friends and relatives. She was deeply affected by the unrelenting repression of friends by the Soviet authorities. Currently she was worrying about Florensky, now awaiting sentence in prison. She was equally concerned about Andreyeva, who after training as a soil specialist in Alma-Ata found work in the construction sector that emerged during Stalin’s intensive drive for industrialization. Regulations forbade ex-prisoners from residing in a large city; after her return from exile, Andreyeva found refuge outside Leningrad so as to be near her twin daughters.

Yudina’s accommodation problems were even more acute in Moscow. As an ‘unregistered’ guest, she was a liability to the people she stayed with – for this reason her aunt Polina asked that her post no longer be sent to her address. Yudina arranged for letters to be delivered care of her friend, Anatoli Dolivo at the Conservatoire. For a while she and her brother Boris rented a room vacated by a parachutist’s widow in a large flat with another family of Yudins (no relations!). A philosopher by training, Pavel Fyodorovich Yudin was of humble origins, but rose to high diplomatic office, later becoming Soviet ambassador to China. He and his wife were warm and hospitable, holding parties and singing Russian songs to accordion accompaniment. Pavel would say, ‘Maria Veniaminovna, you would be carried high – if only you didn’t believe in God.’ Yudina retorted, ‘You won’t be able to carry me high, Pavel Fyodorovich, since I won’t refute my faith in God – you’ll be coming to us instead.’²² Yudin’s home was open to officially approved persons from the academic and theatre world. At a New Year party Yudina met the geneticist Trofim Lysenko and his colleague Isaac Prezent. They arrived in the small hours of morning in their cups. ‘Although it was obvious he was completely drunk, Lysenko did not pronounce a word, fearing to lose his dignity, but surveyed the company with his haughty eagle’s stare.’²³ Yudina dubbed Lysenko ‘an anti-person’ – indeed his pseudo-scientific approach caused untold harm to Soviet genetics. She didn’t think much better of Prezent. He called her ‘his green-eyed beauty’ and tried to seduce her.²⁴ When the parachutist’s widow returned to Moscow, Yudina and her brother once again had to camp out with relatives.

While battling with accommodation problems in Moscow, Yudina tried to retain her Leningrad room, now partitioned up and occupied by various Nevel’ friends. Amongst them was Emelyan (Milya) Zalessky, who had studied physical education at the Lesgaft Institute in Leningrad and was a passionate bibliophile. Zalessky was arrested in December 1933 and his library risked confiscation by the GPU. Yudina agreed to help save Milya’s books, asking friends to transfer them to the remaining section of her room.

In the spring of 1934 Yudina’s brother Boris, helped by her friend Nina Zbruyeva, rented two small intercommunicating rooms in a communal apartment in a wooden house in the courtyard of the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum.^* This became Yudina’s home for the next five years. It was widely quipped in Moscow, ‘Maria Veniaminovna lives with her brother, but sleeps in the bath.’ Yulian Selyu, a young veterinary doctor and lifelong friend of Yudina, came to treat her cat for eczema and discovered what this meant. He saw that Yudina indeed slept in the bathroom, with a board and mattress laid on top of the bathtub!²⁵ Although Selyu called the apartment ‘modest and light’, in reality it was dark and damp, some nine metres square and divided by hardboard from the rest of the living space. The damp provoked painful attacks of rheumatic fever. The apartment was eminently unsuitable for piano practice. In any case Yudina didn’t have a piano and was dependent on using the instruments of kind friends. Most of her concert preparation took place at the Yefimov family apartment on Novogireyevsky Street, where she had access to a lovely Bechstein piano belonging to Yefimov’s niece, Yelena Derviz.

Ivan Yefimov was a well-known sculptor and graphic artist; his wife, Nina Simonovich-Yefimova, was a talented painter and puppeteer, co-founder of the ‘Petrushka’ marionette theatre in Moscow. Yudina had met them in the late 1920s and developed a close relationship, reinforced by shared friendships with Florensky and Favorsky. The Yefimovs valued Florensky not just as a spiritual mentor, but also for his expert knowledge of art and icon-painting.

During the 1920s Yefimov, Favorsky and Florensky all worked at VKhuTEMAS,^** the institute associated with modernist constructivism and utopian experiment. Here Yefimov taught sculpture and Florensky art theory, while Favorsky acted as director of the school between 1923 and 1926. During the years he taught there, Florensky was occupied with research into space and perspective, which resulted in his brilliant, provocative essay ‘Reverse Perspective’, published only in 1967. Florensky and Favorsky were involved in heated polemics with the radical constructivist artists, who dominated VKhuTEMAS – Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin and Lyubov Popova amongst them. Rodchenko expressed his hostility in gross anti-religious caricatures of Florensky and Favorsky. Bizarrely, Florensky’s synthetic view of art, shared by Favorsky, was not so far from the avant-gardists’ – the difference being that Florensky’s was rooted in art’s eternal religious meaning, while theirs was based on an anarchic rejection of artistic conventions. Both Florensky and Favorsky were passionate music-lovers – Florensky was a good amateur pianist (and occasional four-hand partner to Yudina); Favorsky played the clarinet and piano.

Yudina recalled how ‘Favorsky “saw” music in images; he “heard” and could coherently explain the music of Rublyev’s Trinity.’ Altogether, Favorsky’s striving towards beauty had aesthetic integrity: ‘He offered the viewer an amalgamated – rather than merely a visual – impression of the objects he depicted, he captured their essence. In consciously rejecting illusory “truthful” reproduction, Favorsky discovered inner laws in his paintings connected to many differing phenomena.’²⁶ For Yudina, Favorsky equalled Florensky and Yavorsky in his significance as a teacher. She found she could apply his principles to music interpretation.

Happily, Yudina’s new rooms were a mere nine-minute walk from Boleslav Yavorsky’s apartment in Strochenovsky Pereulok, where he lived with the composer and choirmaster Sergei Protopopov, his partner since 1918. She was sure of a warm welcome from them both: ‘Boleslav Leopoldovich (BL) and Sergei Vladimirovich were extremely modest in their needs – riches and luxury simply did not suit them. Sometimes BL and I competed as to whose coat was the more threadbare! [. . .] We usually ate cutlets, which we fried ourselves – or else ham, cutting off and discarding the fat. BL would throw a tea towel over his shoulder and go to the kitchen, still elaborating some artistic concept [. . .] In these real “feasts of friendship” we talked – theoretically – about love. BL declared that at the basis of all real human relationships lies trust. “It exists between us, MV! And we will never, never be enemies.” Thus it was!’²⁷

Moscow not only provided artistic stimulus, but the opportunity to have a social life. Maximilian Steinberg recalled being amazed at Yudina’s appearance when he met her that winter. After typhoid fever, she had grown slim and was glamorously dressed; seemingly her religious interests had slipped into the background.²⁸ Now Yudina gradually acquired her own circle of friends. Some were Leningraders, like Skrzhinskaya’s sister Irina, and Nikolai Antsiferov, her historian friend, who had recently been released from the Solovki and BelBaltLag^* camps and had now moved to Moscow. Probably the closest of her new friends was Nina Zbruyeva, a music teacher by profession and daughter of a well-known singer, with contacts in the literary world. Zbruyeva was totally devoted to Yudina and offered practical assistance of all kinds. Old friends from other towns would contact Yudina when passing through Moscow. Yudina had a joyful reunion with ‘Mikh Mikh’ (as she called Bakhtin) in August 1934, when he was returning from Leningrad to Kustanai, his place of exile.

In the autumn of 1933 an important new friendship was initiated with the philosopher, philologist and cultural critic Alexei Losev. Yudina had originally met him in Moscow some days before his arrest on 18 April 1930, when he had attended her performance of Taneyev’s quintet with the Beethoven Quartet. Yudina was fascinated by Losev as a philosopher dedicated to music and religion. He had received both a philosophical and musical education (he studied violin). As an active member of the Solovyov Religious Philosophical Society, he came into contact with the country’s most renowned religious thinkers – Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank and Sergei Bulgakov. Between 1922 and 1929 he taught aesthetics at the Moscow Conservatoire and at the State Academy of Arts and Sciences. Under the powerful influence of Florensky, Losev became interested in onomatodoxy (imyaslaviye), the heretical dogma regarding the Name of Jesus, laconically defined in Florensky’s words: ‘God is in the name, but the name is not God.’ The Name-Worshippers had provoked great controversy when in 1913 the Athonite ‘heretics’ were arrested by the Tsar’s troops and expelled from Mount Athos. During the 1920s a circle of Name-Worshippers was hosted by Losev and his wife, the astronomer Valentina Sokolova, at their home, which was attended by both Fyodor Andreyev and Florensky. Yudina would undoubtedly have heard of Losev from them, and have read his recent publications, ‘The Dialectics of Artistic Form’ and ‘Music as an Object of Logic’, which appeared in 1927.

Losev and his wife were secretly tonsured on 3 June 1929, taking the monastic names of Andronik and Afanasiya. Soon afterwards, Losev’s tract The Dialectics of the Myth, published early in 1930, was viciously attacked, and he and his wife were arrested. At the Sixteenth Party Congress, held between 26 June and 13 July 1930, Losev was denounced by Party Commissar Lazar Kaganovich. This was fuel to Marianna Gerasimova, sister of the well-known film director Sergei Gerasimov, as she was the investigator in his case. Gerasimova charged Losev with ‘obscurantism’, dabbling in the Kaballa, and other ‘harmful mystical nonsense’. Her close association with Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD, did not bode well – she was dubbed by Losev the ‘affectionate cobra’.

Losev and Sokolova were sentenced respectively to ten and five years in the camps. While Sokolova was incarcerated in the distant Altai Steppe, Losev was sent to the BelBaltLag – the complex of labour camps set up to build the White Sea–Baltic Canal. This project was masterminded by Naftali Frenkel, a fraudster with a genius for organization, who had invented the Soviet system of penal labour for construction projects while an inmate of the Solovetsky labour camp. Later dubbed by Solzhenitsyn the ‘Demon of the Gulag Archipelago’, Frenkel used shock tactics, rewards and punishments, mercilessly eliminating lazy or physically exhausted prisoners, while offering ‘carrots’ to stimulate hard work.

Losev evidently lacked physical strength for the imposed task of timber-logging and was soon transferred to do clerical work. The punishing hours and terrible lighting conditions contributed to a rapid deterioration of his vision. This grandiose project required a multitude of skills, and prisoners like Alexander Meier and Nikolai Antsiferov, both friends of Yudina’s, were retrained in fields like hydrology and soil exploration. Although Yudina visited various labour camps, it is unclear whether she ever went to the BelBaltLag complex; she avoided advertising such activities so as not to endanger her friends. Through the good offices of Yekaterina Peshkova the Losev couple were reunited in 1932 at Medvezhya Gora, the central camp of the extended BelBaltLag complex.

One of the anomalies of the penal system was the organization of entertainment by a special cultural-educational department of the OGPU. Orchestras played music as the prisoners worked; the artist Alexander Rodchenko was sent to photograph the heroic enterprise, and his images were published anonymously in the magazine The USSR in Construction, to demonstrate the social usefulness of hard labour. The OGPU workers’ club hosted evening lectures, debates and theatrical entertainment at Medvezhya Gora, where the despised ‘bourgeois-intellectuals’ excelled. Antsiferov recalled attending a lecture on the history of materialism given by Losev, where he spoke of Einstein’s theory of relativity from a philosophical point of view!²⁹ Another prisoner spoke of ‘Sun Yat-sen and Secret Societies in China’, while a Book-Lovers’ Circle devoted an evening to the presentation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s recent book on Dostoevsky. Meier, now working in the planning department, used his free time to write a long thesis on Goethe’s Faust. Not without irony, he called Medvezhya Gora ‘the new capital of the Russian intelligentsia!’³⁰

After the White Sea–Baltic Canal was completed, all sentences were automatically reviewed. The Losevs were amongst those given early release; they returned to Moscow in the autumn of 1933. Shortly after Losev attended Yudina’s Moscow recital on 1 December, their contact was renewed with particular intensity. Her playing left an extraordinary impression on him, and inspired him to write a short prose story, ‘The Woman Thinker’, part of a trilogy^* which was only published after his death in 1988. The premise of his story was simple: ‘Can a woman be a thinker?’ Yudina’s friend Lyubov Shaporina would have answered affirmatively, for she had remarked in her diary, ‘I prefer M.V. to all other pianists, for her every note thinks.’³¹ Losev was equally emphatic in his fictional story: ‘Well today I can say that a woman can be a thinker! Although until yesterday I was in doubt about this. [. . .] You may think I met some lady Professor of Mathematics, a woman who works at one of our numerous scientific institutions. Oh no, you have a poor opinion of me then. Yesterday I went to a concert of Radina, the pianist.’³²

The name Maria Valentinovna Radina seems a barely disguised reference to Yudina, while her new patronymic, Valentinovna, recalls the given name of Losev’s wife. Radina’s physical attributes are undoubtedly borrowed from Yudina: ‘A massive figure in black . . . yes, yes always in black, de rigueur! Additionally, sparkly decorations and black lace display the flirtatious playfulness of a sorcerer, decorations from which one might recoil – as if from an apparition.’³³ Transfixed by the visions she conjures up as she plays, her unseeing gaze focused on some distant chimera, she transports the listener to a world of colossal events and fathomless tragedies. The author suggests that one should learn from Radina – not from Hegel – how to think, so that ‘Thinking and Being’ and ‘Thinking and Action’ are indistinguishable. Radina plays Bach best of all because Bach is constituted of pure thought. The protagonist of the trilogy, Nikolai Vershinin, is a music-lover, who has heard Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Busoni and Liszt perform. ‘Radina can count among their number, a European Olympian,’ he announces. Yet she displays neither temperament nor passion – she is monstrously cold. Her fascination lies in her profound thought processes.

From December 1933 to February 1934, Losev actively wooed Yudina, believing that their two minds could set sparks flying. There was little inconsistency for him in being married and a secret monk to boot; he pointed to the precedent of ‘Abbé Franz Liszt’. He instructed: ‘You who are married or who know women in lawful or unlawful relations, have no insight into the secrets of sex. [. . .] Only to a monk are the beauties of the mind accessible, and only through the sweet-smelling mystery of prayer can he gaze at the meaningful destiny of world creation.’³⁴

In Losev’s story, away from the concert platform Radina proves to be totally commonplace. On a first visit to her flat, Vershinin finds her squabbling noisily in the communal kitchen, saucepan lids flying. The other lodgers accuse her of having three lovers, unprepossessing men with ridiculous nicknames, Pupsik, Bachchik and Beethovenchik. It seems that Losyev’s portraits have little to do with real-life personages. Commentators nevertheless attribute the ridiculous names Bachchik and Pupsik as farcical prototypes of Bakhtin and Pumpyansky; perhaps Beethovenchik referred to Gnesin?

Radina herself has no interests – she only plays Bach because Pupsik likes it, and is more concerned about the rising cost of eggs. When questioned about her interpretations, she replies that she merely does what her teacher had told her. In other words, away from the keyboard she is far from being a thinker. Vershinin is determined to save Radina from her squalid surroundings. Yet without this milieu she cannot function. The story ends with Radina being shot dead, but with a spiritual apotheosis; Vershinin understands that her true values are hidden in an otherworldly existence.

In early February 1934 Losev gave Yudina a manuscript copy of the story for her perusal. Her outraged reaction can be inferred by the ensuing correspondence, although only Losev’s side survives. He wrote to express his bewilderment: ‘It is so hard to write to you – and useless. I cannot part painlessly from the marvellous image of you with which I have lived these past three months. It seems that we had a deep-deep, long-long, beautiful, luminous friendship, and suddenly – this terrible break!’³⁵ He repeats what he wrote in the story – the captivating force of her playing conveys true philosophical enlightenment. ‘You and Rachmaninov remain for me incomparable luminaries in my philosophical sky.’³⁶ Losev was deeply wounded by Yudina’s rejection of ‘The Woman Thinker’: ‘Your emotional reaction is so full of contempt for me! Your evaluation of me as philosopher and writer, as a human being and a person, is completely destructive.’³⁷ Losev reproached Yudina’s critical approach: ‘That you associate the characteristics of the novel’s heroes either with the author himself or with real people shows your facile, simplified perception – it is a mystery why the brilliant Yudina should fall for it. Furthermore to write about your real weaknesses – even if I could distinguish them – would be as humiliating as slipping my hand in your pocket and robbing you of 100 roubles.’³⁸

Losev reached an unexpected conclusion: ‘My description of Radina’s life (not such a simple life as you assume) seems to touch on your own, for you now consider yourself “unmasked”, and even fear “defamation” of character. To me this reveals a lot about you [. . .] You don’t know that Radina’s faults are taken from an important Russian writer, one of the founders of Symbolism – somebody higher than yourself.’ Seemingly Losev was referring to Andrei Bely, who had just died in early January 1934. Perhaps to provoke Yudina’s jealousy, Losev wrote of his experiences as a monk ‘with our friends, the nuns. Their attitude was probably no less moral than yours, but this did not hinder me from visiting them on my own at the monastery and giving myself over to the intimate joy of the fraternizing of souls [. . .] And the secret of the spiritual charm of our friendship depended not on their having taken monastic orders, but on their sweet-smelling and delicate femininity.’³⁹ However unbending in her moral rectitude, Yudina was nonetheless governed by her passions, and would have deeply resented such snide attacks on her womanhood.

Yudina disdained replying to Losev; instead she decisively severed all relations with him. For her ‘The Woman Thinker’ was not an objective work of art, but an offensive personal insult. Losev believed that such implacable moral judgement was an impediment to philosophal development. Yudina was replete and had abandoned her philosophical quest, whereas Losev was a ‘famished seeker’. He failed to understand that Yudina’s interests were linked to the tangible world, where her need to alleviate other people’s sufferings often overshadowed grand philosophical concerns.

‘The Woman Thinker’ was eventually published in 1994. Florensky’s son-in-law, Sergei Trubachyov, observed that ‘the initial apotheosis of Radina is perceived through a heightened romanticized perception of music [. . .] in the spirit of E.T.A. Hoffmann. As her image is debased to the vulgar and commonplace, so it assumes the quality of perverse self-negation, through the split between elevated, creative phenomena and the mundane [. . .] I became convinced that the likeness to Maria Veniaminovna was arbitrary, even if her Petersburg circle of friends is hinted at. Losev’s concept is incomprehensible if it is isolated from the context of the other stories of his trilogy, united as they are by a single philosophical idea.’⁴⁰

By the end of May of 1934 there was a dramatic reduction in Yudina’s concert schedule in Moscow and Leningrad, although she still performed concerts that season in Baku and Kiev. In the late spring of 1934, on Peshkova’s initiative, she was invited to play for Gorky at his dacha Gorki to the west of Moscow. The motive behind this second visit was to gain permission for Florensky’s family to visit him in Siberia, where Father Pavel was serving his sentence in a research station at Skovorodino, an obscure railway junction halfway between Lake Baikal and the Pacific coast.

Yudina recalled driving down with Peshkova: ‘We passed through beautiful and fragrant woods, full of bird-song [. . .] Then suddenly Yekaterina Pavlovna announced, ‘You know that there is no grand piano, only an upright.’ ‘Take me back straight away,’ I exclaimed, ‘the music will be completely distorted.’ But we agreed that we would take what came, what will be will be!’⁴¹ Yudina described Gorky’s residence – a white stone landowner’s house situated by a river – as perfect: ‘The park, the river and the quay on its banks, the lower and upper gardens, the colourful flower beds – everything as it should be. Yet there was something impersonal about it [. . .] We got a warm welcome from Nadezhda Alexeyevna, the Maitre’s daughter-in-law, who had recently been widowed.’⁴² Gorky’s son Maxim Peshkov had died in strange circumstances – reputedly killed on Stalin’s orders. The atmosphere of police control was stifling, with the sinister head of the NKVD, Yagoda, in evidence, courting the beautiful Nadezhda Alexeyevna – as he had done in the last year of Maxim’s life.

Gorky struck Yudina as a prisoner in a golden cage – his influence receding rapidly and his health failing. Before he appeared, Yudina proceeded to the studio where the ill-fated upright piano stood:

Suddenly – oh what joy – Alexei Tolstoy burst into the room at a run, combining tempestuous dionysian traits with practicality. ‘Only an upright? So you are discouraged? Depressed?’ he quipped. ‘We’ll fix it!’ With that he threw off his jacket and got onto the floor, unscrewed the lower cover, then the upper one. The strings were liberated allowing the instrument to resonate! How often was I to have recourse to this method – in hospitals, in front-line clubs, on boats – where only some miserable upright was available.⁴³

Yudina played for Gorky without stint: Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations, Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Chopin’s Mazurkas. ‘And lastly Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata (Op. 31 no. 2), a rebellious stormy work, whose first movement recitatives look forward to the Ninth Symphony [. . .] Not that the second movement can soothe a soul’s desperation. Here Gorky lost his composure, his heroic heart succumbed – he wept, as if releasing some pent-up, inner rage through abundant tears. He laid his magnificent lion’s head on my shoulders and cried for a long time.’⁴⁴

In her only known recording of the ‘Tempest’ sonata from a live recital in 1954, Yudina creates a sense of turbulent rebellion through the exaggeratedly fast tempi of the outer movements (Largo-Allegro and Allegretto). It brings to mind Yudina’s confession of once being driven in performance by images of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman – perhaps in this very sonata: ‘I wanted to convey the hoofbeats, the chase, the fear.’⁴⁵ After so much agitation, which the philosophical middle movement (Adagio) cannot dispel, release must follow: hence Gorky’s unsuppressed weeping. Yudina will have recalled Florensky saying that Gorky’s tears boded well. What she and Peshkova didn’t perceive was that Gorky was fast becoming an anachronism, a ‘living monument’ no longer able to wield authority. The intelligentsia could not forgive his passive acceptance of concentration camps in Solovki and BelBaltLag, and for becoming the regime’s propaganda tool after extolling rehabilitation through forced labour.

Peshkova and PomPolit were also losing influence. Nevertheless she won the right for Florensky’s family to spend six weeks with him in Siberia during the summer of 1934. Yudina’s hopes of visiting Father Pavel were shattered when, immediately after his family’s departure, he was thrown into solitary confinement, then transferred to the Solovki ‘corrective labour’ camp. Here in July 1937 he was condemned to death by a NKVD ‘troika’, taken to Leningrad and shot on 8 December.

Solzhenitsyn named Florensky as perhaps the most remarkable person devoured by the Gulag. Even during imprisonment, Florensky continued his scientific work, conducting research into permafrost at the Skovorodino Research Station, and into the extraction of iodine from seaweed in Solovki.

In the camps Florensky’s ‘letter quota’ was used exclusively to write to his family. He made a single exception for Yudina, including a note for her in a family letter written on 19–20 April 1936. Having befriended Florensky’s wife, Anna, and eldest daughter Olga, she was a regular visitor to the family home. Her deep friendship with Father Pavel was underpinned by his genuine love of music – and Mozart above all. In this last letter to Yudina, Florensky chided her for ‘living in broken rhythms’. Mozart was an example of divine harmony and equilibrium – that golden paradise lost to mankind. ‘As I grow older, the atmosphere of my childhood emerges with increasing clarity, that is to be with Mozart and in Mozart. This is no dreamt-up theory, or a question of aesthetic taste, but a purely inner feeling, where only in Mozart, quite literally and not allegorically, can we find protection from storms.’⁴⁶ He went on to declare: ‘I want no Capriccio, no Schumann, I don’t want ARBITRARY RULE. Freedom is found where there is legitimacy, even if there is absolute necessity in the arbitrary.’ He repeated to Yudina ‘all that is needed is this clarity, which we actually hold in our hands’.⁴⁷ Bourgeois culture in its current state of disintegration was ‘dissembling and illusory’ and responsible for this lack of clarity.

At his home on Posadskaya Street in Sergiyev Pasad, Florensky kept two instruments in the light and spacious dining room, a Kampf upright and a fortepiano from Glinka’s times. The upright piano was fragile, of a certain vintage, and under Yudina’s touch the strings broke regularly. His daughter Olga, who played four-hand versions of Mozart symphonies with her father, confessed that she preferred her Papa’s more gentle rendering of Mozart. Yudina swallowed her pride but reminded Olga: ‘Nevertheless I play the piano better.’⁴⁸

Yudina liked to quote Florensky’s definition of Bach versus Mozart: ‘Bach climbs majestically to the heights like a pious aspirant, whereas Mozart is always at home there.’⁴⁹ If Florensky saw perfection of form, light and transparency in Mozart, Yudina for her part saw drama and tragedy, and tended to approach his music either from a theatrical-operatic or a spiritual-religious viewpoint. In her interpretations of the Fantasias in D minor K.397 and C minor K.475 she was able to combine these qualities, seeing in those works a premonition of the middle-period Beethoven. Her ways of investing music with her own moods of despair were perhaps another way of seeking emotional release. As Sergei Trubetskoi noted, it was all the more striking that Florensky recognized her as an artist.⁵⁰ In 1967 Yudina expressed her gratitude to Olga Florenskaya for their rare friendship: ‘I can only write the same enduring and eternal truth: that for me there is no one in the world greater than Father Pavel, and there never has been.’⁵¹

At the end of August 1934 Yudina wrote to Lyosha Skrzhinskaya asking her to find ‘the whereabouts’ of Milya Zalessky, now awaiting sentence after his arrest in December the previous year. As was customary, Zalessky was being shunted from one prison to another. ‘I haven’t yet sent him any parcels, as I had no money throughout the summer [. . .] Now I have the parcel ready, but I fear that it mightn’t reach its destination.’⁵² Although she was ‘dying to come’ to Leningrad, she explained disconsolately to Lyosha that money was short. Despite earning good fees with concerts in Baku earlier that month, she had spent most of it, paying back debts.

Yudina kept Skrzhinskaya informed about her Moscow life. She had been to hear Florent Schmitt conduct his music, which she found ‘boring and vulgar. It sounded like Glière. I cannot think why my Greek friend [Mitropoulos] performs his music!’⁵³ She attended a reception at VOKS: ‘I gave a full report on contemporary music (in German!) to a grey-haired American pianist, evidently only a beginner. He was terribly pleased!’⁵⁴

On 11 September Yudina informed her friend that she had hired a grand piano, which was ‘very bad, but passable’, so at last she could practise in her own home! On a lighter note, she reported going for a drive with Lyosha’s sister, Irina, now a proud car-owner – a rare sign of privilege for a private individual. A woman driver was an even greater rarity! Irina recalled Yudina ‘showing her off’ to the young conductor, Kurt Sanderling, who had fled from Nazi Germany in 1936 and worked with the Moscow Radio Orchestra in those years. Irina was instructed to take him for a spin around Moscow in her car.⁵⁵

On 18 October Yudina started the new 1934/35 season in Moscow with another performance of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto under Jascha Horenstein at the Hall of Columns. This was followed on 2 November by a performance in Kiev of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto conducted by Joseph Rosenstock. Yudina then travelled to Voronezh in mid-November for a solo recital and Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 with the local orchestra. Voronezh held special interest, for in June 1934 the great poet Osip Mandelstam was exiled there for three years. As Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poet’s wife, later recalled, ‘Maria Veniaminovna Yudina went out of her way to give concerts in Voronezh so she could see M. and play for him.’ Other musicians, such as the conductor Leo Ginzburg, did likewise. ‘Visits like these were events in our life, and M. with his sociable nature couldn’t have lived without them.’⁵⁶ Yudina noted how much Mandelstam missed seeing art, the ‘French painters’ in particular. ‘Whenever [Yudina] came to Voronezh M. would ask her about them, even while she was playing to him. She once sent him an album put out by the gallery, but the reproductions were very bad and only whetted his appetite.’⁵⁷

Back in Leningrad on 22 November, Yudina performed Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto in the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia under Georges Sébastien. By now, her relations with the Philharmonia were quite strained because of her continuing cancellations and postponements. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the director, Ossovsky, lost patience with her. She received no further invitations until the next season.

The New Year of 1935 saw Yudina determined to play more concerts and radio broadcasts so as to pay off her debts. She happily added new works to her repertoire, including many by Leningrad composers, whom she always liked to promote. On 9, 10 and 13 January she participated in the last performances of Stravinsky’s Les Noces under Klimov at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. Stravinsky’s music was being eliminated from concert programmes from the mid-1930s onwards, as were those of all Russian émigré composers and the Western avant garde. On 9 February between two Les Noces performances Yudina presented Moscow audiences with a novelty, Alfredo Casella’s Partita for piano and chamber orchestra conducted by the composer at the House of Scientists. ‘[Casella] is a very dignified and kind person, vivacious and reliable – it’s very pleasant to meet such a harmonious personality. But I had little to play, as he wrote the piece with his own limited technique in mind. The Italian Embassy turned out in full for the concert – the ambassador’s wife wearing a glass-beaded jacket with a thick plait wound round her head. Her tender profile and grace are alien to us.’⁵⁸

In reality Casella was a musician and pianist of stature, who did much to promote the music of his contemporaries. His work as an editor saw the emergence of Vivaldi’s oeuvre in Italy, as well as his benchmark edition of Beethoven’s sonatas. He himself had in fact performed the Partita in Moscow on an earlier visit. The concerto dated from 1924–5, was written in neo-classical style (although Yudina saw it as popular in origin), and showed Stravinsky’s influence in the clarity of orchestration. Meeting Casella inspired in Yudina the desire to learn Italian and read Dante. She was deeply disillusioned by Dante’s prose-poem La Vita Nuova – his prose irritated her, ‘for it only says what can be better expressed in poetry’.⁵⁹ Neither did she approve of his preoccupation with Beatrice.

Dreams of learning Italian were soon put aside as Yudina decided to show her mettle as a keyboard virtuoso, performing under Leo Ginzburg a marathon of three concertos in one evening on 16 March at Moscow’s Hall of Columns. For this occasion she learnt the Schumann Piano Concerto, adding to it Tchaikovsky’s First and Prokofiev’s Second. Each being a massive work in its own right, the three concertos constituted over an hour and 40 minutes of music – requiring colossal stamina from the pianist. Prokofiev, recently relocated to Moscow from Paris, was in attendance; neither he nor Yudina were satisfied with the orchestra’s contribution. In early July he wrote to her after hearing her perform the concerto more successfully at an out-of-town concert: ‘Thank you for your performance of the Second concerto. I am terribly glad that at last the conductor and orchestra were serious in their attitude, because the Moscow experience (with Ginzburg) was very difficult, given that the management only allowed one and a half rehearsals – for which I wanted to box their ears. I felt embarrassed that you personally were caused such anguish by that performance.’⁶⁰ We don’t know what performance the composer referred to; perhaps one Myaskovsky mentioned without a date with the conductor Joseph Rosenstock – who like Horenstein had been banned from conducting in Germany.⁶¹ Ginzburg for his part later described Yudina as an extremely awkward soloist, who frightened away many conductors. ‘Whereas in chamber music she was an ideal partner [. . .] she felt inhibited by an orchestra, and did impossible things, like skipping 20 bars, forgetting chunks of the music and jumping from one theme to another.’⁶²

The spring of 1935 saw another fiasco in Yudina’s personal life. She had met the well-known architect Vyacheslav Vladimirov late in 1933, and they began a romantic attachment. A member of the Organization of Contemporary Architects and follower of Le Corbusier, Vladimirov had designed a series of exemplary constructivist buildings in Moscow, including the Institute for Experimental Veterinary Sciences. As an enthusiastic supporter of communal living, Vladimirov also worked on collective projects, designing such well-known blocks of homes as the Narkomfin^* on Novinsky Boulevard and with the architect Georgi Lutsky the Aviators block of flats at the Patriarch’s Ponds. One of Vladimirov’s landmark constructions was the large apartment building for ‘workers of the Moscow Arts Theatre’, erected in 1938 – including built-in microphones to eavesdrop on such famous residents as Chekhov’s widow, Olga Knipper, and the theatre director Nemirovich-Danchenko. The Skrzhinskaya sisters recalled Vladimirov as a prepossessing man with the confidence of one accustomed to worldly success.

Yudina herself seemed convinced that their attachment would lead to marriage – and announced to her friends that she wanted to have at least twelve children.⁶³ Vladimirov was a music-lover; in turn he stimulated in Maria a passionate interest in architecture. Vera Yudina recalled that they even went together to ‘choose a piano for their new home’. Then suddenly and unexpectedly, Vladimirov got married to another woman, leaving the unsuspecting Yudina humiliated and grief-stricken. In late March 1935 she wrote to Skrzhinskaya in despair: ‘He is not worthy of me nor I of him. But he is unique in his purity, his charm and much else.’ She was ashamed of her previous happiness with him, and now had to face harsh reality. ‘Ira [Lyosha’s sister], Nicoletta [Nina Zbruyeva], and Pasha [Nina’s maid] saved me from suicide. Time is no healer, it just drives me deeper into despair.’⁶⁴ As so often in times of crisis, Yudina thought of changing profession, even of taking monastic orders. She complained to Skrzhinskaya of the solitary bitterness of the pianist’s life. But which new profession she intended to choose wasn’t clear – one day it was architecture and the next it was medicine.⁶⁵

On 23 and 24 March Yudina performed two concerts in Odessa. From there she travelled to Sevastopol for a day to see Yevgeniya (Zhenya) Tilicheyeva, whose husband had just been arrested. ‘I didn’t notice the south or the sea. At Zhenya’s all I did was weep. But I still want to hope, to feel remorse and hope. With my head at least, I want to enter into another’s misery.’⁶⁶ Before long Tilicheyeva herself was arrested as an enemy of the people and would remain incarcerated in the Gulag for nineteen years. Yudina told Skrzhinskaya, ‘I am using all my strength to play and earn. I want to pay off my debts. I hope to come to Leningrad soon and save my room.’⁶⁷

Once again Yudina was neglecting her career so as to help unfortunate friends. She played one more concert in Moscow performing Taneyev’s Piano Quintet on 27 March with the Beethoven Quartet; thereafter she didn’t play in the capital for two and a half years. She cancelled her recital at the Leningrad Philharmonia in early May. Despite her profuse apologies to Ossovsky, she wasn’t invited to appear there again for the next year. She certainly was not earning money.

That spring a new campaign was launched against ‘socially dangerous elements’, implying people with noble ancestry. While Natalia Andreyeva was living in exile, her mother looked after her twin daughters, Masha and Anna, in Leningrad. Arrested for being the daughter of a general, her mother was exiled to Cheboksary on the Volga with her two sisters – they were never seen again. Sensing imminent danger, Natalia Andreyeva sold off all the family possessions and set off with her twin daughters for Bryansk to stay with her brother, all their worldly goods crammed into one small suitcase.⁶⁸

At this point Valya Zhdan (Yasnopolskaya), a devoted friend of Father Fyodor Andreyev, suggested that Natalia apply for work on the Volga–Moscow Canal, another grandiose project built with penal labour between 1933 and 1937. Zhdan had served her sentence in the Dmitlag, the largest branch of this particular Gulag system, near the ancient city of Dmitrov sixty-five kilometres north of Moscow. At its peak, the camp was estimated to hold 1.2 million people working on the canal’s construction. Prisoners died and were shot in their hundreds, engineers and architects were repressed after the canal’s opening. Irina Skrzhinskaya recalled Yudina travelling to Dmitlag to visit friends amongst the prisoners. By accepting work as a hired labourer of the NKVD in Dmitrov, Natalia Andreyeva and her twins were able to live relatively close to Moscow, initially with the Florensky family at Sergiyev Pasad, then at a rented winter (heated) dacha, just two stops from Dmitrov on the railway. Between 1935 and 1938 Yudina spent a lot of time with the family, and was spiritually at her closest to Natalia Nikolayevna. The twins recalled being shocked when they heard her discussing her love affairs with their mother – ‘it seemed incredible that “old women approaching the age of 40” could talk about love’.⁶⁹

In 1938 Natalia Nikolayevna was sent to work on the construction of the hydro-electric station (Gidrouzel) in Kuibishev (former Samara). The twins were left under Yudina’s guardianship. By now the girls were teenagers and quite self-sufficient in household matters. Yudina liked to spoil them, and using the maintenance money left by their mother she would appear twice a week bearing cakes or other goodies. Once the ‘treats’ were finished, the twins went back to a diet of beans and Yudina to her own affairs.⁷⁰

During the summer of 1935, Yudina gave herself over to architectural studies, strolling around Moscow’s outskirts, sketchbook in hand, making ‘hopeless drawings of ancient architectural monuments, mostly in ruins, alas!’⁷¹ She was enervated by depression and her preoccupation over the fate of imprisoned friends. When Yudina learnt that the famous writer and humanist Romain Rolland was to visit Moscow at the invitation of Maxim Gorky, she sought a meeting with him during his stay between 23 June and July 1935. Yudina knew of Rolland’s hatred of repression, his admiration of Stalin and the Soviet Union. She hoped that if informed of the facts Rolland would intercede for Florensky, now imprisoned in Solovki and working in the harshest conditions. Rolland and his wife stayed most of the time with Gorky, and were kept busy meeting political leaders from Stalin downwards. Yudina’s hopes that Peshkova or Gorky would arrange a meeting proved to be unfounded, while her offical request was turned down. When a group of intellectuals – including the composers Kabalevsky, Bely, Knipper, and the pianist Neuhaus – were invited to meet Rolland at Gorky’s dacha in July 1935, Yudina’s absence was glaring.

Staying in Moscow on the off-chance of a meeting with Rolland meant cancelling her concerts in Baku that July, where Yudina was to play Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. Ironically the work was programmed as the primary condition of accepting the engagement. Prokofiev wrote to Yudina saying how much he regretted her cancellation. ‘There will be a good French conductor, Roger Désormière,^* who will be very attentive and could be useful in securing engagements abroad.’ He was evidently annoyed that ‘other compositions of mine have been struck off the programme to make room for my Second Concerto’.⁷² At this point Yudina confided in Prokofiev, and in her reply of 12 July asked him not to divulge the true reason for her cancellation. (He was about to go to Baku himself.) The director of the Baku Philharmonia was sending her menacing telegrams and threatening to take her to court. She immensely regretted that Désormière had to forgo Prokofiev’s originally programmed works, but surely they could be reinstated – she had warned the Baku Philharmonic of her cancellation three weeks earlier. As for engagements abroad, ‘at this moment this holds no interest for me. Thank you for thinking of me. Forgive me. I hope that I will play the Concerto during the next season.’⁷³

As 1935 drew to a close, Yudina dreamt of moving back to Leningrad to work at the Hermitage. She stayed in Moscow, feeling so despondent that she could not participate in Yavorsky’s Bach seminar that October at the Courses for Professional Education. ‘Forgive me! I am the loser, not you. To play at your seminars is an incredible joy and honour,’ she told Yavorsky. ‘I cannot explain it, but I would be unable to retain my self-possession in front of people.’⁷⁴ She reiterated to Skrzhinskaya: ‘Just now I cannot play for people. I am looking for a separate room. If I find a decent one, then I’ll come to Leningrad to fetch Milya’s and my books, and the green armchairs.’⁷⁵ Already back in October 1934 Yudina had written to her Leningrad friend, Yulia Veysberg, interceding for her former student Yulia Kremlyov, who was ill, without work or the means for survival. (Later Yudina got the Union of Composers to give him funds.) En passant, she mentioned a recent invitation she had received from the Moscow Conservatoire. She haughtily dismissed it – ‘I killed my first youth through pedagogical work, so why should I now kill my second youth? I will wait to teach until old age sets in.’⁷⁶

The year 1936 began with bleak prospects. Yudina had no concerts on the horizon, and she rejected another proposal to teach at the Moscow Conservatoire. However, by the summer of 1936 she changed her mind – doubtless through the persuasion of her good friend, the current Conservatoire director, Heinrich Neuhaus. A professor’s regular salary was not to be sniffed at when concert engagements were so scarce, and Neuhaus exemplified the compatibility of teaching with performing.

* The Large Symphony Orchestra of the All-Union Radio Orchestra was created in 1930.

* Central Commission for the Betterment of Scientists’ Life.

** Yudina plays Brahms’ cadenza in the 1950 recording of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with Kurt Sanderling and the Leningrad Philharmonic.

* All-Union Society for Links with Abroad

** International Society for Contemporary Music.

* To my friend the excellent artist Maria Yudina, in memory of our collaboration in Moscow.

* Luzhnikovskaya Street 29, flat 108 (later renamed Bakhrushin Street).

** Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops.

* Acronym for White Sea–Baltic Sea (Canal) Camp.

* The two other stories were ‘Meeting’ (Vstrecha) and ‘The Tchaikovsky Trio’.

* Dom NarkomFina – The House of the People’s Commissariat of Finance.

* Désormière conducted Prokofiev’s ballets Le pas d’acier and The Prodigal Son for Diaghilev’s company.