Playing with Fire

8

1945–1953

THE ANTI-FORMALIST AND ANTI-COSMOPOLITAN CAMPAIGNS

And seized by furious inspiration

Midst orchestras’ roars and thunder unfurled,

Cloud by cloud you ascended the stairs

Brushing against music of our world.

Nikolai Zabolotsky¹

In September 1944 Shostakovich wrote to Vyacheslav Molotov, Deputy Premier of the Council of Ministers and Foreign Minister, requesting that Maria Yudina should be granted living space adequate to her needs.² It was hoped that as a three-time Stalin Prize-winner, Shostakovich had the authority to achieve the desired result.

Since 1939 Yudina had been living in a two-room communal flat, with only an upright piano, and with her semi-invalid ‘mother-in-law’, Yelena Saltykova. Unable to practise at home, Yudina was saved by her wonderful memory. As Zoya Tomashevskaya recalled, whatever she sight-read once, she could play by heart.³ Yudina herself now penned a letter to Molotov; it was the first time she had ever addressed a prominent political figure on her own behalf:

Over the nine years I have lived in Moscow, I have had no official residence. For two to three years, I inhabited part of a room in a damp semi-basement, separated from the rest by a piece of hardboard. Here I developed severe rheumatism of the joints, which twice put me out of action as a musician. During the Great Patriotic War, this decrepit building was destroyed by bombing. Since then, I stay with relatives, without having a separate room where I can work. Today the situation remains unchanged. Despite my intense artistic activity at the Radio, mostly playing chamber music [. . .] I cannot arrange a single rehearsal at home.

Such conditions were ruinous to her hands and endangered her professional career. ‘I too have the undeniable right to my own living space; as a citizen I gave my all to the Fatherland in the service of Art.’⁴ Most probably, she never sent the letter.

In the summer of 1945 Yudina suffered another severe bout of rheumatic fever. Barely able to stand, she struggled to pay daily visits to her hospitalized ‘mother-in-law’. She demanded of the institutions where she taught that she be granted access to accommodation intended for staff members. The Conservatoire mumbled promises of an attic room needing renovation – the Gnesins’ Institute had nothing available. Yudina grew impatient: ‘Will you give me your word that the attic room will be ready in three to four days?’ she asked the Conservatoire directors. Her pleas assumed urgency after a medical commission diagnosed a serious heart condition. ‘The doctors gave me a fright, saying I would soon be crawling and no longer walking – that was a month ago. Indeed, I can barely walk without a stick. If the promised living space on which my artistic life depends is not forthcoming, then as a last resort I will be forced to write to Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin saying that professionals are not cared for, despite his orders to look after cadres.’⁵ This was doubtless regarded as an empty threat.

In another letter to the Union of Composers, Yudina reminded the organizational committee of her active propagation of Soviet composers. In the past she had received money from Muzfond, the Union’s funding organization. Now she applied for full membership of the Union, hoping this would ensure the right to living space and a regular income, even if it meant resigning from the Moscow Conservatoire. She reminded the committee, ‘when the Germans threatened Moscow, the Radio relied on me and the Beethoven Quartet exclusively for serious music. Now it hardly remembers my existence.’ And she wanted to make recordings. ‘We are all mortal; without them, what will remain of my professional activity, my interpretations of Soviet works?’⁶

In early October, Yudina accused the Conservatoire of sending ‘ominous epistles at a moment when my mother-in-law is ill, with fatal complications. I too have a similar incipient illness! It’s entirely due to my goodwill as an artist that I am working at all. I am at the peak of my creative powers, ready to realize the most interesting projects.’⁷ Amongst these projects was a proposal from Konstantin Popov, artistic director of the Ensemble of Soviet Opera, to stage Taneyev’s Oresteia as part of the Bolshoi Theatre programme. She requested that the Conservatoire reduce her teaching load by half: ‘I cannot undermine the production of the Oresteia [. . .] everything rests on me.’⁸

Late in 1945, Prokofiev came to Yudina’s rescue, offering her use of a ‘two-and-a-half’ room apartment on the Mozhaisk Highway,^* which he had received the previous year from Moscow’s council (Mossoviet). He and his second wife Mira stayed there briefly, before transferring residence to her parents’ flat in the city centre. On 16 January 1946 Yudina wrote to Yelena Skrzhinskaya: ‘I am temporarily living like a Tsaritsa in Prokofiev’s empty flat. My friendship with him and Mira is a gift from heaven.’⁹ Towards the end of her stay she wrote thanking them: ‘I cannot express my gratitude in words or deeds. I hope that during my lifetime I’ll have the chance to demonstrate my indebtedness to you.’¹⁰ She confessed to a few breakages, but had found replacements, and promised the floors would be washed, the piano tuned, and the telephone bill paid in advance.

Even with accommodation problems temporarily resolved, Yudina’s nerves were on edge. She easily erupted in anger when things went badly at the Oresteia rehearsals. She declared that her January recital at the Tchaikovsky Hall had been ‘catastrophic’.¹¹ Perhaps the ‘catastrophe’ was totally subjective, and unobserved by the audience. Live recordings, however, show Yudina as an erratic performer, with occasional memory slips and ‘splashes’. On this occasion, Yudina’s professional pride was hurt, for she had invited Prokofiev to hear her perform his Sonata no. 8, inserted between Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ and Shostakovich’s second sonata. In general, as Yudina told Skrzhinskaya: ‘I am in good health for a person who only sleeps five hours a night, consumed by the burning pressures of work – albeit of the most fascinating kind.’¹² Initially, Yudina relished working with Popov and the wonderful artists from the Stanislavsky Theatre. Yet as rehearsals for the Oresteia proceeded, she became increasingly frustrated with Popov’s consistent undermining of the production’s musical side. Their relationship soon deteriorated into acrimony. Popov accused Yudina of complaining over his head to the Theatrical Organization. ‘I simply cannot believe that it is you who wrote this letter, our former comrade, the great artist M.V. Yudina, until recently loved by us all.’ Yudina had discredited him, and he had lost face. ‘There are cases in life when it’s easier to bury a person than to part with him in life,’ Popov fumed. ‘However, it’s difficult to tell from your chaotic letter what you actually want from me.’¹³

A reconciliation of sorts was effected when Yudina withdrew her complaints to the Praesidium, although she sounded decidedly unapologetic: ‘You are disillusioned in me as a person? Well, I am disillusioned in you,’ she wrote to Popov. ‘But I kept quiet about it, since we meet for work purposes only.’¹⁴ In her view, Popov had overridden all interpretative considerations, showing no respect for her or the cast, not even for the designer, Favorsky, or the librettist, Kochetkov. He was using power as a substitute for moral authority, leaving the rest of the team to find ‘emergency solutions’ to the production’s failures. The Oresteia received a single performance at the hall of the House of Scientists on 21 February 1946. True to spirit, Popov closed the show without consultation. An ignominious epilogue occurred six months later when the Directors’ Office demanded that Yudina immediately return a dress she had been lent to wear at this sole performance.

Thanks to Yelena Fabianovna Gnesina’s intervention with Mossoviet in May 1946, Yudina received her own apartment at 1a Begovaya Street, a new two-storey building built by German prisoners of war. At last, she had somewhere to practise and host friends. Her first guest, Bakhtin, stayed the whole of June. He had returned to Saransk the previous autumn to discover a catastrophic situation; the town was without food, fuel or accommodation. He and his wife found rooms in the former prison. Bakhtin resumed his former post at the Pedagogical Institute, and was now ready to present his doctoral thesis on Rabelais and the theory of ‘Carnivalization’. While staying with Yudina in Moscow, he promoted his dissertation. After his departure he delegated to Yudina various tasks, including the important mission of finding external examiners (opponenty) sympathetic to his cause. In August Yudina took his manuscript to the Leningrad historian Yevgeni Tarlé – her one-time neighbour on the Palace Embankment. He in turn passed it on to the renowned philologist, the Academician Shishmarev, currently director of the Gorky Institute of World Literature, who arranged for the thesis to be examined there.

However, the timing was against Bakhtin. He had submitted his dissertation just as the Central Committee passed a Resolution on 14 August 1946 condemning ideological laxity amongst literary figures and academics. Within a fortnight the notorious Resolution criticizing the journals Zvezda and Leningrad was published. All this signalled a drastic tightening of ideological control.

The examination of Bakhtin’s thesis, now set for 15 November 1946, became a cause célèbre. Based on his theory of Carnivalization and reversal of archetypal roles, its theme was dangerously subversive in Stalinist times, implying a topsy-turvy world, with the de-crowning of the Carnival King. The commission was divided; three examiners were highly enthusiastic, wishing to award Bakhtin the full ‘Doctor’s’ degree; three others vehemently attacked the dissertation on ideological grounds. After endless protraction and referral to a Higher Attestation Committee, Bakhtin was finally awarded the lesser ‘candidate’s’ degree in May 1951.¹⁵

Yudina had recently discovered from Pasternak that Lev Karsavin, her university professor, was living in Vilnius. After deportation from Russia in 1922, Karsavin had settled in Paris, and in 1928 he took up a visiting professorship in Kaunas, then the Lithuanian capital. After the Nazi occupation of France, he moved with his family to Vilnius, where he received a permanent university post. Within months the country was annexed by the Soviets, then occupied by the Germans in June 1941, only to be retaken by the Soviets in 1944. Thus, through an unlucky twist of fate, Karsavin became a Soviet citizen again. Dismissed from his university, he was now working as director of the Vilnius Arts Museum.

Yudina hastily arranged a concert tour in Lithuania in August 1946, and informed Skrzhinskaya, Karsavin’s one-time lover, that she would search him out. Skrzhinskaya asked that nothing be said about her – except that her address remained unchanged should he wish to write. Yudina recalled Karsavin sitting in the front row at her Vilnius recital, listening intently. They met at his home, exchanged news, and renewed discussion. When Karsavin came to Moscow in 1948 on business for the Arts Museum, Yudina held a celebration at her Begovaya Street apartment, where he was welcomed by friends and admirers with gifts of books and toasts to his achievements. Towards the end of that year, his eldest daughter was arrested in Vilnius. Six months later Karsavin was imprisoned and sent to a labour camp in the Komi Republic in the north-east of European Russia. Here in June 1952 he died ‘a martyr’s death’.

At the end of August, Yudina snatched ten days of holiday at the Union of Composers’ House of Rest and Creativity in Sortavala, on the shores of Lake Ladoga. ‘There one breathed lightly and joyfully,’ she recalled. Composers, musicologists and performers worked away in their rooms, furnished with bad upright pianos, and in their spare time enjoyed the splendours of the northern landscape, the rustling of pines and silver poplars, and the lake as stormy as the sea in inclement weather.

By mid-1946, Yudina had returned to her precious Schubert lieder project, which had been abandoned during the war. She now renewed her efforts to create new Russian texts for the songs, without changing a note of Schubert’s music. Yudina addressed a dozen potential translators amongst the country’s poets. In the end, the published anthology only used translations by Marshak, Kochetkov, Pasternak and Zabolotsky.

Samuil Marshak was renowned for his brilliant translations of Shakespeare and Robert Burns, but he proved to be an equally good translator from German. Yudina often ‘swapped’ performances of piano music for her friend’s readings of poetry. She recalled Marshak’s voice ‘with the timbre of a viola da gamba, dusky, mysterious as the Milky Way! In its elegiac quality, it resembled Botticelli, and captured that golden quality of Rembrandt’s portraits, with their overtly melancholic glances.’¹⁶

For the anthology, Marshak ‘started with Goethe, creating the Russian text to ‘An Mignon’, a poem where it is difficult to render the repeating rhymes (such as Herzen Schmerzen), which always coincide with the piano’s Neapolitan Sixth chord, so steeped in lyrical significance. Naturally Marshak coped with ease and great virtuosity, conveying the wistfulness, transparency and atmosphere of the song, characterized by Schubertian Sehnsucht – that untranslatable concept, on which the whole of Romanticism is constructed.’¹⁷ Marshak (with Yudina’s musical editing) prepared isometric translations of some forty songs, of which only a fraction were actually published in the Schubert anthology.

Yudina got to know the poets Sergei Shervinsky and Alexander Kochetkov while staying with Nina Zbruyeva at her dacha on the banks of the Moscow River. The former had hosted Marina Tsvetayeva on her return from France in 1939; more recently Anna Akhmatova was a regular visitor. While Shervinsky turned down Yudina’s request to contribute isometric translations, Kochetkov took up the challenge with relish. As the singer Yuri Fyodorishchev recalled, Kochetkov was highly successful in capturing the phonetic aspect of the original German. ‘His translations not only preserved the pattern of rhythmic stresses, but the sound of the poetic language, which in itself was a source of inspiration to Schubert.’¹⁸ Gentle, modest and assiduous in his work, Kochetkov was the ideal collaborator. Yudina used his textual translations of Schubert lieder, and also commissioned poetic versions of Bach’s cantatas and Schumann’s songs.

Nikolai Zabolotsky first came to Yudina’s attention as a founder of the Oberiut movement along with Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. While Kharms delighted in the absurd, Zabolotsky’s first volume of poetry, Scrolls (Stolbtsy; 1929), was pure grotesque, a parody of urban street life. By the 1930s, his interests were focused on nature and man’s place in it. However, when Zabolotsky’s poem The Triumph of Agriculture (1929–30) was attacked as a ‘formalist’ mockery of collectivization, his position was endangered. Not even his peace offering, Gory Symphony, praising Stalin’s birthplace (albeit written as a paean to nature), could save him from arrest in 1936. Charged with anti-Soviet propaganda, Zabolotsky spent eight years in the Gulag. He completed his seminal translation of The Lay of Igor’s Campaign^* in exile at Karaganda.

When Zabolotsky returned to Moscow, Yudina was amongst those who welcomed him at the Writers’ House in March 1946, when he read his version of The Lay of Igor. She wrote congratulating him, and invited him to participate in her Schubert project. A meeting was agreed in Peredelkino, where the poet and his family were currently staying. ‘It was an easy and joyful occasion. I found Zabolotsky in the courtyard by the edge of the forest, chopping wood. His lovely school-age children were playing nearby. “This is Natasha, this is Nikita,” he introduced them [. . .] I sat down on a tree stump, while they gathered the chopped logs. Inside in his study, I explained my proposal in detail. Nikolai Alexeyevich agreed to it willingly; he loved music, symphonies and oratorios.’¹⁹ Zabolotsky had no technical knowledge of music, so Yudina instructed him how to make the verse’s long and short syllables coincide with the rhythmic stresses of the musical setting. In the autumn they met at Yudina’s Begovaya Street apartment, where Zabolotsky gave her a copy of his volume Wooded Lake and read her his masterpiece, ‘Thunder’ (Groza). Yudina played Beethoven for him, believing his music would appeal most. Indeed, Zabolotsky’s poem ‘Beethoven’ was evidently inspired by her performance, with its second stanza an apt metaphor for creativity.

As Zabolotsky’s knowledge of German was approximate, Yudina wrote out word for word translations of the ‘very best of Schubert’s songs’. She approved his predilection for the tragic figure of Johann Mayrhofer and his choice of ‘Memnon’, which Yudina considered Mayrhofer’s best poem. ‘Here finding an isometric translation proved very difficult because of the way Schubert set the poem. I was always extremely careful in suggesting any modifications to Zabolotsky. Work is work and Schubert is Schubert, and I never forgot with whom I was conversing. In this case Zabolotsky’s Russian text of “Memnon” was not organically successful.’ In all Zabolotsky created eight Russian isometric texts from Schiller, Ossian, Goethe, Rückert, as well as Walter Scott in Adam Storck’s German translation. However, only four of his texts appeared in the published anthology. Schiller’s ‘Ritter Toggenburg’ was excluded because of its length, while his ‘Die Bürgschaft’ (‘The Pledge’) and ‘Ellens Gesang 1’ (‘Raste Krieger’) were rejected by the censor. ‘The Pledge’ was considered inflammatory through Schiller’s reference to Damon’s use of a dagger ‘to free the State from a Tyrant’. Yudina was exasperated at the stupidity of the censors: ‘It was explained that the opening of Ellen’s song “Soldier, rest, Warring is over!” was equally suspect. What Soldiers? What Wars?’²⁰

Initially, Zabolotsky enjoyed his collaboration with Yudina – ‘I could work with such an editor all my life’. But in December 1946, after delivering an agreed number of poems he withdrew from the project. Yudina was mortally offended: ‘Your unexplained contempt for our common cause [. . .] sees the collapse of what I imagined to be the sublime world of poetry, of shared thoughts and friendship [. . .] It is like being struck in the face.’²¹ Despite her censorious tone, Zabolotsky avoided quarrelling with Yudina. As she told Pasternak, he had achieved some superb Schubert translations, ‘but has become arrogant since the publication of his new poem Creators of Roads [. . .] We have bid each other farewell.’²²

From the start, Yudina believed Pasternak’s involvement was integral to her project. Initially, he had wished to be ‘held in reserve’. Even before the war ended, he had embarked on a prose work ‘for the drawer’ entitled ‘Boys and Girls’, and in its next intermediary stage ‘The Notebooks of Doctor Zhivago’. In October 1946 Pasternak confided to Olga Freidenberg: ‘It is my first real work. In it I wish to convey the historical image of Russia over the past forty-five years. At the same time, I wish to express in the story [. . .] my own views on art, the Gospels, the life of man in history and much more.’²³

It was a red-letter day when Pasternak agreed to read the opening chapters of the novel to a select audience at Yudina’s flat on Begovaya Street. Although chronically short of money, she proved extraordinarily inventive when it came to financing the event. Zoya Tomashevskaya, her chosen accomplice, received a telegram from Yudina asking her to drop by the Conservatoire:

I duly appeared. Yudina immediately announced, ‘We’re off to get some money.’ She sought out the Conservatoire’s supply manager, from whom she demanded an order for galoshes. They cost her about five roubles, but could be sold in the markets for a thousand roubles. The manager put up a show of resistance: ‘Professor Yudina I already gave you such an order,’ he said angrily and walked away determinedly, with Yudina marching confidently after him, and me traipsing behind. Soon the order was in her hands, and she addressed me in front of the manager: ‘Here Zoyechka are five roubles, go and get the galoshes, then sell them in the market, and with the proceeds buy some herring, potatoes and vodka. Then send a telegram to Boris Leonidovich Pasternak to come.’²⁴

The reading was to take place on 7 February 1947. Three days earlier, Yudina sent a guest list for Pasternak’s approval. It included the art historian Mikhail Alpatov, her old friend Nikolai Antsiferov, the medieval historian, the Rilke expert, Alexander Neusykhin, the literary critic, Lida Sluchevskaya, her one-time student Artobolevskaya and her sister, as well as Favorsky, whose friendship, she informed Pasternak, ‘came as a gift from Florensky [. . .] It will be a tight squeeze, but we will all fit into my “luxurious one-celled palazzo.” Tea will be served “from the heart”.’²⁵ Pasternak replied immediately, adding two former employees of the Scriabin Museum to the list, and requesting a punctual start at 7 p.m. ‘Altogether such an incredible gathering! Joking aside, I am flattered and shaken,’²⁶ he exclaimed.

The writer Lydia Chukovskaya drove to Yudina’s flat with Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya, whom the poet had just met and fallen in love with. Ivinskaya, presumed by some to be the prototype for Lara in the novel, Dr Zhivago, recalled that the car journey took place in a snowstorm. Pasternak had forgotten the address – the swirling blizzard hindered visibility – then miraculously they saw a light shining. It was Yudina’s home!²⁷ Before embarking on his reading, Pasternak explained various aspects of the novel to the assembled guests. Chukovskaya recorded Pasternak’s passionate recitation – ‘as if his life hung by a hair [. . .] I was aware of his heated countenance, and his way of turning towards me as if to address me. He was reading not just for everybody but also for me.’²⁸ Yudina’s biologist friend (and her cats’ vet), Yulian Selyu, was struck ‘by Pasternak’s ability to immediately make his personages seem totally familiar’.²⁹ After a pause Pasternak went on to read half a dozen of the ‘Zhivago’ poems, including ‘Hamlet’, ‘Indian Summer’, ‘Holy Week’ and, most recent of all, ‘Star of Nativity’. Yudina was completely enthralled by the latter, with its startling Christmas imagery and symbolic visions of the future lending it eternal significance. She told Pasternak, ‘If you had only written that one poem your earthly fame would be ensured! I implore you, allow me to make a copy!’³⁰ Two days later she wrote thanking the poet:

The shadow thrown from your colossal height not only obscures us all, your listeners of yesterday, but throws our own thoughts, work and ideas into the shade. Yet it’s not a question of us, because it suddenly became so clear – who and what you are. A piece of fruit can mature more or less visibly. Your spiritual power has suddenly erased all that is of secondary significance, and now, calmly without malice, smiles at those struck dumb from astonishment, saying ‘How is it that you did not recognize me earlier? I’ve been here all the time.’ And it’s not just your having openly turned towards Christianity, towards Christ, Love and Grace – but all this taken together.³¹

Pasternak’s views on the ethical aspects of Christianity were rooted in the Gospels. He himself defined his views as ‘somewhat different and wider in scope than Quaker or Tolstoyan Christianity’.³² For Yudina, the novel’s grandiose unified concept confirmed its place within the classical tradition, ‘as in Gluck, Mozart, and in the architecture of St Petersburg, I purposely avoid all literary analogies!’ She marvelled at ‘the commensurate rightness of each word, each turn of phrase, the concise and polished sentences’.³³ These impressions were undoubtedly heightened through Pasternak’s expressive reading. Afterwards, she and Yelena Saltykova had endless discussions about the novel’s characters: ‘They have today become our friends, our blood relatives, one cannot stop thinking about them. And that Lara was wrong – why did she go to the restaurant with that scoundrel?’³⁴

In his reply of 9 February, Pasternak thanked Yudina for her analysis and praise, and ‘most of all for the enormous significance of your letter – the letter of a Great Person – thank you for not withholding yourself, for giving so much of your own strength. You have no idea of the seriousness and importance of what I am saying. I send you ‘Star of Nativity’. I read it with a hoarse and exhausted voice, which gave the poem an extra dramatic quality, without which you will like it less.’³⁵ Pasternak’s handwritten copy of the poem became one of Yudina’s most prized possessions, and she copied it many times over for friends – an early instance of samizdat.^*

Only a fortnight later she wrote scolding Pasternak for his continual procrastination in his Schubert translations. ‘Before the war you used the excuse of Hamlet! Now that I have become afraid of you – you criticized my forte in the “Appassionata” sonata – it becomes difficult to ask anything of you.’³⁶ More galling still – Pasternak found time to fulfil requests from actors! ‘And I have to go on bended knee to implore you to translate some of Schubert’s Goethe settings.’³⁷ As it was, Pasternak was already immersed in Goethe, for he was now translating Faust. He agreed to Yudina’s request on condition that the poems were ones he had already translated. They would amend them together to fit the music.

In reality Pasternak hardly needed guidance, for he possessed an excellent knowledge of music. In his youth, under Scriabin’s influence, he had aspired to become a pianist and composer, only renouncing his dream at the age of twenty, when he went to Marburg to study philosophy. Yet for the rest of his life, he enjoyed playing the piano at home. In the 1950s, on a visit to Peredelkino, the poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko heard Pasternak playing four-hand duets with Yudina and was amazed at his ‘almost professional’ level of playing.³⁸

In November Yudina was still waiting: ‘Could I ever imagine that one of the cruellest blows of fate would be delivered by The Poet and Person I honour so much? It is not for me to teach you Boris Leonidovich, that a given promise is an absolute unconditional truth! I have not troubled you for eight months [. . .] I believed in the deadlines you gave me yourself.’³⁹ At last, in 1948 Yudina’s work with Pasternak started in earnest. The Goethe poems chosen were ‘An Mignon’, ‘Der König in Thule’ (from Faust, Part I) and ‘Gesänge des Harfners’, a small cycle of three songs from Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister. Yudina visited Pasternak at his dacha in Peredelkino:

. . . in the magical month of July, so celebrated in his poems [. . .] The foregathered company, hale and hearty [included] the tragic but courageous Nina Tabidze,^* radiant in the glow of the Pasternaks’ hospitality. I had brought some sweets and some wine and was promptly told I understood nothing about wine, which of course was perfectly true! Nevertheless, my bottle was drunk. All was suffused in sunlight, then the flaming colours of sunset lit up the sky. We went to do a bit of work, and afterwards sat up talking through the night. A bed was made up for me in the glass-covered veranda, from where one could see the cemetery [. . .] Who would have thought then that this would be Pasternak’s final resting place?⁴⁰

Their work was intermittent and slow – nevertheless by March 1949 the poet was delivering the promised Goethe translations. Later that year Pasternak held a Goethe reading at Yudina’s home, this time of his translation of Faust, Part I. Mikhail Bakhtin was present on this occasion; he recalled Pasternak calling for dry red wine, gradually drinking the whole bottle placed in front of him as he recited. Afterwards, there was a lively discussion of poetry. ‘Pasternak claimed that poetic language had to be as close as possible to conversational language (not of course mundane everyday language), in the way it avoids literary stamps.’⁴¹

Yudina’s Schubert song anthology was published with a beautifully designed cover featuring an engraving by Vladimir Favorsky. She believed that the wider significance of the Schubert project lay in its educational purpose. The 150th anniversary of Schubert’s birth fell conveniently in 1947, allowing the organization of concerts and broadcasts of Schubert songs, where her students performed under her piano accompaniment. From March 1947 the new translations by Kochetkov and Zabolotsky were already in use at lieder recitals at the Glinka Museum and Gnesins’ Institute.

Around this time her former student and secretary, Alexei Bykov, informed Yudina of the incarceration of the art historian Georgi Vagner in Kolyma, in north-eastern Siberia. Her first instinct was to intercede for him, if necessary, writing to Stalin. On Vagner’s release in early March 1947 he came to visit Yudina. Their talk covered many themes ‘from philosophy, divinity, aesthetics, psychology, literature, music and the visual arts’ – not least a shared love of the artist and mystic Nikolai Roerich. As a token of his respect, Vagner presented Yudina with an album of watercolours of Kolyma – she found them fascinating and ‘reminiscent of India’, perhaps thinking of Roerich’s passion for the Himalayas.

During her recital at the Conservatoire’s Grand Hall on 2 April 1947, Yudina kept the album beside her on the piano, as a symbol of Vagner’s ‘return to the living’.⁴² Her huge programme included Schubert’s B flat Sonata D.960, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Handel, and the premiere of Georgi Sviridov’s Partita no. 1, a dark, brooding piece, at times violent, at others manifesting Shostakovich’s influence. Additionally, she played Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata, her last performance of the work before it was banned in 1948. Alas, her homage to Vagner’s ‘resurrection’ was premature, for he was arrested again the following year, spending another eight years in the Gulag.

The year 1947 saw Yudina’s return to the recording studios with her interpretation of Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 with the USSR State Orchestra directed by Alexander Gauk. It was issued as a set of eight 78 rpm shellac phonograph records, of which seven sides were occupied by the concerto, the eighth by the finale of Mozart’s C minor sonata K.457. Previously the recording date was given as 1944, while a legendary story of Yudina and Stalin evolved around the recording, whose veracity was never put to the test (I deal with it in the Appendix).

From now on Yudina recorded regularly. In July 1947 she laid down her majestic and very idiosyncratic reading of Schubert’s B flat major sonata D.960. The initial very slow tempo – an almost static Molto Moderato of the first movement – makes Richter’s famously slow performance seem fast. However, Yudina, unlike Richter, does not stick to one tempo, and after the initial statement of the theme she gives way to agitation, pushing the tempo forward dramatically. Despite this, her emotional reading retains an imperious logic and overall unity. The development in particular seems to contemplate the doomed narrative of Schubert’s own tragic fate, evident in the recurrent motif of a bar of threatening bass trills. Even more heart-rending is the second movement Andante Sostenuto, where Yudina takes a new tempo in the middle section, embarking to another promised land in the major. None of these fluctuations of tempo are indicated by the composer. Through her intimate knowledge of the lieder, Yudina identified with Schubert, feeling that the meaning and emotions articulated in the songs are also reflected in his purely instrumental music.

Various friends applauded Yudina’s Schubert lieder project: Alpatov commented that, ‘your guiding hand is felt in the whole concept, the style and the music itself’.⁴³ Irina Tomashevskaya, the wife of the Pushkinist, Boris Tomashevsky, felt on the contrary that Yudina was sacrificing her solo career: ‘You can be as angry as you like, but I say – “The piano and only the Piano!” Here your intelligence, your imagination, your culture and your world-vision come into their own. But with mediocre singers, whatever miracles you may produce, it’s not the same thing. Boris Viktorovich heard your Schubert programme on the radio, and was not much impressed. And people said that in the Oresteia it was you alone who shone. God only knows, but your aim to attain the heights of musical culture sometimes seems merely academic! You belong to Art and should not waste your energies. People today need your inspired playing to counteract current professional indifference and cultural impoverishment.’⁴⁴

In Tomashevskaya’s mind, ‘cultural impoverishment’ implied Zhdanov’s anti-formalist campaigns, the ideological attacks affecting every aspect of culture. Between 10 and 13 January 1948 Zhdanov convoked a conference to unmask the pernicious influence of formalism in music. The agenda also touched on the vexed subject of misappropriation of funds from Muzfond by Vano Muradeli, its director, and Atovmian his deputy. This was merely a prelude to the Central Committee’s Resolution of 10 February 1948 ‘On Muradeli’s opera The Great Friendship’, which unleashed an unprecedented onslaught on the country’s most prominent composers – Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Myaskovsky, Shebalin and Gavriil Popov.

Although the ‘formalist’ label applied principally to composers, it was also attached to performers. Yudina was amongst a handful of Conservatoire professors criticized for not going to political meetings and for encouraging students to ignore their studies of Marxism. In early March, Mikhail Chulaki, representing the Leningrad Union of Composers, censured Yudina as a ‘performer-formalist’, while concentrating his attack on the Leningrad Philharmonia as a hotbed of formalist tendencies.⁴⁵

When the Resolution of 10 February was published, Yudina was in Kiev, where on 8 February she performed Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto with Sanderling. On 11 February she gave a recital comprising works by Mozart, and Wagner–Liszt transcriptions, wishing to demonstrate that Wagner was not ‘the exclusive possession of Nazi-Fascists!’ Her concluding piece, the Funeral March from Götterdämmerung in Busoni’s arrangement, surely must have echoed the sombre mood of the Soviet musical community. On her return to Moscow, Yudina hastened to convey her support to Prokofiev: ‘Dear Sergei Sergeyevich, I wished to express to you my deepest respect and loyal sentiments [. . .] You know that the whole world and all your admirers are with you in this moment. Your steadfastly devoted, Yudina.’⁴⁶ Similarly she demonstrated her loyalty to Shostakovich. On the occasion of Yevgeni Mravinsky’s triumphant performances of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony in the latter half of 1948 she wrote to the conductor, sending ‘my most respectful and devoted feelings, gratitude, admiration, affection and pride for your performance of the Fifth in the attendant circumstances’.⁴⁷ The Fifth was one of the composer’s few works still allowed to be performed, and was programmed in concerts in Leningrad on 27 May and 7 December that year.

The day that Zhdanov convoked the composers in January 1948, the shocking news reached Moscow of the death in Minsk of Solomon Mikhoels, the great Jewish actor whom Yudina had befriended. It was understood that his ‘fatal accident’ had been set up, making him the first prominent victim of the anti-Semitic cosmopolitan campaign. Within days of the 10 February Party Resolution, Prokofiev’s first wife, Lina Cordin, was arrested and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment; some eighteen months later Pasternak’s mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, was incarcerated and sent to the Gulag. These sadistic actions, designed to hurt both composer and poet, underlined the weakness of their personal positions. While absolutely opposed to divorce, Yudina turned a blind eye to the behaviour of such ‘geniuses’ as Prokofiev and Pasternak. The latter remained with his family while openly continuing his affair with Ivinskaya until his death. Yudina, loyal to his wife Zinaida and her children, continued to be a regular visitor at the Sunday ‘social’ lunches in Peredelkino. Prokofiev left his first wife, Lina, for Mira Mendelson, on the eve of the Second World War. Yudina managed to enjoy friendly relationships with both of his wives.

On 14 February 1948 a list of forbidden repertoire was drawn up by Glavrepertkom. Amongst the banned ‘formalist’ works were Prokofiev’s Eighth Piano Sonata and Shostakovich’s Second – pieces that appeared regularly in Yudina’s programmes. But now, as the number of her concerts was drastically reduced, she could no longer perform them in any case. Nevertheless, she managed to slip Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto into a marathon concerto programme in Riga on 22 November that year. The conductor, Leonid Vigner, had greatly impressed Yudina when they first played together four months earlier. Now they performed Mozart’s C minor concerto K.491 and Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto, followed by the Prokofiev concerto. The following day Yudina wrote to Vigner, thanking him and the orchestra for their warm support: ‘[This] helps me bear the cruel, stunning blow of my unsuccessful performance [. . .] My honest and confident preparation was crowned not by victory but defeat.’⁴⁸ She apologized profusely, hoping she would ‘have the happiness’ to play with him again. We are left none the wiser about what went wrong – the critic V. Zost noted no mishaps in his review, rather noting Yudina’s immense stature as an artist. For him the highlight of the evening lay in Yudina’s interpretation of Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto and her crystal-clear passagework. He found the textures in Yudina’s Mozart somewhat over-heavy, the fortes occasionally unnecessarily violent. In compensation her quiet playing had extraordinary quality. Zost praised Yudina’s technical prowess and ‘musically erudite’ performance of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, notwithstanding its ‘regrettable signs of formalism’.⁴⁹ The concert was broadcast nationwide; Yudina telegraphed Prokofiev, reminding him to listen in.⁵⁰

Eighteen months earlier Yudina had been censured for playing Shostakovich’s Second Sonata in Kharkov, a work of ‘formalistic over-sophistication and lacking in depth and content’. The finale only showed ‘glimpses of melody’, and the first two movements were a ‘confused medley of sounds, conveying emptiness and poverty of invention’. Such language was reminiscent of the notorious 1936 article ‘Muddle Instead of Music’. The critic berated Yudina for wasting her energy on music exemplifying ‘art for art’s sake’.⁵¹

Yudina attended the opening of the First All-Union Congress of Composers in Moscow on 19 April 1948, specifically to support her Leningrad composer friends. In the days that followed she witnessed the unedifying spectacle of composers recanting or casting blame. Yudina was upset by Mikhail Gnesin’s acquiescent address, and equally distressed by Shostakovich’s speech of abnegation on 24 April. She invited the Leningrad composers home for tea and cakes, reminding them, ‘In my house all formalist squabbles are nullified.’⁵²

Before the Congress of Composers was over, Yudina left Moscow to visit her godmother, Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva, recently returned from Siberian exile. Her arrest had taken place late in 1937, shortly after her husband’s execution. Yudina had failed to keep up with Tilicheyeva during her long years in the camps. Now she sought her out in Ivanovo, a town known for its textile industry, just outside the stipulated 100-kilometre perimeter from Moscow. Tilicheyeva’s response to Yudina’s contrite letter was conciliatory: ‘I don’t have to “forgive” you, because when I saw your letter, my dearest, my heart was overwhelmed by an indescribable joy.’⁵³ She was thrilled when Yudina offered to give a concert at the town’s Musical High School.

The following year Yudina castigated herself again for having recently ignored their mutual friend, Kseniya Polovtseva. Tilicheyeva consoled Yudina with wise words: ‘Don’t allow yourself such confused feelings at Kseniya’s quiet death. In the love, which unites a rather large number of people there is a kind of mutual dependence. We are guilty before one person, and so compensate for this, each in our own way [. . .] Who knows, but perhaps the time, effort and attention which made you restart correspondence with me came in part from Kseniya, as you yourself suggested – and it was for this reason that you then forgot her, since it was impossible for you to gratify everybody. And maybe when you abandoned me, another person was rewarded, and all I had to do was wait.’⁵⁴

At a time when loyalties were stretched to breaking point, disloyal behaviour was beyond the pale. In May 1948 Yudina wrote to berate the Leningrad composer Mikhail Matveyev, whose works she had recently played, for not acknowledging her at the Congress of Composers in Moscow – evidently he was avoiding contamination with ‘a formalist’. Matveyev also failed to greet her at her Leningrad concert on 5 May, where she performed Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy with Sanderling. Although well-wishers were discouraged from going backstage during the interval, persistent friends like Lyubov Shaporina and Yuri Kochurov ‘broke through the blockade’. Faithful admirers like Sofia Vasilyevna Shostakovich (the composer’s mother) and Akhmatova stayed until the end of the concert to thank her.⁵⁵

While in Leningrad Yudina both performed and recorded Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with Kurt Sanderling and the Leningrad Philharmonic. Back in Moscow in June 1948, she recorded with Gorchakov and the Radio Orchestra Mozart’s D minor concerto K.466. Her authoritative and dramatic reading of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue was also recorded that summer. ‘Making gramophone recordings nearly every day is exhausting work,’ she complained to her friend Antsiferov in July. ‘In the evenings I either have to practise or lie erschöpft [prostrate] – I haven’t had a day’s rest.’⁵⁶

In August she managed a short summer holiday with Yelena Saltykova at the renowned Pleshcheevo Lake near Yaroslavl – it proved to be nearly devoid of water and a terrible disappointment. Hastily they took themselves off to the Crimea, but here the mosquitoes ruined their vacation. On returning to Moscow, Yudina was shaken to learn that her elder brother Lev had survived a terrible air crash, where many were killed, burnt or horribly mangled.

The following year, Yudina formed important new friendships with two talented young composers, Alexander Lokshin and Mikhail Meyerovich, whom she met at the Union of Composers’ Rest Home in Sortavala in August 1949. Lokshin in particular impressed her by his vast musical erudition, his excellent pianism, his interesting compositions, and his total immersion in Mahler’s music. In 1945 he was appointed assistant to his teacher Myaskovsky at the Moscow Conservatoire, but he was then dismissed in 1948 for propagating ‘formalists’ such as Mahler, Berg and Shostakovich. Yudina sent off a barrage of letters to help him find employment, initially to Mikhail Gnesin and his sister Yelena: ‘Not to engage him at your Institute would mean overlooking a phenomenon of enormous stature, to misunderstand and to undervalue him. Everything in art comes to him easily, as with Mozart [. . .] What can he teach? Absolutely everything: theory, harmony, orchestration, composition, score reading, musical literature and ensemble.’⁵⁷

Yudina particularly admired Lokshin’s two-piano duo with Meyerovich, and told Gnesina that she would give up her own chamber music class to him. However, Yudina was overlooking the fact that Lokshin had been viciously attacked by Tikhon Khrennikov^* at the 1949 Plenum of Composers. When Lokshin was offered a position on the Gnesins’ Institute faculty of folk instruments, she scoffed, ‘That’s like offering Sviatoslav Richter an accompanist’s job in the class of trombone.’ Yudina helped Lokshin through performing his Brahms transcriptions – in November 1950 she played at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire his arrangements of the Third Symphony’s third movement, and the first movement of the Clarinet Quintet Op. 115.

Both Yudina and Lokshin were in the terminology of the times ‘politically unreliable’. When the vice-director of the Institute, Yuri Muromtsev, criticized Lokshin as ‘politically impure’, Yudina rose to his defence. ‘Lokshin cannot be responsible for [. . .] my reputation for “political illiteracy” [. . .] If I am not trusted, then it is I who should be quitting your Institute.’⁵⁸ In a huff, Yudina handed in her notice. Gnesina persuaded her to stay.

Unexpectedly, another ugly problem arose, when allegations were made about Lokshin being an informer. At least two people concluded that he wrote the denunciations responsible for their arrest and incarceration – the poet and mathematician Alexander Yesenin-Volpin (son of the famous poet Sergei Yesenin) who was arrested in 1949, and Vera Prokhorova, teacher of English and Sviatoslav Richter’s close friend (known to him as VIP), arrested in 1951. Both firmly believed that Lokshin was a seksot (secret collaborator). This accusation was later contested by his family. Whether or not Lokshin had been ‘recruited’ or ‘trapped into serving’, he received no apparent benefits, while the stigma of stukach (informer) haunted him for the rest of his life. He had to endure the humiliation of people refusing to shake his hand or perform his music, as allegedly was the case with the conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky. By 1953 Yudina and Lokshin had stopped seeing each other. ‘He probably hasn’t the strength to put up with both his and my misfortunes, and I can no longer carry his burdens as I did earlier.’⁵⁹ Thus it was that Lokshin composed his striking Piano Variations in 1953 for Maria Grinberg, and not for Yudina. Soon he found a committed champion of his music in the conductor Rudolf Barshai. Such figures as the violinist Leonid Kogan (another alleged informer) and Lokshin should also be considered as victims of the tragic age in which they lived.

Much was contradictory and paradoxical in those years. Yudina struggled to maintain her teaching positions, but now she was suddenly allowed to perform again in Moscow – over the previous two years she had only given concerts in Leningrad. The lifting of this boycott in spring 1950 paved the way for permission to travel to Leipzig as a member of a large Soviet delegation, headed by Shostakovich, for the bicentenary celebrations of Bach’s death. Before leaving, Yudina paid homage to the great Master in a recital at Moscow’s Hall of Columns on 4 June, performing a variety of keyboard works and Cantata arias with the soprano, A. Pazovskaya – here religious texts were permitted, an instance of the inconsistency of Soviet censors.

The Soviet delegation arrived in Germany on 17 July. The festivities started with a Bach Competition, held in Weimar, where the young pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva won the piano section and Igor Bezrodny the violin section. Yudina made her pilgrimages to the places associated with Bach, reputedly walking barefoot to his grave in Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, and making friends with the Kantor, the organist Günther Ramin. The solemn opening of the BachFest took place in the Thomaskirche on 28 July in the presence of the President of the GDR, Wilhelm Pieck.

The official attitude in East Germany towards Bach, endorsed by Soviet ideologists, elevated his instrumental music at the expense of the religious. ‘Kapellmeister Bach’, rather than ‘Kantor’ Bach, replaced ‘dead formulas with human feeling and experience, thereby expressing the bourgeois humanist opposition to declining feudal society’. Soviet musicians paid instrumental homage to Bach on 29 July at Leipzig’s Schauspielhaus. The concert opened with Mstislav Rostropovich’s performance of the Fifth Suite for solo cello, followed by Yudina playing the C minor Toccata BWV 911 and a set of four Preludes and Fugues. After the interval the mezzo-soprano Zara Doloukhanova sang an aria from a religious cantata, and Mikhail Waiman performed Bach’s E major violin concerto. Lastly, the Concerto for Three Pianos was performed by Isai Braudo, Pavel Serebryakov and Shostakovich as a last-minute substitute to Yudina, who had cried off because of severe inflammation of her hands.

In a review of her concert at the Soviet House of Culture in Berlin on 31 July, Yudina (wrongly dubbed a Stalin Prize-winner) was praised for her Bach interpretations, including a group of eight Preludes and Fugues, the C minor Toccata, and the Italian Concerto BWV 971. The rest of the programme celebrated two later German composers: Brahms’ Intermezzo Op. 117 no. 3 and Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations WoO 80.

On her return to Moscow Yudina continued with her own Bach celebrations. She gave the complete cycle of The Well-Tempered Clavier at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, performing volume I on 4 November and volume II on 4 December. The recordings from these concerts demonstrate Yudina’s predilection for slow tempi and spiritual catharsis in the great minor fugues, in contrast to the sparkling clarity of the motor-like, fast preludes (sometimes even rushing too much!), where use of pedal was scrupulously avoided. Sometimes in imitation of the organ, she would double the bass- line in heavy octaves, seemingly a relic from nineteenth-century traditions and Busoni’s organ transcriptions. Despite Yudina’s mastery of the polyphony she occasionally takes a wrong turn, one imagines from sheer cerebral fatigue – as in the A major Fugue and the magnificent B minor Fugue from volume I, where she resorted to jumping to an abrupt halt on the tonic.

Hearing Bach in Leipzig had in turn inspired Shostakovich to compose his own cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues Op. 87. On 31 March and 5 April 1951 he auditioned his new cycle at the Union of Composers on Miusskaya Street, a normal procedure allowing for publication and a commission fee. By his own admission, Shostakovich was nervous and played badly. Afterwards he explained to the large gathering of composers and musicologists why he was following Bach’s inspirational example. The ensuing discussion saw Shostakovich’s principal persecutors of 1948, the ‘official line’ Union secretaries Vladimir Zakharov and Marian Koval, denounce the work’s ‘formalist tendencies’. Musicologists Israel Nestiev, Tamara Livanova and Sergei Skrebkov added their accusations. The latter rejected the D flat major Fugue as ugly – ‘a formalist fugue, a caricature’. The composer Dmitri Kabalevsky berated the cycle as ‘a grave miscalculation. It could not have served as preparation for Song of the Forests.’ In general, the genre of polyphony was deemed too abstract, a ‘formalist aberration’.⁶⁰

The Polish musicologist Alexander Jackowski was invited to attend the two auditions; as an outsider, he was amazed at the professional ineptitude of the discussion, and no less astonished by two women, Yudina and Nikolayeva, courageously rushing to the composer’s defence. Most composer-colleagues such as Yuri Levitin, Nikolai Peiko, Georgi Sviridov and Grigori Fried were lukewarm in their support. The drama critic and Meyerhold expert Lyubov Rudneva recalled Yudina’s indomitable figure enveloped in a voluminous dark dress proclaiming fearlessly: ‘We pianists are eternally grateful to Dmitri Dmitriyevich [. . .] these marvellous works will be performed by pianists throughout the world.’⁶¹ Yudina dismissed those who argued there was no need for polyphony – ‘such child’s prattle is not worth discussing’.⁶² Similarly, she ridiculed the Comrades, who saw Shostakovich’s music as mere caricature. ‘And if indeed amongst the Preludes and Fugues there are instances of caricature, tell me what’s wrong with that? Maybe some of us deserve to be caricatured. Life is far richer and more varied than the recipe provided by Comrade Skrebkov, who is incapable of writing a single Prelude and Fugue!’⁶³ Unsurprisingly, Yudina was accused of ‘revisionist aims and dragging old formalist ideas into the discussion’.⁶⁴

Such a grotesque reception would have normally dashed all hopes for publication. Now an acknowledged Bach expert, Nikolayeva persevered with learning Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues in their entirety, and presented the complete cycle at a second audition at the Union of Composers in the summer of 1952. Her calm, concentrated performance won Shostakovich’s critics over; the cycle was accepted for performance and publication in December 1952. In the meantime, Gilels, Neuhaus and Nikolayeva were performing part of the cycle off manuscript copies, soon to be followed by Yudina, Grinberg and Richter.

In the summer of 1951 Yudina informed Skrzhinskaya with pride that she had ‘played in Moscow to date twelve times, and also in Kishinev, Archangelsk and Baku, and worked with my students until numbness set in! I am suffering from extreme fatigue, I have grown fat and my heart is petering out as I am always seated at the piano. But my spirit keeps going strong!’⁶⁵

By the end of July, Yudina was overcome by exhaustion and accompanying depression. As so often she turned to her old friends, the Bakhtins: ‘Everything inside me is weeping; [. . .] I feel that I not only possess a head and hands, which are always at work, legs which always ache, a heart which always strives to give thanks to God, shoulders which carry heavy burdens, a stomach which doesn’t digest (forgive me!), a throat which always demands hot sweet tea, and a soul, always full of hopes, but also nerves stretched to breaking point.’⁶⁶ Unexpectedly the Bakhtins had sent her a large sum of cash – she thanked them profusely for their ‘Dickensian money – your blood and diamonds’. She explained she had to spend it on her needy relatives, which pre-empted her going on holiday herself. She suggested that ‘Mikh Mikh’ and his wife Alyona come to Moscow – ‘to drink tea and talk, as in the days of Nevel’, Vitebsk, St Petersburg, Leningrad’.⁶⁷ In the event it was she who visited them in Saransk later that month, giving a private concert for their friends at the local Radio.

Yudina was now having to cope with a new problem: the complaints of the Begovaya Street neighbours about her long hours’ practising. A temporary solution was found when her friends, the economist and literary critic Boris Udintsev and his wife Yekaterina, found summer accommodation for her in the housing cooperative at Solomennaya Storozhka. This colony of dachas, a cultural oasis in a spacious wooded area to the north of Moscow, had been designed by Karl Gippius in the late 1920s for the Timiryazevsky Academy of Arts. The following spring Yudina transferred her residence to the same dacha 28 in lot 33 of Novoe Shosse, opposite the Udintsevs, and in spring 1954 moved across the road to the Artemievs’ dacha (no. 30) – her permanent home for the next ten years. The Begovaya Street apartment was left to her geologist half-sister, Vera. Yudina wrote to Vladimir Lyublinsky of her good fortune: ‘Dear Miaooa [. . .] I am living in an earthly paradise! My attic room has bevelled windows, overlooking the forest, with orchards all around, and is naturally divided into two rooms with all the necessary furniture. The grand piano only just squeezed in. The cats got used to it at once, and go visiting our neighbours. It’s a lot cheaper for me! [. . .] This is all thanks to wonderful friends, the Udintsevs.’⁶⁸

The artist Tatiana Glebova left a description of Yudina’s picturesque home:

The attic, reached by a rickety outside staircase, has a tin roof, boiling hot in summer and incredibly cold in winter. A solid fence enclosed the whole square of dacha-like houses, in the middle of which stood a majestic edifice with Corinthian columns. Beams of electric light were projected from the building, illuminating enormous, life-size sculpted figures – this was the studio of the monumental sculptor, Vuchetich. And in a nearby attic, the great pianist Yudina breaks up a chair to heat her room – she was expecting guests that day!*⁶⁹

The summer season was particularly beautiful, despite the many mosquitoes, Yudina’s sworn enemies. In winter menial tasks included chopping logs for the wood-burning stove, fetching water, and clearing the snow. Vuchetich’s studio with his busts of Stalin and other Marxist effigies piled up against the fence were an eyesore – Yudina would shake her fist at them! Despite the inconveniences, the compensations were in sparkling fresh air, and the luxury of being able to play at any time of day or night. Fortunately, Yudina’s closest neighbours, the Udintsevs, loved the sound of her practising. Another reliable neighbour, Olga Ivanova, an evangelical Christian, became a firm friend, helping her with household duties.

The main inconvenience of Solomennaya Storozhka was its distance from the city centre. It was not well served by public transport, so Yudina spent a small fortune on taxis! With no telephone, she had to rely on a secretary, Serafima Alexandrova Bromberg, who kept her schedule and acted as intermediary between herself and students, concert organizers and friends. A highly cultured woman, married to a literary critic, Bromberg acted as Yudina’s secretary from 1952 to 1968, and became a close friend.

While Yudina was away with the Bakhtins in Saransk, storms were gathering at the Gnesins’ Institute. Educational matters and ideological control were now entrusted to Party functionaries of the Committee on the Arts. The new Director of the Institute, A. Aksyonov, threatened the Gnesin family members with dismissal. Yudina was accused of not attending political lectures and openly espousing religion. She now contacted her friend, Pavel Yudin, a member of the Supreme Soviet, asking him to intercede on her behalf with Nikolai Bespalov, Chairman of the Committee for Affairs in the Arts. At the height of the crisis she wrote to Yelena Gnesina, saying ‘I hope I can stay on next year, work in various disciplines, and will not be separated from my beloved students, nor thrown out of the Institute, treasured by me no less than by others. I really do not want to go and see Bespalov or the Central Committee, neither to disturb you through mention of my name.’⁷⁰ With the excuse of budgetary cuts, Aksyonov relieved seventeen teachers and accompanists from their duties during the 1951 summer break. The composer Mikhail Gnesin and his sister, Yevgeniya, co-founder of the Music School, were amongst those dismissed.

Having reduced her workload at the Moscow Conservatoire by half in 1946, Yudina had transferred most of her teaching to the Gnesins’ Institute. In 1950–1 she had one remaining Conservatoire student, graduating at the end of the year. It was decreed that the Conservatoire had no further use for Professor Yudina. Effectively she was dismissed because of lack of students, but clearly at the height of the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns her very existence was suspect!

With such uncertainty, Yudina considered a long-standing offer of a professorship at the Kazan Conservatoire, where her former student Vladimir Apresov now taught. She told Apresov that she could take on a couple of good singing students, two or three first-study pianists and up to three good chamber ensembles. She also recommended Lokshin as a teacher, recounting how ‘we make music together, and I play him my concert programmes. His critical comments carry the greatest authority [. . .] He is a phenomenon – not a person!’⁷¹ She suggested playing a group of Shostakovich’s new Preludes and Fugues – it would serve as a rehearsal for a later performance that December. After her staunch public defence of Shostakovich’s cycle, Yudina confessed to Lyublinsky her disappointment in the work: ‘Strictly between you and me, the more closely I study Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues, the less inspiring I find them.’ What were these works compared to cats, she asked, enthusing about her own cat, Kisanov, whose tail ‘reaches all the way to Ostankino, who runs up and down my Shakespearean staircase, knocks at my window and prefers Mozart to Bach! [. . .] Cats are indescribably wonderful, Shostakovich’s fugues less so.’⁷²

Yudina made her first trip to Kazan in the second half of October. She stayed with Apresov’s family, held masterclasses, gave a Beethoven recital, and met with the Conservatoire Director Nazib Zhiganov. It was agreed she would come to Kazan on a monthly basis for thirty hours’ teaching and one solo recital. She returned to Moscow in a state of extreme exhaustion; chronic lack of sleep made her feel nauseous. As she wrote to Lyublinsky, everything in Kazan felt alien, but she would give it a go for a year. In actual fact she went back once. Having resumed work at the Gnesins’ Institute, she realized it was impossible to sustain a double teaching load and perform concerts.

After a short respite, the purges in education were resumed. Yelena Gnesina received orders from the Chief Department of Educational Institutions ‘to relieve Professor Yudina of her duties at the Gnesins’ Institute, as she cannot ensure the political instruction of her students [. . .] because of major defects in her ideological-political work’.⁷³ Once again Yudina appealed to Pavel Yudin, refuting accusations of ‘demonstrative’ non-attendance of meetings, and ‘cutting herself off from the Collective’. ‘There is nothing “demonstrative” in my non-attendance. In the 1951/52 academic year, I attended at least 90% of the social-political activities – before that I was not always present; much of the time I was seriously ill, and I was also busy with concert tours [. . .] I can hardly be accused of being cut off from the Collective when I systematically give benefit concerts for the Mutual Assistance Fund and Professional Committee.’⁷⁴ Yudina was also charged with her ‘formal’ manner of study of Marxism and Leninism. ‘How does this follow? I actively studied this interesting subject, first in group lessons, and then with an individual instructor, Comrade Y. Osiyeva, who encourages me and lends her approval.’⁷⁵

Further complaints regarded Yudina’s promoting Ravel and Debussy, but she made the point that these composers’ music is ‘regularly performed in concert by Stalin Prize-winners like Richter, Mravinsky, Kondrashin, Oistrakh, in programmes sanctioned by the same Committee on the Arts. So why can’t students occasionally be given the chance to study these works?’ Yudina approached them ‘from a Soviet critical point of view’. And to be censured for teaching Shostakovich’s Piano Trio no. 2 ‘when the composer himself, Oistrakh and Knushevitsky were performing it throughout the country!’ Even the gramophone record of the Trio had been issued ‘after the 1948 Resolution’.⁷⁶

Her advocacy of Bach’s vocal music cost her the class of chamber singing; in the bicentenary year it had been allowed – now it constituted religious propaganda. Yudina protested the charges of baptizing students’ children and having icons at home. ‘This is my right, they are works of art. However, to say I hang amulets and horseshoes on my walls is simply a bad joke. I belong to the Russian Orthodox faith, the religion of the Russian people. Amulets are attributes of paganism and I have none, while horseshoes [. . .] have nothing to do with religion.’⁷⁷

Yudina kept her position, thanks to Pavel Yudin and Yelena Gnesina, who in the meantime was shunted upstairs to a lifetime position as ‘Honorary Artistic Director of the Institute’ – something she suffered in dignified silence.

* Later renamed Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

* Dating from circa 1200.

* A form of self-publication of Soviet dissident writers in the 1960s and 1970s, allowing their manuscripts to be circulated.

* Widow of Pasternak’s close friend, the famed Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze, executed by the NKVD in 1937.

* First Secretary of the Composers’ Union from 1948 to 1991, when the Union was disbanded.