Natasha's Dance

8

From beneath such ruins I speak,

From beneath such an avalanche I cry,

As if under the vault of a fetid cellar

I were burning in quicklime.

I will pretend to be soundless this winter

And I will slam the eternal doors forever,

And even so, they will recognize my voice,

And even so they will believe in it once more.²¹⁰

Anna Akhmatova was one of the great survivors. Her poetic voice was irrepressible. In the last ten years of her long life, beginning with the release of her son from the gulag in 1956, Akhmatova enjoyed a relatively settled existence. She was fortunate enough to retain her capacity for writing poetry until the end.

In 1963 she wrote the last additions to her masterpiece, Poem without a Hero, which she had started writing in 1940. Isaiah Berlin, to whom she read the poem at the Fountain House in 1945, described it as a 'kind of final memorial to her life as a poet and the past of the city - St Petersburg - which was part of her being'.²¹¹ The poem conjures up, in the form of a carnival procession of masked characters which appears before the author at the Fountain House, a whole generation of vanished friends and figures from the Petersburg that history left behind in 1913. Through this creative act of memory the poetry redeems and saves that history. In the opening dedication Akhmatova writes,

… and because I don't have enough paper, I am writing on your first draft.²¹²*

* Akhmatova informed several friends that the first dedication was to Mandelstam. When Nadezhda Mandelstam initially heard her read the poem and asked her to whom the dedication was addressed, Akhmatova replied 'with some irritation': 'Whose first draft do you think I can write on?' (Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, p. 435).

The poem is full of literary references, over which countless scholars have puzzled, but its essence, as suggested by the dedication, is foretold by Mandelstam in a prayer-like poem which Akhmatova quotes as an epigraph to the third chapter of her own poem.

We shall meet again in Petersburg

as though we had interred the sun in it

and shall pronounce for the first time

that blessed, senseless word.

In the black velvet of the Soviet night,

in the velvet of the universal void

the familiar eyes of blessed women sing

and still the deathless flowers bloom.²¹³

Akhmatova's Poem is a requiem for those who died in Leningrad. That remembrance is a sacred act, in some sense an answer to Mandelstam's prayer. But the poem is a resurrection song as well - a literal incarnation of the spiritual values that allowed the people of that city to endure the Soviet night and meet again in Petersburg.

Akhmatova died peacefully in a convalescent home in Moscow on 5 March 1966. Her body was taken to the morgue of the former Sheremetev Alms House, founded in the memory of Praskovya, where she was protected by the same motto that overlooked the gates of the Fountain House: 'Deus conservat omnia'. Thousands of people turned out for her funeral in Leningrad. The baroque church of St Nicholas spilled its dense throng out on to the streets, where a mournful silence was religiously maintained throughout the requiem. The people of a city had come to pay their last respects to a citizen whose poetry had spoken for them at a time when no one else could speak. Akhmatova had been with her people then: 'There, where my people, unfortunately, were.' Now they were with her. As the cortege passed through Petersburg on its way to the Komarovo cemetery, it paused before the Fountain House, so that she could say a last farewell.

overleaf:

Igor and VeraStravinsky arriving at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow,

21 September 1962

Homesickness! that long Exposed weariness! It's all the same to me now Where I am altogether lonely

Or what stones I wander over Home with a shopping bag to A house that is no more mine Than a hospital or a barracks.

It's all the same to me, a captive Lion - what faces I move through Bristling, or what human crowd will Cast me out as it must -

Into myself, into my separate internal World, a Kamchatka bear without ice. Where I fail to fit in (and I'm not trying) or Where I'm humiliated it's all the same.

And I won't be seduced by the thought of My native language, its milky call. How can it matter in what tongue I Am misunderstood by whomever I meet

(Or by what readers, swallowing Newsprint, squeezing for gossip?) They all belong to the twentieth Century, and I am before time,

Stunned, like a log left

Behind from an avenue of trees.

People are all the same to me, everything

Is the same, and it may be that the most

Indifferent of all are those

Signs and tokens which once were

Native but the dates have been

Rubbed out: the soul was born somewhere,

But my country has taken so little care Of me that even the sharpest spy could Go over my whole spirit and would Detect no birthmark there!

Houses are alien, churches are empty Everything is the same: But if by the side of the path a Bush arises, especially

a rowanberry…'

The rowanberry tree stirred up painful memories for the exiled poet Marina Tsvetaeva. It was a reminder of her long-lost childhood in Russia and the one native 'birthmark' that she could neither disguise nor bury underneath these lines of feigned indifference to her native land. From her first attempts at verse, Tsvetaeva adopted the rowanberry tree as a symbol of her solitude:

The red mound of a rowanberry kindled, Its leaves fell, and I was born.²

From such associations the homesick exile constitutes a homeland in his mind. Nostalgia is a longing for particularities, not some devotion to an abstract fatherland. For Nabokov, 'Russia' was contained in his dreams of childhood summers on the family estate: mushroom-hunting in the woods, catching butterflies, the sound of creaking snow. For Stravinsky it was the sounds of Petersburg which he also recalled from his boyhood: the hoofs and cart wheels on the cobblestones, the cries of the street vendors, the bells of the St Nicholas Church, and the buzz of the Marinsky Theatre where his musical persona was first formed. Tsvetaeva's 'Russia', meanwhile, was conjured up by the mental image

of her father's Moscow house at Three Ponds Lane. The house was stripped apart for firewood in the cold winter of 1918. But after nearly twenty years of exile, when she returned to it in 1939, she found her favourite rowanberry growing as before. The tree was all that remained of her 'Russia', and she begged Akhmatova not to tell a soul of its existence, unless 'they find out and cut it down'.³

Of the many factors that lay behind Tsvetaeva's return to Stalin's Russia, the most important was her desire to feel the Russian soil beneath her feet. She needed to be near that rowanberry tree. Her return was the outcome of a long and painful struggle within herself. Like most emigres, she was torn between two different notions of her native land. The first was the Russia that 'remains inside yourself: the written language, the literature, the cultural tradition of which all Russian poets felt themselves a part.⁴ This interior Russia was a country that was not confined to any territory. 'One can live outside of Russia and have it in one's heart,' Tsvetaeva explained to the writer Roman Gul. It was a country that one could 'live in anywhere'.⁵ As Khodasev-ich put it when he left for Berlin in 1922, this was a 'Russia' that could be encapsulated in the works of Pushkin and 'packed up in a bag'.

All I possess are eight slim volumes, And they contain my native land.⁶

The other Russia was the land itself - the place that still contained memories of home. For all her declarations of indifference, Tsvetaeva could not resist its pull. Like an absent lover, she ached for its physical presence. She missed the open landscape, the sound of Russian speech, and this visceral web of associations was the inspiration of her creativity.

Three million Russians fled their native land between 1917 and 1929. They made up a shadow nation stretching from Manchuria to California, with major centres of Russian cultural life in Berlin, Paris and New York. Here were the remnants of a vanished world: former advisers to the Tsar and government officials lived from the sale of their last jewels; ex-landowners worked as waiters; ruined businessmen as factory hands; officers of the defeated White armies worked by night as taxi drivers and by day composed their memoirs about the

mistakes of the White Army leader, General Denikin. Large families, like the Sheremetevs, were fragmented as their members fled in all directions. The main branch of the Sheremetevs left in 1918 with Count Sergei, travelling to Paris and then to New York. But others fled to South America, Belgium, Greece and Morocco.

Berlin was the first major centre of the emigration. It was a natural crossroads between Russia and Europe. The post-First World War economic crisis and the collapse of the mark made the city relatively inexpensive for those Russians who arrived with jewels or Western currency, and in the suburbs of the ruined middle classes a large but cheap apartment could be easily obtained. In 1921 the Soviet government lifted its controls on exit visas as part of its New Economic Policy. At that time Germany was the only major European country to have diplomatic and commercial relations with Soviet Russia. Still paying for the war through reparations and trade embargoes imposed by the victorious Western governments, it looked to Soviet Russia as a trading partner and a diplomatic friend. Half a million Russians crowded into Charlottenburg and the other south-western suburbs of the German capital in the early 1920s. Berliners dubbed the city's major shopping street, the Kurfurstendamm, the 'Nepskii Prospekt'. Berlin had its own Russian cafes, its own Russian theatres and bookshops, its own Russian cabaret. In the suburbs there were Russian everythings: Russian hairdressers, Russian grocers, Russian pawn shops and Russian antique stores. There was even a Russian orchestra. And a Russian football team (with a young Vladimir Nabokov playing in goal).⁷

Berlin was the undisputed cultural capital of the Russian emigre community. Its musical talent was extraordinary: Stravinsky, Rach-maninov, Heifetz, Horowitz and Nathan Milstein could have shared the stage in any concert there. By the time Tsvetaeva arrived, in 1922, Berlin had become the adopted home of some of the most brilliant literary talents of the Russian avant-garde (Khodasevich, Nabokov, Berberova, Remizov). The city had an astounding eighty-six Russian-language publishers - comfortably outnumbering the German ones -while its Russian newspapers were sold throughout the world.⁸

Berlin was also a halfway house between Soviet Russia and the West for writers such as Gorky, Bely, Pasternak, Aleksei Tolstoy and Ilya

Ehrenburg, who were yet to make up their minds where they wanted to be based. It became a meeting place for writers from the Soviet Union, their literary confreres from the West, and the already-established Russian emigre community. Publishing costs in Berlin were extremely low - so low that several Soviet publishers and periodicals set up offices in the German capital. In the Russian Berlin of the early 1920s there was still no clear divide between Soviet and emigre culture. The city was the centre of the left-wing avant-garde, among whom the idea of a common Russian culture uniting Soviet Russia with the emigration remained strongest after 1917. Such ideas were generally rejected in the other major centres of the emigration. But Berlin was different - and for a brief period it was possible for writers to move freely between Moscow and Berlin. The climate changed in the middle of the decade when a group of emigres known as Smena vekh (Change of Landmarks) began to campaign for a permanent return to the Soviet Union and established their own journal Nakanune (On the Eve) with Soviet backing. The turning point came in 1923, when the historical novelist Aleksei Tolstoy defected back to Moscow. In the ensuing scandal the Berlin emigre community became sharply polarized between left and right - between those who wanted to build bridges to the Soviet homeland and those who wanted to burn them.

During the middle of the 1920s the German mark was stabilized, the economy began to recover, and Berlin suddenly became expensive for the Russian emigres. Its Russian population halved as the emigres dispersed across the continent. Tsvetaeva and her husband, Sergei Efron, left for Prague so that he could study at the Charles University. Prague was a centre of Russian scholarship. Tomas Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia, was a distinguished Russian scholar. The Czechs welcomed the 'White Russians' as their fellow Slavs and allies in the Russian civil war. In 1918 a legion of Czech nationalists had fought alongside the anti-Bolsheviks in the hope of getting Russia to rejoin the war against the Central Powers.* After the establishment of

* As nationalists fighting for independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the 35,000 soldiers of the Czech Legion wanted to return to the battlefields in France to continue their own struggle against Austria. Rather than run the risk of crossing enemy lines, they resolved to travel eastwards, right around the world, reaching Europe via Vladivostok and the USA. But as they moved east along the Trans-Siberian Railway (continued)

an independent Czechoslovakia that year, the government in Prague gave grants to Russian students like Efron.

In 1925, Tsvetaeva and Efron moved on to Paris. If Berlin was the cultural centre of Russia Abroad, Paris was its political capital. The post-war Versailles Conference had attracted delegates from all the major parties and would-be governments of Russia-in-exile. By the middle of the 1920s Paris was a hotbed of political intrigue, with Russian factions and movements of all types vying for attention from the Western governments and for the support of the wealthy Russian emigres who tended to live there. Tsvetaeva and Efron stayed with their two young children in the cramped apartment of Olga Chernov, former wife of Viktor Chernov, the veteran Socialist Revolutionary leader who had been chairman of the short-lived Constituent Assembly which had been closed down by the Bolsheviks in January 1918. In the 'Little Russia' that formed around the Rue Daru, the Efrons regularly came across the other fallen heroes of the Revolution: Prince Lvov, Prime Minister of the first Provisional Government; Pavel Miliukov, its Foreign Minister; and the dashing young Alexander Kerensky, another former Prime Minister whom Tsvetaeva had compared to her idol Bonaparte in that fateful summer of 1917.

And someone, falling on the map, Does not sleep in his dreams. There came a Bonaparte In my country.⁹

By the end of the 1920s Paris had become the undisputed centre of the Russian emigration in Europe. Its status was confirmed in the years

(continued) they soon became bogged down in petty fighting with the local Soviets, who tried to seize their arms. The Czechs ended up joining forces with the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had fled from Moscow and St Petersburg to the Volga provinces to rally the support of the peasantry against the Bolshevik regime and the ending of the war following the closure of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. On 8 June the Czech Legion captured the Volga city of Samara, where a government composed of former members of the Constituent Assembly was in tenuous control until its defeat by the Red Army the following October, when the Czech Legion broke up and lost the will to fight, following the declaration of Czech independence on 28 October 1918.

of the depression, as Russians fled to the French capital from Hitler's Germany. The literary and artistic life of Russian Paris flourished in the cafes of the sixteenth arrondissement, where artists such as Goncharova and her husband Mikhail Larionov, Benois, Bakst and Alexandra Exter mixed with Stravinsky and Prokofiev and writers like Bunin and Merezhkovsky, or Nina Berberova and her husband Khodasevich, who had moved there from Berlin in 1925.

As most of the exiles saw it, Russia had ceased to exist in October 1917. 'Sovdepia', as they contemptuously referred to Soviet Russia (from the acronym for Soviet department), was in their view an impostor unworthy of the name. Stravinsky always said that when he went into exile he did not so much leave as 'lose' Russia for good.¹⁰ In her 'Poems to a Son', written in the early 1930s, Tsvetaeva concluded that there was no Russia to which she could return:

With a lantern search through The whole world under the moon. That country exists not On the map, nor yet in space.

Drunk up as though from the Saucer: the bottom of it shines! Can one return to a House which has been razed?¹¹

The idea of Russia as an optical illusion, as something that had vanished like a childhood memory, was a central theme of Russian verse abroad. As Georgy Ivanov put it:

Russia is happiness, Russia is all light.

Or perhaps Russia disappeared into the night.

And on the Neva the sun does not go down, And Pushkin never died in our European town,

And there is no Petersburg, no Kremlin in Moscow -Only fields and fields, snow and yet more snow.'²

For Tsvetaeva the mirage of Russia was the fading memory of her dismantled house at Three Ponds Lane. For Nabokov, in his poem 'The Cyclist' (1922), it was the dream of a bike ride to Vyra, his family's country house, which always promised to appear round the next bend - yet never did.¹³ This nostalgic longing for an irretrievable patch of one's own childhood is beautifully evoked by Nabokov in Speak, Memory (1951). To be cut off from the place of one's childhood is to watch one's own past vanish into myth.

Tsvetaeva was the daughter of Ivan Tsvetaev, Professor of Art History at Moscow University and founding director of Moscow's Museum of Fine Arts (today known as the Pushkin Gallery). Like Tatiana in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the young poet lived in a world of books. 'I am all manuscript,' Tsvetaeva once said.¹⁴ Pushkin and Napoleon were her first romantic attachments and many of the real people (both men and women) with whom she fell in love were probably no more than projections of her literary ideals. She called these affairs 'amities litteraires' - and the objects of her affections included the poets Blok and Bely, Pasternak and Mandelstam. It was never clear to what degree the passion was in her own mind. Efron was the exception - the single lasting human contact in her tragic life and the one person she could not live without. So desperate was her longing to be needed that for him she was prepared to ruin her own life. They met in 1911 when he was still at school, and she barely out of it, on a summer holiday in the Crimea. Efron was a beautiful young man -slender-faced with enormous eyes - and she cast him as her 'Bonaparte'. The two shared a romantic attachment to the idea of the Revolution (Efron's father had been a terrorist in the revolutionary underground). But when the Revolution finally arrived they both sided with the Whites. Tsvetaeva was repulsed by the crowd mentality, which seemed to her to trample individuals underfoot. When Efron left Moscow to join Denikin's army in south Russia, she portrayed him as her hero in The Camp of Swans (1917-21).

White guards: Gordian knot

Of Russian valour.

White Guards: white mushrooms

Ot the Russian folksong.

31. Sergei Efron and Marina Tsvetaeva, 1911

White Guards: white stars, Not to be crossed from the sky. White Guards: black nails In the ribs of the Antichrist.¹⁵

For the next five years, from 1918 to 1922, the young couple lived apart. Tsvetaeva pledged that, if both of them survived the civil war, she would follow Efron 'like a dog', living wherever he chose to live. While Efron was fighting for Denikin's armies in the south, Tsvetaeva stayed in Moscow. She grew prematurely old in the daily struggle for bread and fuel. Prince Sergei Volkonsky, who became a close friend during those years, recalled her life in the 'unheated house, sometimes without light, a bare apartment… little Alya sleeping behind a screen surrounded by her drawings… no fuel for the wretched stove, the electric light dim… The dark and cold came in from the street as though they owned the place.'¹⁶ The desperate hunt for food exposed Tsvetaeva to the brutalizing effect of the Revolution. It seemed to her

that the common people had lost all sense of human decency and tenderness. Despite her love of Russia, the revelation of this new reality made her think about emigrating. The death of her younger daughter, Irina, in 1920 was a catastrophic shock. 'Mama could never put it out of her mind that children can die of hunger here', her elder daughter, Alya, later wrote.¹⁷ Irina's death intensified Tsvetaeva's need to be with Efron. There was no news of him after the autumn of 1920, when the defeated White armies retreated south through the Crimea and crowded on to ships to flee the Bolsheviks. She said she would kill herself if he was not alive. At last, Efron was located in Constantinople. She left Moscow to join him in Berlin.

Tsvetaeva describes leaving Russia as a kind of death, a parting of the body from the soul, and she was afraid that, separated from the country of her native tongue, she would not be capable of writing poetry. 'Here a broken shoe is unfortunate or heroic', she wrote to Ehrenburg shortly before her departure from Moscow, 'there it's a disgrace. People will take me for a beggar and chase me back where I came from. If that happens I'll hang myself."⁸

The loss of Russia strengthened Tsvetaeva's concern with national themes. During the 1920s she wrote a number of nostalgic poems. The best were collected in After Russia (1928), her last book to be published during her lifetime:

My greetings to the Russian rye,

To fields of corn higher than a woman.¹⁹

Increasingly she also turned to prose ('emigration makes of me a prose writer'²⁰) in a series of intensely moving recollections of the Russia she had lost. 'I want to resurrect that entire world', she explained to a fellow emigree, 'so that all of them should not have lived in vain, so that I should not have lived in vain.'²¹ What she longed for, in essays like 'My Pushkin' (1937), was the cultural tradition that made up the old Russia in her heart. This was what she meant when she wrote in 'Homesickness' that she felt

Stunned, like a log left

Behind from an avenue of trees.²²

As an artist she felt she had been orphaned by her separation from the literary community founded by Pushkin.

Hence her intense, almost daughterly, attraction to Sergei Volkon-sky, the eurhythmic theorist and former director of the Imperial Theatre who was forced to flee from Soviet Russia in 1921. In Paris Volkonsky became a prominent theatre critic in the emigre press. He lectured on the history of Russian culture in universities throughout Europe and the USA. But it was his link to the cultural tradition of the nineteenth century that made him so attractive to Tsvetaeva. The prince was the grandson of the famous Decembrist; his father had been a close friend of Pushkin. And he himself had met the poet Tiutchev in his mother's drawing room. There was even a connection between the Volkonskys and the Tsvetaev family. As Ivan Tsvetaev mentioned in his speech at the opening of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1912., the idea of founding such a museum in Moscow had first been voiced by the prince's great-aunt, Zinaida Volkonsky.²³ Tsvetaeva fell in love with Volkonsky - not in a sexual way (Volkonsky was almost certainly homosexual) but in the heady fashion of her amities litteraires. After several barren years, lyric poetry began to flow from Tsvetaeva again. In the cycle of poems The Disciple (1921-2) she cast herself at the feet of a prophet (the 'father') who linked her with the wisdom and the values of the past. The poem 'To the Fathers' was dedicated to 'the best friend of my life', as she described Volkonsky to Evgenia Chiri-kova, 'the most intelligent, fascinating, charming, old-fashioned, curious and - most brilliant person in the world. He is 63 years old. Yet when you see him you forget how old you are. You forget where you are living, the century, the date.'²⁴

In the world which roars: 'Glory to those who are to come!' Something in me whispers: 'Glory to those who have been!'²⁵

Volkonsky dedicated his own Memoirs (1923) to Tsvetaeva - recompense, perhaps, for the fact that she had typed out its two thick volumes for the publisher. She saw his recollections as a sacred testament to the nineteenth-century tradition that had been broken in 191 7.

To mark their publication she wrote an essay called 'Cedar: An Apology'. The title had been taken from the Prince's nickname, given to him because he had planted cedars on his favourite patch of land (today it is a forest of 12,000 hectares) at the family estate in Borisoglebsk, Tambov province.

The cedar is the tallest of trees, the straightest too, and it comes from the North (the Siberian cedar) and the South as well (the Lebanese). This is the dual nature of the Volkonsky clan: Siberia and Rome [where Zinaida settled as an emigree]!²⁶

In the preface to his memoirs Volkonsky voiced the exile's agony:

Motherland! What a complex idea, and how difficult to catch. We love our motherland - who does not? But what is it we love? Something that existed? Or something that will be? We love our country. But where is our country? Is it any more than a patch of land? And if we are separated from that land, and yet in our imagination we can re-create it, can we really say that there is a motherland; and can we really say that there is exile?²⁷