NATASHA

* 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. Chagall made up his own biography - and he frequently changed it. The major decisions of his life were taken, he claimed, on the basis of his own convenience as a practising artist. In 1912 he emigrated from Soviet Russia because conditions there made it hard for him to work. In western Europe, by contrast, he was already famous and he knew that he could become rich. There is no evidence to suggest that he was affected by the Bolshevik destruction of the synagogues and a good deal of the Jewish quarter in his home town of Vitebsk.¹⁰² In 1941, when Chagall fled Paris for America, the danger from the Nazis was real enough - though here again he justified the move in terms of personal convenience. Throughout his life Chagall remained a wanderer, never settling down in any land, or calling it his own. Like the subjects of his paintings, he lived with his feet off the ground.

None the less, the unanswered question of his nationality was central to the painter's life and art. Of the diverse elements that were fused together in his personality (Jewish, Russian, French, American and international), it was the Russian that meant the most to him. 'The title 'A Russian Painter'', Chagall once remarked, 'means more to me than any international fame. In my pictures there is not one centimetre free from nostalgia for my native land.'¹⁰³ Chagall's homesickness was focused on Vitebsk, the half-Jewish half-Russian town on the border between Russia and Belarus, where he had grown up, the son of a petty trader, in the 1890s. In 1941 it was overrun by the Nazis and all its Jewish inhabitants were killed. Three years later Chagall

wrote a moving lamentation 'To My Native Town, Vitebsk' that was published as a letter in The New York Times.

It is a long time since I last saw you, and found myself among your fenced streets. You didn't ask in pain, why I left you for so many years when I loved you. No, you thought: the lad's gone off somewhere in search of brilliant unusual colours to shower like snow or stars on our roofs. But where will he get them from? Why can't he find them nearer to hand? In your ground I left the graves of my ancestors and scattered stones. I did not live with you and yet there was not a single one of my pictures in which your joys and sorrows were not reflected. All through these years I had one constant worry: does my native town understand me?¹⁰⁴

Vitebsk was the world Chagall idealized. It was not so much a place as a mythical ideal, the artistic site of his childhood memories. In his fanciful paintings he re-created Vitebsk as a world of dreams. The muddy streets of the real town were magically transformed into colours reminiscent of a festive set for Mother Goose. Such was the demand for his Vitebsk theme, and the ruthlessness with which Chagall exploited it, that critics accused him of merchandizing his own exotica as art. Picasso said he was a businessman. The painter Boris Aronson complained that Chagall was 'always doing a Fiddler on the Roof'.¹⁰⁵ Yet, however much he might have traded on the Vitebsk theme, his homesickness was genuine enough.

Jews in Israel could not understand how Chagall could be so nostalgic about life in Russia. Wasn't it a country of pogroms? But Vitebsk was a town where the Jews had not just co-existed with the Russians; they were beneficiaries of Russian culture, as well. Like Mandelstam, a Polish-Russian Jew, Chagall had identified with the Russian tradition: it was the means of entry to the culture and values of Europe. Russia was a big, cosmopolitan civilization before 1917. It had absorbed the whole of Western culture, just as Chagall, as a Jew, had absorbed the culture of Russia. Russia liberated Jews like Chagall from the provincial attitudes of their home towns and connected them with the wider world.¹⁰⁶ Only Russia could inspire feelings such as these. None of the other East European civilizations was large enough to provide the Jews with a cultural homeland.

5

When Tsvetaeva moved to Paris in 1925 it had been in the hope that she would find a broader readership for her verse. In Prague she had struggled to keep 'body and pen together', as Nabokov would so memorably describe the predicament of the emigre writers.¹⁰⁷ She scraped by through translation work and hand-outs from her friends. But the constant struggle put a strain on her relations with Efron, a perpetual student who could not find a job, and with her daughter and her newborn son.

Efron began to drift away from her - no doubt losing patience with her constant love affairs - and became involved in politics. In Paris he immediately threw himself into the Eurasian movement, whose conception of Russia as a separate Asiatic or Turanian continent had already taken hold of Stravinsky. By the middle of the 192Os the movement had begun to split. Its right wing flirted with the fascists, while its left wing, towards which Efron veered, favoured an alliance with the Soviet regime as champion of their imperial ideals for Russia as the leader of a separate Eurasian civilization in hostile opposition to the West. They put aside their old opposition to the Bolshevik regime, recognizing it (mistakenly perhaps) as the popular, and therefore rightful, victor of the civil war, and espoused its cause as the only hope for the resurrection of a Great Russia. Efron was a vocal advocate of a return to the motherland. He wanted to expiate his 'guilt' for having fought on the White side in the civil war by laying down his life for the Soviet (read: the Russian) people's cause. In 1931 Efron applied to return to Stalin's Russia. His well-known feelings of homesickness for Russia turned him into an obvious target for the NKVD, which had a policy of playing on such weaknesses to infiltrate the emigre community. Efron was recruited as an NKVD agent on the promise that eventually he would be allowed to return to Soviet Russia. During the 1930s he became the leading organizer of the Parisian Union for a Return to the Motherland. It was a front for the NKVD.

Efron's politics placed enormous strain on his relationship with Tsvetaeva. She understood his need to return home but she was equally aware of what was happening in Stalin's Russia. She accused her

husband of naivety: he closed his eyes to what he did not want to see. They argued constantly - she warning him that if he went back to the Soviet Union he would end up in Siberia, or worse, and he retorting that he would 'go wherever they send me'.¹⁰⁸ Yet Tsvetaeva knew that, if he went, she would follow her husband, as ever, 'like a dog'.

Efron's activities made Tsvetaeva's own position in emigre society untenable. It was assumed that she herself was a Bolshevik, not least because of her continued links with 'Soviet writers' such as Pasternak and Bely, who like her had their roots in the pre-revolutionary avant-garde. She found herself ever more alone in a community that increasingly shunned any contact with the Soviet world. 'I feel that I have no place here', she wrote to the Czech writer Anna Teskova. The French were 'sociable but superficial' and 'interested only in themselves', while 'from the Russians I am separated by my poetry, which nobody understands; by my personal views, which some take for Bolshevism, others for monarchism or anarchism; and then again - by all of me'.¹⁰⁹ Berberova described Tsvetaeva as an 'outcast' in Paris: 'she had no readers' and there was 'no reaction to what she wrote'.¹¹⁰After Russia, the last collection of her poetry to be published during her lifetime, appeared in Paris in 1928. Only twenty-five of its hundred numbered copies were bought by subscription.¹¹¹ In these final years of life abroad Tsvetaeva's poetry shows signs of her growing estrangement and solitude.

Just say: enough of torment - take A garden - lonesome like myself. (But do not stand near by, Yourself!) A garden, lonesome, like Myself.¹¹²

'Everything is forcing me towards Russia', she wrote to Anna Teskova in 1931. 'Here I am unnecessary. There I am impossible.'¹¹³ Tsvetaeva became increasingly frustrated with the editors of the emigre periodicals - professors and politicians like Miliukov who failed to understand her prose and hacked it into pieces to conform to the neat, clean style of their journals. Her frustration drove her to form an over-rosy view of literary life in the Soviet Union. She talked herself into believing that she was 'needed' there, that she would be able to be