Playing with Fire

4

1928–1933

LENINGRAD–MOSCOW VIA TBILISI

Have we gone out of our minds? How do we still believe in the nonsense and phantom of revolution? How could we forget ourselves to such an extent?

Maria Yudina¹

The year 1929 was the one in which – against all the odds – Yudina was not arrested. As many of her closest friends were put on trial, imprisoned and exiled, her own position became ever more precarious. Over the last two years the harsh repressive measures against the excommunicated Josephites were extended to other religious and philosophical groups, notably Alexander Meier’s circle, Voskreseniye, of which Yudina was a member. Now firmly at the helm of the Party, Stalin was transmitting a clear message – independent thought would not be tolerated.

The wholesale purge of Voskreseniye took place between December 1928 and June 1929. Some seventy of its 110 members were accused of counter-revolutionary activity, starting with the arrest of the group’s founders, Meier and Kseniya Polovtseva, on 11 December. Amongst others of the Voskreseniye circle to be arrested were Yudina’s university professors, the historians Ivan Grevs and Olga Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaya, and both of Yudina’s godparents, Lev Pumpyansky and Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva. They were all released within a short period, while other members of the group languished in prison for months, at the end of which they were sentenced to an average of three to five years in a concentration camp. They included Yudina’s friends, Mikhail Bakhtin, the historian Nikolai Antsiferov, and the medievalist Vsevolod Bakhtin and his wife, Yevgeniya.

Yudina’s arrest was expected imminently, but the authorities, fearing an outcry, desisted. Her friend Valentina Yasnopolskaya recalled that while being held prisoner, she was told by her investigator: ‘Yudina wants us to arrest her so that she will be regarded as a martyr in Western Europe. But we won’t fall for that!’² While Yudina was ready for such martyrdom, the Soviet state was not.

Antsiferov recalled meeting Pumpyansky shortly after his release in December 1928: ‘Pumpyansky recoiled from me, as if I was contagious. But a month later he approached me, saying quietly: “You know I was arrested – some time has elapsed, so I can speak now without causing anxiety. The investigator dealing with the Meier case asked me to tell you and Yudina not to be worried by Meier’s arrest, you will not be involved in this case.” Seeing my astonishment, Pumpyansky added, “I kept silent for a month, and neither you nor Yudina have been touched.”’³

Albert Stromin, the investigator handling the proceedings, warned that the ‘Meier Case’ arrests were the start of a large-scale repression of the intelligentsia. Although there was a chaotic or irrational aspect to the arrests taking place, a lucky few escaped the grip of the secret police altogether, while others were accused under separate indictments, leading to multiple or overlapping arrests. Antsiferov was originally arrested under the ‘Meier Case’ in April 1929, kept in horrendous conditions in Leningrad’s Kresti Prison, before being sentenced to a three-year term in Solovetsky labour camp, a sentence that Antsiferov considered ‘mere child’s play’. He was returned to Leningrad in the summer of 1930 – as was Meier – to face new charges under the Academicians’ Case as an alleged participant in the ‘historians’ plot, supposedly headed by Yevgeni Tarlé and Sergei Platonov. This time Antsiferov was sentenced to the notorious camp at Medvezhaya Gora in Karelia to work in the White Sea/Baltic Canal construction. Tarlé got off more lightly and was exiled. Antsiferov found himself travelling to Medvezhaya Gora together with Meier, who declared, ‘Life is finished, now existence begins.’⁴

Whereas Pumpyansky was detained for only four days, Mikhail Bakhtin was arrested on 24 December 1928 on charges of belonging to an alleged anti-revolutionary organization, ‘The Brotherhood of Saint Seraphim’, and to a circle founded by Russian expatriates in Paris. More insidiously, Bakhtin was accused of ‘corrupting’ Soviet youth through his lectures on philosophy. Nevertheless the investigator, Albert Stromin, considered him a minor figure in the case. Bakhtin was held in ‘preliminary detention’ for over six months, during which time his health deteriorated – he already suffered from multiple osteomyelitis, which was further complicated by kidney disease. In mid-July, while in care at the Uritsky Hospital in Leningrad, his book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art was published, receiving a very favourable review from Anatoli Lunacharsky, shortly to be released from his position as Commissar of Enlightenment. His positive opinion did not prevent Bakhtin from being sentenced in late July to five years at the Solovetsky labour camp, an equivalent to the death penalty for a man suffering such fragile health.

Together with Sofia, the wife of Matvei Kagan, the Nevel’ philosopher, Yudina embarked on a mission to intercede for Bakhtin. She addressed Yekaterina Peshkova, the former wife of Maxim Gorky, and head of an extraordinary organization called PomPolit, an acronym for ‘Help to Political Prisoners’. A woman of indomitable courage, Peshkova dedicated her life to alleviating the lot of political prisoners, under whatever regime they were held, something she began doing before the First World War, while living abroad. Her involvement with the Red Cross started before her return to the new Soviet Union, where she created PomPolit in 1922.

Yudina’s admiration for Peshkova knew no bounds:

Whoever did not have the privilege to see her in her Moscow office on Kuznetsky Most, amongst the hundreds and thousands of visitors and petitioners to PomPolit, does not know the true face of Russia during the mid-1920s and early 30s of our era [. . .] How was it that there, just round the corner at the Lubyanka, people were arrested and tortured, and here at Kuznetsky, their sentences were reduced, missing people discovered, permission was gained to send parcels, even to arrange meetings [. . .] Then the ‘counter-weights’ of MOPS^* abroad also alleviated the situation. ‘We’ll cover things up over here, while they’ll uncover them over there.’ In those hard years, Yekaterina Pavlovna, with her majestic beauty and elegance arrived at her ‘office’ on an old, sputtering motorcycle. And he, Gorky, stood behind her, no longer a husband but a friend, a patron, a pillar of support, a proletarian writer, loved and respected by the Party.⁵

Peshkova had no hesitation in involving Gorky in her missions. For her part Yudina addressed the writer Alexei Tolstoy. Both he and Gorky sent telegrams to the authorities urging clemency, while Bakhtin asked the Health Commissariat to review his case. Given his poor state of health, his sentence was commuted to five years’ exile in Kustanai (today’s Kostanai) in Kazakhstan. Similarly, when Meier was condemned to death in 1928, his ‘official wife’ Praskoviya Meier and Peshkova intervened successfully, commuting his sentence to ten years’ hard labour in Solovki – a sentence shared by Polovtseva.

The repression of the intelligentsia was followed by purges connected to industry and production. The infamous Shakhty Trials of 1928 saw mass arrests of engineers and technicians accused of ‘wrecking and sabotage’. Next came a series of arrests in scientific institutions. The Academy of Sciences was particularly vulnerable to ideological control and suffered interior power struggles; in 1930 over 100 of its members were charged with counter-revolutionary activity. The Historians’ case was an offshoot of the Academicians’ case. In 1930–1 it was the turn of bacteriologists, food specialists, agronomists and geneticists. The damage wrought in the sciences, particularly in the fine modern school of Russian genetics, was irreparable and resulted in the ascendancy of charlatans like Trofim Lysenko, who instigated disastrous policies in Soviet genetics and agriculture.

Likewise, from the end of the 1920s, Soviet musical life was torn by conflict and split between two main factions – the proletarian groups and the professional associations. RAPM⁶ (Russian Association of Proletarian Music), founded in 1923, was the most active and powerful of the proletarian groups. It promoted ideological conformity and was accused of over-simplification in the name of accessibility. The Association of Contemporary Music (ASM), on the other hand, supported contemporary composers and endorsed professional standards. Yudina belonged to the Leningrad branch (LASM), where she championed Leningrad composers, participating in its last concert in November 1927. LASM’s closure the following year paved the way for the aggressive dominance of the proletarian factions. Composers were now forced to compromise and justify their aims in ideological terms. In 1932 the Party disbanded all independent groups in every branch of the arts. The initial feeling of general relief was soon overtaken by an understanding that the Party would impose stricter controls and more compromise as the new doctrine of Socialist Realism was imposed. While performers were less affected than composers by such ideological strictures, the teaching profession was a prime target, as Yudina was soon to discover to her cost.

The sweeping arrests and persecution of friends put an end to Yudina’s desire to perform. Apart from her participation in two concerts devoted to Mikhail Gnesin’s music in spring, her first concert in 1928 only took place in November. The next year started on a similarly bleak note, until in July 1929 Yuri Shaporin delivered the score of his long-awaited second piano sonata, dedicated to Yudina. She wrote to the composer at once saying she was too busy with Conservatoire exams and commissions to learn it, as she was teaching ten hours a day: ‘You cannot work in an Institution and remain indifferent to the efforts of colleagues. You will say, this is a waste of time. No more so than your fulfilling commissions for theatre-music!’⁷ Like many other composers, Shaporin was currently having to compose music on ideologically topical themes for theatre productions, as a shield from assault by the proletarian organizations.

In reply, Shaporin lamented that his serious compositions were not being published. Yudina sympathized; only recently she had viewed vocal romances by Moscow composers selected by the State Publishing Commission; they were ‘terrible rubbish’, and the texts no less disgraceful. Shaporin should rise above it, remain true to his gift, and finish his Symphonic Cantata On the Field of Kulikovo, set to words by Blok, which he had started when Blok was still alive. ‘You have a good intellect and critical perception [. . .] so why are you aping current trends?’ she demanded. ‘Shame on you! Your business is to stand for Mussorgsky and for real Russian music – not for Scriabinism.’⁸

The Second Piano Sonata in F sharp minor, composed over two years, was one of Shaporin’s major achievements. Its opening Allegro Agitato alla Toccata immediately points to the influence of his great forebear, Mussorgsky. The music’s passionate expressionism and dense textures in the opening are pitted against contrasting themes of lightness and clarity, linked by skilful transition sections. The work contains some explicit references to Pictures from an Exhibition, an acknowledgement of Yudina’s belief in Shaporin as a ‘second Mussorgsky’.

Within five days of finishing with Conservatoire exams, Yudina learnt the sonata. As she wrote to ‘Dear Shaporik’, this helped her recover her spirits. ‘This evening for the first time in six months, I remember that I am a musician and forget the traumas of life. It’s possible to ignore one’s own troubles, but can one ignore other people’s?’⁹

Yudina played the sonata through to a young artist, who was profoundly touched by the music’s sorrow, ‘as if pierced to the core by some terrible misfortune’. Yudina identified with Shaporin’s musical depiction of ‘oppressive events beyond the soul itself. I cannot [. . .] comprehend the force of impact of such great sorrow. Yet for me could it be otherwise? Is there a smile lurking somewhere – not just for a day or for an hour, but for longer? You definitely have made no mistake in your dedication – this is MY sonata. Now please write a concerto, and soon, as I may die. If I could play it but once! I want it so badly!’¹⁰ A Shaporin piano concerto was announced for the Leningrad Philharmonic season of 1930 with Yudina as soloist, but the work was never written.

Certainly the dismal situation in the country was exacerbating Yudina’s despondency: ‘Where is life precipitating in this depleted, barbaric, wounded Russia?’ she asked Shaporin. ‘How can we still live and bear it, when all we hold sacred is so violated, so besmirched? Have we gone out of our minds? How do we still believe in the nonsense and phantom of revolution? How could we forget ourselves to such an extent? And did not Blok pray to save his own soul or save Russia? He knew that without prayer there is no life, only the void!’¹¹

Yudina also had personal reasons for despair. She started to realize that a love affair with Mikhail Gnesin, whom she had got to know in 1921, existed more in her mind than in his. She now accepted it as a lost cause and upbraided herself as much as blaming him:

If I could only learn to hate you! And to hate my accommodating slavery, to smash the death-ridden chains of ‘duty’, ‘submission’, ‘chastisement’ and ‘detachment’ – all such slavish trash! Life without your love covers me with eternal shame. Why so much lying? What use is culture, when all is hypocrisy? To not have understood the only assignation, to be illuminated by love at our first meeting, when you came to St Petersburg on your way to Palestine in 1921, to not be able to become the mother of your child in all the following meetings, to not be free from prejudice when you were well inclined towards me, and not to kill myself when you finally left me [. . .] How could you, in that sacred time of our first coming together, when I had no chastity, no femininity, no maturity, no truth. Love and creation are the only important things in a woman’s life. Anything else is sheer delirium!¹²

Yudina saw the hypocrisy of her life – going to Church, philosophizing: ‘Oh, be damned, all those books, which only serve to stifle the life force!’ She understood that Gnesin now loved another woman, shortly to become his second wife. She begged a response from him as to whether they should continue to meet. He probably accepted her suggestion ‘just to go on in an ordinary, everyday manner, with no highfaluting words’.¹³ Certainly Gnesin could hardly afford to lose the greatest champion of his work, and Yudina performed his pieces regularly – his Piano Quintet Requiem, his violin sonata and vocal romances. On 29 November 1928 she had performed Gnesin’s monumental Symphonic Moment with the pianist Mikhail Bichter in the latter’s brilliant transcription for two pianos.

In a private Confession (dated 1929) Yudina viewed her failure to love as a lack of faith as a practising Christian. She admonished herself, not for being unable to forget her unrequited love, but more for not wanting to forget ‘the sweetness of sin’. Yet through Yudina’s genuine depression one feels the buoyancy of her character: ‘My heart is like a stone [. . .] I cannot now work or [play] music. But I don’t want to stop loving, that would not be ME – I would become a ruin, a corpse – and surely I should be a living person with fiery passions to be of use to God?’¹⁴ A year later Yudina wanted to send Gnesin her photograph, but thought better of it. Her accompanying note read, ‘I wish, my sunshine, to leave you this photograph of myself when I was young and sin-free, together with the words of Lev [Pumpyansky], written at a time he thought he loved me. [. . .] Everything that happened before you is pre-history, the void.’¹⁵ Yudina referred to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s recent suicide,^* saying she had to be stronger than the poet in order to continue to serve Gnesin.

Yudina had better fortune with friends than with lovers. In the late 1920s she formed two friendships of fundamental importance. ‘I got to know Boleslav Leopoldovich Yavorsky, when I was a young professor at the Leningrad Conservatoire. Halfway through the 1929 academic year, Yavorsky gave a brilliant lecture there at the packed-out Small Hall [. . .] I was particularly impressed by his method of synthesis – his ability to approach music in a manner similar to the visual arts. His impassioned manner of speech, his subtly varied speech inflections, the charm of the timbre of his voice, his sparkling erudition flashing like meteorites lighting up the autumn sky – everything was unique and individual, irresistibly appealing and instructive [. . .] Oh Yavorsky, Yavorsky! You seduced with your intellectual genius, so typically Polish and elegant!’¹⁶

In December 1928 the poet Boris Pasternak visited Leningrad, and Yudina sought a meeting with him. She was engrossed with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Only recently, with the soprano Vera Pavlovskaya-Borovik she had performed Hindemith’s grandiose song-cycle, Das Marienleben, based on Rilke’s poem, for which she had commissioned a translation of the text from Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky. Pasternak wrote about this encounter to his sister Josephine in Oxford:

A month ago, having first made an appointment by telephone, a young female visitor appeared, in type and build a bit like [our sister] Lidochka [. . .] Between sniffles and intense embarrassment, she informed me of her wish – was it possible to ask for a translation from a private individual of a favourite German poet, was such a commission admissible? It was a question of translating several poems from Rilke’s Stundenbuch. I refused her [. . .] and muttered something about perhaps a publisher being interested. Here she interrupted me and asked wouldn’t it be all the same to me, if she offered me the same conditions as the publisher; and I smiled, not only because such private patronage here is materially completely unthinkable now, but because it was extraordinarily touching when one glanced at her darned and mended shoes and her more than humble jersey.¹⁷

Yudina’s name meant nothing to Pasternak, although he was a music-lover and in his youth had aspired to become a concert pianist and composer.

Shortly afterwards, Pasternak attended a concert in Moscow given by the renowned pianist Heinrich Neuhaus:

Brushing aside my compliments, Neuhaus advised me most insistently that I should go and hear the concert of a lady pianist from Leningrad, for in comparison to her he was absolutely nothing. She is a remarkable musician – with some strange quirks – mystically inclined, wears shackles under her dress and behaves accordingly, but interestingly enough she is Jewish by origin and so on and so on. Then he named the visitor I described! She played Bach, [Schumann’s] Kreisleriana, several pieces by Hindemith, and more Bach, mostly his choral-preludes for organ. In the interval I transmitted to her the only volume of Rilke I could part with [. . .] his youthful collection of comparatively weak stories, ‘Am Leben hin’, with a suitable inscription: ‘Forgive me, I did not know it was you. Write to me from Leningrad and I will translate everything you want.¹⁸

He even thought of sending Yudina his youthful musical manuscripts but ended up giving them to Neuhaus.

The concert Pasternak mentioned was in fact Yudina’s recital debut in Moscow, which took place on 5 January 1930 at the Small Hall of the Conservatoire. She had previously performed in Moscow in shared concerts or accompanying singers. Now her reputation as a great pianist had preceded her and the hall was full to bursting. Apart from the pieces Pasternak described, Yudina played works by the Leningrad composers Shcherbachov, Mikhail Yudin (no relation of hers) and Pyotr Ryazanov. The concert was a personal triumph, and she noted with pride that amongst her listeners were the Meyerholds, the Pasternaks and the Neuhauses.

Now at the zenith of her fame, Yudina performed some twenty-two concerts between January 1929 and March 1930 in Moscow and Leningrad alone – concertos, solo recitals, chamber concerts and performances with singers. She also made her debut in Kiev in three consecutive recitals, received with great acclaim. Her repertoire laid emphasis on contemporary music, placed next to great classical masterpieces, such as Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ and ‘Hammerklavier’ sonatas, Chopin’s B flat minor Sonata and Schumann’s Kreisleriana. At a time when performances of Western modern composers were barely tolerated by the Proletarian Associations, she introduced to Russian audiences Hindemith’s Music for Piano Op. 37, and Schoenberg’s aphoristic Sechs Kleine Klavier Stücke Op. 19, and also performed Prokofiev’s fourth and fifth sonatas, and Medtner’s Sonata – Reminiscence. She gave the first performance of Shaporin’s Second Piano Sonata in Leningrad’s Small Philharmonic Hall on 27 January 1929, and was scheduled to premiere Shcherbachov’s concerto with the Leningrad Philharmonic. However, for reasons unknown this never happened.

Yudina continued championing Gnesin’s music, working with the singers Sofia Akimova, Irma Yunzem (a contralto well-known for performing popular songs), Anna Kerner (a superficial artist in Yudina’s opinion), and of course Dorliak. Yudina particularly enjoyed working with Akimova, who was married to her hero, the famous heldentenor Ivan Yershov. Like Dorliak, Akimova had started as a Wagnerian soprano at the Mariinsky Theatre; recently, she had sung the role of Marie in the 1927 Leningrad production of Berg’s Wozzeck, attended by the composer. Yudina’s Leningrad recital of Russian romances with Dorliak was greatly acclaimed, and a repeat performance in Moscow on 11 January 1930 went even better. Although the singer’s voice was not always reliable, her artistry remained unimpaired. Yudina reported to Gnesin on the success of his song ‘Gaetan’: ‘It’s unthinkable to play anything else after it. The audience was shouting, banging their chairs from genuine delight, they were touched to the very core.’¹⁹

No doubt Yudina’s career would have gone from strength to strength had she not been arbitrarily dismissed from the Leningrad Conservatoire in April 1930 for defending her religious beliefs – many of her friends had been arrested for less. As vigilance in educational institutions increased, the Conservatoire authorities started objecting to Yudina’s concert trips to other towns. Things took a more sinister turn when she received a letter from the acting director^* of the Leningrad Conservatoire, Alexei Mashirov, questioning her about her religious activities. Her answer of 11 March showed courage and honesty: she confirmed that she frequented the Theological Pastoral courses – ‘my studies ceased only because the courses were closed’ – neither did she hide her religious convictions, while denying being involved in active propaganda of the Orthodox Church. Challenged about participating in church concerts, she reminded Mashirov that ‘Orthodox Church Music is exclusively vocal, so I could participate in concerts only as a normal chorister.’ Declaring that ‘Ecclesiastical Chant is one of the greatest treasures of Russian musical Culture’, nevertheless she could not propagate it in her role of piano professor. Yudina concluded by saying she saw no reason why religious beliefs could not be combined with academic life. ‘I have no intention of changing my beliefs in any way, while I leave my students complete freedom to hold any philosophical views they choose.’²⁰

Only two days before writing this letter, Yudina had given a triumphant recital at the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The long queue for concert tickets stretched from the Philharmonia to Nevsky Prospekt. According to Yudina’s biographer, Anatoli Kuznetsov, the programme had enormous symbolic significance – Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ sonata and Brahms’ Intermezzo Op. 116 no. 2 (‘song of the abandoned girl’), which referred to her crushed hopes of personal love. Chopin’s Sonata in B flat minor with its famous Funeral March represented the Soviet Union’s tragic destiny, while Prokofiev’s Fourth Sonata, From Old Notebooks,^* with its dark first movement, Allegro molto sostenuto, and brooding second movement, Andante assai, reflected dramatic protest and numbed acceptance. Whereas the exuberant finale, Allegro con brio, described by Boris Asafiev as ‘an outburst of pent-up emotion’, symbolized Good triumphing over Evil. Her final offering, Mussorgsky’s grandiose Pictures from an Exhibition, spoke of the sufferings and glories of the Russian people.²¹ Contemporary Leningraders saw in her performance a spark of hope lighting up a devastated, dark landscape. Others spoke of the euphoric atmosphere in the packed-out hall, redolent with premonitions of danger.

The premonitions proved accurate, for on 24 March a vicious article entitled ‘Nun’s habit in the Faculty’ appeared in the Krasnaya Gazeta (Red Newspaper). Couched in the rabid ideological jargon of the day, the article, signed by a certain Bonko, accused Yudina of religious fascism. ‘Only three days ago, when half a million workers hammered home their response to the priestly-fascist gang, one could meet amongst the worker-demonstrators a column from the Leningrad Conservatoire. The proletarian student body of this Artistic Institute of Higher Education, together with white-headed professors, famous musicians and artists, were protesting against the attempts by cross and censer to mobilize the forces of capitalism to destroy the workers’ Republic. Against the background of vigorous protests and the mighty hypocrisy of the world, Jesuitism here pales to a petty, regional scale. Measure it as you like and draw your own conclusions! For all social classes should be given some idea of who Maria Yudina is – a professor of the same Institution, and educator of youth.’²²

Yudina’s answers to Mashirov’s questionnaire were shamelessly used against her. ‘Well comrades, what can one say? [. . .] Try and probe this hypocritical pacifist wisdom and blatant insolence. Or maybe you should ask the governing body of the Conservatoire how long they have known about their Professor’s activities?’ Bonko advised, ‘What Comrade Yudina needs is a nun’s habit! Dress her then in a nun’s habit, so that she may be liberated the sooner from her teaching duties. She will find her place in the priestly-fascist gang.’ In his view, Soviet higher educational institutions should be actively ‘demonstrating with the working class against bishops, priests, pastors and mullahs’.²³

Mashirov was careful in his report to the Commissariat of Enlightenment to justify Yudina’s expulsion from the Conservatoire for administrative reasons. He accused her and her students of social indifference – the latter had failed to appear at Komsomol meetings, and worse, Yudina forgot to request a leave of absence for concerts in Moscow in mid-April. Mashirov did not want to appear to be purging the Conservatoire of religious elements – he was known personally to defend his staff from extreme ideological attacks. On 15 April a Protocol report was drawn up, deeming that Yudina’s behaviour ‘was deeply reprehensible, incompatible with working in Soviet Higher Education and with the construction of Soviet Musical Culture’.²⁴ Yudina was officially expelled from the Leningrad Conservatoire on 24 April, but did not learn of this herself for several days. Aware of having ignored correct procedure, Yudina wrote to apologize and explain ulterior reasons for her absence – in Moscow a close relative was dying of cancer. Mashirov privately believed the concert in Moscow on 16 April was a cover for celebrating Easter! Worse still, after a few days back in Leningrad, Yudina set off to Kiev at the end of April, again without applying for a leave of absence. (Now Mashirov jokingly suggested she was celebrating May Day!) On 28 April Yudina wrote with an apology – she would be back by early May. Naturally she did not mention that in Kiev she was acting as a messenger for the Josephite clergy. On 7 May, the day after returning to Leningrad, Yudina lodged an appeal against her dismissal. The Conservatoire local committee met on 19 May to discuss her case. In the final account, the verdict of dismissal was confirmed, even while other Conservatoire Professors (her teachers included) tried to support her. Nikolayev abstained – he believed that without Yudina the Conservatoire would be much poorer. Shcherbachov, while agreeing that she had ‘broken the rules of discipline and labour’, deplored the overruling of a wider discussion of her case. Steinberg suggested that the proposal to ‘re-educate Yudina’ should be imposed. Ossovsky and Savshinsky defended Yudina while Comrades Chrenov and Medvedeva believed ‘there was no sense in reconsidering the decision’.²⁵

Boris Filippov recalled that at one of Yudina’s first concerts in Leningrad after the publication of the abusive article, the audience demonstratively showed their sympathy, walking up to the stage between pieces to present her with a single flower or bouquet. Some even handed her wreaths, adorned with ribbons with a clearly visible written message, ‘The darker the night, the brighter the stars!’, or citing the title of the revolutionary song ‘You fell victim to Grievous Bondage’. Others pressed notes or small icons into her hands.²⁶

Dismissed ‘in a blaze of scandal’ as Yudina later described it, she now had many practical problems to face, not least being deprived of her salary. All forthcoming concerts in Leningrad were cancelled in view of her disgrace. Worse still, Yudina’s right to ration cards was withdrawn,^* for she no longer belonged to the category either of ‘worker’ or intellectual ‘labourer’. Effectively, the unemployed, priests and vagrants were all treated as pariahs, and had to buy food in open markets where it was sold at exorbitant prices. Yudina found herself living off the charity of others, aided by the occasional food parcel from her family in Nevel’. Her principal supporter, Yelena (Lyosha) Skrzhinskaya, welcomed Yudina to the family home on Krestovsky Island, helped her with practical matters, and allowed her to eat, sleep and practise piano to her heart’s content.

Yudina’s disgrace was primarily connected with Leningrad, for she was still welcomed in other cities. On 22 November she played an important recital at the Small Hall of Moscow’s Conservatoire, made up of sonatas by Beethoven and Medtner, a series of Schubert and Schumann songs in Liszt’s transcriptions, and lieder by Brahms and Wolf in her own arrangements, concluding with Chopin’s Second Sonata. She informed Skrzhinskaya, ‘The concert went off fairly well, although my [sore] finger and the piano’s heavy action bothered me. I have lost the habit of playing on a real keyboard. But the Chopin and the songs weren’t bad at all. The concert was sold out and I received many greetings and congratulations!’²⁷

At her next concert at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire on 30 November, Yudina performed Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 and Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. A few days beforehand she had written to ‘Cheslavna’ telling her that she was searching for cadenzas to both works – there were oceans of them! Her next epistle to Skrzhinskaya was almost euphoric in mood:

The concert on the 30th was received with ovations, the hall was crammed full. I played not without inspiration and elegance, but in both finales (Mozart and Beethoven) I had two small memory slips; friends said they were hardly noticeable, but it upset me all the same. I didn’t play encores, even if the audience clamoured for them. In the end, I played the Brahms cadenza to Beethoven’s 4th [. . .] Of all the new ones sent to me, Casella’s was the best. Everybody criticized the red dress, and I didn’t wear it, chiefly because it was tight and made playing difficult. I have seen a lot of Pasternak and his lovely wife, Zhenya. Tomorrow I am going to the Meyerholds (they all came on the 30th), and I have also seen Anatoli Dolivo^* and the Neuhauses. [In Moscow] people are glad to see me, and show me respect and admiration! It would be good to inform Pumpa [Pumpyansky] and see what he makes of this!²⁸

Soon it was Yudina’s turn to comfort Skrzhinskaya: she had been dismissed from her position at the Academy of the History of Material Culture, accused of being a ‘church-goer’, and having association with the exiled Karsavin. Skrzhinskaya, a brilliant academic in her own right, remained without work for the next ten years. Yudina encouraged her to get a visa to travel abroad and look up Karsavin; neither of them was surprised when permission was refused. Through doing occasional translations and odd jobs, Skrzhinskaya survived. Ultimately she was saved from arrest, for generally only institutions were subject to full-scale purges – individuals had the chance of remaining unnoticed and untouched.

Yudina somehow got through 1930, a year dominated by a feeling of general catastrophe. At the beginning of the year she had written a despairing letter to Gnesin:

Can anyone live even 24 hours without struggle and the effort to surmount it? In the profound night, as one sleeps, one hears the silence shattered by moans and sighs, the heavy, threatening scrape of wheels, the ungreased axles, the smashed stones [. . .] discordant shrieks, raucous noise. Then the daily spectacle of the overloaded dray horse stumbling forward – hardly a poetic image, although precise in my vision – the suffering heroism, the tortured anguish, difficulties surmounted [. . .] What will remain of this mad, frenzied sweep of history is uncertain, but to me it is abundantly clear that each individual must forge his inner resistance to destruction [. . .] If one shakes off the shackles of slavery, shows love amidst hatred, recalls God in times of atheism, that implies the triumph of freedom, love and faith, which cut through the barriers encircling this ‘crisis in ideology’ and allows one to expose one’s true self [. . .] This of course is the burden of the select!²⁹

Yudina credited her survival to Alexei Ukhtomsky’s teachings. A practising Old-Believer, Ukhtomsky was trained in theology, but specialized in the field of physiology, where he developed his important ‘Theory of Dominance’. Through researching the dominant and inhibiting factors in animal behaviour, he explained fundamental aspects of man’s psychological processes, where the ‘higher’ dominant becomes the focal point of stimulus in a person’s central nervous system. The theory was equally applicable to philosophy, psychology and literary criticism, and for Yudina it illuminated the path leading to Truth. ‘I had several meetings with [Ukhtomsky] in the winter of 1930. His own complex personality was highly instructive to others [. . .] He urged one to look inside a person, uncover his personality, his way of thinking, to reveal the organic processes of human everyday behaviour, arising as a necessity in his consciousness.’³⁰ Ukhtomsky’s principles could be applied to life in general, as Yudina discovered. Writing to Shaporin she explained: ‘You need to live simultaneously in different spheres of life, and preserve a dominant idea as the highest gift, and be guardian of this idea until one’s last breath.’³¹ She reprimanded him for his slack work. ‘I myself am ripped apart by never-ending difficulties; overcoming them saps one’s strength, little is left over for real work. And one day without work kills all joy in life [. . .] If God protects me from this, then surely he would save you, for you have better grounds to believe in the intransient significance of your vocation.’³² Yudina also felt it a moral duty to set Shaporin back on the rails, for his marriage to Lyubov Shaporina was falling apart. In her view, marriage was a sacred bond. Indeed when they divorced, Yudina’s relationship with Shaporin cooled off, while she remained on close terms with his wife.

As the year 1931 started, Yudina’s concert diary looked empty, apart from three concerts in Leningrad between February and April – a recital at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia on 17 February, a repeat performance of Stravinsky’s Les Noces with Klimov on 10 March, and a performance of Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 on 8 April with the Leningrad Philharmonic under Alexander Gauk. Without her teaching salary Yudina faced a bleak financial situation. On receiving an invitation to perform that spring in Tiflis (as Tbilisi was known before 1936), she accepted it with alacrity, seeing it as a demonstration of support. ‘I was given a triumphant reception by the Georgians, and from then on I performed regularly in their country.’³³

Getting to Tiflis was an adventure in itself. She wrote to Skrzhinskaya:

I have a trunk full of stories for you! [. . .] In Moscow I couldn’t get a sleeper on the train [. . .] there was only one international wagon-lit, which the ‘cleaner members’ of the populace were all scrambling to board [. . .] Then I discovered this air connection and mobilized all my financial resources – the ticket costs 197 roubles plus 35 for a suitcase [. . .] The flying machine, ‘Wings of the Soviet’, was wonderful, one of three such airplanes in Russia, with 12 seats, 3 motors – inside everything was beautiful and comfortable. It was making its second flight, for they don’t fly in the winter. We left the morning of 3 May and should have arrived the next day at midday. On landing at Kharkov they explained there was a misunderstanding, the plane would land in Tiflis next evening. Then we experienced delays due to trouble with the motors and bad weather in Piatigorsk. We spent the night in Armavir in a squalid hotel, then the next night in Piatigorsk in a delightful rest house for pilots. From there we flew on to Baku, where I dumped myself on some relatives. At last on 6 May we arrived late afternoon.³⁴

By then Yudina had already missed her first concert on 5 May. At the airport those meeting her had spent several expectant days waiting for news. ‘They desperately enquired of the pilots if I hadn’t fallen out of the plane!’³⁵ Yudina had been particularly impressed by that ‘severe, friendly caste’ of pilots – ‘all quite young, with military manners – one could easily fall in love with them! The mechanics accompanying them travel in pairs and are nearly all Germans, Latvians or Estonians. One had eyes of extraordinary beauty, but kept silent. I asked why – the pilots explained he had just come back from “over there”, where so many friends languish.’³⁶ Between 7 May and 1 June Yudina played eight concerts, with three different recital programmes in Tiflis, two of which she repeated in Yerevan, in neighbouring Armenia. On her day off, she was driven to Lake Sevan and was enraptured by its beauty. Both as a person and as an artist, Yudina made an enormous impression on the Georgians. She also initiated an invitation to Vladimir Sofronitsky, suggesting a two-piano programme in Tiflis. They performed two concerts with works by Mozart and Busoni, and finished with Debussy’s En Blanc et Noir. Yudina and Sofronitsky had been considered rivals since their student days, but the pianists themselves discounted any idea of ‘two camps’; certainly Tiflis audiences greeted them both enthusiastically. Yudina nurtured a soft spot for ‘Vovochka’, and particularly admired his Chopin performances for their ‘strength, brilliance, truth, heartfelt, elegiac feelings and great eloquence’.³⁷

Not long before Sofronitsky had brought the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, to visit her in Leningrad. Yudina recalled that on entering her apartment Vovochka broke the door handle of her large unheated room. ‘I had nothing to offer with tea (those were hard times for me), but all four of us were immeasurably glad to see each other, each recounted his work, hopes and catastrophes. Behind the windows, the ice on the Neva shone, and the enormous winter constellations looked down on us with empathy. We talked happily through the night. They were at the height of their fame, and I was in disgrace. Who could have foreseen how things would change?’³⁸

Sofronitsky’s naïve impulsiveness was evident at the banquet organized in celebration of their Tiflis recital, which took place in a splendid hall, boasting a fountain and a pool teeming with live fish. ‘Evidently, Sofronitsky was bored with all these elderly, highly respected and old-fashioned professors (myself excepted!)’ Yudina recalled. ‘Suddenly he strode into the fountain, still dressed in his concert tails! Everyone was horrified, but he was soon forgiven!’³⁹

The Georgian interlude temporarily restored Yudina’s good spirits. On returning to Leningrad in June, she found the city traumatized by continuing arrests. Her immediate concern was for Father Fyodor Andreyev’s widow, Natalia Nikolayevna Andreyeva, who had been arrested in September 1930 in the fabricated case of ‘The Living Orthodox Church’. Now Yudina had to discover where Andreyeva was being held. The poet Anna Akhmatova hauntingly described her search for her arrested son, Lev Gumilyov, and husband Nikolai Punin. Standing in line with other distraught, benumbed women outside Leningrad’s Kresti Prison, prompted her to write her elegiac poem Requiem. Like Akhmatova, Yudina stood in line at Kresti Prison. She knew that the arrested were moved from prison to prison and from town to town while awaiting sentence. ‘I found Natalia Nikolayevna in [Moscow’s] Butyrky Prison, for she had disappeared from Leningrad. One could hold out hope in those days. One went to various prisons where one handed over parcels; the usual barked-out response was “There’s nobody here of that name!” Then, suddenly the packet is taken – that means you have found your person. When at the Butyrky they accepted my parcel containing a cake, I burst out sobbing from joy; those in the waiting crowd either rejoiced with me, or remained sullen with envy.’⁴⁰

Now that she knew where Andreyeva was being held, Yudina petitioned Peshkova at PomPolit. She also decided to address the GPU’s Procurator General, Nikolai Krylenko, although getting to see him without an appointment was a desperate enterprise. She recalled her recklessness:

I ran up 5 flights of stairs, with armed guards standing on the landing of each flight, and – God knows how – shot past them all without being stopped! I had with me a letter for him from some personal acquaintance [. . .] The secretary seated at her desk wouldn’t let me in. ‘Here – I have a letter, can’t you see it’s marked “Personal”?’ I cried out brazenly [. . .] Suddenly the door was flung open and out walked ‘himself’, a shortish man wearing a pea-coat jacket. His penetrating eyes seemed open to communication and comprehension; here was a military man, making it clear that flattery and boot-licking would get you nowhere. ‘You see, dear Comrade, I came from Leningrad specially and have brought this personal letter.’ The letter (from a female friend of his youth) produced the desired effect. He stated in almost friendly fashion, ‘I will sort it out.’⁴¹

Krylenko himself later came into conflict with the notorious Procurator Andrei Vyshinsky, was arrested and shot in 1938.

Yudina also involved her friends Yuri Shaporin and Alexei Tolstoy in her mission. They both lived outside Leningrad in Detskoye Selo (Children’s Village), a settlement once favoured by the aristocracy for their summer residences, and where tsars built their palaces, giving it the name Tsarskoye Selo. After the Revolution it continued to be popular with the intelligentsia – Yudina dubbed it ‘our Russian Weimar’. In the early 1930s Shaporin and Alexei Tolstoy were collaborating on the opera The Decembrists. They kept open houses, entertaining the cream of Leningrad’s intelligentsia – from the poet Anna Akhmatova, the theatre director Sergei Radlov, to the painter Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Yudina would play for the assembled company. Now Shaporin and Alexei Tolstoy decided to introduce her to Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, better known by his pseudonym Maxim Gorky.

Yudina’s visit to Gorky took place on 18 October 1931 at his Moscow town house on Malaya Nikitskaya Street, where amidst tables laden with food and drink the ‘Maitre’ held court amongst Moscow’s literati. A Bechstein grand piano was placed in the corner of the dining room. When Gorky sat down in a nearby armchair, it signalled the start of Yudina’s massive programme, ranging from a selection of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ sonata, to Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition and Schumann’s C major Fantasie. ‘While concentrating on the music,’ Yudina recalled:

I sensed the presence of this extraordinary personality nearby. Images flashed ‘upon my inward eye’, sad or triumphant; the nameless fates of persons well-known or now forgotten, snowy mountain ranges, and the star-studded sky, matching the third movement of Schumann’s Fantasie originally entitled ‘the Wreath of Stars’ [. . .] After my performance there was applause, hand shaking, greetings, words of gratitude, kissing of hands and sincere invitations to come again after Alexei Maximovich’s return from Italy [. . .] Shaporin and Tolstoy persuaded Gorky that I should be ‘exhibited abroad’.⁴²

After her visit, Yudina went to ‘report’ to Pavel Florensky at his home in Sergiyev Pasad outside Moscow. ‘“So how did it go, did Gorky cry?” asked Father Pavel. “Yes, he cried.” “Then all is well!”’⁴³ Yudina’s own pleas, combined with Peshkova’s and Gorky’s petitions, achieved their result: Andreyeva’s sentence was reduced from three years in the camps to exile in Alma-Ata. Later Natalia asked Yudina how she did it. ‘Shaporin took me under one arm, Alexei Tolstoy under the other, and off we went to play for Gorky,’⁴⁴ she joked.

Andreyeva’s family was anxious how she would survive the rigours of the train journey and the dire conditions in Alma-Ata as a lone widow, torn away from her small twin daughters. After consulting with Father Pavel, Yudina decided to accompany her. Natalia was released in late October and immediately set out on her journey – Yudina followed two weeks later. Her preparations, as Yelena Skrzhinskaya recalled, consisted of ‘stuffing an empty potato sack with as much as possible. Yudina claimed it was the most comfortable piece of luggage, slung over your back like a rucksack.’⁴⁵ Just before she left, the epidemiologist, Pyotr Maslakovets, father of her favourite student Alla, was arrested under the ‘Bacteriologists’ Case’. Little did they think they would next meet in Alma-Ata! Yudina left Skrzhinskaya in charge of her Leningrad affairs. Her excitement about the long journey was tangible in her letters to her: ‘I can’t wait to see the Caspian, the Aral Sea, the deserts and mountains.’ Soon she was ‘fed up with the Russian steppe – no trees have been visible for some time now. The Volga was beautiful, but as it was misty I only saw a little of it.’ The Aral Sea, ‘glimpsed shining in the distance’, was a disappointment, less blue than Lake Sevan. The ‘Oriental Charms’ of an obnoxious – if harmless – drunk provided a diversion. She reckoned that his amorous approaches hid a practical aim – ‘to find somebody to darn his socks’. Yudina used her time to learn Pushkin by heart and observe her travelling companions. ‘The drunken lad has loped off ashamed, the mechanical engineer is reading a novel by Zola [. . .] the couple from Murmansk never stop embracing and kissing, and there is a delightful one-and-a-half-year-old little girl, from a military family who dances to the accordion.’⁴⁶ By the end of the journey she was in despair at the never-ending steppe and the overwhelming amount of dirt inside the train.

Three decades later Yudina recalled her arrival in Alma-Ata:

It was not the sumptuous capital it is today, with its cinema studios, universities, and other attributes of civilization. The train stations were swarming with people. Collectivization ‘de-kulakized’ whole families; they were going somewhere, without knowing where, deprived of their roofs, their cattle, their land – of everything. They travelled standing up in cattle wagons or hanging on to the locomotive buffers. People were lying in the streets, dysentery was rife, there was hardly any food to be had, and in the half-empty markets all one could buy – at an exorbitant price – were lepyoshki [round flat bread] the size of a five-rouble coin, and sausage made from camel meat. These proud kings of the desert shriek and spit at the level of a human head, usually hitting their target in the middle of the face!⁴⁷

During the winter days the weather oscillated between cold and hot. ‘One went out wearing soft felt boots (Valenki), throwing over one’s shoulder a pair of shoes on a string – should one possess them. Those who didn’t either froze or waded through slushy snow in their felt boots.’⁴⁸

By the time Yudina arrived, Andreyeva had already found work and rough lodgings, sleeping on the floor. While hunting for better accommodation for Natalia, Yudina was bitten by a dog in a courtyard. The bite went deep – the dog was rabid; within a few days her whole leg was inflamed, and sepsis had set in. Hallucinating and feverish, Yudina was taken in by some good people, who kept her until the wound had healed. She hazily recalled doctors’ visits – the local medics and those from the exiled community were divided in their opinions about treatment. ‘These medical quarrels continued; then one day I suddenly saw through the window my former student, Alla Maslakovets, walking through the streets with her father and some others. We both wept.’⁴⁹

Yudina was mortified that instead of helping her friends, she herself required help. As she informed Skrzhinskaya, her hosts, a mother and daughter, ‘were likeable, but quarrelsome. The old woman tells me that she had 20 children, but only 4 survived.’ The nights were tedious, as lights were turned off at 8 o’clock. ‘During the day many kind people came to visit, I played a lot of chess – mostly with Pyotr Maslakovets, an excellent opponent, and I read some good books. To begin with my leg was terribly painful and I had to lie recumbent, until the risk of blood poisoning passed.’⁵⁰ Soon another exiled academic arrived from Leningrad – Yudina’s upstairs neighbour Yevgeni Tarlé, a victim of the historians’ purge. Tarlé used to enjoy sitting on Yudina’s balcony overlooking the Neva, ‘seeking inspiration’ for his monumental biography of Napoleon. For his dinner parties, he would often ‘borrow’ her bouquets of flowers that she had received at concerts.

Feeling confident now that Natalia had these new exiles as engaging company, Yudina embarked on her lengthy return journey to Leningrad. Departing towards the end of December, the train got snowed in and was diverted via Dushanbe in Tadjikistan. She arrived back in Leningrad on New Year’s Day 1932 and went straight to Skrzhinskaya’s house from the station. Lyosha recalled, ‘When Marusya came to us, I promptly put her in the bathtub, she was swarming with lice – they dropped off her in heaps – and I scrubbed away layers of dirt. We then had to catch the lice as they hopped out of the bathroom, ensuring they didn’t get into our lodgers’ rooms.’⁵¹

As incomers escaping collectivization crowded the cities, accommodation shortages grew acute. Living space was taken over from those, who according to the new norms had an excess of it. The Skrzhinskays were affected and so was Yudina. The Hermitage authorities, owners of the apartment on Palace Embankment, partitioned her large room into several small ones, divided by flimsy walls. Yudina was distraught, and complained to Skrzhinskaya, ‘The Philharmonia should defend me, after all a pianist cannot live in 9 square metres – a grand piano alone occupies more space than that. Additionally it’s unlawful to do this without written notice.’⁵² Things had been easier to cope with in Alma-Ata, she declared! Although officially she continued to reside in the much-diminished room in Palace Embankment, she now spent most of her time in Skrzhinskaya’s family apartment on Krestovsky Island.

As 1932 started, Yudina continued to be persona non grata at the Leningrad Conservatoire; however, as a concert pianist she found herself back in favour. During that year she performed five times at the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonia in large and demanding recital programmes; additionally she played two concerts at the Leningrad Capella. Her repertoire ranged from Bach, popular Beethoven sonatas, Haydn’s F minor Variations and Schumann’s Kreisleriana to Shaporin and Medtner. On 4 March she performed Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 with the Leningrad Philharmonic under the renowned Czech conductor Václav Talich. The composer and pianist Gavriil Popov recalled that Yudina was so dissatisfied with her performance that she burst into tears in front of him: ‘She was so charming – her tears shone like pearls on her wide, stern, illuminated face.’⁵³

However, by the summer of 1932, life in Leningrad became untenable. Yudina returned to Nevel’ in late July, staying with her family more or less continuously until late November. Her father had remarried and although Yudina considered his new wife Tsetsiliya Yakovlevna ‘an angel’, she found it difficult to slot back into family life, and was troubled by minor health problems – fatigue, dizziness and headaches – signs of stress. Her great joy was her six-year-old stepsister Vera, to whom she read Kipling’s Jungle Book, and herself earned the nickname ‘Bagheera’ (after the panther). She was reconciled with her brother Boris, who had now been diagnosed with cyclothymia or bipolar disorder. He had refused to see her over the last four years. Yudina wanted to help him, and started playing violin sonatas with him to encourage his renewed interest in music. Her only performance in Nevel’ was an impromptu concert in the town park. In early September Yudina consulted Shalvo (Shaliko) Aslanishvili – one-time student of Shcherbachov’s in Leningrad, now head of the Music Theory faculty at Tiflis Conservatoire – about a possible move to Georgia. It occurred to her that Boris might find work there in his newly chosen profession of cinema director. Yudina suggested she might work for the radio, and play the occasional concert in Tiflis. ‘The most important thing is to have some official employment,’ she explained.⁵⁴ Yet privately Yudina was apprehensive about the move and she was worried about her brother’s inability to stick to any one project – there was still a ‘precipice’ between them. As she confessed to her friend from the Bakhtin Circle, Boris (Boba) Zalesky, she disliked the noise and chaos of the south. She implored him to help her settle in; after all he was planning petro-geological expeditions in nearby Batumi. ‘It would be easier for me to begin this new life, if I had a close friend – a European – at hand. I find Tiflis more Asiatic and alien than Alma-Ata. My amusing stories of last year were mere traveller’s tales, which within a month were hateful to remember.’⁵⁵

As a preliminary step, Yudina travelled to Tiflis for five concerts in December 1932. She had already sent in her official application to the Conservatoire, seconded by the composers Vladimir Shcherbachov and Khristofor Kushnaryov, who had likewise been dismissed from the Leningrad Conservatoire in 1930, and had recently been welcomed onto the staff of the Tiflis Conservatoire. Only recently Yudina had attended the premiere of Shcherbachov’s Third Symphony in Leningrad, which took place despite RAPM’s virulent attacks on the composer. Just as her application in Tiflis was accepted, she received through Isai Braudo a counter-proposal to return to the Leningrad Conservatoire. She rejected it: ‘I consider my years of teaching there was a biographical mistake, which I don’t want to repeat in the foreseeable future.’⁵⁶

At the end of December she wrote to Skrzhinskaya about her success in Tiflis:

I am practising until I drop with fatigue, and my fingers are cracked and bloodied. Two concerts were excellent, two good, and the fifth somewhat mediocre. I played lots of new things: Beethoven’s Waldstein (Sonata no. 21), the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, new Schubert song transcriptions and Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives (Op. 22) and some other small pieces, as well as ‘bunches’ of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues [. . .] I have found wonderful new friends, like Sandro Akhmeteli, head of the National Theatre. People here are thrilled not just by my artistry, but also by my exterior! I find it rather amusing and completely unexpected. The weather is slushy and foggy, almost like Leningrad. The houses are cold; Georgian nonchalance cannot cope with winter, and everybody here has become poor.⁵⁷

In early January 1933 Yudina returned to Nevel’ via Donbas, where her sister Flora worked as a doctor in the mining communities. Changing trains at Kharkov, Yudina’s handbag containing her train ticket, passport and money was stolen. Back in Leningrad she applied for new documents. A law had just been introduced in December 1932 requiring all internal passports to be reissued, a system that implied a tighter control in general, particularly of the rural population. Many peasants and collective farm workers were fleeing the land to escape collectivization and the dreadful famine that ensued. A simple but cruel expedient was simply not to issue them with passports. Now residence permits (propiska), mandatory for citizens living in the big cities, were stamped in the passport itself. Without a valid passport and propiska, Yudina ran the real risk of losing her room at the Palace Embankment.

At last, her documents were in order, and Yudina and her brother took the train south, travelling through Dagestan and Azerbaijan before arriving in Tiflis on 30 January 1933. A quiet room in town had been found in a house with a beautiful terrace and the ‘promise of a garden in spring’. However, the room was so small it could only house an upright piano. In compensation the city offered a wonderful cultural life. Yudina befriended the keepers of the National Gallery and was thrilled by Sandro Akhmeteli’s wonderful production of Schiller’s Die Räuber. Equally she was struck by the Georgian people’s appearance, their slender bone structure and Roman noses making them appear both beautiful and fragile, ‘seemingly so light that they might be blown away by the wind!’⁵⁸

Within days of her arrival, Yudina performed her first concert at the Tiflis Opera House with Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto under the direction of the remarkable young Georgian conductor, Yevgeni Mikeladze. He had studied in Leningrad with Malko and Gauk, and was now director of the only symphony orchestra in Tiflis (disparaged by Yudina as ‘complete rubbish’). The Austrian conductor Fritz Stiedri described Mikeladze as the Soviet Union’s most talented conductor. Yudina, too, believed in his world-class potential.⁵⁹ However, Mikeladze did not live to realize it. Like Akhmeteli he provoked the hostility of the future chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, and was arrested, tortured and shot in 1937.

At her first recital in Tiflis’ Philharmonic Hall, Yudina tried out new repertoire: Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze Op. 6 and Chopin’s Fantasie Op. 49, and the Second, ‘Funeral-March’ Sonata, Op. 35. At the last moment, she agreed to add Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue – ‘that old war-horse’. She described her Conservatoire routine to Skrzhinskaya: ‘I teach twice a week from early morning until two o’clock. The students, with one exception, play very badly, but try their best [. . .] I haven’t enough money to liquidate my debts, the Conservatoire pays late and deducts money from the salary. Then I had 350 roubles stolen – a theft effected with virtuosity.’ Life in Tiflis was expensive, and there were blackouts most evenings. ‘When we have electricity it’s a treat! Kerosene is terribly difficult to get hold of and costs a fortune. I managed to get 17 pounds of it for a rouble and was happy as a birthday girl. The shops close early and there is no ink or paper to be had.’⁶⁰

No less than Moscow and Leningrad, Tiflis was undergoing repression. Yudina heard distressing rumours about arrests and purges in Leningrad – names were never mentioned in letters for fear of the vigilant eye of the GPU. Somehow she learnt of the arrest of her spiritual mentor Father Pavel Florensky on the night of 25/26 February 1933 at his town flat in Moscow. Only recently Yudina had met him during a work trip to Leningrad. When she had accompanied him to the station on his return to Moscow:

. . . it seemed that his singular spirit had some form of premonition, for he maintained a concentrated, melancholy silence, and I too became quiet. Nobody was ever to accompany Father Pavel again. While we were immersed in our inner thoughts, I saw Alexander Gauk and Ivan Sollertinsky, standing beside the neighbouring carriage, observing the mysterious passenger. Although Florensky was wearing civilian clothes, his whole image was so unusual [. . .] that Gauk and Sollertinsky fell silent. At last, unable to contain himself any longer, Sollertinsky approached Florensky and bowed low to the ground. The extraordinary significance of this modest passenger had pierced through his characteristic irony.⁶¹

For the moment she knew nothing of Florensky’s fate, but she feared the worst. She was equally anxious about her former students Alla Maslakovets and Anna Artobolevskaya. Alla remained in Alma-Ata with her exiled father until his death in July 1933. Anna’s husband, the zoologist Georgi Artobolevsky, had been arrested in 1931 as part of the ‘Biologists’ Case’ and sentenced to five years’ hard labour at the White Sea–Baltic canal construction. Artobolevsky was released early, in late 1932, but then the GPU came for him again. By chance he was warned of their unwelcome visit; instead of going home, he simply ‘disappeared’ to the provinces, avoiding arrest by moving from one town to another. Artobolevsky was to build up a second career as an actor reciting at concerts. In the meantime Anna travelled to secret meetings with him, which as Yudina understood involved dreadful risks.

Welcome distraction came with a trip to Armenia between 11 and 25 April, to discuss an invitation to teach at the Yerevan Conservatoire. Returning to Tiflis, Yudina fell as she got out of the train and fractured her left shoulder. ‘The pain was unbearable the first days. Now I lie motionless in bed with a hard starched bandage weighing about 20 pounds, which has put my left hand out of action.’⁶²

While recovering, Yudina met Sergei Prokofiev on his concert tour of the Caucasus. She had first come across the composer in Leningrad on his first return trip to the Soviet Union in early 1927. She almost certainly heard him play his Second Piano Concerto Op. 16 in Leningrad on 19 February. Shostakovich attended the concert and found Prokofiev’s interpretation ‘superb’ and the work ‘exceptionally wonderful!’⁶³ One imagines Yudina falling in love with this concerto on that very occasion.

The following evening (20 February) Prokofiev was invited to Vladimir Shcherbachov’s flat to listen to young Leningrad composers. The first to play was Joseph Schillinger, followed by Shostakovich, who made a favourable impression with his first piano sonata. After listening to half a dozen more composers, Prokofiev was dropping with fatigue, but agreed to listen to Yudina, who had just arrived to perform with the composer Kushnaryov a four-hand transcription of his Passacaglia and Fugue for organ. By this stage Prokofiev had developed a terrible migraine, and at the end of Kushnaryov’s piece hastily made his excuses and left.⁶⁴

Probably Yudina did not get the chance to talk to Prokofiev during this Leningrad visit, but now in Tiflis she established friendly relations with him. She will have undoubtedly attended his performance on 17 May of his own Third Concerto with Mikladze, whom he recognized as ‘a very gifted conductor’. The next day Yudina accompanied the composer to the Tiflis Conservatoire where he performed his music, and listened to works by young Georgian composers – in his opinion, all ‘beginners or retrograde’.⁶⁵ Prokofiev told her of his intention to play one of his concertos each season in the Soviet Union. When Yudina expressed her ardent wish to perform his Second Concerto, he conceded her the right to play it during the 1933/34 season, and furthermore promised to provide the orchestral material.

By mid-June, Yudina’s shoulder had recovered sufficiently to allow her to return to performing. At her last concert in Tiflis on 22 June she played Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto under Mikeladze’s baton. In mid-July she travelled to Baku, where she played a full recital on 14 July, and two much-applauded performances of Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth concertos under Leo Ginsburg.

While in Baku she fell seriously ill with dysentery and returned to Tiflis much debilitated. Nevertheless, Yudina was able to attend a celebration in honour of the conductor Alexander Gauk’s fortieth birthday. ‘Gauk was welcomed in Tiflis with great pomp. I didn’t talk to him about my affairs, as I didn’t wish to appear to be currying favour; however, we established a good relationship.’⁶⁶ This indeed proved useful when she moved to Moscow later that summer.

At the beginning of August, Yudina left Tiflis for Moscow. During the rail journey her condition worsened, and she was taken off the train haemorrhaging blood. On 8 August she was admitted to Moscow’s Baumanskaya Hospital, where typhoid fever was diagnosed. This then was Yudina’s entry – more whimpering than triumphant – to the city where she was to spend the rest of her life.

* MOPS or MORS: acronym for International Organisation for Aid to Fighters for the Revolution. Usually known as International Red Aid.

* On 14 April 1930.

* Officially Glazunov was still director of the Conservatoire, although he left Leningrad in 1928 for Paris and never returned.

* Written in 1917, the Fourth Sonata Op. 29, like the Second Piano Concerto, was dedicated to the memory of Prokofiev’s late friend, Maximilian Schmidthof, who had committed suicide in 1913.

* Rationing was introduced to Leningrad in 1929 by the city’s Party Boss and Politburo member, Sergei Kirov. It lasted until his death in 1934.

* Professor of Vocal Chamber Music at the Moscow Conservatoire.