Natasha's Dance, page 61
Tarkovsky said that Hermann Hesse’s line from The Glass Bead Game (1943) ‘could well have served as an epigraph to Andrei Rublev’.204
The same religious theme is at the centre of Stalker (1979), which, in Tarkovsky’s own description, he meant to be a discourse on ‘the existence of God in man’.205 The stalker of the film’s title guides a scientist and a writer to ‘the zone’, a supernatural wilderness abandoned by the state after some industrial catastrophe. He is straight out of the Russian tradition of the Holy Fool. He lives alone in poverty, despised by a society where everyone has long ceased to believe in God, and yet he derives a spiritual power from his religious faith. He understands that the heart of ‘the zone’ is just an empty room in a deserted house. But, as he tells his travelling companions, the basis of true faith is the belief in the Promised Land: it is the journey and not the arrival. The need for faith, for something to believe in outside of themselves, had defined the Russian people, in their mythic understanding of themselves, since the days of Gogol and the ‘Russian soul’. Tarkovsky revived this national myth as a counter to the value system of the Soviet regime, with its alien ideas of rational materialism. ‘Modern mass culture’, Tarkovsky wrote, ‘is crippling people’s souls, it is erecting barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.’206 This spiritual consciousness, he believed, was the contribution Russia might give to the West - an idea embodied in the last iconic image of his film Nostalgia (1983), in which a Russian peasant house is portrayed inside a ruined Italian cathedral.
It may seem extraordinary that films like Stalker and Solaris were produced in the Brezhnev era, when all forms of organized religion were severely circumscribed and the deadening orthodoxy of ‘Developed Socialism’ held the country’s politics in its grip. But within the Soviet monolith there were many different voices that called for a return to ‘Russian principles’. One was the literary journal Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard), which acted as a forum for Russian nationalists and conservationists, defenders of the Russian Church, and neo-Populists like the ‘village prose writers’ Fedor Abramov and Valentin Rasputin, who painted a nostalgic picture of the countryside and idealized the honest working peasant as the true upholder of the Russian soul and its mission in the world. Molodaia gvardiia enjoyed
30. ‘The Russian bouse inside the Italian cathedral’. Final shot from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983)
the support of the Party’s senior leadership throughout the 1970s.* Yet its cultural politics were hardly communist; and at times, such as in its opposition to the demolition of churches and historic monuments, or in the controversial essays it published by the nationalist painter Ilya Glazunov which explicitly condemned the October Revolution as an interruption of the national tradition, it was even anti-Soviet. The journal had links with opposition groups in the Russian Church, the conservation movement (which numbered several million members in
* It had the political protection of Politburo member Mikhail Suslov, Brezhnev’s chief of ideology. When Alexander Yakovlev attacked Molodaia gvardiia as anti-Leninist on account of its nationalism and religious emphasis, Suslov succeeded in winning Brezhnev over to the journal’s side. Yakovlev was sacked from the Party’s Propaganda Department. In 1973, he was dismissed from the Central Committee and appointed Soviet ambassador to Canada (from where he would return to become Gorbachev’s chief ideologist).
the 1960s) and the dissident intelligentsia. Even Solzhenitsyn came to its defence when it was attacked by the journal Novy mir (the very journal which had made his name by publishing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962).207 In the 1970s Russian nationalism was a growing movement, which commanded the support of Party members and dissidents alike. There were several journals like Molo-daia gvardiia - some official, others dissident and published underground (samizdat) - and a range of state and voluntary associations, from literary societies to conservation groups, which forged a broad community on ‘Russian principles’. As the editor of the samizdat journal Veche put it in his first editorial in 1971: ‘In spite of everything, there are still Russians. It is not too late to return to the homeland.’208
What, in the end, was ‘Soviet culture’? Was it anything? Can one ever say that there was a specific Soviet genre in the arts? The avant-garde of the 1920s, which borrowed a great deal from Western Europe, was really a continuation of the modernism of the turn of century. It was revolutionary, in many ways more so than the Bolshevik regime, but in the end it was not compatible with the Soviet state, which could never have been built on artists’ dreams. The idea of constructing Soviet culture on a ‘proletarian’ foundation was similarly unsustainable -although that was surely the one idea of culture that was intrinsically ‘Soviet’: factory whistles don’t make music (and what, in any case, is ‘proletarian art’?). Socialist Realism was also, arguably, a distinctively Soviet art form. Yet a large part of it was a hideous distortion of the nineteenth-century tradition, not unlike the art of the Third Reich or of fascist Italy. Ultimately the ‘Soviet’ element (which boiled down to the deadening weight of ideology) added nothing to the art.
The Georgian film director Otar loseliani recalls a conversation with the veteran film-maker Boris Barnet in 1962:
He asked me: ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘A director’… ‘Soviet’, he corrected, ‘you must always say “Soviet director”. It is a very special profession.’ ‘In what way?’ I asked. ‘Because if you ever manage to become honest, which would surprise me, you can remove the word “Soviet”.’205
8
From beneath such ruins I speak,
From beneath such an avalanche I cry,
As if under the vault of a fetid cellar
I were burning in quicklime.
I will pretend to be soundless this winter
And I will slam the eternal doors forever,
And even so, they will recognize my voice,
And even so they will believe in it once more.210
Anna Akhmatova was one of the great survivors. Her poetic voice was irrepressible. In the last ten years of her long life, beginning with the release of her son from the gulag in 1956, Akhmatova enjoyed a relatively settled existence. She was fortunate enough to retain her capacity for writing poetry until the end.
In 1963 she wrote the last additions to her masterpiece, Poem without a Hero, which she had started writing in 1940. Isaiah Berlin, to whom she read the poem at the Fountain House in 1945, described it as a ‘kind of final memorial to her life as a poet and the past of the city - St Petersburg - which was part of her being’.211 The poem conjures up, in the form of a carnival procession of masked characters which appears before the author at the Fountain House, a whole generation of vanished friends and figures from the Petersburg that history left behind in 1913. Through this creative act of memory the poetry redeems and saves that history. In the opening dedication Akhmatova writes,
… and because I don’t have enough paper, I am writing on your first draft.212*
* Akhmatova informed several friends that the first dedication was to Mandelstam. When Nadezhda Mandelstam initially heard her read the poem and asked her to whom the dedication was addressed, Akhmatova replied ‘with some irritation’: ‘Whose first draft do you think I can write on?’ (Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, p. 435).
The poem is full of literary references, over which countless scholars have puzzled, but its essence, as suggested by the dedication, is foretold by Mandelstam in a prayer-like poem which Akhmatova quotes as an epigraph to the third chapter of her own poem.
We shall meet again in Petersburg
as though we had interred the sun in it
and shall pronounce for the first time
that blessed, senseless word.
In the black velvet of the Soviet night,
in the velvet of the universal void
the familiar eyes of blessed women sing
and still the deathless flowers bloom.213
Akhmatova’s Poem is a requiem for those who died in Leningrad. That remembrance is a sacred act, in some sense an answer to Mandelstam’s prayer. But the poem is a resurrection song as well - a literal incarnation of the spiritual values that allowed the people of that city to endure the Soviet night and meet again in Petersburg.
Akhmatova died peacefully in a convalescent home in Moscow on 5 March 1966. Her body was taken to the morgue of the former Sheremetev Alms House, founded in the memory of Praskovya, where she was protected by the same motto that overlooked the gates of the Fountain House: ‘Deus conservat omnia’. Thousands of people turned out for her funeral in Leningrad. The baroque church of St Nicholas spilled its dense throng out on to the streets, where a mournful silence was religiously maintained throughout the requiem. The people of a city had come to pay their last respects to a citizen whose poetry had spoken for them at a time when no one else could speak. Akhmatova had been with her people then: ‘There, where my people, unfortunately, were.’ Now they were with her. As the cortege passed through Petersburg on its way to the Komarovo cemetery, it paused before the Fountain House, so that she could say a last farewell.
8
overleaf:
Igor and Vera Stravinsky arriving at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow,
21 September 1962
1
Homesickness! that long Exposed weariness! It’s all the same to me now Where I am altogether lonely
Or what stones I wander over Home with a shopping bag to A house that is no more mine Than a hospital or a barracks.
It’s all the same to me, a captive Lion - what faces I move through Bristling, or what human crowd will Cast me out as it must -
Into myself, into my separate internal World, a Kamchatka bear without ice. Where I fail to fit in (and I’m not trying) or Where I’m humiliated it’s all the same.
And I won’t be seduced by the thought of My native language, its milky call. How can it matter in what tongue I Am misunderstood by whomever I meet
(Or by what readers, swallowing Newsprint, squeezing for gossip?) They all belong to the twentieth Century, and I am before time,
Stunned, like a log left
Behind from an avenue of trees.
People are all the same to me, everything
Is the same, and it may be that the most
Indifferent of all are those
Signs and tokens which once were
Native but the dates have been
Rubbed out: the soul was born somewhere,
But my country has taken so little care Of me that even the sharpest spy could Go over my whole spirit and would Detect no birthmark there!
Houses are alien, churches are empty Everything is the same: But if by the side of the path a Bush arises, especially
a rowanberry…’
The rowanberry tree stirred up painful memories for the exiled poet Marina Tsvetaeva. It was a reminder of her long-lost childhood in Russia and the one native ‘birthmark’ that she could neither disguise nor bury underneath these lines of feigned indifference to her native land. From her first attempts at verse, Tsvetaeva adopted the rowanberry tree as a symbol of her solitude:
The red mound of a rowanberry kindled, Its leaves fell, and I was born.2
From such associations the homesick exile constitutes a homeland in his mind. Nostalgia is a longing for particularities, not some devotion to an abstract fatherland. For Nabokov, ‘Russia’ was contained in his dreams of childhood summers on the family estate: mushroom-hunting in the woods, catching butterflies, the sound of creaking snow. For Stravinsky it was the sounds of Petersburg which he also recalled from his boyhood: the hoofs and cart wheels on the cobblestones, the cries of the street vendors, the bells of the St Nicholas Church, and the buzz of the Marinsky Theatre where his musical persona was first formed. Tsvetaeva’s ‘Russia’, meanwhile, was conjured up by the mental image
of her father’s Moscow house at Three Ponds Lane. The house was stripped apart for firewood in the cold winter of 1918. But after nearly twenty years of exile, when she returned to it in 1939, she found her favourite rowanberry growing as before. The tree was all that remained of her ‘Russia’, and she begged Akhmatova not to tell a soul of its existence, unless ‘they find out and cut it down’.3
Of the many factors that lay behind Tsvetaeva’s return to Stalin’s Russia, the most important was her desire to feel the Russian soil beneath her feet. She needed to be near that rowanberry tree. Her return was the outcome of a long and painful struggle within herself. Like most emigres, she was torn between two different notions of her native land. The first was the Russia that ‘remains inside yourself: the written language, the literature, the cultural tradition of which all Russian poets felt themselves a part.4 This interior Russia was a country that was not confined to any territory. ‘One can live outside of Russia and have it in one’s heart,’ Tsvetaeva explained to the writer Roman Gul. It was a country that one could ‘live in anywhere’.5 As Khodasev-ich put it when he left for Berlin in 1922, this was a ‘Russia’ that could be encapsulated in the works of Pushkin and ‘packed up in a bag’.
All I possess are eight slim volumes, And they contain my native land.6
The other Russia was the land itself - the place that still contained memories of home. For all her declarations of indifference, Tsvetaeva could not resist its pull. Like an absent lover, she ached for its physical presence. She missed the open landscape, the sound of Russian speech, and this visceral web of associations was the inspiration of her creativity.
Three million Russians fled their native land between 1917 and 1929. They made up a shadow nation stretching from Manchuria to California, with major centres of Russian cultural life in Berlin, Paris and New York. Here were the remnants of a vanished world: former advisers to the Tsar and government officials lived from the sale of their last jewels; ex-landowners worked as waiters; ruined businessmen as factory hands; officers of the defeated White armies worked by night as taxi drivers and by day composed their memoirs about the
mistakes of the White Army leader, General Denikin. Large families, like the Sheremetevs, were fragmented as their members fled in all directions. The main branch of the Sheremetevs left in 1918 with Count Sergei, travelling to Paris and then to New York. But others fled to South America, Belgium, Greece and Morocco.
Berlin was the first major centre of the emigration. It was a natural crossroads between Russia and Europe. The post-First World War economic crisis and the collapse of the mark made the city relatively inexpensive for those Russians who arrived with jewels or Western currency, and in the suburbs of the ruined middle classes a large but cheap apartment could be easily obtained. In 1921 the Soviet government lifted its controls on exit visas as part of its New Economic Policy. At that time Germany was the only major European country to have diplomatic and commercial relations with Soviet Russia. Still paying for the war through reparations and trade embargoes imposed by the victorious Western governments, it looked to Soviet Russia as a trading partner and a diplomatic friend. Half a million Russians crowded into Charlottenburg and the other south-western suburbs of the German capital in the early 1920s. Berliners dubbed the city’s major shopping street, the Kurfurstendamm, the ‘Nepskii Prospekt’. Berlin had its own Russian cafes, its own Russian theatres and bookshops, its own Russian cabaret. In the suburbs there were Russian everythings: Russian hairdressers, Russian grocers, Russian pawn shops and Russian antique stores. There was even a Russian orchestra. And a Russian football team (with a young Vladimir Nabokov playing in goal).7
Berlin was the undisputed cultural capital of the Russian emigre community. Its musical talent was extraordinary: Stravinsky, Rach-maninov, Heifetz, Horowitz and Nathan Milstein could have shared the stage in any concert there. By the time Tsvetaeva arrived, in 1922, Berlin had become the adopted home of some of the most brilliant literary talents of the Russian avant-garde (Khodasevich, Nabokov, Berberova, Remizov). The city had an astounding eighty-six Russian-language publishers - comfortably outnumbering the German ones -while its Russian newspapers were sold throughout the world.8
Berlin was also a halfway house between Soviet Russia and the West for writers such as Gorky, Bely, Pasternak, Aleksei Tolstoy and Ilya
Ehrenburg, who were yet to make up their minds where they wanted to be based. It became a meeting place for writers from the Soviet Union, their literary confreres from the West, and the already-established Russian emigre community. Publishing costs in Berlin were extremely low - so low that several Soviet publishers and periodicals set up offices in the German capital. In the Russian Berlin of the early 1920s there was still no clear divide between Soviet and emigre culture. The city was the centre of the left-wing avant-garde, among whom the idea of a common Russian culture uniting Soviet Russia with the emigration remained strongest after 1917. Such ideas were generally rejected in the other major centres of the emigration. But Berlin was different - and for a brief period it was possible for writers to move freely between Moscow and Berlin. The climate changed in the middle of the decade when a group of emigres known as Smena vekh (Change of Landmarks) began to campaign for a permanent return to the Soviet Union and established their own journal Nakanune (On the Eve) with Soviet backing. The turning point came in 1923, when the historical novelist Aleksei Tolstoy defected back to Moscow. In the ensuing scandal the Berlin emigre community became sharply polarized between left and right - between those who wanted to build bridges to the Soviet homeland and those who wanted to burn them.
