Playing with Fire

2

1919–1927

BAPTISM, UNIVERSITY STUDIES, PHILOSOPHICAL CIRCLES

How often we weep, me and you

Over life’s pitiful malaise –

My friends, if only you knew,

The darkness and gloom of coming days.

Alexander Blok¹

We were all in a way Flying Dutchmen – We the Russian intelligentsia [. . .] united in seeking the Truth.

Maria Yudina²

Yudina’s return to Petrograd in mid-1919 initiated an intensely rich and formative phase in her life, lasting for the next eleven years. Soon she found herself leading three disconnected parallel lives. From September she was studying conducting and composition at the Conservatoire – her piano studies being suspended due to the inflammation of her hands. Additionally, she frequented courses of philology and philosophy at Petrograd University, following the interests cultivated within the Bakhtin Circle in Nevel’. And thirdly, as a member of the Orthodox Church, she became part of a close-knit community fighting for survival.

Even before embarking on her studies in the capital city, Yudina formalized her conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith. On 2 May 1919 she was baptized at the Petrograd missionary Church of the Protecting Veil of the Holy Virgin on Borovaya Street, at a service officiated by Father Nikolai Chepurin. It was a highly personal affair attended only by a few close friends. Lev Pumpyansky, her appointed godfather, was not present, but the evening beforehand he reputedly prepared Yudina for the event by reading aloud extracts from Pavel Florensky’s writings. Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva, Yudina’s friend from Nevel’, stood as godmother, and left a telling description: ‘Underneath the temple’s great cupola stood a large font [. . .] and over the font were two or three smallish windows. The day was overcast, but when the rite of holy baptism began the clouds parted, and the sunlight poured through the windows. I vividly recall Maria Veniaminovna at that moment, her head surrounded by a golden aura of light.’³

Vera, Maria’s half-sister, recorded that their father was much angered by his daughter’s conversion, holding Tilicheyeva and Pumpyansky responsible. Vera was born in 1926, so the events she spoke of happened well before her birth, and had become part of family legend. ‘One couldn’t mention [Tilicheyeva’s] name in front of Father [. . .] Papa was an atheist and couldn’t stand any kind of religious sentiment, whether Orthodox or Jewish. He drove off Marusya’s fiancés very quickly. As for Pumpyansky, he threw him down the stairs.’⁴ Yet Vera sensed that ‘Father loved and valued Marusya, although he was offended by her “ties with priests”. He called her “my pearl”, and attended her concerts when he came to Leningrad. Yet they avoided any closeness in their relationship, even when she returned to the family home in Nevel’.’⁵

Yudina’s friend, Yelena Skrzhinskaya, had similar observations:

Dr Yudin was a severe, unbending man. He simply couldn’t bear Marusya’s milieu, and Tilicheyeva in particular, whom, as her godmother, Maria Veniaminovna revered until death [. . .] In her room, Marusya had a small religious corner, some pictures in oils of holy images, probably painted by Tilicheyeva, and leaning against them little icons, hung with small chains, rosaries and crosses. On seeing this, her father took the inkwell and hurled it with all his might at these objects. The ink stains remained on the wall, although Marusya did her best to rub them out. When she saw what her father had done, she didn’t start arguing with him, she was very meek. I witnessed their occasional quarrel, but Marusya never did anything to inflame the situation.⁶

While Veniamin Yudin never accepted her religious beliefs, she wisely learnt to avoid this provocative theme with him. Church-going became a way of life for Yudina during the 1920s, but this was no anomaly amongst her contemporaries. The spirit of religious revival that was prevalent amongst the intelligentsia in the decade before the Revolution was compatible both with personal beliefs and the conviction that social and political reform were urgently needed. For Yudina the quest for Christian faith was a way to enrich her inner world and transform her performances into a spiritual act. Years later she recalled how ‘our youth was elevated by selflessness, poverty and the distant rumble of civil war. At the centre of everything was the need to discover the Truth. We could each in our own way claim as our own Alexander Blok’s wonderful words, “I hear the noise of the pages of history being turned.”’⁷

Yet this sudden change from relative economic well-being before the Revolution to the uncertainty and poverty that followed was difficult to accept. Yudina’s friend Lyubov Shaporina, the first wife of the composer Yuri Shaporin, recorded in her diary: ‘Famine started here in Petrograd. Having lived through the siege of Leningrad I realize it wasn’t that authentic hunger from which two and half million people perished. But the transition from complete abundance and plenty to the disappearance of bread, meat, milk and many other products was a misery and torment.’⁸

In Nevel’, Yudina had been protected from the food and fuel shortages. Not that this alarmed her when she returned to Petrograd:

We weren’t looking for material comfort, security or possessions. We were quite content eating pancakes made from potato peelings, wearing clothes concocted out of string and tattered rags. We lived our lives through poetry and music from sunrise to sundown. We despised the upstarts of NEP.^* In 1921 there remained one horse-drawn carriage in Petrograd. A young lady of extraordinary beauty rode in it, and we all openly laughed at her.⁹

Certainly the haggard faces and shattered nerves of much of the population told a different tale. Nevertheless it transpired that material hardship was less of an evil than Bolshevik Terror. As Shaporina recalled, ‘Firewood was nowhere to be found for love nor money. Everybody sawed up cupboards and tables to burn, and we huddled together in one room. Getting hold of firewood was seventh heaven! The city was almost without electricity – it came on at best for one or two hours a day. But if the lights came on all evening and night, then our hearts froze in deathly terror – the authorities were carrying out searches and arrests.’¹⁰

The Cheka,^* the dreaded Secret Police, created in December 1918 within weeks of the Bolshevik takeover, was the first of a series of Soviet repressive security organs founded to combat ‘counter-revolutionary’ activity. From the start the Cheka was given extra-juridical power to make arbitrary arrests and shoot people on the scantiest of evidence, and consequently did not have to answer for its actions. Already from 1918 the country was subjected to a first taste of Terror, which escalated dramatically, completely engulfing the country under Stalin’s rule.

Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, the state structured its administration through a series of Commissariats (Narkomat), headed by a Council of People’s Commissars. The Commissariat for Enlightenment (Narkompros), under the supervision of Anatoli Lunacharsky, was responsible for cultural and educational matters, and promoted progressive policies to educate the proletariat and introduce social reforms. The prestigious old universities of Moscow and Petrograd did not conceal their hostility to the new regime. Narkompros wished to keep them functioning initially, despite the general conditions of cold and hunger.¹¹ During 1920–1 Petrograd University nearly ceased to function, being emptied of teachers and students alike. Olga Freidenberg, a student of classics, wrote to her cousin Boris Pasternak on 25 May 1921: ‘Petersburg is beautiful in its abandonment with its empty streets, with grass and wild flowers springing up in the cracks in the sidewalks. Prolonged misery has made an optimist of me. How odd that desolation should bring freedom, allowing flowers to grow wild in city streets.’¹²

The poet Anna Akhmatova painted a similar picture: ‘All the old Petersburg signboards were still in place, but behind them was nothing but dusk, darkness and yawning emptiness. Typhus, hunger, executions, damp firewood, people so swollen as to be unrecognizable. In Gostiny Dvor^* one could pick a large bunch of wild flowers [. . .] The city had not simply changed, it had turned into its opposite. But people loved poetry (mainly the young) almost as much as they do now.’¹³ Such devotion to the arts in the face of desolation was a phenomenon of the times. People lived through their passionate beliefs, whether for poetry, music, building a new social order, or defending religious convictions.

The fact that the Petrograd Conservatoire remained active during the cold, hungry years of civil war was largely due to the determination and dedication of its director, Alexander Glazunov. Formerly solid and stout, Glazunov had lost so much weight that his clothes hung off his body like a scarecrow. Many professors left Petrograd to cities such as Kiev, Tiflis (Tbilisi), Koktebel in the Crimea, and Vitebsk, where food and fuel were more plentiful. By the end of 1918 Yudina’s favourite teacher, Nikolai Cherepnin, had departed to assume the position of director of the Tbilisi Conservatoire, remaining there until the arrival of the Bolsheviks in 1921, when he left Georgia to take up permanent residence in Paris.

Emil Cooper (Couper or Kuper) replaced Cherepnin as professor of conducting. Having made his name as an opera conductor, he was renowned for his ‘definitive’ interpretations of Wagner’s Ring cycle at the Mariinsky Theatre, while his performances of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh were equally acclaimed. In 1918 Lunacharsky appointed Cooper chief conductor and director of the Ex-Imperial Theatre, as the Mariinsky was temporarily called. In 1921 it acquired a new name, the ugly acronym GATOB (State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet).

For Yudina, Cooper was a legendary figure. As a student she attended his rehearsals and performances of Wagner and of Kitezh, in which Russia’s most famous tenor, Ivan Vasilyevich Yershov, performed. ‘Dear God, what an amazing Grishka Kuterma,^** what an amazing Siegmund,’ Yudina wrote of Yershov. ‘He was the very embodiment of Art [. . .] the High Priest of the Dionysian, and no less of Apollonian reasoning.’¹⁴

In 1921 Cooper was additionally appointed artistic director of the Institution of the Petrograd (later Leningrad) Philharmonic, which included duties as chief conductor of the Petrograd Philharmonic Orchestra, which had been reassembled from the Philharmonic Society’s pre-revolutionary orchestra. A father figure to his musicians, Cooper gave them generous material help during this troubled period. Nevertheless, despite his commitment to the new Soviet musical institutions, he emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1924, ending up in New York as staff conductor at the Metropolitan Opera.

For his part, Cooper was so impressed by the young Yudina that he chose her as his soloist in Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto at the opening of the Petrograd Philharmonia on 10 August 1921, just weeks after her graduation in July. The concert took place in the former Hall of the Noblemen’s Assembly, with its beautiful white columns and eight large glittering chandeliers. For Yudina it was memorable for other reasons: ‘I performed Beethoven’s Fifth at that concert, but it would have been better not to play at all – it was the day Alexander Blok died.^* Emil Albertovich informed us of the news, when I was already sitting at the open grand piano, the orchestra was tuning up. We all rose to our feet, many of us in tears. Then the rehearsal started. We should have postponed the concert, but alas, we lacked understanding of the event’s historical significance and of our irreparable loss.’¹⁵

The great poet had won early recognition in the 1900s, when he was primarily associated with the Symbolist movement. While initially accepting the Bolshevik takeover of October 1917, Blok soon lost all illusions about the Revolution’s benefits. His pessimism was reinforced through his feeling that he could no longer write poetry: ‘All sounds have stopped. Can’t you hear that there are no longer any sounds?’ he demanded of the writer, Kornei Chukovsky. After the Revolution, Blok’s health deteriorated drastically, and he died a natural death ‘of exhaustion’ at the age of forty.

The reaction of all educated people on learning of Blok’s death was well captured by the twenty-year-old writer, Nina Berberova: ‘I was seized by a feeling, which I never again experienced, that I was suddenly orphaned.’¹⁶ The funeral, held on 10 August, was attended by over 500 people. The writers Andrei Bely, Vladimir Pyast, Yevgeni Zamyatin bore Blok’s coffin high over the heads of the mourners. As Berberova commented, ‘Probably there was not a man in this crowd who did not think – if only for a moment – that not only Blok had died, but this city was dying with him, its special power over people was coming to an end, a historical period was closing, a cycle of Russian destinies was being completed.’¹⁷

While Blok’s death was a terrible blow for the Russian intelligentsia, worse was to come. The thirty-five-year-old poet and co-founder of the Acmeist movement, Nikolai Gumilyov, had been arrested by the Cheka on 3 August for counter-revolutionary activity. Gumilyov – incidentally Anna Akhmatova’s first husband – was charged with participating in a monarchist conspiracy, the so-called Tagantsev plot. On 26 August 1921 he was summarily shot along with sixty others, just before Maxim Gorky had time to deliver the pardon he had allegedly elicited from Lenin. As early as 1922, it was admitted that Gumilyov and his ‘fellow plotters’ had been executed on trumped-up charges.

What followed afterwards – mass deportations, the exile of the intelligentsia and the start of planned repressions – was a logical consequence of those August events. Many of the country’s intellectual and religious figures with whom Yudina was mixing now faced a stark choice between emigration – leaving behind inherited culture, language, family and friends – and remaining in Soviet Russia, thereby risking imprisonment, execution, the labour camps, or enforced exile in the wastes of Siberia.

Yudina, too, was invited to leave Russia by the violinist and composer, Iosif Achron, a pupil of Leopold Auer. She had first heard him perform with orchestra under Cherepnin’s direction at a Bach cycle organized by the Petrograd Conservatoire in 1917. Yudina was impressed by Achron’s violin playing, and admired even more his ‘most unusual, [characteristically innovative compositions], closely linked in style to Mahler’s cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn.’¹⁸ Achron’s interpretation of Bach’s violin concertos had inspired Yudina to write him a complimentary letter. He replied asking her to emigrate with him. ‘I was incensed! I had no intention of leaving Russia, all the more so with a young man, who had “not asked for my hand in marriage”. Our morals were strict in those days.’¹⁹

In general Yudina disapproved of the idea of leaving her country. In this she shared Anna Akhmatova’s feelings as expressed in the lines: ‘But to me the exile is forever pitiful,/Like a prisoner, like someone ill,/Dark is your road, wanderer,/Like wormwood smells the bread of strangers.’²⁰ Yudina, no less than Akhmatova, had no wish for the taste of foreign bread, even when there were considerable shortages of the native product at home. Whosoever experienced the chaotic years of civil war and Soviet repression became accustomed to hardships.

In compensation, Yudina was able to profit from Bolshevik progressive policies on women’s education. Women were now given equal access to universities, as well as the right to free civil union, divorce on demand, leglized abortion, and so-called socialization of housework. In the decades preceding the Revolution higher education for women had only been available privately – in Petersburg/Petrograd at the Bekhterev and Lesgaft Courses, and the prestigious, intellectually elitist Bestuzhev Institute, where, exceptionally, women could gain a university degree.

Thus in the 1919/20 academic year Yudina was of the first generation of women to attend Petrograd University. As an external student she frequented lectures at the faculty of classical philology (headed by the distinguished Professor Faddei Frantsevich Zelinsky), as well as Nikolai Lossky’s courses on Fichte’s philosophy and Zelinsky’s lectures on Hellenism. The poet Blok had praised Zelinsky as the university’s best professor, while Mikhail Bakhtin acknowledged him as the closest thing to a teacher he had ever had. Zelinsky’s influence on Bakhtin is evident in his views on popular culture as an invigorating and subversive force, and on dialogue as a philosophical means of expression.

Yudina vividly recalled how her Petrograd University professors were subjected to ideological stress. ‘Our maitre Zelinsky towered above us all. He had no intention of leaving Russia, although the University was emptying of teachers [. . .] He taught until the very last minute. The alternative was to wait for his subject to be abolished from the curriculum or be dismissed. Forcibly separated from the University, our professors had to look for other work to engage their wonderful minds. They also needed to earn their bread (however stale) to feed themselves and their families.’²¹

Despite Zelinsky’s enormous international reputation, his conflict with the authorities forced him to leave Petrograd in 1920 for his native Poland. His departure was symptomatic of the increasing suspicion with which the prestigious universities of Petrograd and Moscow were treated. In the face of mutual hostility, the Bolsheviks undermined their authority, while prioritizing the creation of new proletarian and provincial universities. The founding of Workers’ Faculties (Rabfacs) in 1922 coincided with a virulent purging (‘chistka’) of the ‘old class’ of professors and students. Those teachers who resisted the ‘proletarization’ of the student body on the grounds that this debased academic standards were branded disloyal to Soviet power.

The following academic year (1920/21) Yudina abandoned philosophy and philology to enrol in the history faculty of Petrograd University, renowned for the excellence of its Medieval Studies. It was headed by Ivan Grevs, the teacher of a whole generation of brilliant minds, including the historian Olga Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaya, and the philosopher and historian Lev Karsavin – all of whom Yudina knew and revered. Her teacher of Hellenistic religion, Ivan Ivanovich Tolstoy, ‘represented the cognitive sciences in a riot of learning, despite his inherent qualities of restraint and aestheticism [. . .] Just a few of us attended his lessons – amongst them the brilliant Olga Freidenberg, who sat and stared fixedly at Ivan Ivanovich with her enormous smoky grey, crystal-clear eyes. She herself was a myth, a sibyl, and to boot, she was Boris Pasternak’s cousin.’²² At the time of writing, some fifteen years after Freidenberg’s death, Yudina lamented that ‘she remains misunderstood and unrecognized – this great philosopher and classical philologist’.²³

Perhaps the most illustrious amongst the Petrograd history professors was Lev Karsavin, who combined interests in history, spiritual philosophy and metaphysics. Indeed, Karsavin started by studying philosophy, but switched to medieval history at the behest of Professor Grevs, concentrating on the transitional period between the late Romans and Middle Ages. Karsavin’s quiet magnetic personality exerted a special fascination on his students. Perhaps it was unsurprising that in 1916 he became passionately involved with a twenty-year-old student at the Bectuzhev Courses, Yelena Cheslavna Skrzhinskaya (known to friends simply by her patronymic, Cheslavna). The way he experienced and transformed the love affair into a literary phenomenon had a significant effect on his philosophical thinking and spiritual life. As Karsavin’s biographer Dominic Ruben wrote, ‘Cheslavna Skrzhinskaya was a pretty and gentle girl from an aristocratic family [. . .] A rising star in the history department – later she became one of Soviet Russia’s leading medievalists.’²⁴ Gossip soon spread. Even before the affair had fully blossomed, Karsavin was seen ‘racing down the wide university corridor on a lady’s bike which, rumour had it, belonged to a certain female admirer and muse’.²⁵ Indeed, Karsavin did not bother to hide the affair, even from his family.

Skrzhinskaya was to become Yudina’s closest Leningrad confidante and lifelong friend. They were drawn together as much through their love of music as their passion for history. Cheslavna had studied piano since childhood, and in 1925 Yudina accepted her as a piano student. Skrzhinskaya recalled first meeting Yudina in 1921 at one of Lev Karsavin’s seminars: ‘Maria Veniaminovna sat at the edge of the table by the wall, and listened with great attention, but did not participate in the discussion. Her wavy hair gave away her Jewish origins. I would see her at seminars and lectures, and once, while passing by Palace Embankment I greeted her – it felt as if we were already acquainted. I decided to pay an impromptu visit to her house – I nervously rang the doorbell, but she received me very well.’²⁶

This view of Yudina as an ‘amateur’ too shy to open her mouth in classes or seminars was confirmed by other students, including Skrzhinskaya’s sister, Irina: ‘Marusya didn’t attend many of Lev Karsavin’s seminars. She was a new student, very timid [. . .] Karsavin was to play a tragic role in my sister’s life. They loved each other, but he was not ready to sacrifice his family, although they knew of his love affair.’²⁷

Karsavin described his romance with a certain degree of self-irony in his book Noctes Petropolitanes, published in 1922, the year he was expelled from Russia. As Irina remarked, ‘Everything happened as described in the introduction, we were participants in the story. Here he parodies himself and everything that came in the following chapters.’²⁸ The charismatic Karsavin left a deep impression on Yudina: ‘Whoever attended Karsavin’s lectures, participated in his seminars or talked with him is forever linked to him. The spirit of doubt was great in him, the spirit of sarcasm, the spirit of “interlocutor” of our age. But what, one wonders, lay behind this complex, angular, almost hermetic figure?’²⁹ Even though Yudina only studied with Karsavin for a short time, through a series of coincidences she was to maintain ties with him and his family throughout her life.

Yudina returned to her Conservatoire piano studies in the autumn of 1920, with the intention of graduating the following summer. For the moment she continued with her university courses, although obviously her music studies took precedence. By the winter she found this double load untenable, as she acknowledged to Viktor Zhirmunsky, her Professor of Philology: ‘It is with great regret and shame that I inform you that because of extraordinary circumstances I can no longer attend your seminar [. . .] You will already have understood that as an amateur, my work can have no scientific interest [. . .] I simply did not calculate my strength; to work in two different fields with the same energy is evidently impossible.’³⁰

At her graduation ceremony (see Chapter 3) it was announced that Yudina had been appointed to the teaching staff of the Petrograd Conservatoire, and immediately afterwards she embarked on a brilliant concert career. Nevertheless she found time to continue attending university courses, if only sporadically, sing in Church choirs and generally devote much time to Church matters. At the Conservatoire she made it a rule never to speak of religion with students, unless she discovered that they were already practising Orthodox Christians. While not broadcasting her faith, Yudina did not hide her views, as when she compiled an obligatory questionnaire for the Leningrad Conservatoire in 1925. In answer as to whether she belonged to a political party she wrote: ‘The Party is too serious a matter to only have sympathy for it, one needs to be active. In many aspects I agree with the Russian Communist Party, but I cannot join it because of my idealistic and religious views.’³¹

Yudina also admitted with regret:

I never became an academic, for music claimed so much of my attention at the time. But I am happy that the roots of an intellectual and ethical way of life were deeply embedded in me at that time [. . .] I received the ‘key’ to humanist knowledge, an immense field of thought, of which I can avail myself until my dying day. The teachers and students were such amazing people – the very ‘cream of humanity’! Selfless, hard-working, responsible, actively good. Nobody thought of ‘careers’, everything was genuine, fashioned from ‘pure metal’.³²

Later in life, Yudina would express nostalgia for the old St Petersburg ethos, which did not outlive the 1920s:

We often stood near the Palace Bridge after some lesson or seminar, or by the Sphinxes on the University Embankment, waiting while the drawn-up bridges closed again. Our discussions would continue, while we watched the blazing Petersburg sunsets. Everything was enfolded in quiet, rustling autumn mist, as the half-empty ships silently glided by. We were all in a way ‘Flying Dutchmen’! We – meaning [. . .] the Russian intelligentsia, with its many differences in character, aspirations and destiny, united in seeking the Truth.³³

Yudina indeed found lifelong friends within the circles of the literary and humanistic intelligentsia. Many, like her, were members of the religious-philosophical circles Volfila and Voskreseniye^* while also belonging to the Orthodox Church. The Church paradoxically underwent a form of renaissance after the Revolution, having at last escaped from two centuries of secular control imposed by Peter the Great with the abolishment of the Patriarchate. Only in the last decades of the nineteenth century did ecclesiastical independence from the state become a pressing issue. With Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication after the February Revolution and the Bolshevik takeover of October 1917, the Church gained autonomy, however short-lived. In November 1917, Metropolitan Tikhon Belavin of Moscow was elected Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church – the first for some 200 years.

On 23 January 1918 Lenin issued a decree enforcing the separation of Church from State, and School from Church, while simultaneously enforcing a policy of ‘militant atheism’, which threatened all forms of organized religion and deprived the Church of its institutional rights. From 1920 a period of persecution and martyrdom began; thousands of church buildings were pulled down, most monasteries were closed, while in 1923 the first forced labour camp was established at the great fortified Solovetsky monastery – also referred to as Solovki. Conflict was inevitable when Patriarch Tikhon condemned the atrocities committed by the Soviet regime against members of the Church, and the massacre of the Tsar and his family on 17 July 1918.

Yet conversely the Bolsheviks’ policy of oppression served to stimulate a revival of interest in the Orthodox Church itself. As the scholar and expert on Russian medieval history, Dmitri Likhachov, recalled: ‘The persecution of the Church was so unbearable to any Russian, that many non-believers started frequenting Church services, as a means of distancing themselves from its oppressors.’³⁴ In all this, what rang true for Yudina was Mikhail Bakhtin’s assessment of the human need for religion as a higher goal: ‘Without God, without faith in the absolute otherness, self-awareness and self-expression are impossible, and this is not, of course, because they have no meaning in practice, but because trust in God is the immanent constructive factor.’³⁵ She believed that synonymous with baptism was the responsibility to defend the principles of the Orthodox Church. Such commitment was compatible with the intelligentsia’s search for a system of universal belief, combining religious, philosophical and social ideals.

Already from the beginning of the century, circles of discussion, created around a central figure, had brought like-minded people together. As Likhachov observed, ‘The Russian culture of the Silver Age was born in conversations and discussion that were absolutely frank and free [. . .] New discoveries were made during these conversations, in which – according to some unspoken spiritual law – no fewer than three people ever participated [. . .] It was symptomatic that Stalin’s assumption of power in 1928 and imposition of dictatorship on the minds and souls of people coincided with the persecution of these “circles” of the intelligentsia, their meetings and discussions.’³⁶

Spiritual-philosophical circles continued to emerge after 1917, even if they only enjoyed short existences. Exceptionally the circle Voskreseniye kept going until 1928. Its roots lay in the famous Petersburg Religious Philosophical Society, founded in 1907 by the spiritual thinkers Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Lossky. Later the Symbolists Dmitri Merezhkovsky and his wife, Zinaida Gippius, became the most prominent members, together with the philosopher, Alexander Meier. A Marxist, active in radical politics from the early 1900s, who underwent multiple arrests, Meier evolved his views on philosophy, becoming increasingly interested in religion in its wider, non-clerical sense.

Because of the diverging interests of Merezhkovsky and Meier, the Religious Philosophical Society did not survive the Revolution. Other circles arose in its place, including ‘The Brotherhood of Saint Sophia of Divine Wisdom’, whose declared aim was discussion of the Gospels. Its members included the philosopher Nikolai Lossky, Mikhail Bakhtin and his followers, and the historians Grevs and Karsavin. Another such circle was ‘The Brotherhood of Saint Seraphim Sarovsky’ (named after the most recently canonized Russian saint), with which Bakhtin was also briefly associated. Yudina was highly sceptical of this particular circle.

No sooner did the Bolsheviks close one circle, than others sprang up in its place. When the Orthodox Theological Academy was shut down, it was effectively replaced by the Institute of Theology, initially headed by the Metropolitan, Veniamin Kazansky. After Kazansky’s execution in 1922, Lev Karsavin became its leader, although within months he himself had been arrested and deported. Yudina attended the Institute’s Higher Theological Courses for several years and conducted its choir until its closure in 1928. These circles were not exclusive of each other, and members moved from one to another, attending lectures and participating in discussions. The authorities regarded any independent initiative with great suspicion. It required a lot of ingenuity to establish a circle and keep it going, although as Likhachov recalled, all that was actually needed was a space to hold lectures or discussions: ‘A room in a flat, the hall of the Tenishev school, a teacher’s schoolroom. The time and place of meetings were communicated by handwritten announcements or by word of mouth.’³⁷

Yudina and other members of Bakhtin’s Circle sustained the circles Volfila and Voskreseniye. The former was founded early in 1919 at the initiative of the Social-Revolutionary Ivanov-Razumnik and the writer Andrei Bely. Volfila’s aim was to discuss philosophical questions of cultural activity and heritage; religious belief was not a requisite for joining. Its meetings were attended by a wide range of illustrious men: the poet Blok, the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the philosophers Lossky and Meier, the historian Karsavin and the artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Non-members, including the writers Mikhail Zoshchenko and Yevgeni Zamyatin, were invited to lecture. Yudina actively participated in the unconstrained discourse encouraged at these meetings. Smaller ‘circles’ were created from Volfila’s sub-divisions for specific discussion.

By the time Volfila was closed in 1923, its members had almost all joined Voskreseniye, founded in 1917 at the initiative of Meier and his common-law wife, the artist and architect Kseniya Polovtseva – both to become lifelong friends of Yudina’s. Voskreseniye (with its double significance of ‘Sunday’ and ‘Resurrection’) was specifically defined as a religious philosophical society. Likhachov recalled that although its members originally met on Tuesdays, the meetings were then transferred to Sundays – giving sense to the dual meaning of its title. The circle fostered a synthesis of Christianity and Socialism, where the concept of ‘resurrection’ as intellectual rebirth was appropriate. Meier and Polovtseva proclaimed the need to link communism and Christ, reflecting Blok’s vision in his poem The Twelve (1918). For other members Voskreseniye provided a less extreme forum for the discussion of Christian ideas. Many members expressed sympathy with the aims, if not methods, of the Bolsheviks. As the philosopher Georgi Fedotov declared in the group’s initial charter, ‘We acknowledge the truth and justice of socialism, but seek some spiritual basis for it.’

Yudina was introduced to Voskreseniye in 1918 by her godmother, Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva. Other members of the circle became Yudina’s loyal friends: the historian and expert on St Petersburg, Nikolai Antsiferov, the Orientalist Nina Pigulevskaya (originally from Nevel’), as well as the students of medieval history Vsevolod Bakhtin (no relation of Mikhail Bakhtin) and his wife Yevgeniya. Yudina’s teachers Grevs and Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaya were also active members of the circle.

Yudina was already an admirer of the charismatic Meier, and vastly impressed by his erudition. After Likhachov’s arrest, he got to know Meier in the spring of 1929: ‘Meier appeared in the Solovki camp together with his wife Polovtseva. He had initially been sentenced to execution by firing squad, but was granted “grace” and condemned to a 10-year sentence – the longest term of punishment in those years. He was a very unusual man, he never tired of thinking, whatever the conditions, and he tried to make sense of everything philosophically.’³⁸ Likhachov identified him as a new mentor: ‘The conversations I had with Meier and the Solovetskaya intelligentsia were for me a second university – and first in terms of significance.’³⁹

Voskreseniye’s meetings were initially held in the premises of Volfila, and were widely attended, with up to 150 people present. But soon the circle was only able to operate privately in domestic premises, usually the flats of individual members. From 1924 it was decided for caution’s sake not to meet as one unit, but to divide up into smaller groups. Thus Voskreseniye became an umbrella for a variety of circles, divided by theme and meeting on different days of the week. Yudina and Pumpyansky attended the ‘Tuesday Circle’ led by Georgi Fedotov as a study group for the ‘Reappraisal of Values’. If the existence of a circle of free-thinking people was still possible in the mid-1920s, it was merely a question of time before Voskreseniye would be forcibly closed. It so happened that because of a minor disagreement Yudina ceased her membership of the circle at the end of 1928, just a few weeks before it was disbanded, and within days of the first arrests of its members. More surprising was how long Voskreseniye managed to keep going, given its open association with religious matters at a time when religion was increasingly under assault.

With Bakhtin’s return to Leningrad in 1924, his circle was reconstituted. Its meetings were usually held at Yudina’s apartment on 10th January Embankment – always known by its former name, Palace Embankment (Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya). The first-floor apartment was ideal as it boasted an enormous room and balcony. From Yudina’s surviving invitation notes to friends, it is evident the talks and lectures were of an impromptu, last-minute nature and the guests were hand-picked, a necessary precaution. Here is a typical letter dating from July 1924, to the musicologist Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov, son of the famous Nikolai, and husband of Yudina’s friend Yulia Veysberg: ‘Highly respected Andrei Nikolayevich, If you are free and if it is of interest to you, at 8 o’clock this evening at my home Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya 30, flat 79, the PHILOSOPHER BAKHTIN, recently arrived in Petrograd, will give a lecture on the theme “Problems of Content, Material and Form in Artistic Creation”, as a philosophical reflection on Formalist methods.’⁴⁰ Bakhtin’s next lecture at her flat would instead be for ‘a very intimate circle of people’. These events were well attended, and they aimed to raise funds for charitable purposes. Pumpyansky recalled the theme of Bakhtin’s first cycle of Petrograd lectures as ‘The Hero and the Author in Artistic Creation’. Here Bakhtin would refute Formalist methods from a philosophical standpoint. He was in general very disdainful of the superficiality of Formalist philosophical thinking, but wanted to explore its theories in linguistics and the autonomous function of literary devices.

Over the next two years, Yudina issued similar invitations to lectures by Bakhtin and Pumpyansky on a variety of philosophical and literary themes. Evenings were also devoted to a particular writer. Here for instance she writes to her friend, the philologist Yevlaliya Kazanovich, apologizing for a last-minute invitation to honour the memory of the poet Valery Bryusov: ‘I myself only discovered about it yesterday, since the meeting was transferred from a different venue to my place. Bakhtin and Pumpyansky will make speeches, and perhaps others too.’⁴¹

Another literary figure thus honoured was Vyacheslav Ivanov, about whom Bakhtin’s brilliant lecture covered ‘the whole of culture’, as one admiring member of the audience put it.⁴² In November and December 1926 respectively Yudina hosted two evenings dedicated to living poets, the first to Konstantin Vaginov, and the second to the ‘village’ or ‘archaic’ poet, Nikolai Klyuev. The aim of the second meeting was to collect money for the impoverished writer, who had no means of earning an income. Yudina’s short missives indicate the themes that Bakhtin was working on at the time – Dostoevsky, discourse and dialogue, the polyphony of ideas, as well as his ambiguous relationship with the Formalists. Most of these subjects were connected to his principal work of those years, The Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, published in 1929.

Bakhtin’s Circle also acquired new members, including the biologist Ivan Kanayev and the petro-geologist Boris Zalesky, both of whom would become lifelong friends of Yudina and Bakhtin. The circle never had a fixed programme, and it functioned as a hermetic group of friends, dominated by Bakhtin’s quiet, charismatic personality. It reopened with eight lectures on Kant’s Critique of Judgement given by Bakhtin himself – once again his brilliance and erudition overwhelmed his listeners. The circle also addressed contemporary concerns, including the study of psychoanalysis – Freud and Otto Rank in particular – promoted by the philologist Valentin Voloshinov, a founding member of the group, who specialized in the social aspects of Marxist theory. In the later part of the 1920s, Voloshinov published Freudianism – A Marxist Critique, possibly co-authored or even written in its entirety by Bakhtin.

In 1926, Pumpyansky wrote to the Nevel’ philosopher Matvei Kagan, now living in Moscow:

You are much missed here throughout these years, but particularly this year – when we are doggedly studying theology. The circle of our present friends remains the same: MV Yudina, Mikh Mikh Bakhtin, Mikh. Izr Tubyansky and myself – Believe me, we have more than once exclaimed, ‘What a pity that Matvei Isayevich is not here, he would help us unravel the matter!’ [. . .] After night-time discussions, we relive our reminiscences of those wonderful Nevel’ times – ‘Dear Ladies, Dear Gentlemen. Dear Mikhail Mikhailovich’ – a phrase which Maria Veniaminovna loves to recall.⁴³

Despite Pumpyansky’s warm references to Yudina, they had recently quarrelled bitterly. She expressed her indignation in a letter to her friend Kazanovich: ‘I ask you never to mention his name again in my presence. I despise this subject to the extreme!’⁴⁴ Pumpyansky had never been popular with her friends; Skrzhinskaya in particular had taken against him already in the early 1920s and nicknamed him ‘Pumpa’. Towards the end of the 1920s, like Voloshinov, Pumpyansky took up with Marxism. This probably ensured his survival and allowed him to teach at the Leningrad Conservatoire in the early 1930s, but it will hardly have endeared him to Yudina or others of the Bakhtin Circle. His brilliant pupil from Vitebsk, Ivan Sollertinsky, likewise learned how to use – or manipulate – Marxist ideology in his writings and discourses, and thereby flourished in his various careers in Leningrad.

Pumpyansky was indeed an improbable and colourful figure. Bakhtin’s biographers, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, describe ‘his, cast-off, ill-fitting uniform coat which gave him the appearance of an early-blooming Sergeant Pepper.’⁴⁵ He was the model for Teptelkin, the main character of the 1927 novel The Satyr’s Song^* by Konstantin Vaginov, a member of the Leningrad absurdist group, OBERIU.^** Here Vaginov satirizes a group of St Petersburg pre-revolutionary intellectuals unable to adapt to the new Soviet society. Living in their ideological ivory tower, they become ineffectual and isolated. Teptelkin is described as a mysterious creature surrounded by satyrs and nymphs, often observed carrying a kettle of boiling water from the communal dining room. Back in his room, ‘he absorbs himself in the most senseless occupation, needed by nobody – writing a thesis about an unknown poet to be read to a Circle of yawning ladies and exalted youths’.⁴⁶ The novel also paints gentle, ironic vignettes of Bakhtin, Yudina and other group members; yet its underlying message emphasizes that such lively, enquiring minds were doomed within the new Soviet system.

The process of stamping out independent thought had started as far back as 1922, when the Bolshevik state turned its attention from civil strife to eliminating opposition. Lenin believed that the free-thinking intelligentsia constituted a threat as potential opponents, and he personally drew up a list of 220 ‘undesirable elements’ for expulsion from the country. Prior to this, the first show trials had been directed at the clergy and the Social Revolutionaries – Lenin’s former allies, whom he now ruthlessly quashed. In the autumn of 1922 some fifty of Russia’s most prominent thinkers were arrested and deported with their families on the so-called ‘Philosophy Steamer’ (actually there were two boatloads of deportees). Prominent philosophers and academics of the calibre of Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, Nikolai Lossky and Lev Karsavin were amongst those banished from Petrograd to enforced exile. In 1917 in a flash of premonition, Franck talked of being destined to live in a vacuum ‘[. . .] there is no longer a Motherland. The West does not need us – nor does Russia, because she no longer exists.’⁴⁷

The situation of the Orthodox Church was even more dramatic. In April 1922 Patriarch Tikhon was placed under house arrest at Moscow’s Donskoi Monastery. The Party authorities recommended a show trial or expedient execution, but they feared an international outcry. As the first Orthodox bishop to work in North America during the early 1900s, Tikhon actually held honorary American citizenship. Although the authorities released him in June 1923, he lived nominally under house arrest. Tikhon was deprived of Patriarchal powers in favour of a Soviet-controlled organization known as the ‘Living Church’, originally founded by the Renovationist movement. It was now appropriated as a slogan for a bogus institution at the service of the Bolsheviks; its carefully orchestrated infiltration by the Cheka was cynically designed to undermine the Renovationists’ genuine wish for reform.

While Tikhon’s arrest was largely symbolic, the notorious Petrogradsky Trial of the summer of 1922 saw an unparalleled travesty of justice. The Metropolitan of Petrograd, Veniamin Kazansky, had been arrested on 1 June and tried – along with eighty-five other defendants – for ostensibly resisting confiscation of church valuables in the state campaign to alleviate famine. In contrast to Patriarch Tikhon, Veniamin had permitted the donation of church artefacts to this cause. Now he stood accused by the Prosecutor, Pyotr Krasnikov, of conducting ‘counter-revolutionary politics’ under cover of the Church. The ensuing trial by a quirk of fate took place in the Hall of the Petrograd Philharmonic where only ten months earlier Yudina had given the opening concert. Along with many churchgoers, she followed the trial over its six weeks’ duration, and was duly impressed by the Metropolitan’s quiet dignity. On 5 July, together with nine other defendants, he was declared guilty and sentenced to death. Yudina expressed her shock in a letter to her friend, the composer Yuri Shaporin: ‘I started to come to only yesterday, when the sentence was pronounced. Then all the tension of expectation was transformed to despair. And one of the worst things was the complete indifference of society – it’s deeply deplorable.’⁴⁸

The prosecutor secured commutation of six of the ten death sentences. Metropolitan Veniamin and three others were executed by firing squad. Amongst them was the Dean of Kazan Cathedral, Archpriest Nikolai Chukov, a figure well known to Yudina as a chorister in the cathedral choir. After these events, from the autumn of 1922, she transferred attendance and her choral activity to the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, soon to be associated with the schismatic ‘Josephite’ branch of the Church.

In the same letter to Shaporin, Yudina responded to his request to help him receive rations – he had recently returned to Petrograd from Petrozavodsk and had no work or money:

I spoke with Professor Adrianov, the husband of the singer Zoya Lody – he thinks it will be difficult to slip you onto the list for rations – there are new commission members who do not know you. I myself know nobody, except the chief of the Petrograd Philharmonic administration, who is a fan of my performances. But how can I, at this particular moment, have any conversation with the authorities? [. . .] In general I love to help others and I am happy to do what I can. But I cannot approach Adrianov again, for my sharp tongue is a match for yours. On leaving the Tribunal I came across his wife, Zoya Petrovna, and incensed by her indifference, I let slip some barbed criticisms, which she did not deserve, even if historically and morally I am right.⁴⁹

At the end of the letter Yudina asked Shaporin to lend her a book by the jurist Lev Petrozhitsky, The Theory of Law and Morality – she needed to consult it on procedures of registering protest against the sentences in the Petrogradsky Trial. As an afterthought she mentioned that it would be safest to remove herself from the scene. ‘Father is waiting for me in Nevel’; he is afraid that I might cross somebody because of my work, and find myself liable for trial. Destroy this counter-revolutionary epistle immediately.’⁵⁰

Yudina was careful not to tell even her closest friends when she left on a mission to visit imprisoned clergy members or join protests against the treatment of Church leaders. In a letter to Yevlaliya Kazanovich dated 12 September 1923 she signed off as ‘Your truly devoted Moscow madwoman’, allowing her friend to understand she had gone to the capital to protest against Patriarch Tikhon’s house arrest. A situation of extreme delicacy was being played out, whereby Tikhon attempted to maintain the allegiance of believers, walking a tightrope of political neutrality. He appealed for loyalty to the Soviet regime, stating that civic duty was to the state, while spiritual duty was to God. Such honourable compromise was necessitated as a means of self-preservation, although in the future it proved unsustainable.

Upon Tikhon’s death on 7 April 1925, the process of finding a successor was initiated – not without the interference of the OGPU, as the Cheka had been renamed in 1923. The election was complicated by the fact that of the thirteen appointed ‘locum tenens’, twelve were now in prison. Amongst them was the Moscow Metropolitan, Sergei Starogorodsky, who negotiated agreement with the security organs in order to save the situation – the whole hierarchy of the Patriarchal Church was in peril of extinction. On his release on 27 March 1927, Starogorodsky became effective head of the Russian Orthodox Church, as the single ‘Locum Tenens’. Yet when he declared absolute loyalty to the Soviet state in July, he provoked enormous controversy. A large proportion of bishops and congregational believers refused to accept his declaration, with its words ‘Your joys are our joys, your cares are our cares!’ smacking of sycophancy. The controversy proved irreconcilable, and it resulted in schism. This in turn provided the Bolsheviks with an excuse to initiate a wholesale campaign against religion, while maintaining control of the Patriarchy. Of the various separatist movements that sprung into being, by far the most important was the ‘Josephite movement’ (Iosiflyanskoe dvizhenie), named after the Leningrad Metropolitan Iosif Petrovykh, who had declared himself absolutely against compromise with the authorities. Petrovykh was arrested and not allowed to return to Leningrad, but he continued to direct the movement through his messengers. It was then that Leningrad’s Church of the Resurrection of Christ – more commonly known as the Church on Spilled Blood – took on the status of a cathedral church of the eparchy, and became the centre for Josephite supporters.

For Yudina, the Church on Spilled Blood was a second home; she had been singing in its wonderful choir since 1922. There she got to know the priest, Father Fyodor Andreyev, whose lectures on divinity and Christian Apologetics she had attended at Petrograd’s Theological Institute. Andreyev served briefly at the Kazan Cathedral, until it was taken over by false Renovationists in 1923. He then served as a junior priest at Petrograd’s Sergiev Cathedral until its closure. At that stage Father Fyodor started holding services at the Church on Spilled Blood, and became the effective leader of the Josephite movement after Metropolitan Iosif’s arrest. From early 1927 he became Yudina’s confessor, and had an enormous influence on her. She deeply admired Andreyev as a wonderful preacher and considered him ‘a man not of this world’ for his rigour in Christian practice.⁵¹ He in turn nurtured the greatest respect for Yudina, although, as he told his family, ‘she wasn’t sufficiently baptized’⁵² – referring to her difficulty in relinquishing her independent views. Naturally she became a confirmed Josephite.

On 14 July 1927, Andreyev was arrested, accused of ‘counter-revolutionary agitation’. He was released six weeks later on account of his ill health. His twin daughters, Maria and Anna, were only four at the time, but retained a clear memory of the dramatic events of their early childhood. ‘Father was still in prison when Metropolitan Sergius made his famous declaration, stirring up real antagonism [. . .] The Church was the highest of everything for him, and he played an active part in the movement against the ecclesiastic policies of Metropolitan Sergius.’⁵³ From prison Father Fyodor wrote letters on behalf of the clergy to the Metropolitan in an attempt to dissuade him from his divisive policies. As Anna Andreyeva recalled, the security organs believed that their apartment was the Josephites’ headquarters. She emphasized that ‘the Josephites’ efforts were directed at the preservation of the purity of spiritual life and not at struggling with the Soviet authorities, as was subsequently claimed at the trials of clergy’.⁵⁴

Just before his arrest, Father Fyodor introduced Yudina to his friend, Father Pavel Florensky, who was to assume an enormous spiritual influence over her. Florensky was that rare breed of polymath whose knowledge ranged from mathematics, applied and theoretical physics to art history and theology, all of which, however, were subordinated to his religious faith and spiritual interests. Florensky had remained on the periphery of the current troubles of the Church, detached from politics and ecclesiastical intrigue. While he regarded the 1917 Revolutions as the beginning of inevitable persecution, he also believed that freedom of the spirit outside religion was a mirage, unattainable even under democracy. His submission to the Bolsheviks was effectively a pose. ‘For authorities issuing forth from the belly of Leviathan, I have no recognition other than the toes of my boot!’ he had declared in 1917.⁵⁵

Submission inevitably meant cooperating with the regime, for it was precisely his brilliance as a scientist that made Florensky indispensable to the Soviet state. Ironically, from 1921, he found himself a full-time researcher on Lenin’s pet project – the State Plan for electrification of the whole Soviet Union – working for the Experimental Electro-Technical Institute and the Carbolite Commission in the sphere of mechanics and chemistry, and in the investigation of high-voltage techniques. Father Pavel started his work as an electro-technician still wearing his priest’s cassock, a remarkable sight in such times! In the following years his inventions led to no fewer than ten patents deposited on behalf of the Soviet state.

Despite great differences in character, Florensky and Yudina developed a strong friendship, reinforced by Father Pavel’s intimate knowledge of music. Yudina would play for him for hours on end at her apartment on Palace Embankment. She recalled the joy of accompanying him to the antiquities department of the Hermitage, visiting the Botanical Gardens, hearing his thoughts on Dutch painting, on Mozart and Bach, on the poet Karolina Pavlova. ‘He explained his own works, his views on Khlebnikov, on plants in general. His synthetic all-embracing universality, a silence, transparent as dew in a crystal goblet, enveloped his whole personality.’⁵⁶ It was this luminous ‘silence’ that impressed Yudina most.

Sergei Trubachyov, Florensky’s son-in-law, identified the defining differences between these two towering personalities: ‘In Yudina, emotion was dominant, in Florensky – reason. Yudina’s stormy temperament and unruly nature were pacified by Florensky’s presence. That which aroused protest in Yudina, provoked submission in Florensky. In life, Yudina was restless and rebellious – Florensky was stable and pure-minded. The contrast in their personalities was evident at a much deeper level. In her questing, Yudina moved from the past towards the contemporary; Florensky from the present day back to the past.’ Father Pavel understood that ‘her meteoric character has to be accepted as a fact of life; one must take each appearance of hers as it comes.’⁵⁷

Florensky was on the closest terms with Father Fyodor Andreyev and supported his position as head of the Josephites. By coincidence, shortly after Andreyev’s release, Florensky was arrested in May 1928. The accusations levied at him concerned alleged association with monarchists and former aristocrats, who like him lived in the city of Sergiev Posad north of Moscow. On 14 July, Father Pavel was sentenced to exile in Nizhny Novgorod. He was released after two months, largely due to the intervention of the philanthropist and human rights activist, Yekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova.

Peshkova enjoyed a unique position, winning the trust of both prisoners and the security organs. Aged twenty she had married the writer Maxim Gorky. They separated five years later; nevertheless they maintained friendly relations throughout their lives. A fearless woman, Peshkova dedicated her life to alleviating the lot of political prisoners, under whatever regime they were held. In 1918 she joined the Red Cross, and in 1922 became chairwoman of the organization ‘Help to Political Prisoners’ known by the acronym ‘PomPolit’, the only organization of its kind in the Soviet Union. PomPolit survived until 1937 – probably due to Peshkova’s personal friendship with Lenin. Through its services, sentences could be reduced or commuted, and prisoners were allowed to receive food parcels and letters.

Shortly after Florensky was freed, Father Fyodor Andreyev was arrested for a second time. He was held in solitary confinement for two months, where the awful conditions exacerbated his terminal illness – tuberculosis of the throat. He was released in December 1928 on compassionate grounds through the intervention of family, friends (Yudina included) and the tireless Peshkova. Father Fyodor was an immensely popular figure, and his death on 23 May 1929 at the relatively young age of forty-two elicited immense sorrow. At his funeral, crowds turned out in an unprecedented demonstration of support, carrying his coffin from the Church on Spilled Blood along Nevsky Prospekt to the Nikolsky cemetery. When the police tried to block the path of the mourners, the procession simply turned down smaller side streets. Not since Dostoevsky’s funeral had such crowds turned out to pay their respects.

Yudina’s close circle of friends was largely drawn from the Josephites, who like her also frequented the Voskreseniye circle. Amongst them was Boris Filippov, who had come to Petrograd in 1923 as ‘a young man full of confused ideas’ – a convinced Marxist, a follower of Kant, and a dedicated reader of Dostoevsky. When his uncle took him to a service at the Church on Spilled Blood he became aware of Russia’s tragic past, abandoned his position as an atheist, and joined the Brotherhood of Seraphim Sarovsky. It was in this church that Filippov first caught sight of Yudina prostrating herself, as she bowed low to the ground beside the canopy marking the place of Alexander II’s murder. He noted ‘her darned shoes with holes in the soles, an unusual sight in the years of NEP, which had brought relative well-being’.⁵⁸ Within a couple of years he got to know Yudina personally through common acquaintances, including Ivan Mikhailovich Andreyevsky, the founder of the Seraphim Sarovsky religious circle. Andreyevsky’s wife, Yelena Sosnovskaya would become a close friend of Yudina’s.

Filippov recalled the heady discussions and arguments revolving around the meaning of faith. ‘No, Boris,’ Andreyevsky muttered in his nervous, rapid patter, energetically gesticulating with his thin hands, ‘Good deeds turn to ashes. They will not save a Christian, for he is rewarded in this world [. . .] The only thing to save us is Faith in God, only and exclusively Faith! You will not be asked at the Last Judgement how you lived and sinned, but how you believed, and how strong was your belief!’ Andreyevsky had just been released from the Solovetsky and Svirsky camps, and from 1927 lived in exile, while secretly visiting ‘Piter’.^* ‘No, Ivan Mikhailovich,’ Yudina retorted, ‘it has been said that Faith is measured by deeds.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ interpolated Andreyevsky, ‘but those deeds connected to Faith. Morals and charitable acts have nothing to do with Faith. Only Protestants use a codex of morals, and nothing more.’ Shura Makarova, an old-believer and self-immolator in the past, and now a fervid Josephite, entered the discussion. ‘Ivan, in the official old Orthodoxy the only thing that was demanded was the Act of Faith.’⁵⁹

For Yudina, living by her faith nevertheless presupposed the obligation to help others. Filippov recalled how:

. . . she somehow managed to travel to the camps and places of exile of the disgraced Josephite bishops, bringing messages and instructions from them to their priests and congregations. In all this Maria Veniaminovna was troubled, almost embarrassed: ‘Whom do they take me for? Almost all my acquaintances and friends have been arrested at least once, many of them are in the camps [. . .] I haven’t even been called up by the GPU!’ ‘That’s nothing to be sad about, Mashenka,’ we laughed. My mother really loved Yudina and added, ‘Be glad of your good fortune.’⁶⁰

As Filippov observed, it was hard to believe that a person in those times could be so completely and openly devoted to God’s laws and heedless of the material things of life:

When Maria Veniaminovna came out of the Church on Spilled Blood – and as a rule she never missed a service – she was hemmed in by a crowd of beggars. And without even glancing around her, she gave to left and right the whole contents of her pockets. I remember a lanky beggar, a typical vagrant imposter of old times, who come winter or summer went barefoot, dressed in a very dirty gown of lurid brown colour, with a Cossack belt bedecked with metal discs tied round his waist. On his breast he wore a large, carved wooden cross, in his large hands a knarred staff the height of a man. His knotted hair, red edged by grey, fell loose nearly to his waist, his fiery red beard was streaked with grey, and his small cunning animal eyes peered out from under bushy eyebrows. He did not so much ask as demand in his low trombone voice, ‘Oh God’s servant Maria, give to a pilgrim from the Athos and Kiev shrines.’ He was completely unperturbed that the New Athos had been turned into a Soviet Institution. And Maria Veniaminovna, without counting her change, gave him whatever remained in her purse. ‘That’s not much, oh God’s servant,’ the vagrant muttered.⁶¹

Even though Yudina earned a relatively good amount of money through concerts and teaching, she rarely had enough for her basic needs. Filippov noted:

Usually she was as hungry as a wolf. She would come over to us and announce [to Mother] straight away, ‘Lidia Andreyevna, mmm . . . something smells so good in your kitchen. Is that Borsch cooking on your primus?’ Six families lived in our communal flat, and six primus stoves bubbled and spluttered away on the large, unheated range in the former nobleman’s kitchen. Yudina not only had good ears and eyes, but her olfactory sense was very refined, and she could sniff out any smell. ‘Come, Mashenka,’ Mother invited, ‘we’ll have lunch together.’⁶²

As anti-religious propaganda intensified and atheism became the official dogma, the term ‘Catacomb-church’ came into common usage to denote those practising Christians who rejected the ‘official’ Sergeyite Orthodox Church. The Party authorities had most to fear from a united Church with strong popular appeal. In practice all religious movements were abhorrent to the Communist regime, which indiscriminately repressed Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Shamanists. By the end of the 1920s most churches had stopped functioning and the priesthood was decimated. At the same time there were committed believers who decided to secretly take monastic vows, known as strizhka, the shaving of the head. These included Yudina’s historian friends Vsevolod Bakhtin and his wife, and the philosopher Alexei Losev and his wife. Even in recent years rumours abounded that Yudina had taken monastic vows, but there is no evidence to show for it. Certainly she never accepted Sergei Starogorodsky’s compromised Orthodoxy, and after the repression of the Josephite movement she stopped confessing or attending church services for nearly thirty years.

* The New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin in 1921, allowing free-market enterprise so as to give temporary respite to the population from hunger and the hardships of War Communism.

* Acronym for the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.

* The enormous department store on Nevsky Prospekt.

** The treacherous drunkard in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh.

* The poet Alexander Blok died on 7 August. His funeral was held on 10 August, the day of Yudina’s concert. Evidently she was referring to a rehearsal three days before.

* Volfila: Acronym of the Free Philosophical Association. The Philosophical Circle Voskreseniye (meaning both ‘Sunday’ and ‘Resurrection’) was created in 1917 and closed in 1928.

* Kozlinaya Pesnya, sometimes translated as The Goat’s Song.

** Acronym for Ob’edinenie real’nogo isskustva (The Union or Association for Real Art). Founded in 1927 by the Leningrad writers Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky and Nikolai Zabolotsky.

* St Petersburg or Leningrad.