The Magical Chorus

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

Part One: THE GATHERING STORM

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Part Two: A TIME OF CATASTROPHES

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part Three: RENDEZVOUS WITH STALIN

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Photo Insert

Chapter Nine

Part Four: THAWS AND FREEZES

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Part Five: A TIME OF CHANGES

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Notes

A Note About the Author

A Note About the Translator

Also by Solomon Volkov

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Culture and politics have always been indivisible, and to maintain the contrary is also making a political statement. A stark and tragic example of that connection is Russian culture in the twentieth century: perhaps for the first time in history did such a brutal experiment of politics being forced into the cultural life of such a huge country take place over such a long period, continuing through world wars, convulsive revolutions, and the most ruthless terror.

That is the subject of this book, the first of its kind in any language: while studies in particular areas of cultural-political interrelationships in Russia in the last century are proliferating, there has not been a unified presentation.

The relationship between rulers and culture is a theme that has interested me since my Soviet childhood. My first collection did not consist of the usual toy soldiers or stamps; following Joseph Stalin’s death in March 1953, I clipped newspaper photographs of the late dictator with cultural figures like the writer Maxim Gorky or actors from the Moscow Art Theater. This is how far back the psychological roots of this work go. Later, as a journalist, member of the Union of Soviet Composers and senior editor of its Sovetskaya Muzyka magazine, and interviewer of many leading cultural figures, I continually had to deal with the political aspects of Soviet culture, which at the time seemed vastly urgent to us all. As a witness, I have tried to convey that sense of urgency here.

By education and personal inclination I have always had an intense interest in music, ballet, theater, and the art market—all integral parts of Russian culture—which sometimes seems to be terra incognita for other historians, who tend to rely on their teams of researchers and so often end up making egregious errors.¹

As the reader will see, I focus on such masters as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (and his students Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev), Mikhail Vrubel, Mikhail Fokine, Fedor Chaliapin, Pavel Filonov, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Alfred Schnittke, and such cultural milestones as the Moscow Art Theater, the liturgical music of the turn of the century, Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons, and the “Amazons” of the Russian avant-garde (as well as the “second avant-garde,” still not studied thoroughly), placing all these nonliterary institutions and movements in a political and social context. Together, these exceptionally strong and beautiful voices unite in a “Magical Chorus,” to use the poet Anna Akhmatova’s evocative metaphorical description.

However, there is no denying the fact that Russia—no matter what the Western view may be—has always been a logocentric country, and therefore writers hold center stage in The Magical Chorus. Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn each tried to realize the idea later crystallized in Solzhenitsyn’s maxim that in Russia a great writer is like a second government.² They wanted to influence the regime, while the authorities attempted to manipulate them. None of these giants managed to implement his program fully, but in the process, all three created their enormous personal, heavily politicized legends. It is impossible to overestimate the role played by these writers in Russia’s public life.

Political turbulence in the twentieth century increased the worldwide resonance of the Russian Magical Chorus, but at too high a cost: death, ruined lives, and creative devastation. For seventy years, the Iron Curtain separated the Russian mainland from the émigré diaspora. They began merging comparatively recently, and that complex and tortuous process is observed in my book. Another painful ideological split in Russian culture—between “urbanites” and “villagers”—cut across the entire century and is still hurting today. It sometimes seems that this conflict is growing more acute in contemporary Russia.

I am fortunate in having good relationships with major figures in both camps. Paradoxically, I would like to think that my move to the United States, where I continue to write and lecture about the old and the new Russian cultures and have been a longtime commentator on the subject, first at the Voice of America and then for Radio Liberty, gives me the opportunity to be more objective. I recall the words of Joseph Brodsky, who once told me he considered his cultural situation in New York as an observer’s position high on a hilltop, with a view of both slopes.³

A long-distance view is definitely needed as the globalization of culture increases. There are those in Russia who fiercely attack globalization, some who criticize only its excesses, and still others who warily welcome it; but in fact, Russia has been part of this process since the country opened up to Western Europe in the late seventeenth century. It is just that events have accelerated immeasurably.

Lenin and especially Stalin understood the usefulness of culture as a political tool not only inside the country but in the international arena, too, and they wielded the weapon well. The Bolsheviks were innovators in cultural propaganda, making the constant complaints of the Communist leaders about the West’s ideological aggression sound disingenuous: they themselves had created this confrontational arena.⁴

The Nobel Prize in Literature became one such highly publicized political event; it was given to five great Russians: Ivan Bunin (1933), Boris Pasternak (1958), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970), and Joseph Brodsky (1987). Year after year, the Soviet authorities expressed outrage that the Nobel Prize was politicized. Responding to such attacks, Solzhenitsyn noted reasonably, “Even though the Swedish Academy was always being accused of politics, it was our barking voices that made any other assessment impossible.”⁵ Thus, each prize came enveloped in a cloud of controversy, and I give special attention to the behind-the-scenes intrigues leading up to the awards.

Nowadays, every significant local cultural gesture sooner or later takes on a global resonance, usually a political one; when it does not, the reason is also political. There is probably no way back to truly autonomous cultural reservations. Russian culture, even domestically, is more and more judged as part of a global marketplace, a situation the Russian intelligentsia finds unusual and painful after seventy years of isolation.

For me, the best Russian examples of sophisticated cultural analysis were always the writings of Alexandre Benois and Prince Dmitri Svyatopolk-Mirsky (D. S. Mirsky) in their émigré period, when their style, authoritative for connoisseurs and accessible for neophytes, was marked by a rare balance of “gentle anger and ironic love.”⁶ It still resonates today.

Throughout the years I spent working on this book, my guiding star was the memory of my precious conversations with some of its protagonists: Natan Altman, Anna Akhmatova, George Balanchine, Joseph Brodsky, Sergei Dovlatov, Kirill Kondrashin, Yuri Lyubimov, Anatoli Rybakov, Georgi Sviridov, Viktor Shklovsky, Alfred Schnittke, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

I am also deeply grateful to the following, who generously responded to my queries about those dramatic times: Nikolai Akimov, Vassily Aksyonov, Grigori Alexandrov, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Nina Bruni-Balmont, Rudolf Barshai, Tatiana Bek, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Andrei Bitov, Dmitri Bobyshev, Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Nikita Bogoslovsky, Elena Bonner, Alexander Borovsky, Lili Brik, Yevgeny Brusilovsky, Sergei Chigrakov, Marietta Chudakova, Boris Eifman, Alexander Galich, Leonid Girshovich, Evdokiya Glebov, Alexander Godunov, Yakov Gordin, Vladimir Horowitz, Boris Grebenshchikov, Irina Graham, Sofia Gubaidulina, Lev Gumilev, Alexandra Danilova, Edison Denisov, Oleg Efremov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Natalia Ivanova, Roman Jakobson, Mariss Jansons, Gia Kancheli, Vassily Katanyan, Nikolai Khardzhiev, Aram Khachaturian, Igor Kholin, Andrei Khrzhanovsky, Lincoln Kirstein, Edward Kline, Elem Klimov, Leonid Kogan, Alexander Kosolapov, Yuri Kochnev, Gidon Kremer, Natalia Krymova, Savva Kulish, Sergei Kurekhin, Jay Leyda, Eduard Limonov, Fedor Lopukhov, Lev Losev, Alexei Lyubimov, Vladimir Maximov, Berthe Malko, Yuri Mamleyev, Sulamif Messerer, Czeslaw Milosz, Nathan Milstein, Igor Moiseyev, Yevgeny Mravinsky, Anatoly Nayman, Ernst Neizvestny, Viktor Nekrasov, Natalya Nesterova, Irina Nijinska, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Odnoralov, David Oistrakh, Bulat Okudzhava, Alla Osipenko, Nadezhda Pavlovich, Vladimir Paperny, Sergei Paradjanov, Viktor Pivovarov, Maya Plisetskaya, Boris Pokrovsky, Lina Prokofiev, Irina Prokhorova, Lev Raaben, Edvard Radzinsky, Rita Rait-Kovaleva, Yevgeny Rein, Sviatoslav Richter, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Maria Rozanova, Mstislav Rostropovich, Harrison Salisbury, Andrei Sedykh, Marietta Shaginyan, Rodion Shchedrin, Angelina Shchekin-Krotova, Iosif Sher, Yuri Shevchuk, Konstantin Simonov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Boris Slutsky, Vassily Solovyov-Sedoi, Vladimir Soloukhin, Arnold Sokhor, Vladimir Spivakov, Anna Sten, Isaac Stern, Vera Stravinsky, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Flora Syrkina, Alexander Tcherepnin, Yuri Temirkanov, Nikolai Tikhonov, Alexander Tyshler, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Vladimir Vasiliev, Oleg Vassiliev, Georgy Vladimov, Andrei Voznesensky, Pavel Vulfius, Vladimir Vysotsky, Maria Yudina, Leonid Yakobson, Vladimir Yankilevsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Sergei Yutkevich, Vyacheslav Zavalishin, and Alexander Zinoviev.

Conversations with Vagrich Bakhchanyan, Alexander Genis, Yuri Handler, Boris Paramonov, Yevgenia Petrova, Alexander Rabinovich-Burakovsky, Alla Rosenfeld, Ivan Tolstoy, and Peter Vail were very helpful. Some ideas in this book were first discussed in the friendly homes of Grisha and Alexandra Bruskin and Tatiana Rybakov and Elena Kolat. Naturally, none of them is responsible for my conclusions and opinions. Thanks to my wife, Marianna, for transcribing the interviews cited here and for her gallery of photographic portraits, which contains some of the most vivid personalities of twentieth-century Russian culture. Some photos were graciously supplied by Natalia and Ignat Solzhenitsyn and by Gennady Krochik. The present book is once again the result of deeply satisfying collaboration with my translator, Antonina W. Bouis, and my editor at Knopf, Ashbel Green.

Chapter One

On November 8, 1910, people all over Russia snatched up the latest editions of newspapers reporting the death of Count Leo Tolstoy on the previous day, at 6:05 a.m. at Astapovo Station. The photographs showed perhaps the most famous writer in the world at that time: an austere, gray-bearded man of eighty-two, with high-set, very large ears and shaggy brows drawn over his piercing (some said “vulpine”) eyes.

Another world-celebrated writer, though a lesser light, Maxim Gorky, was living in exile on the Italian island of Capri and wrote when he learned of Tolstoy’s death: “This struck the heart, and I howled with hurt and longing.”¹ In a letter to a friend, Gorky exclaimed in a typically fanciful manner, “A great soul has departed, a soul that had embraced all of Russia, everything that was Russian—about whom save Tolstoy can that be said?”² The cosmopolitan modernist poet Valery Briusov stressed the writer’s universality in his memorial essay: “Tolstoy was for the entire world. His words went to Englishmen, and Frenchmen, and the Japanese, and the Buryats.”³ From Paris, the political émigré Bolshevik Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), doggedly—as only he could—insisted that Tolstoy’s “global significance as an artist and his worldwide fame as a thinker and preacher, both reflect in their own way the widespread significance of the Russian revolution.”⁴

As it happens, all three were probably right. We tend to think of Tolstoy as a cultural phenomenon of the nineteenth century, the author of War and Peace (1863–77, perhaps the greatest novel in the history of the genre) and such masterpieces as Anna Karenina (1873–77) and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1886). Yet this giant dominated both the cultural and the political life of the early twentieth century also. Briusov wasn’t exaggerating: Tolstoy combined the fame of Voltaire, the popularity of Rousseau, and the authority of Goethe; he was compared routinely to biblical prophets. In his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, two hundred kilometers south of Moscow, Tolstoy received devotees from all over the world, who flocked to hear his antigovernment and antibourgeois sermons. Gorky, in his memoirs of Tolstoy (a tour de force of twentieth-century Russian nonfiction), confessed that when he looked at him, he thought, not without envy: “That man is godlike!”

However, Tolstoy was made up of contradictions, containing “multitudes,” to use Walt Whitman’s phrase. He was simultaneously a born archaist and a natural innovator—in his life, in his writing, and in his passionate religious and political beliefs, which sometimes verged on total anarchism. Gorky noted, somewhat caustically (and in seeming contradiction to his worship of Tolstoy): “Psychologically it would be quite natural for great artists to be larger than life in their sins, as well.”⁵

Tolstoy’s works, while belonging to the apex of nineteenth-century realism, boldly went beyond its framework: another contradiction. Tolstoy rejected and mocked the modernists, but they made good use of his artistic breakthroughs. It’s a surprisingly short distance from Tolstoy’s “interior monologue” to James Joyce’s stream of consciousness. Viktor Shklovsky, the bad boy of Russian formalism, early on placed Leo Tolstoy among the avant-garde: “Tolstoy in his works, which were constructed as formally as music, used such devices as defamiliarization (calling a thing not by its usual name)” and cited his description of the institution of property through the perceptions of a horse.⁶ This “alienation technique”(Verfremdungseffekt) was later used and abused by Bertolt Brecht and other European avant-garde writers.

The publication in 1911–1912 of three shabby gray volumes came as a revelation for the Russian public: The Posthumous Fiction of L. N. Tolstoy included the short story “Father Sergius” the play The Living Corpse, in which, according to Shklovsky, Tolstoy “captured the living speech of trailing sentences” and the prophetic novella about the endless Russo-Chechen war, Khadji Murat, on which he had worked until 1906. A half century later, Shklovsky, no longer holding the radical views of his youth but still habitually spouting paradoxes, maintained that in Khadji Murat Tolstoy had been a forerunner of socialist realism (“documentary subject seen through a romantic prism”). “It is Tolstoy who is the father of socialist realism, not Gorky, as they teach you,” Shklovsky told me, still cocky at eighty-two.⁷

Since Tolstoy the writer was cast by critics as the patron saint of everything from realism to socialist realism, it comes as no surprise that politically he was variously labeled as well. Contemporaries tried to pin him down as a repentant aristocrat, or the voice of the patriarchal Russian peasantry, or a Christian anarchist, and even as a diehard revolutionary. It was all true to a point: Tolstoy preached an extreme simplicity of life and took a hard libertarian stance toward government, which he considered immoral and illegal, yet he also rejected all forms of violence. In his famous 1909 article “I Cannot Be Silent,” he protested capital punishment in Russia and did not recognize the authority of organized religion. This inevitably led the rebel count into conflict with the autocracy and the Russian Orthodox Church. Many believed that a confrontation with Tolstoy gravely weakened both institutions.

Even in April 1896, just before the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the all-powerful High Procurator of the Holy Synod, in charge of the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, denounced Tolstoy (in approximately the same indignant language that three-quarters of a century later was heaped on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn by the Soviet Politburo): “He spreads the terrible contagion of anarchy and disbelief throughout Russia…. It is obvious that he is the enemy of the Church, the enemy of all government and of all civil order. There is a proposal at the Synod to excommunicate him from the Church, in order to avoid any doubts and misunderstanding in the people, who see and hear that the intelligentsia admires Tolstoy.”⁸

So, the Holy Synod excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901; a year later he wrote to Nicholas II (calling the tsar “beloved brother”), putting forth his provocative views on the regime and the church: “Autocracy is an obsolete form of rule…. And therefore this form of rule and the Orthodoxy connected to it can be supported, as it is today, only through violence: excessive security measures, administrative exiles, executions, religious persecutions, the banning of books and newspapers, warped education, and all sorts of evil and cruel acts.”⁹

Did Tolstoy actually expect his bold address to so influence the tsar that he would “understand the evil he does”? Nicholas II simply ignored him, and the writer decided the tsar was “a pathetic, weak, and stupid” ruler. Tolstoy wanted to teach, not to advise modestly and respectfully, as ritual demanded. Nicholas II (whose advisor then was Pobedonostsev and after 1907, Grigory Rasputin) had no intention of playing pupil. Thus a dialogue did not ensue. Accordingly, Tolstoy’s model for the twentieth-century discourse between monarch and great writer, between regime and cultural hero, never took hold. It was this model that later Gorky and Solzhenitsyn—each in his own way—also tried to establish. Solzhenitsyn would depict Nicholas II with sympathy and understanding in his novel August 1914: did he perhaps imagine himself as the last tsar’s ideal interlocutor and advisor?

The shrewd Alexei Suvorin, the influential publisher of the promonarchist newspaper Novoye Vremya [New Times], wrote in his diary on May 29, 1901: “We have two tsars: Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy. Which is stronger? Nicholas II can’t do anything with Tolstoy, he can’t shake his throne, while Tolstoy is undoubtedly shaking the throne of Nicholas and his dynasty. Tolstoy is excommunicated by the Synod’s decision. Tolstoy replies, the reply is disseminated widely in manuscript form and in the foreign press. Just let anyone try to hurt Tolstoy. The whole world will raise a hue and cry, and our administration will turn tail and run.”¹⁰

Suvorin accurately described the situation, which was unprecedented for Russian society. In Tolstoy, Russia’s educated classes had a leader who wanted to dictate his solutions to the tsarist government on key social and political issues: war and peace (literally), the distribution of land, and also administrative and judicial reform. “The strength of his position,” wrote Boris Eikhenbaum, the leading Tolstoy scholar, “was that even though he opposed his era, he was still a part of it.”¹¹

It was that tremendous strength that led Lenin to his famous description of Tolstoy in 1908 as “the mirror of the Russian revolution.” For Lenin, Tolstoy was revolutionary because of his “ruthless criticism of capitalist exploitation, his exposé of government coercion and the comedy of the courts and government administration, his baring of the yawning contradictions between the growth of wealth and the growth of poverty.”¹²

Yet for Tolstoy, earthly power and influence were not enough. Even as a twenty-seven-year-old, Tolstoy came up with a new religion (he noted it in his diary), and he spent his life shaping it, step by step building his image of demigod. In his scheme of things, Christ and Buddha were mere teachers of human wisdom, alongside whom the writer’s “godlike” (in Gorky’s phrase) figure could naturally take its place.

Gorky also made the caustic observation that Tolstoy “considered Christ naïve and worthy of pity.” True, Tolstoy felt that he was actually in a better position to interpret the teachings of Christ than Christ himself. Surprisingly, this rather immodest assumption was eagerly shared in the early twentieth century by many enlightened people all over the world—from France, where Romain Rolland became an enthusiastic standard-bearer of Tolstoy’s Christian socialism, to India, where Mahatma Gandhi successfully took up Tolstoy’s concept of nonviolent resistance. In the United States, both William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, one the prosecutor and the other the defense attorney in the notorious Scopes trial in 1925, were fervent adherents of Tolstoy’s moral teachings.

Tolstoy’s fame was spread and fanned by the world media, hungry for sensation. Tolstoy, who only pretended to be a hermit in his Yasnaya Polyana and in fact liked giving interviews, manipulated the press masterfully. Consequently, never had a Russian writer enjoyed such fame abroad in his lifetime (the celebrity of Alexander Herzen and Ivan Turgenev, who had actually lived in Western Europe, was much more modest). It is telling that Herzen printed his antigovernment booklets in Europe at his own expense, while Tolstoy was endlessly reprinted throughout the world primarily because his books were international best sellers, particularly his new works on religious themes.

Even though Herzen was among the first to produce “tamizdat” (works addressed to Russian readers published first in the West) and “samizdat”(the same works distributed inside Russia illegally, in manuscript copies), Tolstoy undoubtedly took this phenomenon to a new level. His articles, appeals, and open letters, banned by the Russian censors but printed in the West, circulated everywhere almost simultaneously, and the Western attention greatly helped his reputation at home. (Solzhenitsyn’s later situation was similar.) Thus Tolstoy in effect escaped official control.

Unable to subdue him during his lifetime, the Russian government and the Orthodox hierarchy tried to hijack the writer after his death, which became a sorry spectacle when Tolstoy ran away. He had long proclaimed his desire to live according to his teaching, not as a count but as a simple peasant, and abruptly escaped from his estate and his family.

But pneumonia kept him at the small railroad station of Astapovo, which was instantly besieged by journalists and film crews, attending family and close friends (with bitter strife within this group), representatives of the tsar and church, and observers of different political leanings. The family tried to maintain the remnants of decorum in a clearly scandalous situation. The press tried to get as much out of the colossal sensation as they could get away with. And the government tried to prevent any disorder, which it feared greatly, and which the liberals would have loved to exploit.

The media naturally won out: this was one of the first examples of their newfound power in Russia. The world saw the documentary footage showing how Tolstoy’s wife was not permitted to see the dying count. Endless newspaper reports with photographs from Astapovo not only made the private death of a genius uncomfortably public but also revealed the embarrassingly ugly squabble over his will and testament.

Unused to dealing with modern media, the government and the Holy Synod made one clumsy mistake after another. A monk was sent to Tolstoy to persuade him to reconcile himself with the official church. Tolstoy had only to say two words: “I repent.” The attempt failed. Astapovo was filled with police agents who sent long coded telegrams to their higher-ups about the latest contretemps and the comings and goings of the journalists and other suspicious characters.

The police tried to contain Tolstoy’s funeral in Yasnaya Polyana by sharply limiting access to the public from St. Petersburg and Moscow and to control the memorial gatherings all over the country, which in many cases took on markedly oppositionist political overtones. Demonstrators on Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg carried posters demanding, in the spirit of Tolstoy’s teaching, the repeal of the death penalty. Suvorin’s Novoye Vremya reported that these “disorders” were provoked by people from the Caucasus and by the Jewish press: “Up to their eyes in dirty politicking, which Tolstoy had abhorred, they turned the memory of the wise man into an excuse for banal banner waving.”¹³ Thus in 1910 the idea of the undue influence of the Jewish media on Russia’s domestic policies was already promoted, to be resurrected in the late twentieth century. Typically, the alarm was voiced by the camp of the conservative press, which was trying to hang on to its overwhelming political and economic influence.

Mikhail Menshikov, an influential columnist of Novoye Vremya, claimed that the death penalty was one of the foundations of true Christian civilization, and the Jews were merely using Tolstoy’s protests against it in order “to disarm the government.” In turn, the liberal journalists (many of whom were Jewish) pointed at the government and the church as the real conspirators in this story. The noisy polemics turned Tolstoy’s funeral into one of the biggest media circuses of the first decade of the twentieth century.

Was this what the ironic Anton Chekhov had in mind long before Tolstoy’s death in a conversation with Ivan Bunin (who was to be the first Russian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature)? “Once Tolstoy dies, everything will go to hell!”¹⁴ Tolstoy, however, outlived the reclusive Chekhov by over six years, and Chekhov’s death and funeral in June 1904 were a vivid contrast to the spectacle of Tolstoy’s farewell. In Bunin’s opinion, Tolstoy’s grave drew “people alien to him, admiring only his criticism of the church and government and who experienced even happiness at his funeral: that showy ecstasy that always overwhelms the ‘progressive’ crowd at all the ‘civic’ funerals.”¹⁵

Chekhov’s funeral couldn’t have been more different. The only great Russian writer who arguably made no effort to inflate his own image, he died in Badenweiler, a small German resort, at forty-four, of tuberculosis that had been eating away at him for fifteen years. His face, as Bunin sadly noted, had turned yellow and wrinkled like that of a very old Mongol. The coffin was brought from Germany to St. Petersburg in a railroad car labeled in big letters, to the horror of those meeting the body, “For Oysters.” The writer’s widow, Olga Knipper, the famous actress of the Moscow Art Theater, was dismayed that only fifteen or so people had come to the train station. The absurdity of it all belonged in a Chekhov short story.

While Chekhov’s funeral at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow was well attended, it nonetheless depressed Gorky, who lamented to another writer friend, Leonid Andreyev: “I am all splattered by the gray mud of speeches, inscriptions on wreaths, newspaper articles, and various conversations. Involuntarily thinking of my own death, I imagine the ideal funeral in this way: a dray cart carries my coffin and it is followed by one indifferent patrolman. A writer in Russia cannot be buried in a better, more noble, more decent way.”¹⁶

If only Gorky could have known how “indecent” his own funeral in 1936 would be by the standards he had defined in 1904: a crowd of one hundred thousand people on Red Square, pompous speeches by Soviet leaders, with police and army on guard. By the end of his life Gorky had been proclaimed by Joseph Stalin to be “the great humanist” and fighter for “all progressive humanity.” Chekhov had been more concerned with the happiness of the individual; in the opinion of many people, he did not fight for anything. He simply sang the mundane—that was how he was perceived by critics and readers. They did not like the fact that Chekhov, unlike Tolstoy (and later Gorky and Solzhenitsyn), did not aspire to be a leader or teacher of life. Contrary to the Russian cultural tradition, he was not a prophet, or a yurodivy (holy fool), or dissident. That is why Chekhov became so popular on the stages of Europe and the United States. The West is mistaken when it takes Chekhov for a typical Russian writer.

Although he admired Tolstoy greatly, Chekhov nevertheless felt strongly that prophecy was not the writer’s job. His alienation reflected the realities of the new Russia, moving from the peasant commune to a developed capitalist society. The “peasant” anarchist Tolstoy wrathfully denounced that path. His ideas, populist and quasi-Christian (with strong Buddhist overtones), had not only formed the consciousness of the modern Russian intelligentsia but had also created an influential paradigm for the behavior of the politically astute writer in general. When Russia’s movement toward a Westernized market-based society was interrupted by the revolution of 1917, the Tolstoy model reigned supreme for a long time: in the Soviet era art was seen as a direct tool for improving human nature, and the didactic element in culture came to the forefront. (See Shklovsky’s paradoxical idea of Tolstoy as precursor of socialist realism.) In that sense, Chekhov was an opponent of Tolstoy and his followers in life and art. Chekhov’s ideology was diffused in the artistic fabric of his work and it is very difficult to separate it out.

This does not mean that Chekhov had no ideals at all, as both liberal and conservative commentators of the day had charged. But those ideals were secular, sober, and incomparably more pragmatic than the views of Tolstoy. Tolstoy was rightly compared to a prophet: his moral sermon was passionate and unambivalent. “Do not kill,” “Do not eat meat,” “Abstain from sex,” “Live according to the Bible,” Tolstoy admonished. Many people obeyed, hoping to make their lives better. But Chekhov back in 1894 wrote to Suvorin: “Tolstoy’s philosophy affected me strongly and influenced me for six or seven years…. Now something within me protests; thrift and fairness tell me that there is more love of mankind in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism.”¹⁷

After Chekhov’s death, Tolstoy compared Chekhov’s style to the Impressionists: “You watch a man seemingly smear whatever paints come to hand without any selection and the strokes seem to have no relationship to each other. But you step back a bit and look, and the whole forms a complete impression.”¹⁸ This admiration for Chekhov’s innovation extended only to his prose; as Tolstoy himself told Chekhov: “I can’t stand your plays. Shakespeare wrote badly, and you’re even worse!”¹⁹

This may appear bizarre now, but Tolstoy was not alone in his dislike of Chekhov the playwright; Gorky, Bunin, and many critics at the beginning of the century had serious reservations about his work. The premiere in 1896 at the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg of Chekhov’s first mature play, The Seagull, was a disaster with a squall of hostile reviews, like the one in Peterburgskii Listok: “This is a very badly conceived and clumsily crafted play, with an extremely strange content, or rather, with no content at all. This is a muddle in poor dramatic form.”²⁰

It is not clear what would have happened to Chekhov the playwright if a boldly innovative theatrical organization had not sprung up in Russia. It revolutionized the art of the stage not only in Russia but throughout the world. The Seagull was produced again in 1898 by the recently formed Moscow Art Theater (MAT). Surprisingly, this enterprise was launched by a mediocre playwright, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and an amateur actor, Konstantin Alekseyev-Stanislavsky. These unlikely candidates intended to reform the Russian theater radically; they believed it (correctly) to be in shambles. Routine reigned on the stage then—in direction, which was rudimentary, in wooden acting, and in incongruous scenery.

For these Russian theatrical revolutionaries (Nemirovich-Danchenko was an aristocrat, Stanislavsky from a wealthy merchant family) the guiding star was Chekhov’s modern sensibility, which the traditional stage could neither understand nor accept. It is not surprising that the old guard saw it all as a muddle: after all, Chekhov had totally rejected the concept of the “well-made play,” with its intricate plot twists, over-long monologues and artificial dialogues resembling opera duets. A Chekhov play is usually put together from bits of detached phrases and the action has been moved to the subtext. In the finale of The Seagull, the suicide of one of the characters is introduced this way: “A vial of ether has exploded.” In Uncle Vanya the line “Ah, it must be very hot in that Africa—a terrible thing” summarizes the tragic ending of an entire life. People on the stage collide and go their separate ways like microbes under the microscope of a doctor, which Chekhov was by training.

Chekhov’s modern ideology was inculcated into the social discourse primarily from the stage of the MAT. This is how the Symbolist poet Alexander Blok described a MAT production of a Chekhov play in a letter to his mother: “It is a corner of the great Russian art, one of the accidentally preserved, miraculously unsullied corners of my vile, filthy, stupid, and bloody motherland.”²¹ Another poet, Osip Mandelstam, would write later, somewhat ironically: “The Art Theater is the child of the Russian intelligentsia, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone…. From childhood I recall the reverent atmosphere that surrounded the theater. Going to the Art Theater for a member of the intelligentsia meant practically taking communion, going to church.”²²

It is possible that Anna Akhmatova’s ironic attitude toward both MAT and Chekhov, which so shocked me when we met in 1965, came from Mandelstam. “Chekhov is not compatible with poetry,” said Akhmatova. Her anti-Chekhov stance seemed paradoxical, but it reflected Akhmatova’s aversion to the cultural intelligentsia mainstream of her youth, which she felt was strongly influenced by MAT and Chekhov.

The very concept of intelligentsia is specifically Russian. It implies not only an educated person—scientists, scholars, writers, journalists, lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers, and college students—but a certain liberal outlook. Psychologically, the intelligent (with a hard G), unlike the white-collar worker, had a civic conscience, valued freedom, and sought to liberate the lower classes.

The traditional Russian perception is that the intelligent was first and foremost an altruist serving the ideals of good and justice. This matched MAT’s program, which brought together aesthetics and ethics for the first time in Russia on such a high artistic level on the stage. MAT became a kind of club for the intelligentsia.

Ironically, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, like Chekhov, abhorred politics. But politics caught up with them, forcing its way into their hothouse of high art. The audiences stayed on after premieres for a lecture by a critic on the play. After the lecture, lively topical discussions continued outside the theater. Young people debated with particular passion.

“People with a deep spiritual wound go to the theater,” wrote a reviewer in 1905, speaking primarily of MAT. “The theater is the only place where a Russian citizen feels like a citizen, where he meets with others like himself and involves himself in the formation of public opinion.”²³ Andreyev described people leaving MAT after a performance of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters with the sense that they had to seek a way out of the “black mist” of life that surrounded them. They perceived the play that seemed to have no point or idea as an epitaph for an era.

Chekhov literally created a new audience. After The Seagull, all the premieres of his new plays at MAT—Uncle Vanya (1899), The Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904)—became milestones not only in the country’s public life but in the personal lives of many viewers as well. It was reflected in the enormous number of letters written to MAT, containing gratitude, personal confessions, and requests for advice. Replying to one of these sincere epistles, Stanislavsky sermonized in 1901, “Do you know why I abandoned all my personal affairs and took up the theater? Because the theater is the most powerful pulpit, more powerful in its influence than books or the press. This pulpit fell into the hands of the rabble of humanity, and they turned it into a place of depravity…. Mytask is to explain to the modern generation, to the best of my ability, that the actor is a prophet of beauty and truth.”²⁴

Chekhov didn’t take these self-aggrandizing declarations of Stanislavsky’s too seriously. Although many people (including Bunin, who admired and envied him) believed that he owed his fame to MAT, Chekhov actually despised actors, calling them vainglorious and seventy-five years behind the rest of Russian society. He feared lofty sentiments, and sarcastically told Bunin, who had compared his work to poetry, that poets were those who mindlessly use words like “silvery vista” and “chord” and slogans like “forward, ye people, to battle darkness!” One should sit down to write, Chekhov said, only when one felt as cold as ice.

This outward coldness, unusual for Russian literature, unnerved all the political camps. The influential liberal guru Nikolai Mikhailovsky handed down his infamous verdict this way: “Mister Chekhov writes away in cold blood and the reader reads along in cold blood,” adding that for Chekhov “it’s all the same—be it a man or his shadow, a bell or a suicide.” Chekhov responded irritably, comparing critics to the gadflies that keep horses from plowing: “I’ve been reading criticism of my stories for twenty-five years, and I can’t recall a single valuable suggestion, I never heard any good advice. However, once the critic Skabichevsky made an impression on me, predicting that I would die in a drunken stupor under a fence.”²⁵

The Russian Marxists, flexing their muscles at that time, had the most bones to pick with Chekhov. It must be noted that their leader, Lenin, who was no aficionado of contemporary literature, made an exception for Chekhov and Tolstoy. (Chekhov was also a favorite of the young Stalin.) But Lenin’s friend, Vaslav Vorovsky, a leading Marxist critic, described the world of Chekhov’s plays as “a Philistine swamp, where frogs croak smugly and fat ducks swim officiously,” a world of “star-crossed ‘sisters,’ miserable ‘seagulls,’ wretched owners of ‘cherry orchards,’ and there are so many of them, and they are all oh so gloomy, exhausted by petty suffering.”²⁶

For the Marxist Vorovsky, Chekhov was a “pessimist and objectivist.” He championed another writer—the young Alexei Peshkov, who burst onto the Russian literary scene in 1892 under the pseudonym Maxim Gorky. According to Vorovsky, “while the wan, faded Chekhovian types were limping along on the surface of life…in those sad days, Gorky spoke out as the daring herald of the brave.”²⁷

By the age of twenty-five, Gorky had led a turbulent life. If his own account is to be believed, he had worked many odd jobs, as a laborer, stevedore, and baker, and had traveled around Russia by foot. He was the first to present a new hero in Russian literature—the vividly depicted tramp, the “déclassé element”—and this brought him enormous fame. His first book became a best seller, his name was on everyone’s lips, his photographs in all the newspapers, and he could not walk down the street unaccosted by fans. Highbrow commentators were flabbergasted: “Neither Turgenev, nor Count Tolstoy at the time of War and Peace, nor Dostoevsky ever had such popularity.”

Gorky’s impact was similar in Europe and America; Stefan Zweig confirmed that Gorky’s works literally stunned Western readers at the start of the century. The shock was political, of course. While Dostoevsky and Tolstoy spoke of the coming violent Russian Revolution as a dangerous disease, Gorky’s was the first Russian voice to welcome it unconditionally with no sense of “mystical horror before the future,” as Zweig put it.

The relationship between Gorky and Chekhov, eight years his senior, developed in a rather curious way. They first met in March 1899, both tall and with deep voices, but otherwise quite different: Chekhov slender, with a neat beard, easy movements, always tastefully dressed, an ironic gaze above his pince-nez; Gorky stooped, red-haired with a yellow mustache, a duckbill nose (Tolstoy told Chekhov that “only the miserable and the angry have noses like that”), always deliberately clothed in a “simple fellow” manner, waving his arms about like a windmill.

At first Gorky was unreservedly ecstatic about Chekhov, who responded sympathetically; in a letter to a woman friend he wrote, “Gorky, I believe, is a real talent, his brushes and paints are real, but it’s untrammeled, swashbuckling talent.” He also wrote to her, “In appearance, he’s a tramp, but inside he’s a rather elegant man.”²⁸ Chekhov defended Gorky publicly in a cause célèbre now known as the Academy Incident.

It happened in 1902, when Gorky at the age of thirty-four was elected honorary academician in the category of belles lettres of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (the president was Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, an accomplished poet). When Nicholas II learned of the selection, he was infuriated. Even sympathetic historians point out the fateful combustion of lack of will and stubbornness in the tsar’s character. His cultural tastes were as unassuming and eclectic as that of a provincial high school teacher: he was simultaneously an admirer of Chekhov, the tabloid Novoye Vremya, the popular humor magazine Satirikon, and the quasi-folkloric art of the famous singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya, who would die in 1940 in a French prison, arrested as a Bolshevik spy. Regarding Gorky, Nicholas informed the minister of public education: “Neither Gorky’s age nor his slim works present sufficient cause for his election to such an esteemed title…. I am deeply incensed by all this and order you to announce that on my command Gorky’s election is annuled.”²⁹

The Academy obeyed slavishly, outraging the press. Chekhov, who had been made an honorary academician two years earlier, resigned in protest, thereby fanning the scandal. But in the meantime, offstage, relations between Chekhov and Gorky were deteriorating. A confrontation was brewing, and it was eventually played out by proxy, through their wives.

The French suggest cherchez la femme as the source of any conflict. Look for the politics, as well. Political, artistic, and personal relations often intertwine so that it is impossible to find where one ends and another begins. In 1900, MAT brought its production of Uncle Vanya to Yalta, the Black Sea resort where Chekhov was recuperating. Gorky was there, too, having fled from his wife. Chekhov kept teaching Gorky how to pick up women, considering himself, not without reason, to be an expert. Perhaps in order to goad Gorky, who was hesitating, Chekhov began courting two leading actresses of MAT at once—Maria Andreyeva and Olga Knipper. Both were striking, larger-than-life beauties and intellectuals, although Andreyeva was married with two children and Knipper was free. Perhaps this mattered most for Chekhov: he married Knipper the following year. Gorky took Andreyeva, and she became his common-law wife in 1903.

Gorky had become a famous playwright by then. He began writing plays in 1901, urged on by Stanislavsky, as well as by Chekhov, who, however, was underwhelmed by Gorky’s first attempt, The Smug Citizens, reproaching the author for aesthetic archaism—“an irreparable flaw, like red hair in a redhead.” Gorky, in a letter to a friend, had a rather different view of his debut: “I, your Alyoshka, scored honorably on my preliminary test for title of playwright. (Watch out, William Shakespeare!)”³⁰

The Smug Citizens, shown by the Moscow Art Theater in 1902, was not a success, even though publicity from the Academy Incident helped. (The play became popular much later, when the Soviet director Georgy Tovstonogov presented it in his Leningrad theater in 1966 with the incomparable Yevgeny Lebedev as the lead; I was lucky to see this legendary production.)

Undeterred, Gorky gave his second play to MAT as well, and this time he hit the jackpot. Originally titled At the Bottom of Life in Russian and shortened at Nemirovich-Danchenko’s suggestion to At the Bottom (known in English as The Lower Depths), the play first brought to the Russian stage the castoffs of society—thieves, prostitutes, and tramps. Now it is clear that it is Gorky’s best play (perhaps his best work) and a masterpiece of world twentieth-century drama. But critics were outraged after the premiere: “You feel as if you have been dunked forcibly in a cesspit!…Gorky plucks on the lowest and vilest strings of the human heart”³¹ “Too much cruelty, inhumanity, groaning, and curses…. Does life ever look like this?”³²

The public, however, loved The Lower Depths, applauding such catchphrases as “Lies are the religion of slaves and masters!” and “The truth is the God of a free man!” The character played by the great Ivan Moskvin, the sly wanderer Luka, was deemed controversial: a philosopher who explains and accepts everything. (The poet Vladislav Khodasevich, who knew Gorky well, later suggested that Luka’s philosophy in many ways reflected Gorky’s personal convictions.) The play was performed fifty times to standing-room-only audiences in just a few months (December 1902–April 1903).

Chekhov, who had considered himself the leading contemporary author of the Art Theater and who had frankly not expected such adroitness from Gorky, grew worried and wrote to Knipper: “I was so pessimistic about Lower Depths this summer, and look what success!” She consoled her husband by telling him that Stanislavsky was “dreaming of Cherry Orchard and said just yesterday that even though Depths was a success, his heart was not in it. It’s lies, he says.”³³ Stanislavsky, who always felt that political engagement and art “were incompatible, one excludes the other,” was probably bothered by the openly political tone of Gorky’s triumph. A theater revolutionary, in life Stanislavsky was extremely conservative and cautious, which came in good stead in future complications, particularly in his dealings with Stalin in the Soviet era.

A rift—political, cultural, and personal—began between the two playwrights, threatening to break up MAT. Chekhov and Gorky were the protagonists, but remained in the shadows, while their wives, Knipper and Andreyeva, MAT’s stars, acted it out, each trying to pull the theater in her husband’s direction. In a letter to Chekhov on February 16, 1903, Nemirovich-Danchenko informed him that a disgusting “crack, like the ones in walls, needing some repair,” had formed in MAT and it is, alas, “growing slowly.”³⁴ Clever Nemirovich-Danchenko told Chekhov (as if the writer didn’t already know from his own wife) that two hostile camps had formed at MAT: in one were Stanislavsky with Nemirovich-Danchenko and Knipper, in the other, Andreyeva and Savva Morozov, the Moscow merchant and patron of the arts who was unrequitedly in love with Gorky’s wife.

The Moscow merchant class, long ridiculed by the liberal press for its wealth and its bigoted retrograde views, had by the start of the twentieth century nurtured a number of extraordinary figures who mightily increased Russia’s cultural prestige. An example was set in the late nineteenth century by Pavel Tretyakov, who put together the largest collection of Russian art (his younger brother, Sergei, collected French artists almost exclusively, from Géricault to Courbet). Following Sergei Tretyakov’s cosmopolitan line, the Moscow merchants Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin bought the avant-garde works of the young Picasso and Matisse, which now are the pride (and source of solid income through loans for exhibitions) of Russia’s major museums.

Matisse later said of Shchukin that he always picked his best works. Sometimes Matisse was reluctant to part with a good painting and he would say to Shchukin, “This didn’t come off, let me show you something else.” Shchukin would look at the canvases long and hard and end up by declaring, “I’ll take the one that didn’t come off.”³⁵

Many Moscow merchants were eccentric, but even in their midst, Savva Morozov (of the Morozov clan) stood out. The successful boss of family-owned pig-iron smelters and chemical plants with several thousand employees, he was also one of the main sponsors of the Russian Social-Democrats, namely, their most radical part, the Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin.

Morozov was also a generous patron of the arts; he saved MAT from bankruptcy. The brand-new building for MAT, designed by the Art Nouveau architect Fedor Shekhtel with a revolving stage, rare then even in the West, and state-of-the-art lighting equipment, was built with his money and personal supervision in Kamergersky Pereulok, where it remains one of the architectural landmarks of Moscow.

Morozov became the de facto executive director of MAT. The new triumvirate running the famed theater struck a curious picture: the elegant giant of a man Stanislavsky, with gray hair, demonic black eyebrows, and childlike eyes; the stocky, confident, shrewd Nemirovich-Danchenko, the typical Moscow gentleman with well-tended beard; and with them the nervous, grimacing, and extremely unattractive Morozov, with a dark red, Tatar-like face and a crew cut on his round head.

With his newfound power at the theater, Morozov began giving central roles to his goddess Andreyeva, cutting out MAT’s other star, Knipper. Naturally, Gorky was delighted and wrote to Chekhov: “When I see Morozov backstage, covered in dust and worrying about the success of the play, I am prepared to forgive him all his factories (a forgiveness he does not need)—I like him because he loves the theater altruistically.”³⁶ Chekhov, upset and informed by his wife that Morozov also loved Andreyeva altruistically but did not care too much for Knipper, tried to keep the patron away from the stage. “He should not be permitted to get too close to the essence of the work. He can judge acting, plays, and actors as a member of the audience, not as the boss or director.”³⁷

Few people knew that Andreyeva (before MAT she was married to a high tsarist official) had become a committed Marxist. She financed the Bolshevik press; Lenin gave her the party nickname “Phenomenon.” Only she could dare let a Bolshevik leader, Nikolai Bauman, hide in her closet while she entertained the Moscow chief of police in the next room. Andreyeva was a welcome guest at the palace of Grand Duke Sergei, whose wife (sister of the empress) painted her portrait, never suspecting her subject was the financial agent of the Bolshevik Party. Andreyeva made both Morozov and Gorky sponsors of the party, introducing them to Lenin.

For the radically inclined Gorky and Andreyeva, their recent idol Chekhov was no longer revolutionary enough. In 1903 when he read The Cherry Orchard, Gorky, still smarting from Chekhov’s remark two years earlier about his aesthetic backwardness, disparaged the play: “In reading, it does not impress me as a major work. There isn’t a single new word.”³⁸

Chekhov himself was not averse to fame and popularity, and he was worried over The Cherry Orchard. He fretted that the “progressive” audience, typical of MAT, would reject the play as apolitical, and therefore old-fashioned. He was not comforted in the least by the raptures of Stanislavsky, who insisted that he had wept like a woman over the play. Stanislavsky’s tears, as Chekhov knew too well, did not mean much, since the director, who admitted that he did not understand contemporary literature anyway, considered The Cherry Orchard a tragedy, while Chekhov described it as a comedy, even a farce.

Chekhov’s apprehensions came to pass. The critics saw nothing in the MAT production, bathed in elegiac tones, but the author’s deep pessimism. One wrote: “If this theater needs a motto for the portal, I would recommend the inscription from a medieval bell: Vivos voco, mortuos plango [I hail the living, mourn the dead]…Mortuos plango: Anton Chekhov. Vivos voco: Maxim Gorky.”³⁹

Chekhov blamed Stanislavsky and MAT for the unsuccessful production of his last play; he died soon afterward. Andreyeva felt that she and Gorky were winning. She had already fought with Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, which is documented in the latter’s rather harsh letter to her (February 1902), in which he calls her the nastiest word in his vocabulary: “ham.” “I hate the ham actor in you (don’t be mad)…. You start telling lies, you stop being kind and intelligent, you become abrasive, tactless, insincere on stage and in life.”⁴⁰

Back then, in 1902, Andreyeva pretended not to take offense. But in 1904, she left MAT, telling Stanislavsky in parting, “I have stopped respecting the work of the Art Theater.” Naturally, Gorky broke off relations with MAT, too. The worst blow for the theater was Morozov’s announcement that he was quitting the directorship of MAT and stopping his financial support. Stanislavsky was horrified: the theater had suddenly lost two of its major authors, Chekhov and Gorky, a leading actress, and its main sponsor.

Then came the sensational news that Morozov was planning a new theater in St. Petersburg especially for Andreyeva, even more fabulous than the one he built for MAT. The press had a field day, relishing the story that the new enterprise would be a dangerous competitor for MAT, opening in the fall of 1905 with a sensational new play by Gorky. Stanislavsky wrote to his confidant: “Someone is spreading rumors in Moscow and the papers that we have a schism, that everything is collapsing, that I am leaving the Art Theater.”⁴¹

It all ended literally with a bang. On May 13, 1905, Savva Morozov shot himself in his hotel room in Nice. To aim accurately, he circled the heart on his chest with a marking pencil. Nervous breakdowns were not unusual in the Morozov family, but the official version of suicide after a severe depression is now considered suspect. Some suggest the Bolsheviks were involved, and Morozov’s family hinted that it was a murder: after all, Morozov had insured his life for one hundred thousand rubles (an enormous sum in those days), and he gave the bearer policy to Andreyeva, who turned the money over to the Bolsheviks immediately after his death.

As it happens, Morozov’s sudden death saved MAT. Without a sponsor, the planned competing theater in St. Petersburg did not materialize, Andreyeva quietly returned to MAT, and even Gorky, who had scornfully declared that he could not possibly give his new play to the Art Theater, reconsidered. His drama Children of the Sun premiered on October 24, 1904, at MAT, and it is remembered for the mayhem on the opening night.

At the time, the situation in Moscow, as elsewhere in Russia, was extremely tense. In 1904, Nicholas II declared war on Japan, a war intended to be brief and victorious but which ended eighteen months later in a humiliating defeat. Then on Sunday, January 9, 1905, a demonstration of thousands of workers who’d gone to the tsar’s palace with a petition of grievances ended when the army and police opened fire and killed many hundreds.

After that Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg, mass strikes by workers in Moscow and other cities turned into street battles with police and soldiers. Under pressure of his advisors, the tsar reluctantly signed a manifesto on October 17, 1905, granting constitutional rights—freedom of speech, assembly, and political parties—and announced the creation of the first elective Russian parliament, the Duma.

The manifesto did not defuse the situation. The next day, October 18, Bauman, the Bolshevik who had hidden from the police at the apartment of the actress Andreyeva and was now a leader of the rebellion, was killed by a member of the Black Hundred, an ultranationalist right-wing populist organization. His funeral on October 20 turned into a mass demonstration in Moscow, the first in the city’s history. Gorky, who attended with Andreyeva, maintained that several hundred thousand people, “all of Moscow,” took part in the procession: workers, students, intellectuals, actors, and performers, including Stanislavsky, and the famous bass Fedor Chaliapin. There were more than one hundred fifty wreaths, including one from Gorky and Andreyeva: “To a fallen comrade.” When the demonstrators began to disperse, they were attacked by Cossacks and a mob of supporters of the tsar.

The last act of Gorky’s Children of the Sun at MAT depicted a riot: an infuriated crowd burst on stage, a shot was heard, and the hero, played by audience darling Vassily Kachalov, fell. Stanislavsky apparently had not expected this bit of stagecraft to be the equivalent of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. The audience at the premiere was edgy: they feared all kinds of provocations and even an attempt on the life of the author. The mob scene and shot seemed too real to the spectators, who perceived it as an attack by armed thugs on the actors. As Kachalov recalled: “The noise was incredible. Women had hysterics. Part of the public rushed to the stage, apparently in order to defend us. Others fled to safety. Some rushed to the coatroom, to get guns from their coat pockets. Some shouted: ‘Curtain!’”⁴²

The performance had to be interrupted. This may have been the first time in the history of Russian theater that art and politics became so intertwined that the audience could not tell where one ended and the other began.

Most of the Russian cultural elite was involved one way or another in the revolutionary tumult of 1905, and positions—as always in Russia—were quickly polarized. The poet Zinaida Hippius complained in her article “Choice of Sack” that Russia’s cultural figures were “divided in half and tied up in two sacks, one labeled ‘conservatives,’ the other, ‘liberals.’”⁴³ As soon as one enters the public arena and opens one’s mouth, Hippius grumbled, one is instantly thrown into one of the sacks. There is no way out.

Confrontation was not avoided even in music, traditionally the most apolitical of all cultural endeavors. The controversy centered on the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who was Russia’s most influential musician after Tchaikovsky’s death in 1893.

At the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where Rimsky-Korsakov was an esteemed professor, a deadlock developed after Bloody Sunday. A student in the military band boasted that he had participated in the shooting of the workers. Other students were outraged and demanded his expulsion. The administration balked. When Rimsky-Korsakov, whose political views had taken on a “bright-red shade,” as he put it, supported the student demands, the composer was fired from the staff.

This hasty step by the supervising officials once again showed the political shortsightedness typical of Russian cultural bureaucrats. The firing of Rimsky-Korsakov quickly became a newspaper scandal and outraged the public: the composer received piles of letters and telegrams of support from all over the country, even from people who had not heard of him before that. Peasants collected money to aid “the musician who suffered for the people.” Rimsky-Korsakov became a national hero.

The influential St. Petersburg newspaper Novosti, in an article sarcastically headlined “How We Support Talent,” added a composer’s name for the first time in Russian history to a list of political victims of the tsarist regime. “We drove Pushkin to a suicidal duel. We sent Lermontov to face bullets. We sentenced Dostoevsky to hard labor. We buried Chernyshevsky alive in a polar grave. We exiled one of our greatest minds, Herzen. We expatriated Turgenev. We excommunicated and denounced Tolstoy. We expelled Rimsky-Korsakov from the conservatory.”⁴⁴

The culmination of the confrontation with the regime came with the St. Petersburg premiere of Rimsky-Korsakov’s one-act opera Kashchei the Immortal, composed in 1902. It was an obvious political allegory, in which Kashchei, the evil sorcerer of Russian folk tales, is vanquished by the power of love. The musical fairy tale was a genre in which Rimsky-Korsakov, a master of national idiom and opulent orchestral writing, had no peers. But Kashchei was an unusual experiment for him, where the composer, known for his dislike of the innovations of Debussy and Richard Strauss, unexpectedly embraced musical modernism, adding strange harmonies and impressionistic colors, so strong were his political emotions.

The production of Kashchei, performed on March 27, 1905, by the students of the same conservatory from which the composer had been fired, turned into an event that was described by a newspaper as “an unprecedented, colossal, overwhelming public demonstration. The beloved artist was blanketed by flowers, greens, bouquets.”⁴⁵ The authorities acted foolishly here, too. When shouts from the audience called “Down with autocracy!” the police lowered the fire curtain with such alacrity that it almost squashed sixty-one-year-old Rimsky-Korsakov, who was onstage taking his bows. On orders from the governor general of St. Petersburg, Dmitri Trepov (who would soon order the troops suppressing riots: “No warning shots and don’t be stingy with the bullets!”), the audience was chased out of the hall. No wonder that twenty-three-year-old Igor Stravinsky, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, wrote to his teacher’s son in 1905 with uncharacteristic radical fire: “Damned kingdom of mental hooligans and obscurantism! The Devil take them!”⁴⁶ and went on in unprintable language.

Stravinsky’s outburst reflected a swiftly expanding gap between the Russian intelligentsia and the autocracy. Nicholas II was losing his credibility. This was an unstoppable development influenced also by cultural giants such as Tolstoy, Chekhov with MAT, Gorky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, each in his way and degree. The Red Wheel, to use Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor, started to roll.

Chapter Two

The dizzying events of 1905, and in particular the tsar’s manifesto of October 17 granting constitutional freedoms, which encouraged liberals, also brought into the political arena powerful conservative forces that came to be known as the Black Hundred. The term applied to the members of the Union of the Russian People, a party on the extreme right that existed from November 1905 until the revolution of February 1917. In a broader sense, it was henceforth used for all proponents of a rigidly conservative and xenophobic line in Russian public and cultural life.

Over the years, the term “Black Hundred” became strongly pejorative, which is why leading conservatives like Solzhenitsyn disliked it. But the original Black Hundred was proud of it. One of the founders of the movement, Vladimir Gringmut, in his 1906 article “Manual for the Monarchist Black Hundred,” explained, “The enemies of autocracy use the term ‘Black Hundred’ for the simple, black [in Russian, the word also means illiterate, unenlightened] Russian people who during the armed revolt of 1905 stood up to defend the sovereign Tsar. Is it an honorable name, ‘black hundred’? Yes, very honorable.”¹ Vadim Kozhinov, a leading neoconservative of the late twentieth century, also considered the term appropriate.

According to Kozhinov, the Black Hundred was an “extremist monarchist” movement, which led an uncompromising battle with revolution. Russian Jews, in the views of the Black Hundred, played a disproportionately active or even leading role in the revolutionary movement. This was formulated succinctly by the monarchist Vassily Shulgin: “For me the ‘Jewish preponderance’ in the Russian intelligentsia class was clear at the turn of the century. The Jews have taken over, besides the universities, the press and through it, control over the intellectual life of the country. The result of this preponderance was the power and virulence of the ‘liberation movement’ of 1905, of which the Jews were the backbone.”² In the opinion of Shulgin and other ultraconservatives, by 1905 “Jews had taken over political Russia…. The brains of the nation (except for the government and government circles) were in Jewish hands.”³

The essayist and philosopher Vassily Rozanov, perhaps the most brilliant and most controversial exponent of Russian antiliberal thought, a figure some find attractive and repellent simultaneously, had a somewhat different opinion of the matter. “Kikes, madness, enthusiasm, and the holy purity of Russian boys and girls—that is what wove our revolution, which carried the red banner down Nevsky Prospect the day after the manifesto of October 17 was proclaimed.”⁴

Rozanov cut an eccentric figure. Physically quite unattractive (red hair sticking out in all directions, rotted black teeth, mumbled speech with spittle flying), he exaggerated that ugliness in his frank autobiographical writings. He started out his literary career with a thick philosophical treatise of more than seven hundred pages, which he published at his own expense and which went unnoticed. Rozanov gradually developed a quasi-Nietzschean aphoristic style, never seen before in Russian literature.

Ideologically Rozanov was a committed proponent of monarchy and a devout Orthodox Christian. But readers of his best books in the aphoristic genre—Solitaria (1912), Fallen Leaves (1913 and 1915), and Apocalypse of Our Times (1917–1918)—easily fall under Rozanov’s spell regardless of their own ideology. The Soviet dissident Andrei Sinyavsky, for whom Rozanov was one of the most important writers, justly noted that Fallen Leaves was not simply a book title but a definition of a genre. Or as Rozanov himself put it, “The wind blows at midnight and carries leaves…. Life in swift-flowing time tears off from the soul our exclamations, sighs, half-thoughts, half-feelings.”

Rozanov was very proud of his innovative literary manner. For all the profundity and perceptiveness of his remarks on literature or religion, it sometimes seems that stylistic originality was more important to him than his ideas. “Not every thought can be written down, only if it is musical.” Because he willfully published articles pro and contra the revolution, in support of the monarchy and criticizing it, anti-Semitic pieces and Judophilic ones, Rozanov was labeled unprincipled. He shot back, “Isn’t there one hundredth of truth in revolution? And a hundredth in Black Hundred?…So, you should all bow down to Rozanov for, let’s say, ‘cracking the eggs’ of various hens—geese, ducks, sparrows—constitutional democrats, Black Hundred, revolutionaries—and then dropping them on a single ‘frying pan,’ so that you can no longer distinguish ‘right’ and ‘left,’ ‘black’ and ‘white.’”⁵

For Rozanov perhaps the central theme was the connection between God and sex. He spoke and wrote about it with disarming frankness, which was shocking in those days (his book Solitaria was banned for a while as pornographic). Rozanov’s interest in the subject was typical of the Russian intellectual elite of the early twentieth century. One of the seminal thinkers of the period, Nikolai Berdyaev, categorized himself as “a kind of erotic philosopher.”

The “sex problem” was a dominant topic in the influential intellectual salon of the St. Petersburg writer and philosopher Dmitri Merezhkovsky and his wife, the poet Zinaida Hippius, a red-haired beauty with the eyes of a mermaid. As Berdyaev noted, “an unhealthy mystical sensuality, which had not existed previously in Russia, was everywhere.”

This erotic-religious obsession crystallized into a notorious incident in St. Petersburg. On May 1, 1905, a group gathered at the apartment of the decadent poet Nikolai Minsky, including Berdyaev, the influential Symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov, the writer Alexei Remizov (all with their wives), Rozanov, Fedor Sologub, soon to be celebrated for his novel, Petty Demon, and a certain musician, as an eyewitness recorded, “a blond Jew, handsome, unbaptized.” They dimmed the lights and twirled in a dervish-like dance in a mock Dionysian mystery. Then they symbolically crucified the musician, who had volunteered for the part.

The point of the gathering was to perform a blood sacrifice. Ivanov and his wife, Lydia Zinovyeva-Annibal, dressed in red chitons with sleeves rolled up (“just like an executioner,” that eyewitness put it) cut the musician’s wrist, mixed the blood with wine in a chalice and offered it around the circle. The ritual ended with “fraternal kisses.”

Word of the strange ritualistic gathering quickly spread through St. Petersburg, picking up new, spicy details. In the version of the writer Mikhail Prishvin, who had not been there, Rozanov became the main protagonist: “They dined, drank wine, and then took communion with the blood of a Jewess. Rozanov crossed himself and drank. He tried to get her to undress and get under the table, and offered to undress and be on the table.”⁶

It was no surprise that Prishvin, who knew Rozanov well, imagined him to be the initiator of such a risqué sexual-religious rite. Rozanov’s philosophical writings were always balancing on the edge of erotic provocation, and many suspected that he was prepared to cross the line not only in theory but in practice. The proper Alexandre Benois, the leading art critic of the period, recalled with a shudder another time that Rozanov almost turned an evening into “an outrage.”

Rozanov, Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Hippius, Benois, and a few others were debating the symbolic significance of the episode in the New Testament when Jesus washes the feet of his disciples before the Last Supper. The Merezhkovskys hailed that “deed of humiliation and service,” and suggested that they enact the ritual then and there. According to Benois, the greatest enthusiast of the idea was Rozanov, who babbled, eyes aglow, “Yes, we must, we must do this and do it now.” Benois, who generally had the greatest sympathy for Rozanov and his eccentricities, this time suspected “depraved curiosity,” since Rozanov obviously was planning to wash the white, slender legs of the seductive Hippius, and no one could guess where that would lead. The cautious art critic, horrified by the specter of unbridled group sex, stopped the religious ecstasy of his fellow guests in their tracks, for which Rozanov later berated him; Benois, he said, your skepticism scared off an infusion of the Holy Spirit.

Benois recalled that he and the people of his artistic circle “were in those years acutely interested in the mystery of life and sought an answer in religion.”⁷ To debate these issues, they decided to form The Religious-Philosophical Assembly, which opened in November 1901 in the building of the Imperial Geographical Society on Theater Street, across the way from the famous Imperial Ballet School.

For Russia, which lacked a tradition of regular public religious debates with the participation of the intelligentsia, this was an unprecedented event. They first had to get permission from the Holy Synod, which had only nine months previously excommunicated Leo Tolstoy. The Synod gave its approval. While the intellectuals wanted to break the hold of positivism, which had reigned in the Russian discourse since the 1860s, the church officials were eager to show that they were open to dialogue with the intelligentsia. So a delegation of the founding fathers of the Assembly went for the blessing of Metropolitan Anthony of St. Petersburg at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.

Benois, who described the trip with a bit of humor, was quite impressed by the white hood with a diamond cross pin of the regal but gentle metropolitan and by the excellent tea in heavy, faceted glasses and the delicious pastries. He was also amused by the fact that the delegation included, besides the Russian Orthodox Merezhkovsky and Hippius, two Jews (Nikolai Minsky and the artist Leon Bakst) and, as the Catholic Benois put it, the “definitely Jew-obsessed” Rozanov. Thus, the delegation had first to discuss whether or not to approach for the metropolitan’s personal blessing, and if they did, whether or not to kiss his hand as he made the sign of the cross over them.

These recollections of an avid participant in the Russian religious revival of the early twentieth century are very telling. They evince the extraordinary breadth of the movement’s spectrum, which is forgotten now, sometimes intentionally in an attempt to underscore its fundamentalist characteristics. And yet this religious renaissance, which played such an exceptional role in Russia’s twentieth-century culture, included both conservatives and innovators—“two of each kind,” like Noah’s Ark: religious fanatics but also anticlericals like Maxim Gorky, the composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Sergei Taneyev, the poet Sergei Esenin; monarchists, populists, and Bolsheviks (the latter represented by Anatoly Lunacharsky and Alexander Bogdanov); realist painters and the founders of abstract art (Vassily Kandinsky); and committed homo-phobes and some open homosexuals (most famous among the latter, the poets Mikhail Kuzmin and Nikolai Klyuev).

Early exponents of the ideas of the religious renaissance were the painters Viktor Vasnetsov and Mikhail Nesterov (considered today by some nationalists as the best Russian painter of the twentieth century; Nesterov lived to receive the Stalin Prize in 1941), who began painting stunning frescoes at the end of the nineteenth century in monasteries and churches. With them was Mikhail Vrubel, the most formidable personality in Russian Symbolist art, still underappreciated in the West, but now regarded in Russia as a seminal figure of the era.

Vrubel, of Polish descent with an admixture of Russian, German, Danish, and Tatar blood, sometimes called the Russian Cézanne (with Van Gogh’s temper, one might add), was notable for his artistic dualism. He began with the creation of an iconostasis for a church and ended with an enormous, mysterious painting Demon Downcast (1902), the culmination of almost twenty years of obsession with that theme. (Demonism in a Nietzschean interpretation was fashionable among Russian Symbolists.) Even Vrubel’s prophet Moses (for the frescoes in the church of St. Cyril in Kiev) was endowed with a strangely demonic gaze. The artist felt that his demons were not so much evil as suffering and grieving androgynous spirits. Vrubel’s downcast Demon, spread out on a fantastical mountain landscape, had an elongated body, with slender arms behind his head, and a feminine gaze, injured, fragile, but at the same time imperious and winning.

Researchers have found that the same young woman’s face served as the model for the twenty-eight-year-old Vrubel’s study for an icon of the Virgin and for the first sketches of the Demon’s image. The philosophical and artistic antinomy that tore at the artist’s mind (as well as bad genes) brought Vrubel in 1902 to a psychiatric hospital, where he died in 1910, at the age of fifty-four, completely blind. The artist Sergei Sudeikin left a description of his visit at the clinic, Vrubel’s tiny body, bright pink face with the whites of his eyes a horrible pale blue, and with a blue cast beneath the eyes and around his lips. Sudeikin thought those colors symbolized “frozen madness,” but Vrubel astonished him by reciting The Iliad in Greek, Virgil in Latin, Faust in German, Hamlet in English, and Dante in Italian, adding commentary in French.⁸ Sudeikin saw a drawing of the head of the Demon in Vrubel’s room—the image continued to haunt the artist.

In 1906, Sudeikin attended an exhibition of Russian artists organized by Sergei Diaghilev at the Paris Salon d’Automne. It began with icons and ended with Vrubel. The Vrubel hall included the grand panel, ten by sixteen meters, Mikula Selyaninovich, depicting the Russian mythological hero. In 1896 it was presented at the National Russian Industrial Art Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod. Even though its sketch had been approved by Nicholas II, the panel’s unusual modernist manner created a scandal among viewers and in the press (in particular, it was viciously attacked by the young reporter Maxim Gorky). At the insistence of the Academy of Arts, the panel was removed from the official pavilion. It was one of the more infamous artistic-political imbroglios at the turn of the century.

Sudeikin and the refined mystical artist Pavel Kuznetsov, both of whom had their own works in the Diaghilev show, restored Vrubel’s panel, which had begun flaking in storage, folded up like a blanket. With his friend, the Futurist artist Mikhail Larionov, Sudeikin wandered around the Autumn Salon every day, and always saw a stocky man in the Vrubel hall, standing for hours in front of Mikula Selyaninovich. It was the young Pablo Picasso.⁹ This must have been the only case when the tastes of an avant-garde Spanish artist and an extremely conservative Russian monarch coincided.

At Vrubel’s funeral on April 3, 1910, in St. Petersburg, the only eulogy at the open grave was given by Alexander Blok, the best-known Russian Symbolist poet in the West and one of the most esteemed twentieth-century poets in Russia. Looking “grim, remote, charred”(in the words of his friend and rival, the writer Andrei Bely), Blok, twenty-nine, his face an enigmatic Apollonic mask, uttered sad words in a monotone about the victory of the night, both in Vrubel’s paintings and in life, for “what is darker wins.”¹⁰

Blok’s speech was heard in silence by the luminaries of the Russian art world: Benois, Bakst and Diaghilev, Valentin Serov, Nikolai Roerich, Boris Kustodiev, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Did they guess that in eulogizing Vrubel, Blok was also metaphorically mourning the defeat of the revolution of 1905? Like Vrubel’s art, Blok’s poetry was antinomic: it contains the lofty and base, the altar and the tavern, the Madonna and the heroine of one of his most popular poems, The Unknown Woman, a prostitute slowly wending her way through the drunks “with rabbit eyes” in a bar.

Blok’s poetry charted the path of Russian Symbolism, which appeared as the native response to the French experiments of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. But like everything Russian, this literary movement blossomed with mysticism and heightened philosophical aspirations modeled on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Boris Eikhenbaum, in a speech at a memorial for Blok in 1921, said: “The knight of the Beautiful Lady; Hamlet pondering nonexistence; the wild profligate, nailed to a bar counter and giving himself up to gypsy charms; the grim prophet of chaos and death—all that for us was the unfolding of a single tragedy, and Blok was its hero.”¹¹

Blok, earlier than others, was pinpointed by Russian literary scholarship (especially by the “formalists” Eikhenbaum and Yuri Tynyanov) as the creator of his own biographical mythos. Tynyanov explained the “Blok phenomenon” thus: “When people speak of his poetry, almost always they unwittingly replace the poetry with the human face—and everyone has come to love the face and not the art.”¹²

True, the image Blok created, not only in his poems, but also in his letters, diaries, and notebooks, of a martyr sacrificing himself for art and truth, was an inspiring one. It does not matter that the real Blok in the reminiscences of his contemporaries appeared as an alcoholic, debaucher, misogynist who ruined his wife’s life, and anti-Semite (Zinaida Hippius, who shared Blok’s Judophobic views, called him an “exceptionally fierce anti-Semite” and noted in her diaries his desire “to hang all the kikes”).¹³ Yet none of the evidence managed to shake Blok’s legend, such was the power of his image: the severity and significance of Blok’s looks, ideally confirming the idea of how a “poet” should appear and act; the unfeigned tragic tone and music of his poetry; and his symbolically untimely death. Nor was Blok’s image undermined by the attacks of his literary enemies—in particular, the envious parody of Blok in Alexei Tolstoy’s novel Road to Calvary, where he is depicted as the famous poet Alexei Bessonov, gulping down wine, seducing women right and left, and writing about the fate of Russia, although he knows the country “only from books and pictures.”

Tynyanov was the first to place Blok’s “literary personality” in a historical, mythos-forming tradition that can be traced to Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy and was continued by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin, for whom the “Blok mythos” served as an example. (We can now add later writers to the list: Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky.) Blok modeled himself also on Vrubel (the legend of artist as “sacred madman”).

The wing of Vrubel’s Demon touched the work and posthumous legend of another famous Nietzschean and occultist of the period, the composer Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915), whose music was met with incomprehension, irritation, and anger, but also with elation and adoration similar to the cult of Blok. Scriabin was a particular favorite of the Russian Symbolists Andrei Bely and Vyacheslav Ivanov and then the younger poets Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, who in typically grandiloquent fashion proclaimed: “In the fateful hours of cleansing and storm we raised aloft Scriabin, whose heart is a sun burning above us.”¹⁴

Many leading Russian Symbolists followed the German Romantics (Friedrich Schiller) and Dostoevsky in the belief in the great transformative power of art. “From art,” said the visionary and mystic Bely, author of the novel Petersburg, considered by the finicky Vladimir Nabokov to be on the level of the works of Proust, Joyce, and Kafka as a masterpiece of twentieth-century world literature, “will come a new life and the salvation of humanity.”¹⁵

But Scriabin did not simply talk about the possibility of combining art with ethics and religion: he tried to turn his utopian romantic-symbolist ideas into reality. A small, quick-moving dandy with a neat beard and upward pointing mustache, Scriabin, an extreme solipsist, came to believe that he was a religious prophet (“theurge,” in Symbolist jargon). From his adolescent “grumbling at fate and God”(as he admitted), he came to self-divinity and the connected ideas of self-sacrifice, without ceasing to play with Nietzsche’s demonism (“Satan is the yeast of the Universe”). Hence, the demonic motifs in some of his best piano works, such as “Poème satanique”(1903) and the Ninth Sonata (1913), which the composer called a Black Mass.

Scriabin’s music is exalted, seductive, comparable to Vrubel’s infernal canvases and Blok’s intoxicating poetry. The peak of the flirtation with the occult came with Scriabin’s Prométhée—Poem of Fire (1910), a stunning work for a large symphony orchestra and piano, organ, chorus, and special light keyboard. The musical symbolism of this innovative opus was influenced by The Secret Doctrine (1888), the fundamental work of Theosophy leader Helene Blavatsky, who interpreted the mythological Prometheus as a theosophist hero, a titan rebelling against God.

Blavatsky’s concept of Lucifer as the “bearer of light” (lux and fero) apparently prompted Scriabin to introduce the part of Luce (light) in the score of Prométhée: during the performance, the composer called for multicolored “fiery columns” in the hall. The score was published in 1911 by a fan of the composer, the conductor Sergei Koussevitzky, with a fiery orange cover, as specified by Scriabin, and an androgynous depiction of the demon Lucifer (cf. the androgynous nature of Vrubel’s Demon).

Scriabin contemplated a great Mysterium, an apocalyptic musical action that, once realized, would lead to the “end of the world,” when matter would begin to perish and the spirit would triumph: a Second Coming brought on by the power of art as transformed by Scriabin. Bely and Ivanov could only watch in envy as the rather abstract idea for a mysterium that they had propagated suddenly moved closer to reality: Scriabin was already discussing how he would build a special temple on a lake in India to be the center of this unheard-of ritual, which would in some way involve all of humanity; the composer started raising funds for the temple; he was picking the right spot for it….

It all ended abruptly in the spring of 1915, when Scriabin died from blood poisoning at the age of forty-three. There were only forty pages of sketches for the Acte préalable of the Mysterium, an introduction of sorts. Others tried to turn those sketches into a completed work; it has even been performed and recorded, but, alas, without the anticipated mystical effect.

The Scriabin case was unique in the speed of his trajectory, which stunned contemporaries compared to a rising line, and composer’s exalted image, unheard-of previously in Russia. But it was also a typical part of the new spiritual strivings in Russian culture. The notable musical premieres of 1915, just before the death of Scriabin, included Sergei Taneyev’s cantata Upon Reading the Psalms, Alexander Gretchaninoff’s cantata Praise God, and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil. The next year, 1916, saw the performance of the stylish requiem Fraternal Prayer for the Dead by Alexander Kastalsky, director of the Synod School and of the Synod Choir, a connoisseur of ancient Russian chorale music and leader of the “new wave” in Russian spiritual music, which sought to purify but also to democratize it.

Compared to Scriabin’s works (and bearing in mind that Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps had already exploded on the scene), these compositions appear quite conservative, although their archaism is varied. It is curious to note that while Gretchaninoff was undoubtedly a religious man (but a political radical, who wrote “Funeral March” in revolutionary 1905 for the Bolshevik Bauman), church was never central to Rachmaninoff’s world view, and Taneyev was openly agnostic and anticlerical. (Kastalsky presents a special case: he started out with a loyal submission of his church music to Nicholas II in 1902 and ended up in 1926 as a member of the Red Professors group at the Moscow Conservatory, writing works about Lenin and the Red Army to the doggerel of the Communist court poets Demyan Bedny and Alexander Bezymensky and creating the officially approved arrangement of the “Internationale,” which served as the Soviet Union anthem until 1944.) But all these quite different composers were active in the Russian religious renaissance.

Like Taneyev (head of the Moscow composers), the patriarch of the St. Petersburg school of composition, Rimsky-Korsakov, was openly atheistic, but that did not hinder him, as one of the directors of the Court Capella, from taking part in Orthodox arrangements of the traditional Easter service. Rimsky-Korsakov’s reaction to Scriabin’s mystical plans was sarcastic: “Could he be losing his mind because of religious-erotic lunacy?”¹⁶

Rimsky-Korsakov was in no danger of such lunacy. Critics often described the open sensuality of the billowing waves of Scriabin’s music, which they felt was exactly what Rimsky-Korsakov’s oeuvre lacked. (Scriabin was very amorous, like Blok. The only known extramarital romance of Rimsky-Korsakov, with the singer Nadezhda Zabela, wife of the artist Vrubel, was apparently platonic.)

Quite telling is the reaction of the critic Yevgeny Petrovsky (who had given Rimsky-Korsakov the idea for his antimonarchist opera Kashchei the Immortal) to the premiere of his idol’s new opera, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia, in St. Petersburg in 1907. The reviewer noted that Rimsky-Korsakov, who based the opera on the religious legend about the miraculous rescue of Kitezh from the Tatar invasion (according to the story, the city sank underwater and its residents were taken aloft to heaven), expressed in his music not the “elevation of souls upward,” but a “measured procession of the cross around and near the church.” Another observer agreed: “That walking ‘around’ rather than ‘upward’ is characteristic of Kitezh as a whole.”¹⁷

This curious Freudian criticism missed the mark: the restraint of Kitezh is affecting. Anna Akhmatova once said that she held Kitezh higher than Wagner’s Parsifal because of the purity and chastity of its religious feeling, which she considered typically Russian.¹⁸

The young Sergei Diaghilev loved Kitezh for the same reason. There is a perception of Diaghilev, who created the model for art entrepreneur in haute culture in the last century, as being a Westernizer and cosmopolite. That is a misapprehension: Diaghilev throughout his life was an inveterate Russian nationalist, even a “fanatic” one in Benois’s opinion, but he learned in his later years to mask these feelings out of pragmatic considerations.

The personality of Diaghilev, that Rastignac from the Russian provinces (he came to St. Petersburg from remote Perm, pink-cheeked, red-lipped, and blatantly optimistic), managed to combine altruistic adoration of art with charming opportunism, which he was the first to admit. This can be seen in his relations with Rimsky-Korsakov, with whom he claimed to have studied composition (probably just a legend).

But Diaghilev did in fact show his compositions to Rimsky-Korsakov once in 1894, and the master called them “more than foolish.” The infuriated twenty-two-year-old Diaghilev told Rimsky-Korsakov: “The future will show which of us history will consider greater!” And left proudly, slamming the door behind him.¹⁹

This confrontation did not keep Diaghilev, who was gathering a landing party of Russian music to descend upon Paris in 1907 for his now-legendary Russian Historical Concerts, to ask for support and cooperation from Rimsky-Korsakov, whom he now addressed as his “favorite and beloved teacher.” Rimsky-Korsakov did not want to appear before “those feuilleton French” who “understand nothing,” but Diaghilev was a great arm-twister. An eyewitness reported that Diaghilev “flattered, hypnotized with praise, he berated, he grew heated, gesturing furiously and running around the room.”²⁰ In the end, the austere maestro wrote to Diaghilev, “If we have to go, let’s go, said the parrot as the cat pulled him out of the cage,” and traveled to Paris, where he and the other Russian composers and performers dragged there by the persistent impresario—Alexander Glazunov, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Chaliapin—were met with great success (despite the ominous rumors that “terrorists with bombs” were seen at the concerts).

In 1897, Diaghilev outlined his ambitions in a letter to Benois: “To polish Russian painting, cleanse it, and most importantly, present it to the West, glorify it in the West.”²¹ Diaghilev did not manage to realize this program successfully in painting, but ten years later he began implementing it in music (and after that, in ballet), where things went much better.

The Russian Historical Concerts of 1907 (five performances) cost an enormous sum, 180,000 francs, which came not from the tsar’s treasury, as rumor had it, but from the businessmen of the Russo-American Rubber Company, who got “a cup of tea” with Diaghilev’s patron, Grand Duke Vladimir, in exchange. Diaghilev was an innovator even in the field of finding sponsors; however, the Russian press was quick to dub him a “Gescheftmacher of genius.”²²

But without this dealmaker, it is now clear, one of the cultural milestones of Russia would probably not have existed. This was the journal Mir Iskusstva [World of Art], which appeared from 1899 to 1904, published by the association of young artists and literati of the same name, which tried to rejuvenate national culture (Benois even suggested calling the journal Renaissance). While striving to overcome the utilitarianism of the previous generation of Russian artists (and condemning the radically populist aesthetics of Leo Tolstoy, considered by the younger crowd “a slap in the face of beauty”), Diaghilev still proclaimed that “art and life are inseparable.” This dualism was evident in the Mir Iskusstva attitude toward the West: Diaghilev and Benois professed “love for Europe,” but also insisted that that very love helped Russian classics from Pushkin to Tchaikovsky to Tolstoy “to express our izbas [cottages], and our bogatyrs [mythic heroes], and the unfeigned melancholy of our songs,” that is, to be true nationalists.

The editorial board, authors, and friends of Mir Iskusstva, which was subsidized at the outset by the Moscow merchant Savva Mamontov (who also started the first private opera company in Russia) and Princess Maria Tenisheva, a wealthy patron of national culture and crafts, quickly fell apart into two camps. One consisted of artists—Benois, Bakst, Serov, and Konstantin Somov—and the other, of writers and philosophers who despised “those stupid and ignorant daubers”—Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Hippius, Rozanov, and the proto-existentialist Lev Shestov, who published one of his most important early works, “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy,” in Mir Iskusstva.

Diaghilev, as the editor, tried to avoid excessive “decadence” and to play a mediating centrist role. The first issue carried, to the horror of Benois and his snobbish friends, reproductions of the then-popular religious and historical works of the traditionalist painter Vasnetsov. Diaghilev also promoted not only the subtle Impressionist landscape artist Isaak Levitan and the perceptive portraitist Serov, who tended toward stylization (both were close to Mir Iskusstva), but the much more conservative titan of Russian realist painting, Ilya Repin.

To keep the journal afloat, Diaghilev had to perform miracles of political tightrope walking. In 1900, Mamontov, who went broke, and Tenisheva, who was infuriated with showoff Diaghilev, stopped funding the journal, so the quick-witted impresario talked his close friend Serov, who was doing a portrait of Nicholas II, to ask the tsar for help. Nicholas II (according to the artist Kustodiev, who had discussed aesthetic topics with the tsar while doing his own sketch of the sovereign) was not in favor of artistic innovation (“Impressionism and I are two incompatible things”)²³ and was skeptical about the “Decadents.” Still, trusting Serov, the tsar commanded that a subsidy of fifteen thousand rubles be given to Diaghilev, with another thirty thousand later added: a very impressive sum for those years and a salvation for the journal.

Diaghilev had to maneuver through the shoals of religious issues, too. He was probably more superstitious than devout, but he was proud to publish the “God-seeking” Rozanov and he frequented the meetings of the Religious-Philosophical Assembly. He was strongly influenced by the literary lions on the board of the journal, Merezhkovsky, Hippius, and especially, his cousin Dmitri Filosofov, tall, languid, charismatic, and probably Diaghilev’s first lover (who dropped him to spend fifteen years living in a ménage à trois with Merezhkovsky and Hippius).

This did not keep Filosofov from being a moral purist in questions of culture and a religious fundamentalist. We can find echoes of Filosofov’s ideas in Diaghilev’s letter to Chekhov of December 23, 1902, where recalling a discussion with the writer on “whether a serious religious movement is possible in Russia now,” the impresario insists: “It is, in other words, the question: to be or not to be? for all contemporary culture.”²⁴

Chekhov, who viewed Diaghilev sympathetically, was much more skeptical. When Diaghilev, who worshipped him, asked him to become a coeditor of Mir Iskusstva, Chekhov refused: “How could I live under one roof with D. S. Merezhkovsky, who believes definitely, believes like a teacher, while I have long lost my faith and can only look incredulously at any intelligent believer?”²⁵

Both Merezhkovsky and Filosofov saw Chekhov as an aesthete, remote from real life, and a social relativist. (Interestingly, Leo Tolstoy was convinced that Merezhkovsky and company used religion “for fun, for a game.”) They promoted these views in their own magazine, Novy Put [The New Path], which they started with Filosofov as editor in 1904. Zinaida Hippius wrote sarcastically in Novy Put that Chekhov was not a teacher of life, as a true writer must be, but “merely a slave who was blessed with ten talents, high trust—and squandered that trust.”²⁶

A mighty circle of influential religious philosophers (mostly former Marxists) appeared on the pages of Novy Put—Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Semyon Frank. In 1909 they published the anthology Vekhi [Landmarks], accusing the Russian intelligentsia of atheism, nihilism, and sectarianism, which led, in their opinion, to the defeat of the revolution of 1905. Vekhi proclaimed philosophical idealism to be the most reliable foundation for all future reforms.

Vekhi turned out to be enormously influential and went through five editions in a single year. Leo Tolstoy found the main idea in the anthology—the priority of self-perfection—to his taste, but the literary style repulsed him as vague and artificial. Gorky called Vekhi “the vilest little book in the entire history of Russian literature,” and Lenin branded the anthology “the encyclopedia of liberal renegades.” (This became the required answer about Vekhi on future exams in Soviet colleges.)

By 1909, when Vekhi appeared, Diaghilev was not very interested in religious and philosophical disputes. He had begun his celebrated Russian Seasons the previous year, bringing Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, with Fedor Chaliapin in the starring role, to Paris. Rimsky-Korsakov did the instrumentation for the opera, and at Diaghilev’s persistent requests, wrote several additions. He died a few days after the final Paris performance of Boris Godunov, at the age of sixty-four.

Diaghilev’s goal was to astonish Parisians by the opulence of the production. With Benois, he found and bought ancient brocade and expensive silks for the costumes, designed by Ivan Bilibin, an artist of the Mir Iskusstva group. The coronation scene of Boris Godunov was produced with maximum lavishness. Parisians were overwhelmed by the spectacle of the tsar accepting the scepter and orb from the patriarch, Boris being showered with gold and silver coins and having an embroidered belt wrapped around him. There was also a solemn procession with icons and gonfalons, impressive boyars in sparkling raiments, grim archers in red caftans bearing aloft enormous banners, and exotic-looking priests with censers regally entering to the deafening ringing of church bells.

But the center of the performance, amid all its color and lushness, was the gigantic figure of Chaliapin in the role of Tsar Boris. The great bass, famous not only for his thunderous voice but his incomparable dramatic interpretations, played the hero of Mussorgsky’s proto-Expressionist opera with the full range of emotions. At first his Boris was imperious, but with a sense of foreboding; at the end, he was desperate and exhausted and half-crazed by the knowledge of his doom. The French saw more than a mighty singer on the stage of the Grand Opera; Chaliapin appeared as the hero of some work by Dostoevsky.

This was a turning point in Diaghilev’s enterprise and in the Western reputation of Russian music. The picky Parisian critics were amazed by the innovations of Mussorgsky, whom they compared to Shakespeare and Tolstoy (the composer had a strong influence on Debussy, Ravel, and other leading French musicians of the time), and they raved over the production and the performers, Chaliapin in particular, whom they called “actor number one of our age.” Chaliapin wrote with justifiable pride to Gorky, “We shook up the flabby souls of contemporary Frenchmen…. They’ll see where the power is.”

The fascination of the French with Chaliapin had a political element. While he was at the Grand Opera he published in the newspaper Le Matin a passionate open letter in which he complained that the Russian land, so rich in talent, was constantly oppressed “by someone’s heavy boot, trampling everything alive into the snow”—first the Tatars, then the ancient princes, now the police. Chaliapin promised the French audience: “I will give my heart to the citizens of this birthplace of freedom. It will be the heart of Boris Godunov: it will beat beneath the raiments of brocade and pearl, the heart of the criminal Russian tsar, who died tormented by his conscience.”²⁷

This was a clever and bold move on the part of the singer, a smart mix of political gesture and artistic emotion. (Subsequently, other famous Russian musicians, like Mstislav Rostropovich, tried to emulate Chaliapin.) In the revolutionary year of 1905, Chaliapin sang a protest song, “Dubinushka” [The Club], from the stage of the Imperial Bolshoi Theater, for which the irritated tsar demanded he be punished. Wisely, the management demurred. Then, in 1911, during a performance of Boris Godunov at the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg with Nicholas II in the audience, Chaliapin got on his knees with the chorus and sang the national anthem, “God Save the Tsar.” Both episodes were widely publicized. The first riled the right, the second, the left, because both sides wanted to have the great singer in their camp.

This continued after the revolution of 1917. In 1918, eight years after Chaliapin was granted the highest title of “His Majesty’s Soloist,” the Bolsheviks made Chaliapin the first recipient of a new honorific, “People’s Artist.” But that did not help the Bolsheviks keep Chaliapin. Although he had hailed the overthrow of the monarchy, Chaliapin saw that “‘liberty’ had been turned into tyranny, ‘fraternity’ into civil war, and ‘equality’ meant stomping down anyone who dared raise his head above the level of the swamp,”²⁸ as he put it, and he left Russia in 1922, never to return. Later Stalin, who was a big fan of Chaliapin, made a few attempts (through Maxim Gorky, a close friend of the singer) to get him to return to his homeland. The cautious Chaliapin did not fall into Stalin’s trap.

The political zigzags continued even after Chaliapin’s death in 1938 in Paris. (He lived to be sixty-four, like Rimsky-Korsakov.) Despite the fact that the Soviet Union had stripped the singer of his People’s Artist title in 1927 because he donated a large sum to help the poor children of Russian émigrés in France, the cult of Chaliapin continued to flourish in his former homeland.

The Chaliapin mythos promoted by the press before the revolution was of the poor boy who made it to the top by virtue of his talent (the Gorky model). This legend persisted in the Soviet Union, even after his departure for the West, because Chaliapin was one of the first Russian musicians to make recordings, and they became hugely popular. He sang both the classical repertoire and popular folk songs. The old, hissing records were played for many years at parties all over Russia, where people consumed vodka and pickles and sobbed listening to the magnificent bass singing the heartrending ballad “The sun rises and falls, but it is dark in my prison.”

Chaliapin’s ambivalent status as émigré also bolstered his reputation. By remaining in the West, like his friend and musical mentor Rachmaninoff, the singer avoided the total appropriation of his image by the Soviet regime. He remained the personification of Russian strength, valor, and flair, unfettered by party discipline or Communist ideology. So the émigré Chaliapin made an unexpected posthumous journey: in 1984, after coming to terms with the singer’s heirs, the Soviet government flew his remains from Paris to the prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. This political gesture signaled the rise of a new cultural atmosphere and the advent of perestroika. Chaliapin maintains his position in Russia as the most famous musician of the twentieth century, surpassing not only his mentor Rachmaninoff but every contender even from the world of pop.

It was not Diaghilev who placed Chaliapin on that pedestal, although he did much to make it happen. But it is hard to deny that Diaghilev played Svengali in the case of Vaslav Nijinsky, turning his short ten years onstage into the longest-lived and most mysterious ballet legend of the twentieth century.

When Nijinsky met Diaghilev in the fall of 1908 in St. Petersburg (and became his lover), the eighteen-year-old dancer was already known to ballet fans: his remarkable performance in the early works of choreographer Mikhail Fokine drew attention. But Diaghilev made Nijinsky an international star.

Diaghilev introduced ballet in his second Russian Season in Paris (1909), and it quickly became the raison d’être of his enterprise. Ironically, this had not been his original intention. Benois always insisted that Diaghilev had never been a rabid ballet fan. Political and socioeconomic circumstances made him a ballet impresario.

In 1909 bureaucratic intrigues stopped the tsar’s support for the Russian Seasons and they lost their official status as a cultural manifestation of the Russo-French political alliance. The wealthy Western bourgeoisie became the main sponsor of Diaghilev’s enterprise. For that audience, one-act ballets that did not require overcoming linguistic and historical barriers were much more attractive than long, complex, and heavy Russian operas. Plus presenting ballets was much cheaper.

The ambitious Diaghilev had not only wanted to become director of the imperial theaters, he dreamed of an even higher position, as arbiter and manager of all Russian culture. Fate determined otherwise, although the court intrigues and scandals that put an end to Diaghilev’s official career cannot be laid at the feet of fate alone: the clashes were predetermined by the entrepreneur’s modernist tastes, his independent behavior, and his open homosexuality.

The resulting situation was unique for Russia: a powerful cultural enterprise, independent of the government (and consequently at odds with it), supported by Western capital and audiences, and therefore oriented to them. Its success was due to Diaghilev, the first (and still unsurpassed) global impresario of Russian culture.

There were losses for Russia in this case, as well. In culture, the role of personality is supreme; it is tempting to imagine the flowering of Russian culture if Diaghilev had remained in the country. On the other hand, it is not difficult to assume that he would not have gotten along with the Bolsheviks any more than he had with the tsarist court. Perhaps his role was to build a revolutionary yet workable model for the interaction of Russian and Western cultures under the aegis of a charismatic personality.

In 1927, at the end of the Diaghilev era, Anatoly Lunacharsky, still the first Bolshevik cultural boss (although his comparatively liberal reign was coming to a close), called Diaghilev “amuser of the gilded crowd.”²⁹ Lunacharsky meant the impresario’s dependence on a group of wealthy sponsors who were “rootless, feckless, and wandering all over the world in search of amusement” and which could “pay a lot of money, which can grant newspaper fame, but it is greedy. It demands continually new sensations from its ‘amuser.’”³⁰

This was a Marxist critique of the Diaghilev model, perceptive but perhaps not quite fair. For the Communist Lunacharsky hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers, workers, and peasants attending an official exhibition of politically correct realistic paintings in Moscow in 1926 were vastly more important than “ten thousand glazed drones” gathering at Diaghilev’s opening nights. Lunacharsky recorded his conversation with Diaghilev, who defended his patrons (“thirty or forty Maecenas-connoisseurs”) as the progressive cultural elite whom the unwashed masses would follow, in Diaghilev’s expression, “like thread behind a needle.” It was that elite (the leading patrons, connoisseurs, collectors, influential journalists, dealers) who shaped the modern market for high culture.

Lunacharsky naturally considered Diaghilev’s analysis obsolete bourgeois nonsense, and the actual minister of culture condescendingly instructed the would-be minister Diaghilev from the height of his ten-year Soviet experience: “This is the first time in history that art is properly posited as the vital element of people’s lives and not as dessert for the gourmands.”³¹ But now, more than eighty years after that conversation, the world market for haute culture functions more on the Diaghilev model, and Lunacharsky’s lecture sounds like old-fashioned social rhetoric. In other words, Diaghilev’s ideas turned out to be more practical.

Diaghilev did have his own illusions. He thought he was controlling the tastes of his Western patrons, while in fact it was at least a two-way process. He whetted the artistic appetites of his sponsors, and they urged him on toward ever-greater avant-garde and cosmopolitan offerings. The provincial from Perm was transformed into the cultural arbiter of Paris, London, and New York, along the way changing from an earnest admirer of Repin, Vasnetsov, and Nesterov into the aesthete who commissioned stage sets from Picasso, Braque, Roualt, and Matisse.

Two productions stand out on Diaghilev’s astonishing journey among the milestones in twentieth-century culture: the premieres of Igor Stravinsky’s ballets Pétrouchka (1911) and Sacre du printemps (1913). Pétrouchka alone would be enough to immortalize its creators, the composer and designer (Stravinsky and Benois), choreographer (Mikhail Fokine), dancers (Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina), and producer (Diaghilev).

We can picture them in late May 1911 in the basement of the Teatro Constanzi in Rome, where they rehearsed Pétrouchka for the Paris premiere: there was a heat wave (and certainly no air-conditioning), sweaty Fokine dashing around the greasy raspberry red cloth covering the floor, trying to drum into the dancers the extremely complicated rhythmic figures that the composer, in his proper vest but with his shirtsleeves rolled up, banged out on a tinny upright piano that barely covered up the noise of traffic outside.

Occasionally the artist Serov (who also helped with a sketch of one of the costumes) and the religious philosopher Lev Karsavin, the ballerina’s elder brother, both living in Rome at the time, would drop by the rehearsals. What a bouquet of talents and what different fates awaited them. The first to die, of angina in 1911 in Moscow, was Serov, forty-six, the highly regarded (by everyone from the tsar to the revolutionaries) maverick of early Russian modern art, whose reputation at home, as opposed to the West, was always high both among connoisseurs and the public.

Benois, stunned by Serov’s death, in his obituary placed him in the ranks of Titian, Velázquez, and Franz Hals (in Russia, many agreed). Benois did not overestimate his own potential as an artist; he considered the only work worthy of outliving him his monumental memoirs. In that masterpiece, Benois, who died in 1960 in Paris, just two months short of his ninetieth birthday and without seeing his work published in full, wrote about his constant bickering with Diaghilev, who had died thirty years earlier, in Venice (just as a fortune-teller had once predicted, “on water”). Benois felt Diaghilev was too taken with the avant-garde, even if the impresario had become with Stravinsky one of the most influential artistic figures of Russian descent in the West. Together they radically reshaped the map of world culture, yet in Russia their fame never equaled Serov’s.

This happened in part because both Diaghilev and Stravinsky were perceived (and still are) as émigré modernists. Having bid Russia farewell in 1914, Diaghilev never returned. Before his death, he waxed nostalgically about the Volga River, the gentle landscapes of Levitan, and music of Tchaikovsky. Stravinsky visited the Soviet Union in 1962, at the age of eighty, after a hiatus of half a century, and was even received by the country’s leader, Nikita Khrushchev. But in response to an invitation to return again, he reportedly muttered, “Enough’s enough.”³²

In the West, Nijinsky became the personification of men’s dancing, but in the Soviet Union he fell so far off the cultural map that even at the height of perestroika in 1989, when Pravda, then still the country’s most influential newspaper, decided to mark the centenary of the émigré dancer’s birth, it misspelled his name as Nejinsky.

Fokine’s Pétrouchka and The Dying Swan (he basically improvised the latter in 1907 as a sad and charming solo for its incomparable first performer, Anna Pavlova) are now ballet emblems of the twentieth century. But while The Dying Swan, which later became the signature piece of another great ballerina, Maya Plisetskaya, is nostalgic and fragile, Pétrouchka is all movement and tragic urgency.

The ballet is a puppet drama: pathetic Pétrouchka (a mixture of the British Punch and the Italian-French Pierrot) loses his beloved Ballerina to the arrogant and coarse Moor. The puppets are manipulated by the mysterious and powerful Magician. All around is the spectacle of the Russian Shrovetide carnival, which stunned Parisians with the vividness and energy of the music, the beauty of stylized sets and costumes, and the inventiveness of the choreographer in depicting—almost à la Stanislavsky’s Art Theater—the holiday crowds (there were more than one hundred dancers onstage).

Karsavina, who replaced Pavlova as chief star of Diaghilev’s company, was the ideal Ballerina in Pétrouchka, a sensual and naïve toy. The artistic presentation of that naïveté was informed, however, by Karsavina’s fierce intellect. It could be said that both she and her brother were philosophers, only she danced and her brother wrote books.

Of all the members of that carefree and happy Roman group, Lev Karsavin had the most tragic fate. Exiled on Lenin’s personal orders from Bolshevik Russia in 1922 (with other leading anti-Soviet intellectuals—Berdyaev, Frank, Ivan Ilyin, Fedor Stepun, and Pitirim Sorokin), Karsavin settled in Paris, lectured on medieval philosophy at the Sorbonne, befriended Matisse and Fernand Léger, and then found himself living once again on Soviet territory after World War II, in Lithuania.

Karsavin was arrested and deported to Siberia, to the Abez camp in Vorkuta, where Nikolai Punin, a prominent theoretician of avant-garde art, was also serving time. There Karsavin and Punin used to lecture fellow prisoners on the fine points of the icon of the Virgin of Vladimir or Malevich’s Black Square.³³ The camp guards had other forms of amusement: the prisoners were regularly awakened in the middle of the night, lined up and marched to a big pit, and then spread out around its perimeter in preparation to be executed. Each time, the prisoners prepared to die, but they were returned to their barracks.³⁴ Karsavin died of tuberculosis in 1952 and was buried without a coffin, in nothing but a shirt with his camp number, tossed into a hole dug out of the frozen ground. Punin died there a year later.

Nijinsky’s life, while different, was tragic and symbolic in its own way. In Pétrouchka he danced himself, as the insiders at the premiere knew full well: a puppet manipulated by the all-powerful Magician Diaghilev. Nijinsky was famous for his phenomenal leaps, in which he seemed to hang in the air for an instant. But for the role of Pétrouchka, Fokine did not create any virtuoso steps. Nevertheless, it was a signature role for Nijinsky, as was the Faun in L’Après-midi d’un faun, choreographed by Fokine to music by Debussy.

Fedor Lopukhov, a great choreographer and classmate of Nijinsky’s (whom he did not like very much), told me that in ballet school Nijinsky was awkward, to the point of seeming mentally retarded.³⁵ Benois recalled that Nijinsky had a lot of trouble with the role of Pétrouchka in rehearsals. The artist was astonished by the metamorphosis that occurred when Nijinsky put on Pétrouchka’s patchwork costume and tasseled cap and applied the whiteface makeup with round spots of rouge and crookedly drawn eyebrows. Suddenly Benois saw the beseeching eyes “of that horrifying grotesque, half-puppet half-human.”³⁶

For the first time in the history of the dance, on June 13, 1911, on the stage of the Théâtre Châtelet in Paris appeared a hero who could have come from the pages of a Dostoevsky novel, as the French press noted instantly. But the Parisian critics understandably missed the influence of Alexander Blok’s Symbolist drama The Fair Show Booth, produced in St. Petersburg in 1906 by the avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold: the characters included an awkward and suffering clown Pierrot (played by Meyerhold himself), who bled cranberry juice instead of blood.

Pétrouchka might have seemed to be a triumph of Mir Iskusstva. And it was, if one takes into account Fokine’s production, Benois’s design, and Karsavina’s interpretation: a nostalgic look at old St. Petersburg by a sophisticated group of Russian Europeans gathered in Paris. But Nijinsky and Stravinsky, encouraged by Diaghilev, boldly leaped beyond the Mir Iskusstva stylized aesthetics toward the avant-garde.

Nijinsky left Diaghilev in 1913, after choreographing the premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps. It was a desperate attempt by Pétrouchka to escape his master, and it led to a nervous breakdown.

Nijinsky’s last performance was on September 26, 1917, as Pétrouchka (a joke of fate); he was twenty-seven. Sojourns in expensive clinics treating schizophrenia followed. The most famous dancer of the twentieth century, Nijinsky died in London in 1950, leaving not only his legend but an astonishing document, his diaries of 1919. In those notes, Nijinsky surprises us by his naïve wisdom. Calling himself a crazy clown and “God’s fool”(“a fool is good where there is love”), Nijinsky writes about his fascination with the religious teaching of Leo Tolstoy (the dancer was a vegetarian, “meat develops lust”), his bisexuality, his rejection of war, and his love of Russia and dislike of the Bolsheviks. Nijinsky wanted people to stop deforestation and overuse of oil. He also admits his addiction to morphine and masturbation, and he concludes bitterly: “Now I understand Dostoevsky’s Idiot, for they take me for an idiot.”³⁷

There is a photograph taken in 1929 with Nijinsky with a terrified smile standing between Karsavina and a pompous Diaghilev in tails: the impresario had brought the “crazy clown” to a performance of Pétrouchka, in the hope that watching it might return his sanity. Diaghilev died that year; Nijinsky survived him by almost twenty-one years.

Coming after Pétrouchka (but conceived before it), Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps is arguably his most successful and organic work. It may well be the greatest score of the twentieth century. The audience at the premiere of Sacre on May 23, 1913, in Paris, famously rioted. The French public resisted the overwhelming onslaught of Stravinsky’s music, afraid to hear its message, loud and clear: the world was on the brink of catastrophe.³⁸

The First World War, which broke out in July 1914, took millions of young lives, destroyed the old European order, and triggered a series of destructive revolutions. European civilization never did rebound from that blow, which was foretold by the turbulent, cruel rhythms of Sacre du printemps.

The Russian empire, which entered the war on the side of France and England against Germany and Austro-Hungary, turned out to be a colossus with feet of clay. At first the war was hailed by many leading Russian intellectuals: they thought it “a great blessing” (the Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov). Berdyaev then also believed that the war had a providential significance: “It punishes, kills, and purifies by fire, reviving the spirit.”³⁹

The figure of Razumnik Vasilyevich Ivanov, whose pen name was Ivanov-Razumnik (1878–1946), stands apart. An antiwar critic and cultural historian, he had published as early as 1912 a magazine article signed “The Scythian” which proclaimed a rejection of bourgeois civilization as an “alien culture.” “The order of such a life inevitably will be destroyed.”⁴⁰

That article was the proto-manifesto of an influential Russian cultural movement known as Scythianism, which retains its attraction for many in Russia to this day; from it came the theory of cultural Eurasianism, according to which Russia, as the great state on the border of Europe and Asia, has its own unique path and role in global geopolitics. Herodotus used the term “Scythian” for the semi-mythical nomadic tribes that invaded the Black Sea steppes from Asia in the eighth century BC; in the imagination of the Russian intellectuals they became a symbol of barbarian might and energy. Among adherents of Scythianism, a left-radical ideology with populist roots, were the major Russian poets of the era—Blok, Bely, Esenin, and Klyuev.

The motto chosen by Ivanov-Razumnik and his friends were the words of the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen from his classic work, My Past and Thoughts: “I, like a true Scythian, happily see the old world fall apart and think that our calling is to inform it of its imminent death.”

Stravinsky, who never formally declared himself a Scythianist, clearly was at that period (and later) influenced by its neonationalist ideas. (Interestingly, Ivanov-Razumnik and Stravinsky had a common friend, the musicologist Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov, one of the composer’s sons.) Stravinsky’s Scythian outlook can be seen in his conversation with Romain Rolland, who wrote it down in September 1914.

The French writer had come to Stravinsky with a request to join a protest in print against German “barbarism”—a timely topic. But Stravinsky (whom Rolland described as a short man, with a sallow, weary face, and weak-looking—a false impression!), without justifying Germany, did not agree that it was a barbaric country, calling it instead “decrepit and degenerate.”⁴¹

Barbarism, according to Stravinsky, was a feature of a new culture. Stravinsky argued, in the Scythian spirit, that Russia was predestined to play the role of a “beautiful and powerful barbarian country, pregnant with new ideas that will fertilize world thought.”⁴²

Stravinsky also made a political prediction that was fully in line with the ideas of Ivanov-Razumnik and his friends: that the war would be followed by the revolution that would overthrow the Romanov dynasty and create the Slavic United States.

It is tempting to perceive Sacre du printemps as the greatest manifestation of the Scythian spirit in culture. In Russian poetry that spirit was expressed powerfully in Blok’s topical poem, “Scythians”(1918):

Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asians,

With slanted and greedy eyes!

The Blok–Stravinsky parallel was never considered, as far as I know, by their contemporaries (even by the Eurasianist Pierre Souvtchinsky, who knew both men and wrote about both). Blok was not friends with Stravinsky, and judging by his diary and notebooks, had never heard a single note of his music. Still, one might imagine that it was Sacre du printemps that the poet had in mind when he called upon the Russian intelligentsia to accept the revolution: “We loved those dissonances, those roars, those ringing sounds, those unexpected transitions…in the orchestra. But if we really loved them instead of merely tickling our nerves in fashionable theater halls after lunch, we must listen and love the same sounds now, when they fly out of the world orchestra.”⁴³

The ideologist of Scythianism, Ivanov-Razumnik, had in 1915 distributed hectograph copies (the samizdat of the time) of his antiwar article, “Trial by Fire,” in which he maintained that only united democratic forces could stop the monstrous slaughter. Blok liked the article; he subsequently wrote about war: “For a moment, it seemed that it would clear the air; it seemed that way to us, people overly impressionable; in fact it turned out to be a worthy crown to the lies, filth, and vileness into which our homeland had sunk.”⁴⁴

Russia suffered one humiliating disaster after another in the war. The economy was falling apart, with long breadlines even in the capital. The three-hundred-year-old autocratic rule of the Romanov dynasty, which had survived the revolutionary upheavals of 1905, was drawing to an end.

On January 1, 1916, Alexander Benois wrote in his diary (which was published only in 2003): “What will the new year bring? If it only brings peace, the rest will fall into place.”⁴⁵ But for Benois (like Blok, a committed opponent of war), it was clear that Nicholas II (whom Benois was calling “the madman” who was “absolutely incapable” of ruling Russia) and his government did not comprehend “the meaninglessness of this deviltry.” It horrified the moderate, cautious Benois: “Human stupidity is limitless, all-powerful, and it is quite possible that we will end up in universal bankruptcy and cataclysm!”

On February 20, 1917, Benois wrote: “Something must happen—there is an awful lot of electricity accumulated. But will it be anything decisive?”⁴⁶ He did not have long to wait for an answer: the autocracy, which had seemed invincible quite recently, collapsed within a few days that month. Gorky hailed this development enthusiastically. Most probably, Leo Tolstoy and Chekhov, had they lived to see it, would have reacted in the same way. The fall of the Romanov dynasty was not a chance occurrence but the culmination of a process.

Nicholas II abdicated from the throne, a Provisional Government was formed, but it too was unable to end the war and stop the economic decline. Only Lenin, the charismatic leader of the extremist party of Bolsheviks, promised workers and soldiers immediate peace and a good life if a dictatorial socialist regime is created.

Blok, in his 1917 diary, pointedly noted an absence of “genius” in the old ruling class. “Revolution presupposes will,”⁴⁷ he wrote. Only Lenin had the focus and iron will at that moment, and following his plan, on October 26, 1917, the Bolsheviks burst into the Winter Palace, arrested the meeting ministers of the Provisional Government, and took over the capital.

The Russian cultural elite on the whole considered this an irrational adventure. Almost all of them were certain that the new regime would fall in a week or two. The Bolshevik culture commissar Lunacharsky hoped that if they managed to hold for a month, events would follow by momentum. In the meantime, the Bolsheviks found themselves isolated in the Winter Palace. Only a very few people from the intelligentsia were willing to make contact with them—of course, they included such notables as Benois, Blok, and Meyerhold.

The astonished Benois thought it all resembled a production by his friend Diaghilev, whom he had compared to Lenin in his diary. With Diaghilev “everything first looked ridiculous and sometimes even nasty,” creaking and collapsing until the last moment, and then somehow, he turned it into a beautiful and successful show. Perhaps the Bolsheviks would burn a few things and then calm down and in the end establish sober and reasonable order. “I doubt that they will build anything lasting,” concluded the skeptical Benois.⁴⁸ He was a cultivated man but certainly no prophet.

Chapter Three

In December 1917, the newly minted Bolshevik Commissar of Education (who in fact dealt with all cultural issues), Anatoly Lunacharsky, had two visitors in his small office in the Winter Palace: Nikolai Punin, twenty-nine, formerly the art critic of the trendy magazine Apollo, and experimental composer Arthur Lourié, twenty-six. Lisping but eloquent Punin (who also had a facial tic) and, in contrast, the outwardly calm, ironic, and exquisitely dressed Lourié were part of the innovative milieu in post-revolutionary Petrograd. They had come for permission to use the Hermitage Theater, which adjoined the Winter Palace, for the production of Death’s Mistake by Velimir Khlebnikov, the mad genius of Russian experimental literature, in the staging of another giant of the Russian avant-garde, the artist Vladimir Tatlin. (Khlebnikov had a reputation in advanced circles as a dervish and prophet, and in 1912 he had predicted the year of the coming revolutions—1917.)

It’s quite possible that the planned presentation of Khlebnikov’s eccentric play (one of his best works) was merely a pretext for Punin and Lourié to meet with Lunacharsky. In any case, the conversation quickly moved on to more lofty issues—the creation of a new communist culture and the participation in it of the intelligentsia. The situation here was very unfavorable for the Bolsheviks.

The three main directions in Russian arts had formed before the revolution. The traditionalists were in the right wing: the Imperial Academy of Arts and the society of “Wanderers,” realistic painters who had once fought against academic art but later joined it, setting up a profitable conveyor belt for producing popular genre paintings “from Russian folk life” and undemanding landscapes.

The center was held by the moderately eclectic and passéist Mir Iskusstva, headed by Benois, the first Russian artistic association to be oriented toward the West but with strong overtones of traditional Russian ideas of “art serving the people.” By the time the monarchy fell, Mir Iskusstva, which had criticized academic culture and the Wanderers as being old-fashioned, had itself turned into a respectable brand name, whose leaders were probably the most influential trendsetters for current mainstream tastes.

The new players began to appear in 1910, ambitious groups of so-called left art, which for many years was labeled “Futurist” in Russia: such associations as the Knave of Diamonds, Union of Youth, and Donkey’s Tail. Petr Konchalovsky, Ilya Mashkov, Aristarkh Lentulov, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Vladimir Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov and other innovators and visionaries subsequently became famous in the West as the Russian avant-garde, stunned the world, and today attract the greatest interest among Western art historians.

But in 1917 the artistic merits of their works were rather questionable to the majority of people. Most, even members of the educated intelligentsia, regarded the innovators with a snigger, if not outright hostility. The Bolsheviks were no exception in this case. Their leader Lenin, while a political radical, had extremely conservative tastes in culture.

Lunacharsky’s views on art were much more tolerant than Lenin’s, but even he could, for example, in 1911 refer to Vassily Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstract art, as a man “obviously in the final stage of psychic degeneration.”¹ Contrary to later legends about Lunacharsky as a connoisseur and fervent proponent of avant-garde art, he was sincerely baffled by Kandinsky’s work: “He scrawls, he scrawls some lines with the first paints that come to hand and signs them, the wretch—‘Moscow,’ ‘Winter,’ and even ‘St. George.’ Why do they permit him to exhibit, really?”²

When the Bolsheviks seized power, they encountered sabotage everywhere. Lunacharsky, arriving at the Ministry of National Education to take over the job, was not met by a single official, only guards and messengers. Recalling how the major cultural figures had reacted to the Soviet regime, Lunacharsky wrote in 1927: “Many of them fled abroad and others felt like fish out of water for quite some time.”³

The Bolsheviks themselves would have preferred to deal with the established big names. But the luminaries were in no hurry to meet the Bolsheviks halfway. Even the “stormy petrel of the revolution” Gorky, who at one time was a friend of Lenin, attacked him in the opposition newspaper Novaya Zhizn [New Life]: “Imagining themselves the Napoleons of socialism, the Leninists rail and roar, completing the destruction of Russia.”⁴

Gorky knew very well that the Bolsheviks’ plans for culture were rather vague: it was supposed to become “proletarian” and accessible to everyone. But that was for the future, and in the meantime they had to organize the protection of palaces and museums from looting by the revolutionary masses. The Bolsheviks got several important experts from Mir Iskusstva involved, particularly Benois, who found a common language with Lunacharsky, whom he sarcastically called St. Anatoly Chrysostom.

Remaining Commissar of Education until 1929, Lunacharsky played an extraordinary role in the formation of Soviet culture of the Lenin period. He looked like a typical member of the intelligentsia (soft beard and ever-present pince-nez); he had received a doctorate from Zurich University and as a young man had even worked part-time at the Louvre as a guide for Russian tourists. After the revolution he started wearing a military green jacket, but he never lost his geniality and relish for playing the role of the arts patron.

Lunacharsky was a prolific cultural journalist, publishing 122 books with a total of more than a million copies, between 1905 and 1925. Most importantly, Lenin trusted him, assuming that Lunacharsky “knows how to persuade people,” as long as you keep him under control. And even though a strict Lenin kept his often over-enthusiastic cultural tsar on a short leash, he did not accept his resignations when Lunacharsky tried to protest some of Lenin’s harshest decisions.

However, even that “good-natured child”(as cynically inclined literary critic Kornei Chukovsky called him) grew impatient dealing with the endlessly vacillating Benois and his friends from Mir Iskusstva, who in typical centrist fashion wanted “to retain their innocence and still make money”—obtain cultural power through the Bolsheviks but run things from backstage, taking on no real responsibility. Benois, as can be seen from his diary for 1917–1918, was unpleasantly surprised by the fact that the role of favorite to “Queen Lunacharsky” was suddenly played by the Futurists: the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and his henchman, Osip Brik.⁵

That should not have been a surprise to Benois: yes, after a brief hesitation (which did take place, even though they tried to deny it later), the Russian avant-gardists decided to collaborate openly and actively with the new regime, since it gave them a unique opportunity to be in charge, and the Bolsheviks, holding their noses, accepted this arrangement out of purely pragmatic considerations. This was a classic marriage of convenience.

As a result, in 1918–1919, the previously marginal avant-garde suddenly was omnipresent. Even without enumerating titles and posts in the ever-changing bureaucratic and cultural structures and institutions that the “left wing” occupied, it was clear that the reins for once belonged to them. Punin and Lourié, after their meeting with Lunacharsky, took leading positions in the cultural departments of the People’s Commissariat of Education.

Futurists, being socially engaged in their desire to modernize not only all aspects of culture, but also of everyday life, were the most visible. But other avant-garde sects became involved. Stocky and with a pockmarked face, Kazimir Malevich created the famous Black Square, the icon of twentieth-century abstract art and the highest achievement of the non-figurative Suprematist movement he founded, based on fundamental geometric forms. His antagonist and competitor for leadership of the Russian avant-garde, Vladimir Tatlin, the tall, thin, and clumsy Constructivist who assembled objects of art from nontraditional components, also occupied various executive positions in Petrograd and Moscow. Even Kandinsky (despite Lunacharsky’s initial dislike of his work), who looked like a real aristocrat compared to Malevich, who resembled a Polish peasant, and Tatlin, whose cloth cap gave him a rather proletarian air, dashed about from meeting to meeting, feverishly participating in the total reorganization and transformation of the old system of art education, while constantly fighting with his fellow avant-gardists.

With the blessing of the Bolsheviks, they did away with the old Academy of Arts in Petrograd and instituted Free State Art Studios—first in Petrograd and then in Moscow and other cities. Their goal was to attract the broad masses to art, preferably of the avant-garde kind. There were no exams or requirements for admission and students could invite anyone they wanted to teach.

An astonished realist painter described the situation: “In Tatlin’s studio, instead of easels, palettes, and brushes there were anvils, carpenter’s benches, a lathe, and corresponding tools. They built compositions out of various materials: wood, iron, mica, bast, combining them without giving thought to meaning. The works were incongruous but bold.”⁶ According to him, Tatlin would say, “Who needs anatomy, who needs perspective?”⁷

The walls of the Free Studio in Moscow (the former Stroganov School) were covered with Malevich’s slogans: “The downfall of the old world of art is in your hands,” “Let’s burn Raphael.” Raphaels were not burned, but valuable plaster casts that generations of young artists had used in their study of the craft were thrown out on Punin’s orders. A huge canvas by Mir Iskusstva artist Nikolai Roerich, The Taking of Kazan’, was removed from the storeroom of the Academy and cut up into pieces for students to use as they saw fit “in class work.”

At that moment, both the regime and the avant-garde gained by their symbiosis. Living conditions after the revolution had become much harsher, with destruction and hunger at a peak. The Bolsheviks tried to control the situation using the policies of “War Communism”: they nationalized industry, monopolized trade, and introduced a barter system of food parcels and coupons.

Serving the Soviet system gave the avant-garde artists not only a chance to survive but to promote their radical views in official media and to publish books, a great luxury in those days. Kandinsky managed to print his monograph “Steps: An Artist’s Text” under the aegis of the People’s Commissariat of Education in early 1919, when the catastrophic paper shortage (it was available only for Communist propaganda) and shrinking printing capacities had brought about the “café period” in literature: writers and poets unable to publish their works gave readings in various seedy, semi-underground establishments proudly dubbed “cafés.” This was how they earned their keep and managed to reach an audience.

The Soviet government was the dominant sponsor of culture. It gave Kandinsky, Malevich, Tatlin, and other recent outsiders the opportunity to head commissions that bought paintings for the new museums of contemporary art (the first of the kind in the world) and selected works for exhibitions that were now free both for participating artists and viewers. For the Soviet regime this was a way of warning off the sabotage of eminent traditionalists; in fact, the Bolsheviks used the energetic radicals as effective strike-breakers.

The avant-garde artists were also brought in to do propaganda for the new regime, and the most visible projects were statues of famous revolutionaries of the past (this was the personal pet idea of Lenin) and the decoration of cities for revolutionary holidays. The artist Natan Altman did the most radical work (which subsequently found its way into every anthology of avant-garde design): he remodeled the symbols of the tsarist regime in Petrograd—the Winter Palace and the square in front of it. In October 1918 the Winter Palace and the other buildings that made up the famous classical architectural ensemble were covered in gigantic propaganda panels depicting workers and peasants in a Futurist manner.

The tireless Punin urged the revolutionary designers to obliterate the historic buildings and monuments, not merely ornament them. “Blow up, destroy, and wipe the old artistic forms from the face of the earth—how could the new artist, the proletarian artist, the new man not dream of this?”⁸ In realizing Punin’s ideas as much as the cautious Bolsheviks would permit, Altman placed a tribune made up of red and orange sections in the center of the square by the Roman-style Alexander Column, creating a visual metaphor: the column was burning in revolutionary flames.

I’ll never forget Altman’s reply to my question in 1966: where did they find the apparently substantial funds needed to transform the Winter Palace, Hermitage, Admiralty and the many other palaces of the city in the lean year of 1918? “They weren’t stingy then,”⁹ the old artist replied enigmatically, the thin line of his Parisian mustache twisting in a smile.

One of the notable events in the celebration of the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution was the premiere of Mystery Bouffe, a play by the twenty-five-year-old leader of literary Futurism, Mayakovsky. The actress Andreyeva, the politically involved wife of Maxim Gorky, had become a cultural big shot under the Bolsheviks. She gave the young poet the idea of writing a topical satirical review. On October 27, 1918, at 8 p.m., at the Petrograd apartment of his mistress Lili Brik, Mayakovsky gave the first reading of the play to an elite group that included Lunacharsky, Altman, Punin, Lourié, Levky Zheverzheyev, and most importantly, the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, at the time in charge of all theaters in Petrograd. (Mayakovsky had invited the poet Alexander Blok, but it was a rainy night and Blok did not go, writing in his notebook: “No will, no me.”)¹⁰

The tall and handsome Mayakovsky read impressively in his lush bass voice (Andreyeva believed he would make a brilliant actor). Mystery Bouffe—an avant-garde and ironic retelling of the story of the Flood and Noah’s Ark from the Old Testament, in which the flood becomes the metaphor for world revolution—made a profound impression on the audience and the very next day a delighted review by Lunacharsky appeared in the press, announcing that Meyerhold would stage a production as part of the anniversary celebrations. Malevich, who had proclaimed the triumph of Suprematism (a term he invented for his austere concept of abstract art) over “the ugliness of real forms” back in 1915, took on the design. He defined Suprematism as the “purely painterly art.”¹¹

For Malevich, Mayakovsky’s Futurist play looked too conservative. Later he would explain, “I perceived the staging as the frame of a painting and the actors as contrasting elements…the actors’ movements had to complement rhythmically the elements of the sets.”¹² Mayakovsky was trying to present an avant-garde propaganda play, but the visionary Malevich wanted more: “I considered it my task not to reproduce the existing reality but to craft a new reality.”¹³

No designs by Malevich for Mystery Bouffe, which was performed only twice, nor have any photographs of the performance survived. According to members of the audience, Malevich construed Hell as red and green “Gothic” stalactite caves; the devils’ costumes were in two halves, red and black. The Promised Land that the ark reaches at the end of the play looked like a large Suprematist canvas. The audience did not comprehend the scenic design, and Mayakovsky himself was not very pleased with Malevich’s work, as Zheverzheyev (who later became the father-in-law of George Balanchine, a great admirer of Mayakovsky) remembered.¹⁴

Mayakovsky was a jack-of-all-trades for the November 7 premiere: some of the actors, frightened by the play’s apparent blasphemy, skipped the performance, and the playwright had to appear as Methuselah and even as one of the devils (in a red and black leotard). The influential critic André Levinson, who later as an émigré in Paris berated both Diaghilev and Balanchine for their break with tradition, declared that Mayakovsky, Malevich, and Meyerhold “need to please the new master, which is why they are so crude and vehement.”¹⁵

Surprisingly thin-skinned, the ruffian Mayakovsky immediately demanded that Levinson be condemned “for filthy slander and insulting my revolutionary feelings.”¹⁶ Punin and other Futurists also denounced the hapless critic in the press for “covert sabotage.”

For Meyerhold, meeting Mayakovsky was a blessing; as the director recalled, “We immediately found a common ground in politics, and in 1918 that was the most important thing: for us both, the October revolution had been a way out of the intellectual dead end.”¹⁷ At that point, Meyerhold was forty-four, one of the most prominent people in Russian theater, reaching dizzying heights via a very zigzagged path. The son of a provincial Lutheran vodka distillery owner and a convert to Russian Orthodoxy, he had become one of the stars of the Moscow Art Theater from the moment Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko founded it in 1898. But after an argument with Stanislavsky he left to become a notorious leader of Symbolist theater and in 1908 was offered the position, to everyone’s surprise, of director of the Imperial theaters—the Alexandrinsky and Maryinsky—only to perform an even more unexpected somersault in 1918, when he joined the Bolshevik party.

Like all geniuses, Meyerhold was a complex and contradictory personality. With all the qualities of a theater leader—self-confidence, independence, persistence, and unflagging energy—Meyerhold, paradoxically, always sought a powerful ally, an authority figure on whom he could depend. Chekhov was such a surrogate father for Meyerhold, who was fourteen years his junior. They began a correspondence in 1899, when he was an actor at the Art Theater, and some eighteen months later he wrote to Chekhov: “I think of you always. When I read you, when I perform your plays, when I ponder the meaning of life, when I am at odds with my surroundings and myself, when I am suffering loneliness…. I am irritable, picky, and suspicious, and everyone considers me an unpleasant man. But I suffer and contemplate suicide.”¹⁸

In that same, extremely frank letter to Chekhov dated April 18, 1901, Meyerhold expressed outrage over the police suppression of a student demonstration by the Cathedral of Kazan in St. Petersburg, which he had witnessed on March 4, when “on the square and in the church, those young people were beaten with whips and sabers, ruthlessly, cynically.” Meyerhold complained to the playwright that he could not “engage calmly in artistic matters when my blood is boiling and everything calls for struggle,” and yet exclaimed, “Yes, the theater can play a tremendous role in the reshaping of everything that exists!”¹⁹ (A curious detail: Meyerhold’s correspondence—or was it Chekhov’s?—was read by the tsarist police and an extract from the seditious letter by the future director was placed in the “File of the Police Department on Actor of the Art Theater Vsevolod Meyerhold.”)

Later, Meyerhold would insist: “Chekhov loved me. That is the pride of my life, one of my most treasured memories.”²⁰ He claimed that it was Chekhov who had raised doubts in him about the validity of Stanislavsky’s “realistic” Method and encouraged him to search for new Symbolist ways in theater.

In any case, after Chekhov’s death in 1904, Meyerhold found a new guiding star, the poet Alexander Blok. In 1906 in St. Petersburg, he staged the twenty-six-year-old’s Balaganchik [Fair Show Booth], which brilliantly combined a declaration of mystical Symbolism and a vicious parody of it. Preceding the Stravinsky-Benois-Fokine Pétrouchka by five years, Meyerhold appeared onstage in Fair Show Booth as a suffering Pierrot, at the end of the performance crying to the audience: “Help me! I’m bleeding cranberry juice!”

The following apt description of the scandal provoked by the premiere of Fair Show Booth can be compared to the similar reaction to Sacre du printemps in 1913: “The fierce whistling down of the foes and the thunder of friendly applause mixed with shouts and cries. That was fame.”²¹ Blok and Meyerhold came out together for bows, a contrasting couple—the stony poet, whose Apollonic ashen mask of restraint hid the gloom in his steel-gray eyes, and the Dionysian director and actor, moving and swaying as if boneless, waving the long sleeves of his white Pierrot costume.

This was a memorable moment for both. Meyerhold always considered the premiere of Fair Show Booth the real start of his life as a director. Four years before his death, Blok described Fair Show Booth enigmatically as “a work that came out of the depths of the police department of my own soul.”²²

Unlike Chekhov’s mysteriously missing letters to Meyerhold, Blok’s diary notes about the director have survived; they serve as a guide to the “very difficult”(in Meyerhold’s words) relationship. In the archives of the Institute of Russian Literature in St. Petersburg, there is a photograph of the young Meyerhold—dandified hat, his famous aquiline nose, the meaty lips—with an inscription to the poet: “I came to love Alexander Alexandrovich Blok before I ever met him. When we part, I will take away a steady love for him forever. I love his poetry, I love his eyes. Yet he does not know me.”²³

Blok admitted that Meyerhold’s production of Fair Show Booth was ideal, but by 1913 he referred to another of Meyerhold’s stagings as “Mediocre Hue and Cry.”²⁴ The director would come to the poet for advice on whether or not to get a divorce, while Blok noted in his diary his “distrust for Meyerhold.”²⁵ The director later recalled Blok: “We argued rarely. Blok did not know how to argue. He would say his piece, which had been building up, and then be quiet. But he had a marvelous ability to listen—a rare trait.”²⁶

With the other founders of the ArtTheater, Meyerhold was at the source of the defining interpretations of Chekhov’s plays using the Stanislavsky Method. Another person might have exploited this for the rest of his life. But just four years later, Meyerhold made a sharp turn to Symbolist theater with his production of Blok’s Fair Show Booth. Then followed a period of extravagantly lavish productions in the Imperial theaters, which many contemporaries considered opulent requiems for the fading tsarist regime: Molière’s Don Juan, Richard Strauss’s Elektra, and Mikhail Lermontov’s Masquerade.

They called Meyerhold’s Masquerade the “last play of tsarist Russia.” This is apt both metaphorically and factually: the premiere took place in the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater on February 25, 1917, and the Romanov dynasty fell a day later. By 1918, Meyerhold was doing the first production of the first truly Soviet play, Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe.

Unceasingly inventive and experimental, in 1920 Meyerhold proclaimed “October for the theater,” a revolutionary slogan: “No pauses, psychology, or ‘emotions’ on stage…. The public should be involved in the stage action and create the play collectively—that is our theatrical program.”²⁷

In realizing this manifesto, Meyerhold staged the play The Dawn, by the Belgian Symbolist poet Emile Verhaeren, as a mass rally. Ramps connected the stage with the hall, where the lights were left on for the performance. The actors, without makeup or wigs, spoke directly to the audience, which had plants who provoked viewers into discussion with the actors.

The most memorable example of this new approach was seen on November 18, 1920, when during a performance a telegram was delivered to Meyerhold about a decisive victory in the Civil War: the advancing Red Army forced the broken remains of the White Army to flee to Turkey. Meyerhold had the actor playing The Messenger read the historic telegram from the stage. An eyewitness described the audience reaction: “I had never heard such an explosion of shouts, cries, and clapping, such a fierce howl within theater walls…. I never saw a greater merging of art and reality either before that performance or afterward.”²⁸

Inspired by this experiment, Meyerhold decided to stage a new adaptation of Hamlet, with the graveyard scene an up-to-date political review, the text to be written by Mayakovsky. Marina Tsvetaeva was commissioned to render the verse translation of the tragedy, but this project fell through: Tsvetaeva fled to Berlin in May 1922.

Meyerhold continued bursting with innovations that changed the landscape of theater: he got rid of the curtain; he used constructions by the avant-garde artist Lubov Popova instead of traditional sets; he introduced a new system of training actors that he called “biomechanics”—a complex mixture of gymnastics and acrobatics that helped the actor control his body’s movements precisely and naturally, an “anti-Stanislavsky Method” of sorts.

In the 1920s, Meyerhold’s fame reached its peak: he was adored by progressive youth, he was copied, envied, showered with awards (after the then-rare title of People’s Artist, which he received even before Stanislavsky, Meyerhold became honorary Red Soldier of the Moscow Garrison, honorary Red Sailor, Miner, and so on), and—the truest sign of popularity—parodied. Mikhail Bulgakov predicted acidly that Meyerhold would die when the trapezes with naked boyars in an “experimental” production of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov collapsed and fell on him. (Even clairvoyant Bulgakov could not have imagined Meyerhold’s cruel death at the hands of Stalin’s henchmen.) At that time, “Meyerhold” and “stage director” were synonymous.

Meyerhold’s influence extended to the fledgling Soviet film world, where one of his students was the up-and-coming Sergei Eisenstein, whose revolutionary masterpiece Battleship Potemkin appeared in 1926. Iconoclastic Eisenstein nevertheless called Meyerhold “incomparable” and “divine.” In his memoirs, published in Russia only after Gorbachev’s perestroika, Eisenstein bitterly recalled the period in 1921 when Meyerhold, still a famous and revered director, was being harassed out of positions of responsibility by the authorities.²⁹

Meyerhold’s radicalism seemed excessive in the new political landscape, which had changed noticeably. In 1921, after winning the Civil War against the White Army, the Communists once again faced the threat of counterrevolutionary revolt from within. The severe revolutionary order they had instituted was not working. The country lay in ruins.

The Soviet regime kept clinging to the disastrous market-free economy. The cultural avant-garde wholeheartedly supported this policy, for it suited their artistic ideals. But the workers and peasants grumbled. More than 20,000 seamen rebelled in March 1921 at Russia’s largest naval base, Kronstadt near Petrograd, bringing the city to a siege situation. Anti-Bolshevik peasant riots spread in the provinces.

Gathering their last strength, the Bolsheviks cruelly suppressed the Kronstadt Rebellion and the peasant Vendée. Switching to carrot-and-stick policies, Lenin decided to make some concessions. In May 1921, overcoming the resistance of the majority of his party comrades, he proclaimed the New Economic Policy (NEP). Small private trade was permitted again, small private factories and crafts shops opened, kiosks selling trifles appeared on the corners and intersections of Moscow and Petrograd, and were gradually joined by shops, cafés, delis, patisseries, and bakeries. Workmen tore down old boards from the windows of closed shops and installed new panes, and soon displays showed luxurious still lifes forgotten over the hungry years of revolution and war: bread, cheese, pastry, bagels and rolls of every size and shape, heavy hams, a variety of sausages and cheese, and even such exotic fruit as grapes, oranges, and bananas.

Private initiative created the economic miracle that had eluded the Bolsheviks, and collapse was averted. Hunger and misery dissipated, and so did the dreams of the avant-garde artists for hegemony in culture. Not so long ago, they had been instituting utopian projects on a planetary scale: Meyerhold intended to open the Theater of International Proletarian Culture in Moscow in 1920, and Kandinsky wanted to convene an International Congress of Art. But once “normal” life was reestablished, it turned out that the masses did not need avant-garde art.

The innovators were being replaced in their executive cultural posts by traditionalists, who had previously taken a wait-and-see position regarding the Bolsheviks. The Soviet leaders were eager to form an alliance with the “realists,” because the majority of the Bolsheviks had very conservative tastes. And so, the patriarch of the Art Theater, Nemirovich-Danchenko, came out of an audience at the Kremlin and announced with pleasure that “the attitude toward theaters has changed strongly: Meyerholdism has lost not only its prestige, but all interest.”³⁰

With growing confidence, the Bolsheviks were pushing aside the Futurists, especially their loudest representative, the loyal Mayakovsky, whom Lenin viewed “with suspicion and even irritation,” according to Maxim Gorky. “He yells, he makes up these crooked words.”³¹ Lenin’s patience broke when Mayakovsky published his new narrative poem 150,000,000 at a state printing house without the author’s name but under the seal “Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic,” which made the Futurist poem appear to be an example of sanctioned, official literature.

A note sent by Lenin to Lunacharsky during a government meeting on May 6, 1921, has been preserved: “Aren’t you ashamed to vote for publishing Mayakovsky’s 150,000,000 in 5,000 copies? It’s nonsense, stupidity, idiotic and pretentious. I think only 1 out of 10 such things should be published and no more than 1,500 copies for libraries and eccentrics. And Lunacharsky should be horse-whipped for Futurism.”³²

With Lenin’s support and even direct participation, an attack began on the avant-garde in the state art education system, where they had previously held command positions. In an appeal addressed to Lenin on June 13, 1921, the adherents of realism expressed their indignation that for the last three and a half years the “Futurists ruthlessly suppressed all the other movements in art, creating a privileged financial situation for themselves and placing artists of a different creed into a hopeless situation.”³³ The traditionalists presented a long list of grievances against the avant-garde: “They strive via pure force to cultivate Futurist and abstract art…. They shamelessly turn students into grimacing ‘innovators.’…The country is in danger of being left without seriously trained artists.”³⁴

The Bolsheviks continued to play cultural games with the administrative dexterity they had demonstrated from the first days of the revolution, but there was only one aim of all those complicated bureaucratic maneuvers, the endless denunciations, counterdenunciations, government and party resolutions, decrees, and ukases (many of which were Lenin’s): to disavow the avant-garde as the official cultural course.

The avant-garde artists were the first to realize it. They fought back desperately, calling their aesthetic opponents anti-Soviet and swearing fealty to the authorities at every step. But some of them, under various pretexts, began drifting to the West. Kandinsky, who had been, among other things, vice-president of the Russian Academy of Artistic Studies, went to Germany in 1921, ostensibly to create an international branch of the Academy. He became one of the leaders of the avant-garde Bauhaus school of art and design and found world recognition as the father of abstract painting and predecessor of the American Abstract Expressionists of the late twentieth century.

The colorful Jewish primitivist Marc Chagall, who had been “plenipotentiary in charge of art affairs of the city of Vitebsk” in Russia and who had festooned the city for the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, moved to Moscow (pushed out of Vitebsk by the more radical Malevich), and from there in the summer of 1922 to Berlin, and then to Paris. (Many critics believe that the best works of both Chagall and Kandinsky belong to their early period.) The Constructivist sculptors Naum Gabo and Natan Pevsner (who were brothers) had worked actively in Moscow but also ended up in Western Europe. One of the “Amazons of the Russian avant-garde,” Alexandra Exter, left for Venice in 1924 to take part in the organization of the Soviet pavilion for the international art exhibition; like Chagall, she settled in Paris. These people lived through the most difficult years in Russia. Their emigration signaled the beginning of the end of the Russian avant-garde as a national phenomenon.

Exter’s departure in particular meant the complete collapse of the unofficial group of “Amazons” that had formed in Russian innovative culture before the revolution. They were called Amazons by friends and foes—the latter mockingly, the former with delight and awe, stressing their uniqueness not only for Russia but for the world. In fact, it is impossible to name another similar group of such powerful, vivid, and innovative women artists.

Outwardly, the status of women in prerevolutionary Russia, even among the educated urban strata, was low—they had not won the right to vote nor did they have equal rights with men for education and labor. But within the elite and bohemian groups of Moscow and St. Petersburg the situation was different: the participation of gifted women in the cultural discourse was keenly welcome.

A veteran of the prerevolutionary Futurist movement, Benedikt Livshits, later recalled in his book, The One-and-a-Half-Eyed Archer (1933), remarkable for its density, the role played by Exter and her friends Olga Rozanova and Natalya Goncharova: “Those three amazing women were always in the front lines of Russian painting and brought a warlike ardor into their milieu, without which our further success would have been impossible. These true Amazons, those Scythian riders, got an immunity to Western ‘poison’ from an injection of French culture.”³⁵

The great tragic actress Alisa Koonen (a star of Alexander Tairov’s expressionist theater) maintained: “Goncharova did not look like an Amazon at all. She attracted people with her femininity, gentleness, and pure Russian beauty. Her hair was combed back, she had a thin face with big black eyes.”³⁶ And art critic Abram Efros described Rozanova this way: “Her image was distinguished by total alertness and noiseless restlessness. Truly she resembled a mouse, housewifely and anxious. Exhibitions and paintings were her murine kingdom.”³⁷

Another deviation from the feminist stereotype was that most of the Russian Amazons were apparently happy in their heterosexual relationships. The most famous couple was, of course, Goncharova and her comrade-in-arms of many years, Mikhail Larionov, the royal couple of the Russian avant-garde, who moved to Paris in 1917 and created some of Diaghilev’s most famous productions, such as Prokofiev’s Chout [Jester] (Larionov) and Stravinsky’s Les Noces (Goncharova). Stravinsky valued Larionov’s talent highly, but thought, nevertheless, that sometimes Goncharova did his work for him. “He made a vocation of laziness, like Oblomov.”³⁸

The relationships of the other Amazons were legendary, too: Varvara Stepanova and one of the leaders of the Russian avant-garde, Alexander Rodchenko, Nadezhda Udaltsova and the artist Alexander Drevin. Rodchenko, who was a friend of Udaltsova’s, later recalled that she “spoke of Cubism softly and ingratiatingly. As if a living confirmation of Cubism, she had a very interesting face of a nun with close-set eyes, looking with two completely different expressions, a slightly deformed Cubist nose and thin, nunnish lips.”³⁹ According to the severe Rodchenko, Udaltsova “understood Cubism more than the rest and worked more seriously than the rest.”⁴⁰

The fate of Udaltsova and her husband was tragic: Drevin was arrested on the night of February 16, 1938, and he was executed ten years later in a Stalinist prison. Udaltsova was not told of her husband’s death, and she continued submitting appeals for his pardon for almost twenty years, until she learned the horrible truth in 1956. But before her death in 1961, taking advantage of the Khrushchev “Thaw,” Udaltsova managed to have an exhibition of her own works (1958) and to show her husband’s paintings after a gap of a quarter century. It was only then that Udaltsova and Drevin were talked about again, only to be soon forgotten for another thirty years, until their full canonization after Gorbachev’s perestroika.

Chapter Four

From the beginning of their rule, the Bolsheviks were reluctant to allow leading cultural figures to travel abroad. They were more lenient with the avant-garde: first, because they were mostly lefties themselves, and therefore more trustworthy; second, the authorities did not consider them very important—even if they did not return to Russia, it would be no great loss.

It was another thing when the major mainstream writers and poets, respected and popular even before the revolution, started heading west: Bunin, Alexander Kuprin, Konstantin Balmont, Merezhkovsky and his wife, Hippius. This became embarrassing for the Soviets, especially when they received the following memorandum in June 1921 from the head of the foreign department of the Cheka, or secret police, who handled requests for travel abroad. “Taking into account that the writers who have gone abroad are waging an active campaign against Soviet Russia and some of them, such as Balmont, Kuprin, and Bunin, stoop to the vilest lies, the All-Russian Cheka does not consider it possible to satisfy such requests.”¹

Now it was the Politburo, headed by Lenin, that discussed every candidate who asked to travel to the West. The case involving Alexander Blok, the forty-year-old leader of Russian Symbolism who was perhaps the most beloved poet in Russia at the time, was most troubling.

Blok, who considered the old Russia a “horrible world,” had welcomed the Bolshevik revolution and supported it with two of its arguably most impressive poetic manifestoes: the dense and intensely lyrical narrative poem The Twelve, in which a squad of Red Army soldiers patrolling revolutionary Petrograd is compared to the twelve apostles and Christ miraculously appears to lead them, and the passionate and prophetic poem The Scythians, inspired by the nationalist ideas of his ideological mentor Ivanov-Razumnik. These masterpieces, quickly translated into all the major languages (in France they were illustrated by Larionov and Goncharova), were read in the West as the most profound artistic interpretation of the seismic revolutionary cataclysms in Russia.

But the Bolsheviks still did not trust Blok, even arresting him—albeit briefly—in 1919 on suspicion of conspiracy. In 1921, Blok, exhausted and malnourished, developed septic endocarditis (inflammation of the inner lining of the heart) and inflammation of the brain (meningial encephalitis). Gorky and Lunacharsky appealed to Lenin to let the poet go to Finland for treatment. At first the Politburo refused. Then Lenin and his comrades relented, but too late: on August 7, Blok died, mourned as a victim of the Bolshevik regime by many. As Lunacharsky bitterly commented in his secret letter to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party: “There will be no doubt and no refutation of the fact that we killed Russia’s most talented poet.”² Thus Blok, a fellow traveler, became the first widely acknowledged great martyr of Soviet cultural policies. The second major figure to appear on that list was the poet Nikolai Gumilev, thirty-five, who was executed on August 25, 1921, with sixty other “counterrevolutionaries,” accused of supporting the recently routed anti-Soviet Kronstadt uprising.

Before the revolution, Gumilev became well known as leader of the Acmeist movement in poetry, which he founded with his wife, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam, to bring “beautiful clarity” in opposition to the fogs of poetic Symbolism. An adventurer and conquistador by nature, but awkward looking with long limbs and crossed eyes, Gumilev was transformed by action, being a born leader. As a young man he had gone on three dangerous expeditions to Africa (as it has recently been revealed, most probably on assignment from Russian intelligence agencies)³ and at the very start of World War I, where he had volunteered, he was twice awarded the highest medal for valor, the St. George Cross.

In 1917, Gumilev was in Paris, where he befriended Larionov and Goncharova. She drew an expressive portrait of the poet as a sleek dandy in her favorite colorful neoprimitivist manner. He returned to Bolshevik Petrograd, where he embarked on a dangerous and still somewhat mysterious game with the authorities: he participated energetically in various educational endeavors promoting the new regime yet behaved provocatively, giving public readings of his promonarchist poetry and announcing, “The Bolsheviks won’t dare touch me.”

Well, they did, executing Gumilev on flimsy evidence and despite Lenin’s promise to release the poet, which he allegedly gave to Gorky, who was constantly intervening on behalf of the persecuted Russian intelligentsia. It seems that Gumilev used himself as a guinea pig to see if the Soviet regime would allow major cultural figures a certain degree of intellectual freedom. The answer, which the poet paid with his life to get, was “No.”

Entering NEP, the Bolsheviks in effect told the intelligentsia: as long as we were unable to feed you, you had the right to a small bit of independence; now take your hunk of bread and salami and serve the new regime without murmur. This period saw a lessening role for Lunacharsky, arguably the most educated and tolerant of Soviet leaders, whom Lenin, the wily political tactician, made mediator between the authorities and the intellectuals whenever the situation was critical for the Bolsheviks.

Lenin once admitted to the German Communist Klara Zetkin: “I am incapable of considering the works of Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism and other ‘isms’ the highest manifestation of artistic genius. I do not understand them.”⁴ When Lenin (whom Gorky later described as a “bald, solid, sturdy man who could not pronounce the letter R” with “amazingly lively eyes”) was asked to express his opinion about a work of art, he usually replied, “I don’t understand anything here, ask Lunacharsky.”⁵

Still, Lenin was obviously annoyed by Lunacharsky’s fondness for high culture, especially the theater (Lunacharsky wrote plays, too), over the elementary education of the masses. Lenin rebuked Lunacharsky on August 26, 1921, the day after Gumilev was shot, with a harsh remark: “I suggest piling all theaters into the grave. The People’s Commissar of Education should be teaching grammar, not dealing with the theater.”⁶ According to Lunacharsky’s memoirs, Lenin tried to shut down the Bolshoi and the Maryinsky theaters several times, reasoning that the opera and ballet “were a piece of purely bourgeois culture, and no one can argue with that!”⁷ Fortunately, Lunacharsky, with figures in hand, could show that shutting down these great cultural palaces would bring tiny economic profit and enormous propaganda loss, thereby fighting off Lenin’s attacks (with the quiet support of Stalin, a fan of opera and ballet).

In the second half of 1921, Lenin became seriously ill, and in May 1922, a stroke paralyzed his right side. In the gap before the next stroke, in December, Lenin initiated the expulsion abroad of 160 “of the most active bourgeois ideologues,” including the crème de la crème of Russian philosophy—Lev Karsavin (at the time, the elected rector of Petrograd University), Sergei Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Frank, Ivan Ilyin, and Stepun.

The final list of banished philosophers was sanctioned personally by Lenin. It was his last anti-intellectual shot before his third stroke, which in March 1923 ended his involvement in state affairs.

Lenin died January 21, 1924, but the Party’s cultural policy had been supervised for some time by Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik military leader, and Nikolai Bukharin, the prominent ideologue. Both were much more authoritative figures than Lunacharsky, but they dealt with culture more as a hobby, even while writing about it frequently enough.

Their later struggle against Stalin and their deaths at his hand has created a myth of their cultural tolerance. But both Trotsky and Bukharin, while comparatively educated men who spoke several languages, remained Marxist doctrinaires all their lives and ruthlessly criticized philosophers, writers, and poets for any sort of ideological deviation.

For example, in a Pravda article published in September 1922, Trotsky belittled the expelled leaders of the Russian religious renaissance—Berdyaev, Karsavin, Frank, and others: “There aren’t many takers to shake up the neoreligious liquid distilled before the war in the little apothecaries of Berdyaev and others.”⁸

In Trotsky’s opinion, the influence of the “new religious consciousness” on Russian literature had “dwindled to nothing.” Contradicting himself, Trotsky petulantly scoffed at the religious motifs in the poetry of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, especially mocking their constant appeals to God: “Now there’s truly a place where you can’t get to the door without God…. It is a very convenient and portable third person, completely house trained, a friend of the family, who sometimes performs the duties of doctor for female dysfunctions. How this elderly personage, burdened by the personal and often very labor-intensive errands of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and others, manages in his spare time to handle the fate of the universe is incomprehensible.”⁹

Bukharin, who held more moderate positions politically than the extreme left Trotsky, could be just as unbridled in his attacks on cultural figures who displeased him: he called Berdyaev’s work “nonsense”¹⁰ in 1924 and in 1925 a “brain eclipse.”¹¹ But Bukharin and Trotsky united to push through the Politburo a famously benign resolution “On the Party’s policy in the sphere of literature” of June 18, 1925 (the draft had been prepared by Bukharin). This resolution not only defended mainstream authors who were attacked brutally by the Communist dogmatists in the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), but also proclaimed that the Party “cannot insist on a preference for any particular literary form” and even called for free competition among various cultural groups and tendencies.

Naturally, even in 1925 the Communists were not as liberal in deed as they were in word. NEP, which started in 1921, forced them to loosen the ideological reins a little (in Moscow alone in 1922 there were 220 small private publishing houses), but by 1922 the authorities restored tight control over printed product by establishing a special censor’s office—The Main Directorate on Literary Affairs and Publishing (Glavlit).

The ruling party supported “proletarian” writers, of whom, according to RAPP data, there were several thousand in 1925. They were given priority financing, organizational help, and access to state publishing houses. Peasant writers were treated much more suspiciously, even though officially the Soviet state was one of united workers and peasants.

In a letter to Bukharin dated July 13, 1925, Maxim Gorky endorsed the wariness of the Bolsheviks toward the peasantry. “The Central Committee resolution’ On the Party’s policy in the sphere of literature’ is a marvelous and wise thing, dear Nikolai Ivanovich! There is no doubt that this smart smack on the head will push our belles-lettres forward.” And after that dubious compliment, Gorky moved on to his point: “Dear comrade, either you or Trotsky should point out to worker writers that the work of peasant writers is appearing next to their oeuvre and there is the possibility, I would say, inevitability, of conflict between these two ‘directions.’ Any censorship here would only be a hindrance and would exacerbate the ideology of muzhik-worshipers and village-lovers, but criticism—ruthless criticism—of that ideology must be aired right now.”¹²

Gorky—unlike Leo Tolstoy, who idealized the Russian muzhik—always considered the peasantry a dark, uncontrollable force, simultaneously lazy and cruel and permanently anti-intellectual. He felt that Count Tolstoy did not know the real countryside, while he, Gorky, who had come out of the people and had walked all over Russia, understood it completely. Like the leading Bolsheviks, Gorky disliked and feared the peasants, pointing out: “I have always been distressed by the fact that in Russia the illiterate village dominates the city and also by the zoological individualism of the peasantry and the almost total absence of social emotions in it. The dictatorship of politically literate workers, in close alliance with the scientific and technical intelligentsia, was, in my opinion, the only possible way out of this impossible situation.”¹³

In a country where at the start of the revolution, the mostly illiterate peasants constituted 82 percent of the population, the Bolsheviks, who considered themselves the avant-garde “proletarian” squad, shuddered when assessing the economic and cultural threat coming from the gloomy and distant peasant ocean. Many urban intellectuals felt the same way; Gorky was no exception here.

In this unsettled context, the suicide of Sergei Esenin was no less symbolic than the death of Blok and execution of Gumilev in 1921. Esenin, thirty, was the leader of the so-called New Peasant poets. On the night of December 27, 1925, Esenin hanged himself in a room at the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad. That morning, he had attempted to write down a farewell poem, but there was no ink in the room; he cut a vein in his left wrist and wrote in blood:

Farewell, my friend, without a hand, without a word,

Do not sorrow or furrow your brow—

In this world, dying is nothing new,

But living, of course, is no newer.

The appeal of Esenin’s tender, crooning poems (he wrote mostly of love, nature, and animals) was greatly enhanced by his tragic fate. This made him the most universally popular twentieth-century poet in Russia. Still, the Esenin phenomenon remained local, and even in Russia some connoisseurs (for example, Akhmatova) regarded his poetry skeptically.

Prince Dmitri Svyatopolk-Mirsky (perhaps the finest Russian literary critic of the twentieth century, writing as D. S. Mirsky in English after he emigrated), while noting in 1926 that Esenin “had many bad poems and almost no perfect ones,”¹⁴ nevertheless lauded his poetry’s special charm and touching appeal and also his specifically national longing, for which unsophisticated (but also many quite sophisticated) readers in Russia still adore Esenin.

Foreigners who wish to peek into the soul of eternal Mother Russia must read Esenin in the original, since the translations fail to convey his essential Russianness. For all the seeming simplicity of his most famous poems, some of which have become folk songs, Esenin remains a mysterious figure. His political, aesthetic, and religious views form a tangle of unresolved contradictions.

One can find statements by Esenin for and against the old Russia, the Soviet regime, the Bolsheviks, the West, and America. He has poems that are tender, misogynistic, sad, brutish, imbued with religious feeling, and blasphemous. His admirers included the last Russian empress, Maria Fedorovna, and the militant Bolshevik Trotsky. The empress told Esenin that his poetry was “beautiful but very sad.” Esenin replied that so was all of Russia.¹⁵

Gorky recalled the first time he saw Esenin in Petrograd in 1915: “Curly-haired and blond, in a light blue shirt, a long coat with a fitted waist and soft boots that gathered at the ankles, he was very much like a saccharine postcard.”¹⁶ Ten years later Esenin looked very different: the blond hair had faded, his heavy drinking muddied his once bright blue eyes, and the angelic face had turned ashen gray. He had had countless brief affairs and three notorious marriages.

His first wife was Zinaida Raikh, who later married Meyerhold and was brutally murdered in her apartment in 1939, soon after the director’s arrest; the murder—there were seventeen knife wounds in her body—was never solved. His second wife was a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy, and the third, the great American dancer Isadora Duncan, who came in 1921 to revolutionary Moscow to start a school of “free dance.” Duncan was eighteen years older than Esenin and obviously madly in love with him, always cuddling up to him in public, which embarrassed the poet. He would curse at her and even hit her, but nevertheless, he was proud of his marriage.

Esenin traveled through Europe with Duncan and even came to the United States. Upon his return in 1923, Esenin, deeply offended by the Americans’ total lack of interest in his poetry, wrote: “The supremacy of the dollar has destroyed any striving in them for complicated issues. The American is totally involved in beeznis and wants to know nothing else. Art in America is on the lowest level of development.”¹⁷

But the achievements in “art of manufacture,” as Esenin called it—the Brooklyn Bridge, the neon lights on Broadway, the radio broadcasting Tchaikovsky—made a strong impression on him (as it had on Mayakovsky, who first came to the United States in 1925): “When you see or hear all that, you are amazed by the possibilities of mankind and you are ashamed that back in Russia people still believe in an old man with a beard and pray for his mercy.”¹⁸ In 1923, electricity was more important than God for Esenin. In that respect, at that moment he was closer to Chekhov and Gorky than to Leo Tolstoy.

Esenin’s death in 1925 stunned Russia; a wave of copycat suicides swept the country. The Communists were worried. Their culture arbiter Bukharin was not thrilled by Esenin: “Ideologically Esenin represents the most negative traits of the Russian countryside and the so-called national character: brawls, an enormous inner lack of discipline, and an idolization of the most backward form of social life.”¹⁹

But the poet’s undisputed popularity made Bukharin panicky: “How does Esenin capture the youth? Why are there ‘Esenin’s widows’ clubs among the young people? Why do Young Communist League members often have a copy of Esenin’s poems under their Communist Guide? Because we and our ideologists have not touched the strings in young people that Sergei Esenin did.”

As to be expected, the Soviet state fought Esenin’s influence, which they called Eseninism, with repressive measures: lovers of Esenin’s poetry were expelled from college and the Komsomol and in the years before World War II and even later, you could get a sentence in the prison camps for having and distributing handwritten copies of Esenin’s “hooligan” works.

The Soviets “purged” the circle of Esenin’s friends; one of the poet’s mentors, the “Scythian” Ivanov-Razumnik, was first banned from publication and then arrested. He survived purely by accident. Ivanov-Razumnik, citing a private conversation with Esenin in 1924, explained that the poet’s suicide was “the result of his inability to write and breathe in the oppressive atmosphere of the Soviet paradise.”²⁰

The other New Peasant poets, close comrades-in-arms of Esenin, suffered a dramatic fate as well. Stalin’s antipeasant policy was detailed in 1929 (the year he declared The Great Watershed), soon after the national celebrations of his fiftieth birthday, which cemented the cult of personality of the new Soviet leader.

Stalin announced the end of NEP and the start of the first industrial Five-Year Plan, with mass collectivization of agriculture. The millions of peasants who refused to join kolkhozes (collective farms) were branded kulaks and were subject to mass deportation. Disavowing the compromising policies of the past, Stalin put the question this way: “Either backward to capitalism, or forward to socialism. There is no and can be no third path.”²¹

It was obvious which path was chosen; a violent change was imposed on the Russian peasantry—in the words of Solzhenitsyn, “an ethnic catastrophe.” Stalin’s “liquidation of kulaks as a class” brought indescribable suffering and led to a famine. The ruthless policy also destroyed the cultural ideologues of the peasantry, the poets Nikolai Klyuev, Sergei Klychkov, Petr Oreshin, and their younger follower, the talented Pavel Vasilyev, who was touted as the new Esenin. Charged with “counterrevolutionary” sympathy for kulaks, they all perished.

In the declassified transcripts of Klyuev’s interrogation after his arrest in February 1934, the poet describes collectivization as “the state’s violence against the people, spurting blood and fiery pain…. I regard collectivization with mystical horror, as an invasion of demons.”²² Klyuev also declared stubbornly: “My opinion is that the October revolution sent the country into a vale of suffering and disasters and made it the most miserable in the world, and I expressed that in my poem, ‘There are demons of plague, leprosy, and cholera.’”²³

Many literati (including Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky) considered Klyuev a better poet than Esenin. Like him, Klyuev was a maddeningly complicated figure, at once a firm traditionalist and a bold innovator. Like Esenin, even before the revolution he began to mourn the wasting away of the traditional peasant way of life in Russia, doing so in complex verse weighted down by clusters of modernist metaphors. Like Esenin, Klyuev dressed as a stylized paysan—in a side-buttoned collarless shirt and a woolen jacket known as armyak, low boots, a large pectoral cross, and brilliantined hair—and did not hide his homosexuality, which was rather unusual in Russian literary life then. (Another exception to this rule was his contemporary, the prominent modernist poet Mikhail Kuzmin.)

In 1918, Klyuev joined the Bolshevik Party, only to be expelled two years later because “his religious convictions are in complete contradiction to the party’s materialistic ideology.”²⁴ Klyuev left behind a powerful cycle of poems in honor of Lenin (1919) and Pogorelshchina [Burned Out], in Brodsky’s opinion the most brutal poetic exposé of the Soviet antipeasant policy.

Sadly, there were not many works written about those horrible years, despite the fact that Russia was predominantly a peasant country with a powerful tradition of idolizing the peasantry in literature, culminating in the works of Leo Tolstoy. It is telling that for Chekhov peasant life was no longer a central theme and that Gorky treated peasants with undisguised contempt. This reflected the growing cultural gap between the peasantry and the intelligentsia.

The liberal author and critic Kornei Chukovsky ventured in his diary on June 1, 1930, at the height of the destruction of the Russian peasantry, that “the kolkhoz is the only salvation for Russia, the only solution to the peasant question in the country!”²⁵

The diaries also record a presumably unfeigned appreciation of Stalin as destroyer of the kulaks, expressed in a private conversation with Chukovsky by the literary theoretician Yuri Tynyanov: “As author of the kolkhoz, Stalin is the greatest genius restructuring the world.”²⁶

Isaak Babel, the master of the Soviet short story, attempted to write about collectivization. In 1931 he published a fragment of a planned novel in the journal Novy Mir, but it was not very successful and he dropped the project, because, as Babel admitted, “that grandiose process was torn into disjointed shreds in my consciousness.”²⁷

Stocky, bespectacled, and ironic, Babel did not condemn collectivization publicly, but he did not become its singer, either, even though the nationalist critic Vadim Kozhinov and his colleagues in the postperestroika period accused the late writer of participating in the forced collectivization of farms in the Caucasus and Ukraine. In his youth, Babel, a man with an extremely checkered past, had—by his own admission—worked for the Cheka, and later considered as close friends some of the highest-ranking officials of the Soviet secret police (this fact was noted with disapproval by Solzhenitsyn in 2002), but that still did not make Babel an apologist for the security apparatus.

As early as 1925 the émigré D. S. Mirsky noted that the magic of Babel was “to sharpen” a tragic anecdote artfully as in Pushkin’s novellas and maintained that even in his most “realistic” works, like the short-story cycle Red Army about the Civil War, the writer remained politically unengaged: “Ideology for him is just a helpful device.”²⁸

In fact, Babel cannot be called the bard of the criminal world, either, but his colorful stories about Odessa’s exotic bandits and muggers belong to the highest achievements of Russian prose. His ability to preserve a distance between author and character is comparable to Chekhov’s.

Next to Babel, Osip Mandelstam, a famously difficult poet, seems, strangely enough, much more politicized. Born just three and a half years before Babel, in 1891, Mandelstam had won a serious literary reputation even before the revolution, unlike Babel. Mandelstam, with Gumilev and Akhmatova, belonged to the Acmeists, the St. Petersburg group of poets opposed to Symbolism. Scrawny but scrappy, Mandelstam saw a “longing for world culture” in Acmeism, and even in his early poems, collected in 1913 in The Stone, he created an original style—hieratic, solemn, filling intentional ellipses in meaning with numerous historical, literary, and political allusions. Mandelstam declaimed his poetry to everyone he met, wailing and lisping, according to a contemporary, “insinuating and at the same time arrogant, even satanically arrogant.”²⁹