Natasha's Dance

prepared, lest we only in dreams come together, all conceivable dreams to forswear;

    to be drained of my blood, to be crippled, to have done with the books I most love, for the first available idiom to exchange all I have: my own tongue.

    But for that, through the tears, oh, Russia, through the grass of two far-parted tombs, through the birch tree’s tremulous macules, through all that sustained me since youth,

    with your blind eyes, your dear eyes, cease looking

    at me, oh, pity my soul,

    do not rummage around in the coalpit,

    do not grope for my life in this hole

    because years have gone by and centuries, and for sufferings, sorrow, and shame, too late - there is no one to pardon and no one to carry the blame.87

    Stravinsky’s exodus to America followed a similar emotional path. He wanted to forget about the past and move on. His childhood was a painful memory. He had lost his father, two brothers and a daughter before he ‘lost’ Russia in 1917. He needed to put Russia behind him. But it would not let him be. As an emigre in France, Stravinsky tried to deny his own Russianness. He adopted a sort of European cosmopolitanism which at times became synonymous, as it had once been in St Petersburg itself, with an aristocratic hauteur and contempt for what was thought of as ‘Russia’ in the West (that is, the version of peasant culture which he had imitated in The Firebird and The Rite of Spring). ‘I don’t think of myself as particularly Russian,’ he told a Swiss journalist in 1928. ‘I am a cosmopolitan.’88 In Paris

    Stravinsky mixed in the fashionable circles of Cocteau and Proust, Poulenc and Ravel, Picasso and Coco Chanel. Chanel became his lover and transformed him from the rather unattractive and self-effacing man who had arrived in Paris in 1920 into the homme dur et monocle, elegantly dressed in finely tailored suits and drawn (with Asiatic eyes) by Picasso.

    Stravinsky made a very public show of distancing himself from the peasant Russia that had inspired his earlier works. It had turned into the Red Russia he despised - the Russia which had betrayed him. He denied the influence of folklore on his work. He claimed (mendaciously) that the ancient Russian setting of The Rite of Spring was an incidental choice that followed from the music, which he had composed first, without regard for the folklore.89 He similarly denied the Russian roots of The Peasant Wedding - a work entirely based on musical folklore. ‘I borrowed nothing from folk pieces’, he wrote in his Chronique de ma vie in 1935. ‘The recreation of a country wedding ritual, which in any case I had never seen, did not enter my mind. Ethnographic questions were of very little interest to me.’90 Perhaps he was trying to distinguish his own music from the ersatz folklore (one should really call it ‘fakelore’) of the Stalinist regime, with its pseudo folk-dance troupes and balalaika orchestras, its Red Army choirs which dressed up in generic ‘folk’ costumes and played the role of happy peasants while the real peasants starved or languished in the gulags in the wake of Stalin’s war to force them all into collective farms. But the lengths to which he went to erase his Russian roots suggest a more violent, personal reaction.

    The music of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period was an expression of his ‘cosmopolitan’ identity. There is almost nothing evidently ‘Russian’ - and certainly no musical folklore - in jazz-inspired works such as the Octet for Wind (1923), or in classically formed works like the Piano Concerto (1924); and even less in later works like Dumbarton Oaks (1937) or the Symphony in C (1938). The fact that he chose Latin - rather than his native Russian or adopted French - as the language of his ‘opera-oratorio’ Oedipus Rex (1927) lends further weight to this idea. Nicolas Nabokov, who spent the Christmas of 1947 with the Stravinskys in Hollywood, was struck by the apparent

    thoroughness of the composer’s break with his native land. ‘For

    Stravinsky, Russia is a language which he uses with superb, gourmandlike dexterity; it is a few books; Glinka and Tchaikovsky. The rest either leaves him indifferent or arouses his anger, contempt and violent dislike.’91 Stravinsky had an amazing chameleon-like capacity to adapt and make himself at home in foreign habitats. This, too, was perhaps a product of his Petersburg background. His son recalled that ‘every time we moved house for a few weeks my father always managed to give an air of permanence to what was in fact very temporary… All his life, wherever he might be, he always managed to surround himself with his own atmosphere.’92

    In 1934 the composer became a citizen of France - a decision he explained by claiming he had found his ‘intellectual climate’ in Paris, and by what he called ‘a kind of shame towards my motherland’.93 Yet despite his French passport and his orchestrated image as an Artist of the World, Stravinsky harboured deeply felt emotions for the country of his birth. He was far more rooted in his native culture than he readily acknowledged; and these feelings were expressed in a concealed way within his works. Stravinsky felt profound nostalgia for St Petersburg - a city that was ‘so much a part of my life’, he wrote in 1959, ‘that I am almost afraid to look further into myself, lest I discover how much of me is still joined to it’.94 So painful was its memory that in 1955 the composer refused an invitation to Helsinki on the grounds that it was ‘too near a certain city that I have no desire to see again’.95 Yet he loved Rome, and Venice too, because they reminded him of Petersburg. Stravinsky’s sublimated nostalgia for the city of his birth is clearly audible in his Tchaikovskian ballet The Fairy’s Kiss (1928). He was equally nostalgic about Ustilug, the family’s estate in Volhynia, where he had composed The Rite of Spring. Ustilug was a subject he would not discuss with anyone.96 It was an immeasurable source of pain to him that he did not know what had happened to the house where he had spent his happiest childhood days. Yet the fact that he laboured longer on The Peasant Wedding than on any other score is an indication of his feelings for the place. The work was based on sources he had retrieved from the house on his final visit there.

    Throughout his life in exile Stravinsky remained emotionally attached to the rituals and the culture of the Russian Church - even if

    in France he became attracted intellectually to the Catholic tradition, which he celebrated in his Symphony of Psalms (1930). In the mid-1920s, after nearly thirty years of non-observance, Stravinsky resumed an active life in the Orthodox community, in part under the influence of his wife Katya, who became increasingly devout during the long illness from which she eventually died in 1939. As an artist and as an emigre, Stravinsky found solace in the discipline and order of the Russian Church. ‘The more you cut yourself off from the canons of the Christian Church,’ he told an interviewer while at work on the Symphony of Psalms, ‘the more you cut yourself off from the truth.’

    These canons are as true for the composition of an orchestra as they are for the life of an individual. They are the only place where order is practised to the full: not a speculative, artificial order, but the divine order which is given to us and which must reveal itself as much in the inner life as in its exteriorization in painting, music, etc. It’s the struggle against anarchy, not so much disorder as the absence of order. I’m an advocate of architecture in art, since architecture is the embodiment of order; creative work is a protest against anarchy and nonexistence.97

    Stravinsky became a regular attender at services in the Russian church in the Rue Daru. He surrounded himself with the paraphernalia of Orthodox worship - his homes in Nice and Paris were filled with icons and crosses. He dated his musical sketches by the Orthodox calendar. He corresponded with Russian priests in all the major centres of the emigration, and the Russian priest in Nice became ‘practically a member’ of his household there.98 Stravinsky claimed that the strongest pull of the Russian Church was ‘linguistic’: he liked the sound of the Slavonic liturgy.” It comes across in his Slavonic chants for the Russian church.*

    This desire to return to the religion of his birth was connected to a profound love of Russia, too. Throughout his life Stravinsky adhered to the Russian customs of his childhood in pre-revolutionary Petersburg. Even in Los Angeles, his home remained an outpost of the old Russia.

    * Before switching to Latin he had intended to set the Symphony of Psalms in Slavonic,

    too.

    The living room was filled with Russian books and ornaments, pictures and icons. The Stravinskys mixed with Russian friends. They employed Russian servants. They spoke Russian in their home. Stravinsky spoke in English or in French only if he had to, and then in a thick accent. He drank tea in the Russian way - in a glass with jam. He ate his soup from the same spoon with which as a child he had been fed by his babushka.100

    Chagall was another Artist of the World who concealed a Russian heart. Like Stravinsky, he invented his own image as a cosmopolitan. He liked to claim that the questions of identity which critics always asked (‘Are you a Jewish artist? A Russian? Or a French?’) did not actually bother him. ‘You talk, I will work,’ he used to say.101 But such statements cannot be taken at face value.