In Stravinsky's Orbit: Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris 9780520975521

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In Stravinsky’s Orbit

In Stravinsky’s Orbit Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris

Klára Móricz

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2020 by Klára Móricz

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Móricz, Klára, 1962- author. Title: In Stravinsky’s orbit : responses to Modernism in Russian Paris / Klára Móricz. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019044472 (print) | lccn 2019044473 (ebook) | isbn 9780520344426 (cloth) | isbn 9780520975521 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Music—France—Paris—20th century—History and criticism. | Expatriate composers—France—Paris. | Composers— Soviet Union. | Stravinsky, Igor, 1882-1971. | Duke, Vernon, 1903-1969. | Prokofiev, Sergey, 1891-1953. | Nabokov, Nicolas, 1903-1978. | Lourié, Arthur, 1892-1966. Classification: lcc ml270.8.p2 m67 2020 (print) | lcc ml270.8.p2 (ebook) | ddc 780.92/247—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044472 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044473 Manufactured in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the memory of my mother and Nonna Barskova

c ontents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Note on Transliteration Introduction

viii xi xiii xiv 1

1. Double Narratives or Dukelsky’s The End of St. Petersburg

21

2. Soviet “méchanique” or the Bolshevik Temptation

58

3. Neoclassicism à la russe 1 or Reclaiming the Eighteenth Century in Nabokov’s Ode

97

4. Neoclassicism à la russe 2 or Stravinsky’s Version of Similia similibus curentur

123

5. 1937 or Pushkin Divided

151

6. A Feast in Time of Plague

173

7. Epilogue or Firebird to Phoenix

207

Notes Selected Bibliography Index

225 267 281

illustrations

1.1. Facade of St. Isaac’s Cathedral with the truncated inscription from Psalm 21 (“The king shall joy in thy strength”) in Vsevolod Pudovkin’s silent film, The End of St. Petersburg (Mezhrabpom, 1927) [7:33] 44 1.2a. St. Isaac’s Cathedral in the fog from The End of St. Petersburg [7:38] 45 1.2b. Smoky factory scene from The End of St. Petersburg [8:17] 45 1.3a. The opulent interior of the Winter Palace from The End of St. Petersburg [1:26:32] 46 1.3b. The empty pail of the worker’s wife from The End of St. Petersburg [1:26:41] 46 1.4. Peasant lad and his mother, shown as ants from the top of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, from The End of St. Petersburg [16:52] 46 1.5. First image of the equestrian monument of Alexander III from The End of St. Petersburg [7:29] 47 1.6. The crying statue from The End of St. Petersburg [50:28] 47 1.7a. Truncated image of the statue of Nicholas I from The End of St. Petersburg [7:42] 48 1.7b. The Bronze Horseman as shown in The End of St. Petersburg [8:03] 48 1.8a. Shadow of the statue of Alexander III in The End of St. Petersburg [16:17] 49 1.8b. Alexandre Benois’s illustration for the poem “The Bronze Horseman” by Alexander Pushkin, 1905–18 (Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia/ Bridgeman Images), © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, used by permission 49 viii

illustrations

ix

1.9. The Soviet and German Pavilions facing each other in 1937, photographer unknown 54 1.10. The Soviet and German Pavilions in competition (caricature in Candide, July 15, 1937) 55 2.1. Baba Yaga’s Fight with the Crocodile, from D. Rovinskiy, Russkiye narodnïye kartinki, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Izdaniye R. Golike, 1900) 81 3.1. Luminous triangle in the set design by Pavel Tchelitchew for the feast in Ode, Howard D. Rothschild Collection on Ballets Russes of Sergey Diaghilev, Harvard University 116 3.2. Pavel Tchelitchew’s set design for scene 3 from Ode, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, used by permission 116 3.3. Pavel Tchelitchew, costume for a star, c. 1928, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, used by permission 117 4.1. André Bauchant, Apollon Apparaissant aux Bergers, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, used by permission 127 4.2. Serge Lifar as Apollo with Alexandra Danilova, Felia Dubrovska, and Lubov Tchernicheva as the Muses in Apollon Musagète, final pose showing the ascent to Parnassus. Photographer unknown. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library, Jerome Robbins Dance Division 128 5.1. Concert poster for the celebratory concert in Salle Pleyel, Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College 155 5.2. Image of Serge Lifar with Pushkin, from Géa Augsbourg, La Vie en images de Serge Lifar (Paris: Corrèa, 1937), © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich, used by permission 158 5.3. Invitation to Serge Lifar’s Pushkin exhibition, with Jean Cocteau’s drawing, Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College 160 5.4. “Pushkin days in Moscow,” caricature in Posledniye novosti, February 11, 1937, p. 1 166

acknowled gments

Many people inspired and helped my project. I am grateful for the archivists and staff of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the New York Public Library; and the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Claude Lorentz was of special help at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Strasbourg, as were Flore Bugnicourt at the Médiathèque de Monaco, Fonds Patrimonial; Dr. Felix Meyer and Isolde Degen at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland; and Natalia Ermolaev at the Prokofiev Archive at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. I profited from the knowledge and generosity of Stanley Rabinovitz and Michael Kunichika at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture. Steven Heim from the interlibrary services at Amherst College fulfilled my most difficult requests, and Arts and Humanities Librarian Sara Smith helped me with locating images on the web. Michel Fourcade, president of the Cercle Maritain, granted me access to the collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Strasbourg, and Vincent Laloy sent me copies of letters by Arthur Lourié and his father Louis Laloy. Stefan Hulliger shared with me valuable data from his personal collection of Lourié documents and was always ready to answer questions about Lourié. Olesya Bobrik also shared with me her transcription of Lourié’s letters with Sergey Koussevitzy and Boris de Schloezer, as well as excerpts from Lourié’s diaries. My student Faith Wen took high-quality photographs of documents at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture. Several people helped my work at various stages, and I am happy to acknowledge their generous support. Simon Morrison gave me advice at the beginning of my project and generously shared with me his copies of the correspondence between Vernon Duke and Sergey Prokofiev. Caryl Emerson was always ready to xi

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Acknowledgments

give me feedback on my writings about Lourié and sent me the transcript of an interview she conducted with Joseph Lynch, Lourié’s former lawyer in Princeton. Stanley Rabinovitz read one of my chapters and helped me with the translation of difficult Russian passages. Michael Kunichika invited me to present one of my chapters at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture. Eric Sawyer commented on my introduction and encouraged my work. Anna V. Nisnevich generously read and critiqued two of my chapters. Her feedback was especially crucial for shaping my chapter on Prokofiev. Sergey Glebov gave me advice on archival sources and was always ready to respond to my questions. Polina Barskova inspired many interpretative aspects of my work. She read several chapters, gave valuable feedback, and was always ready to brainstorm and have inspiring discussions. Having coffee with her once in a while kept me focused and provided me with intellectual stimulus. Nonna Barskova taught me the love of Russian language, poetry, and culture. She read all of my chapters multiple times, pointed out mistakes, not sparing me from criticism. She also gave me continuous support and encouragement. Her belief in my work was indispensable for the completion of this project. Lynn Garafola invited me to give two lectures at Columbia University, which provided me with valuable feedback on my work. She also guided me to sources crucial for my research and generously shared with me two chapters from her forthcoming book on Bronislava Nijinska. Steven Bullock and the other reader of my manuscript spared no effort to improve my book. I took most of their advice and I am grateful for their suggestions. My greatest thanks is due to Richard Taruskin, who read my manuscript closely twice, giving the book the best editing possible. I am deeply grateful for his invaluable help and honest criticism. My research was supported by a grant from the Amherst College Faculty Research Award Program, as funded by The H. Axel Schupf ’57 Fund for Intellectual Life. I also received funding from the Amherst College Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty. I thank Raina Polivka of UC Press for her enthusiasm and guidance during the publishing process, Madison Wetzell for responding promptly to all my questions about the preparation of the manuscript, Susan Higman Larsen for the thorough copyediting, and Ben Ayotte for the preparation of my music examples. This list would not be complete without thanking my family, my daughter Emma Schneider, my brother, and my sister who were always ready to give me emotional support. My husband, David E. Schneider, was always the first to listen to my ideas. Without his constant support, encouragement, patience, expert editorial help, and honest criticism I would not have been able to complete my work. I dedicate my book to the memory of my mother, Emma Pajor, and Nonna Barskova, two important people in my life who passed away while I was working on this book. I will always miss them.

abbreviations

Duke Coll. Koussevitzky Coll. Lourié Coll. Maritain Coll. Prokofiev Arch. Prokofiev Diaries 2 Prokofiev Diaries 3 Schlozer Coll. Selected Letters of Prokofiev

Vernon Duke Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Sergey Koussevitzky Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Lourié Collection, New York Public Library, Music Division, Special Collection. Centre d’Archives, Cercle d’Etudes Jacques et Raïssa Maritain, Bibliotèque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg. Prokofiev Archive, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Sergey Prokofiev Diaries, 1915–1923: Behind the Mask, translated by Anthony Phillips. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Sergey Prokofiev Diaries, 1924–1933: Prodigal Son, translated by Anthony Phillips. London: Faber and Faber, 2012. Boris de Schloezer Collection, Fonds précieux, Médiathèque de Monaco. Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev, translated by Harlow Robinson. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.

xiii

note on transliteration

The transliteration of Russian words follows the system in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980). Modifications, serving to aid English pronunciation and ensure consistency, are applied as proposed by Richard Taruskin in Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (1993). Exception is made for names commonly used in English (Rachmaninoff, not Rachmaninov, Eisenstein, not Eysenshteyn), names ending with -sky (Stravinsky, not Stravinskiy) or -ai (Nikolai, not Nikolay). In bibliographical references of Russian names and titles, I maintain fidelity to Cyrillic characters or keep the transliteration as it appears on the title page, even if it differs from the spelling of the name in the main text.

xiv

Introduction За все, за все спасибо. За войну, За революцию и за изгнанье. За равнодушно-светлую страну, Где мы теперь “влачим существованье.” Нет доли сладостней—все потерять. Нет радостней судьбы—скитальцем стать, И никогда ты к небу не был ближе, Чем здесь, устав скучать, Устав дышать, Без сил, без денег, Без любви, в Париже. . . [Thank you for everything: for the war, The revolution, and the exile, For the indifferently bright country Where we are now “dragging our existence.” No fortune is greater than to lose everything. No fate is more joyous than that of a wanderer, And you have never been closer to heaven Than here, tired of missing home, Tired of breathing, Powerless, penniless, Loveless, in Paris.] from georgy adamovich, “two poems,” 1936 1

Before leaving for America in 1918, Sergey Prokofiev paid a visit to Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin’s commissar for education. According to Prokofiev’s short autobiography, written in 1941 for the readership of Sovetskaya muzïka (Soviet Music), Lunacharsky, an enthusiast of contemporary art, tried to persuade him to stay: “You are a revolutionary in music, as we are in life—we should work together.”2 Lunacharsky’s assumption that Russian artists with progressive leanings should serve the most politically progressive state called into question Prokofiev’s intention to practice modernism in the West, which the new Soviet State regarded as politically regressive. For the Soviets, the innovative aspect of Western modernism meant little more than the meeting of market requirements, innovation for innovation’s sake.3 When Stalin’s power consolidated in the 1930s, state support for 1

2

Introduction

modernist art morphed into increased censorship and eventual persecution, but in the 1920s Russian emigrants with modernist ambitions had still been haunted by the Soviet accusation that having chosen to leave Russia they had acted “against history, and therefore, against art, and would be punished by artistic sterility and death.”4 The myth of Russian artistic sterility abroad was an important propaganda tool on the pages of Krasnaya nov’ (Red Virgin Soil, 1921–41), the first Soviet literary review created in response to the émigré journal Sovremennïye zapiski (Contemporary Notes, 1920–40) in Paris. The Soviets’ insistence on dividing Russian culture into “old” and “dying” émigré art and “young” and “thriving” Soviet art was all the more pronounced because it had no basis in Soviet reality, where modernism, notwithstanding the Futurists’ early attempts to find common ground with the Revolution, never thrived and was driven to the brink of extinction during the anti-modernist campaigns during Stalin’s reign. As Leonid Livak shows, modernism as a concept and as a cultural practice proved to be problematic both in the Soviet Union and in the context of Russian emigration.5 Seeing Prokofiev’s determination, Lunacharsky granted the composer permission to leave the country, “owing to poor health” and “artistic necessity.” Lunacharsky’s liberal attitude toward artists who wanted to leave the Soviet Union inadvertently facilitated what came to be known as the “first wave” of emigration, which led to the division of Russian culture into two: one at home, the other in exile. Likely inspired by literary historian Gleb Struve, Marc Raeff has dubbed this exiled culture “Russia Abroad.”6 Struve’s term, together with its variants (“Russia outside Russia” and “zarubezhnaya Rossiya”), indicates the belief that after the Revolution the culture of prerevolutionary Russia continued outside of the Soviet Union. Unlike the word emigration, Struve’s term was intended to mark the exiled Russians as a community deprived of the possibility of return. Throughout this book I use “Russia Abroad” and emigrant culture interchangeably to signal that for Russians in Paris the hope that the Soviet experiment would eventually fail and they could return home was central to their cultural identity.7 The culture of Russia Abroad was hardly uniform, covering geographically vast areas and consolidating its center in Paris in the middle of the 1920s when, for economic reasons, Berlin yielded its leading role to the French capital. Focusing on exilic literature, Maria Rubins visualizes extraterritorial Russian culture as an archipelago, a seemingly independent and isolated, but culturally interconnected chain of islands with shifting centers and in constant flux, “owing their origin to a series of volcanic eruptions.” Most of the Russian emigrants in Paris from the first wave still adhered to what Rubins calls the “victim tradition” of exile, which slowed integration and interaction with the host country.8 Artists and intellectuals of all stripes fled the Bolshevik utopia, sometimes under hair-raising circumstances. Of this book’s protagonists, Boris de Schloezer (1881– 1969), music critic and brother-in-(common)-law of Alexander Scriabin, moved

Introduction

3

with his sister and her three children from starving Petrograd to German-occupied Kiev in 1918, then to Yalta, where he was conscripted into the White Army. Only after contracting typhoid was he spared from being sent to the front.9 The young composer Vladimir Dukelsky (1903–1969) escaped from Odessa on the last over-crowded cargo ship to leave before the Red Army entered the city.10 Even Nicolas Nabokov (1903–1978), cousin of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, whose emigration was greatly helped by influential family connections, had the emigrants’ share of hardship after he escaped with his family trying to settle first in Athens, then in The Hague, and then in Stuttgart and Berlin, where he had pursued his music education before moving to Paris in 1923.11 Igor Stravinsky and Sergey Diaghilev, already living abroad before the Revolution, became stateless in 1921 when Lenin stripped expatriates of their citizenship. On September 28, 1922, Lenin sent more than one hundred Russian intellectuals suspected of being unsympathetic to the new regime into exile on the German steamer Oberbürgermeister Hacken, remembered as the “philosophy steamer.”12 The composer Arthur Lourié (1892–1966), Stravinsky’s confidant in Paris in the 1920s, had left voluntarily on the same ship the previous month. By 1926, the year Soviet music critic Leonid Sabaneyev (1881–1968) arrived in Paris, about 80,000 Russians were living in France, some 45,000 of whom had settled in the capital.13 In 1929, Ivan Bunin, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature, could jokingly report that in Paris it was only the Eiffel Tower that had not been captured by the Russians: “on the Champs Élysées the Don Cossacks are singing . . . On the Grand Boulevards balalaikas are playing.” Nothing escaped the Russian invasion. “In the dressmaking shops—Russian hands. In the ballet—Russian legs.” The papers carried front-page articles about the defection of Soviet diplomat Grigory Besedovsky; the French author Maurice Rostand was writing a play about the last tsar of Russia (Le dernier tsar, 1929), featuring the Russian-born French actress Ludmilla Pitoëff; the movie theaters played Russian films and films with Russian topics, such as Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia (1928), Fyodor Otsep’s Living Corpse (1929), Hanns Schwarz’s Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna (1929), Ernst Lubitsch’s Patriot about Tsar Paul I (1928), and Alexander Ivanov-Gai’s Ivan the Terrible (1915). Russian pianist Alexander Brailowsky was all the rage, and the “symphony orchestras never stopped playing Stravinsky.”14 The main protagonists of this book are Russian composers in Paris, especially those who inhabited Stravinsky’s orbit. Who were they? According to Sabaneyev, who in 1927 summed up the state of Russian music at home and abroad, they could not be considered a unified group because they lacked a common aesthetics.15 Lourié took the opposite view, arguing that Russian music ceased to exist in Russia after the Communist coup, and that now it was the Russian composers in Paris who represented the homeland.16 Lourié’s argument is familiar to scholars who study the double existence of postrevolutionary Russian culture. The official Soviet line at home, they claim, had

4

Introduction

little connection with the exiled branch, which became a shadowy reflection of the Russian culture that “might have been” without the traumatic break of 1917. The exiled culture gave at least temporary home to intellectuals, many of whom, like Lourié, believed that they continued where prerevolutionary Russia left off. In his recent book, Livak gives a detailed account of what was at stake at this political and cultural border patrolling.17 The cultural category of Russia Abroad is well established, and numerous studies have been written about the literary work of Russian emigrants in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet aside from Stravinsky and Prokofiev, the most famous Russian composers of their generation, musicians are strikingly absent from studies of Russia Abroad. Richard Taruskin’s 2005 essay “Is There a ‘Russia Abroad’ in Music?” is the best entrée into the topic—and it serves as the inspiration for my study.18 Like Sabaneyev and Lourié, Taruskin asks the crucial question: “Can one profitably view the musicians of the Russian interwar diaspora as a group?” To put it differently, “Can one speak collectively of ‘Russia Abroad’ when speaking of music, or only of various Russians abroad?” I attempt to answer this question by taking a somewhat narrower focus, limiting my study to Russian Paris, especially to Stravinsky’s circle, and “charting personal relationships,” which ultimately determined how composers responded to the experience of exile.19 Whereas prerevolutionary Russia, the imagined cultural center for Russian intellectuals, became a phantom land, the real center for Russian musicians was Stravinsky, the star of Parisian musical life, whose alliance to Russian musical traditions was ambiguous at best. Grouping exiled Russian composers together, even in a limited geographical area, has its risks. One is the danger of seeing their work from a Western European perspective as mere exotica, a limiting category that both Stravinsky and Lourié tried to escape. Another potential pitfall is to succumb to the essentialist view that assumes that these composers share some mysterious Russian “essence” that intuitively enables them to speak a stylistically unified musical language, an argument French musicologist Gisèle Brelet made in her contribution to Pyotr Suvchinsky’s two volumes of essays on Russian music in 1953.20 Such a view can easily gain political meaning and is thus part of a nationalistic historical narrative currently thriving in Russia as the country gradually reclaims its formerly exiled intellectuals, aiming to close the gap between the artificially separated two Russian cultures and retroactively create a unified cultural identity. Belated unification can occur with the protagonist’s eager consent, as Stravinsky demonstrated in 1962 during his first return to his homeland since 1914, when he embraced his Russianness in no uncertain terms: “I have spoken Russian all my life. I think in Russian, my way of expressing myself is Russian. Perhaps this is not immediately apparent in my music,” Stravinsky, who by that time had defected to the twelve-tone camp, added, “but it is latent there, a part of its hidden nature.”21 He seems to have forgotten that by the late 1920s he had declared himself a cosmopolitan whose only remaining Russian quality was that he liked music “the way all Russians like music.”22

Introduction

5

This study rejects both the essentialist and the politically charged attempts to unify Soviet and exiled Russian cultures. But I also argue against presenting postrevolutionary Russian culture as existing in two unrelated versions: a distorted form in Soviet Russia and a hermetically preserved old form in the cultural space of exile, an approach that dominated studies of Russian culture during the Cold War.23 As I demonstrate, the cultural border between the Soviet Union and interwar Paris was porous, allowing interactions between the two Russian cultures at least for a while. As the émigré critic Mark Slonim recalled nostalgically in 1931, Russian culture in the 1920s was still a “system of communicating vessels” with a constant flow of ideas, people, and texts between Soviet Russia and the Russian communities in European capitals.24 As such, it functioned as what Andreas Huyssen defined as a “transnational” cultural space, a term that underlines “the dynamic processes of cultural mingling.”25 I do not present a comprehensive chronicle of Russian music in interwar Paris. Rather, I highlight cultural transformations that occurred as prerevolutionary Russian culture migrated West, interacting with French culture as well as with newly minted Soviet trends that were aggressively showcased in Paris to the delight of the French intellectual elite and to the despair of Russian emigrants. I focus on the composers Lourié listed in an important article on the “Russian School” in 1932 as the most important—Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Nabokov, and Dukelsky—leaving out Igor Markevich (1912–1983), the youngest Diaghilev composer on Lourié’s list, whose compositional career was hampered by the impresario’s death in 1929.26 Instead of Markevich, I give voice to Lourié both as an insightful critic and a composer. No study of Stravinsky’s orbit could be complete without giving due consideration to such an important satellite. Nor is this book primarily an account of these Russian composers and their work in emigration. My focus is instead the emigrant space they inhabited and shaped. Several interrelated topics that characterize this cultural space run through the book, first among them the conflict between the narrative of modernism, which requires constant innovation, and the narrative of exile, which considers its mission the preservation of past culture. As Livak points out, this “innovative paradigm” of modernism was problematic both in the exiled Russian culture, in which emigrants insisted on the double mission of preserving and developing the best of prerevolutionary Russian culture, and in Soviet Russia, where political and aesthetic innovations had never been easy bedfellows.27 By combining the perspective of modernism and exile, my study responds to Livak’s call for “the integration of the unduly separated academic fields—modernist and exilic studies—in a single domain of scholarly inquiry.”28 My study also explores the conflict between the Bolsheviks’ and the emigrants’ visions of Russia and its past, which explains the emigrants’ attraction to neoclassicism, a transnational artistic vision that gave them the opportunity to both reconnect to their own past and embrace the French

6

Introduction

idealization of classicism. Equally important in this study are St. Petersburg and its golden poet Pushkin as symbols and cultural foci of emigrant nostalgia. Nostalgia clashed with the political and artistic temptation of Bolshevism, which attracted even Russian emigrants in Paris, where Soviet artistic and political products provided emigrants with an irritant against which they had to measure their cultural aspirations. The emigrants’ musical space in Russian Paris was defined by the centripetal and centrifugal force of Stravinsky’s disproportionate influence. In turn, Stravinsky’s philosophy of musical time, formulated by Suvchinsky and later Brelet, bore the mark of the peculiarity of the emigrants’ perception of time. In broader terms, my topic is emigrants’ responses to the trauma of the Revolution and the consequent exile. I argue that Russian emigrants in the 1920s and 1930s reacted to the trauma by redefining their relationship to modernism’s threefold division of time into past, present, and future. Most fixated on the past with nostalgia, recreating and transforming it with loving care and a self-delusional refusal to accept the modern idea of time as irreversible and progressive. Emigrant nostalgia fits both of Svetlana Boym’s definitions of nostalgia: retrospective nostalgia that thrives on nóstos (return) and attempts to reconstruct the lost home, believing in it as truth and tradition; and reflective nostalgia that focuses on álgos (longing) and “cherishes shattered fragments of memory” without contemplating return. Both, she writes, can be viewed negatively as “an abdication of personal responsibility, a guilt-free homecoming, an ethical and aesthetic failure.”29 As Joseph Brodsky put it, emigrants’ obstinacy for keeping their gaze fixed on the past translated into “the repetitiveness of nostalgia,” which resulted in “a failure to deal with the realities of the present or uncertainties of the future.”30 Being nostalgic also meant wearing the label “emigrant” openly, preventing, or at least significantly limiting, potential interaction with the host country. One way to escape the trap of nostalgia was to go in the opposite direction and at least experiment with marching in step with the Bolsheviks and their obsession with revolutionary progress, an attitude that required a radical detachment from the past and a commitment to a utopian future. Predictably, few emigrants chose that route. Those who did, like Prokofiev, were easy targets for the Soviet government’s efforts to lure back its intellectual luminaries. Neither nostalgia nor yielding to the Bolshevik temptation proved to be productive in the context of emigrant existence. Neoclassicism provided an alternative sense of temporality: an illusory past scrubbed of historical associations— light, unconcerned, emotionally detached, free of historical guilt. Like nostalgia, neoclassicism involves a backward gaze but lacks its emotional charge, remaining instead cold and calculating in its creation of a carefully constructed, imaginary past. As Scott Messing and Richard Taruskin pointed out, the neoclassical impulse in French music appeared as a strong reaction against German influence, first in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. The trauma of World War I under-

Introduction

7

standably exacerbated the anti-German bias of neoclassicism and offered Stravinsky the opportunity to become “Wagner’s Antichrist.”31 In an ironic twist neoclassicism, an artistic trend deeply rooted in French nationalist resentment, allowed the Russian Stravinsky to turn into “the paragon of Frenchness.”32 This part of the story is well known. But neoclassicism was not simply Stravinsky’s passport to Europe. It was also his effort to recover his Russian past, as Schloezer, the first critic who applied the term to Stravinsky in 1923, insisted. Integrating various French definitions of neoclassicism into exilic studies, I offer the context of Russian exile to shed light on a little-explored aspect of this infinitely elusive term. In the remainder of the introduction I provide a short overview of the musical life of Russian Paris, relying on Lev Mnukhin’s exhaustive four-volume chronicle of Russian emigrant events in Paris,33 as well as on Prokofiev’s witty, sharp-tongued commentary on the hustle and bustle of interwar Paris and the rivalries in its Russian musical subculture, preserved in his diaries. From Stravinsky’s and Prokofiev’s exalted positions, Paris in the 1920s was a veritable mecca for musicians, where in the 1927–1928 season alone 267 symphonic concerts took place, with premieres of 133 new compositions by 105 composers.34 Opportunities were obviously much more limited for Russian composers of less fame. Sabaneyev’s analyses of the scene, both his optimistic description from the late 1920s and his depressed survey from 1937, reflect the perspective of a failed composer.35 Not always a trustworthy music critic, Sabaneyev was nevertheless an astute social observer whose views resonated with other marginalized Russian composers struggling in the French capital. Lourié’s analysis of Russian Paris is more ideologically tendentious. Although, like Sabaneyev, he ultimately ended up on the margins, for almost a decade he was a vocal proponent of Stravinsky’s aesthetics and thus played a significant role in shaping the narrative of Russian music in Paris. In spite of their opposing conclusions about the existence of a Parisian Russian school of composition, Lourié’s and Sabaneyev’s analyses both focus on Stravinsky, whose music and aesthetic beliefs exerted an especially potent gravitational pull for Russians in Paris. S O U N D I N G RU S SIA N I N PA R I S

The poet Vladislav Khodasevich once remarked that Russians, even when all else disappeared, would assemble into the strangest groups, founding, for instance, societies “of those who once walked in the Summer Garden,” or “of those who prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace.”36 Musicians were a bit more practical. They formed ensembles, founded a conservatory, started concert series, orchestras (among them several balalaika orchestras), choruses, musical societies, opera companies, and music publishers. Posledniye novosti, the most important daily émigré newspaper in Paris between 1920 and 1940, and Vozrozhdeniye, a more conservative Russian paper, provided daily listings of concerts and musical events

8

Introduction

of interest to Russian audiences. Surveying just one year, 1927 (a year explored in detail in chapter 2), demonstrates a pervasive Russian presence in Paris’s musical life. In January, lovers of Russian opera could attend Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride at the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées. In February, they could hear a concert performance of Anton Rubinstein’s Demon, in April Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko in the Théâtre Trocadéro, in September his Snow Maiden in concert performance at the Salle Gaveau, and in October Modest Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, also a concert performance, at the Salle Pleyel. Professors and students of the Russian Conservatory gave concerts at least once a month. Russian musicians were also frequently featured with French orchestras. The Colonne Orchestra engaged the opera singer A. I. Mozzhukhin in January, and the singers of the Kedrov Quartet and Vladimir Horowitz in February. In February and March, the singers V. I. Braminov and G. F. Leonov performed with the Pasdeloup Orchestra. Russian singers, violinists, and pianists performed Russian music besides the standard repertory. In April pianist R. Otsup slipped the premiere of a work by Nikolai Medtner into a program of Rameau, Scarlatti, and Chopin in the Salle de Géographie. In May Nikolai Orlov played Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Sсriabin, and Prokofiev in the Salle des Agriculteurs, with Prokofiev in attendance. Musicians were engaged to play not only at concerts but at Russian clubs, evenings of music and poetry, balls, banquets, and fundraising events. Mnukhin’s Russkoye zarubezh’ye chronicles a flourishing musical life, with Russian musicians at the center of attention in the French capital. Until 1928, when Sergey Koussevitzky ended his concerts in Paris to give his full attention to the Boston Symphony, and 1929, when Diaghilev’s death put an end to his Russian Ballet, the highlights of the Parisian musical season were unquestionably Koussevitzky’s concerts and Diaghilev’s dazzling spectacles. Between 1921 and 1928 Koussevitzky not only gave premieres of important works by Stravinsky and Prokofiev, but he also introduced works by such other living Russian composers as Maximilian Steinberg, Alexander Kastalsky, Alexander Glazunov, Alexander Gretchaninov, Dukelsky, and Nikolai Lopatnikov to the Parisian public. He even risked performing excerpts from Nikolai Obukhov’s Book of Life in 1926, a premiere that left many in the audience bewildered.37 Diaghilev served a somewhat smaller circle of living Russian composers. Besides Stravinsky, only Nikolai Tcherepnin, Steinberg, Prokofiev, Dukelsky, and Nabokov made his roster. For Russian composers who wanted to rise, it was crucial to belong to either Koussevitzky’s or to Diaghilev’s circles. Even Stravinsky’s and Prokofiev’s careers needed the steady support of both. Concerts were only one of many venues where musicians interacted. Prokofiev’s diaries paint a vivid picture of the constant buzzing that energized him during his years in Paris. During the Paris season of Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet and Koussevitzky’s concerts, which in the 1920s lasted from the end of May until the end of June, Prokofiev attended at least one, if not two concerts, a day. In the 1927 season

Introduction

9

he had important premieres with both Koussevitzky and with Diaghilev. On May 26, 1927, by no means a unique example in Prokofiev’s calendar, he worked with Leonid Massine, the choreographer of his new Diaghilev ballet, Pas d’acier, went to hear Koussevitzky’s rehearsal of his Overture, op. 74, and attended a performance of his Third Piano Sonata. He was not so preoccupied with his own premieres as to miss the dress rehearsal of Stravinsky’s new opera Oedipus Rex, on May 30, the rehearsal and concert of his friend Dukelsky’s Piano Concerto, or a concert demonstrating mechanical instruments. If not attending concerts in the evening, he would socialize with musicians, attending a party to celebrate Koussevitzky’s opening concert, a soiree at the Princess de Polignac featuring Horowitz, or a gathering at the house of Henry Prunières, editor of the Revue musicale, with Maurice Ravel, Manuel de Falla, Arthur Honegger, Koussevitzky, and Arthur Rubinstein. At these events he learned what his fellow musicians thought of the highlights of the season—the most entertaining part of the evening at Prunières’ was hearing Koussevitzky and Rubinstein’s vicious critique of “both Oedipe and Stravinsky’s abominable conducting.”38 Musicians also visited each other. On January 25, 1924, for instance, Prokofiev entertained the family of Nikolai Tcherepnin by playing them his opera Love for Three Oranges and his Fifth Piano Sonata. A month later he tried out the sonata again at the Prunières. He was eager to show his new piece to Stravinsky, who graciously agreed to listen. On June 18, 1927, he played his Overture, op. 42, and his ballet Pas d’acier for music critic Jean Marnold, a Prokofiev enthusiast who, the composer reported, wanted to start a new journal “with a pro-Prokofiev” agenda. Suvchinsky brought Dukelsky over to Prokofiev’s so that the young composer could pay him his Piano Concerto. Prokofiev showed his Second Concerto to Koussevitzky in the Pleyel shop, where by chance they also managed to overhear the concluding bars of Stravinsky’s Piano Concerto, being rehearsed in the same building.39 Composers listened, overheard, and gossiped. A convenient gathering place was the music store of Koussevitzky’s publishing house, Rossiskoye muzïkal’noye izdatel’stvo or Édition russe de musique, on rue d’Anjou, the only music store outside Russia that carried scores of new Russian music written both inside and outside that country.40 Prokofiev, who had no permanent address, had his mail sent to Édition russe, where he also stored his manuscripts. He dropped by frequently to pick up mail, collect manuscripts, discuss the publication of his work, peruse new scores, and encounter other composers. In his diary he recorded his meetings with Stravinsky, another frequent visitor on rue d’Anjou, with whom he often discussed new projects. On November 11, 1928, after running into Stravinsky at the publisher, Prokofiev accompanied him to the rehearsal of Le Baiser de la fée, which Stravinsky conducted. Seeing them together always thrilled Russian composers. Spotting Prokofiev greeting Stravinsky once at a concert, Nabokov exclaimed: “How fascinating to witness the very essence of Russian music saluting itself.”41

10

Introduction

Koussevitzky’s Édition russe was also a source of much needed financial support for underemployed composers. Stravinsky recommended his friend Lourié to prepare piano transcriptions of his Octet and Symphonies of Wind Instruments for publication. Sabaneyev, who had little sympathy from Prokofiev and Stravinsky because of his anti-modernist stance,42 ended up doing copying work there, “slaving away over manuscripts by [Alexander] Gretchaninov,” as Prokofiev noted maliciously in his diary.43 Sabaneyev was indeed quite desperate. A highly educated music critic and pianist with a degree in mathematics, he had unfulfilled ambitions as a composer. In 1933 he moved his musical activities to Nice to write music for the film studio “La Victorine,” accompany ballet performances at hotels and casinos, and, after 1937, to give two-piano recitals with his wife, occasionally featuring his own compositions.44 O U T O F O R B I T: S A BA N EY EV

As Sabaneyev’s failed compositional career demonstrates, the musical scene in Paris did not benefit all living Russian composers. In Russian Paris, most musical events featured standard Russian fare that was played and replayed ad nauseam. As the discouraged Sabaneyev complained in an article he wrote for Sovremennïye zapiski (Contemporary Annals) in 1937, the average Russian emigrant was not particularly musical. Even those who loved music would rather hear balalaika orchestras and Gypsy music than a new symphony by Prokofiev. If they were lovers of classical music, they loved the classics—Chaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth—music that reminded them of the Russian musical scene they had left behind. Russian composers who emigrated lost the small audience for contemporary music that had just begun to materialize a few years before the war in Russia. At concerts where works by Russian emigrant composers were played, such as the concerts sponsored by the Russian Musical Society Abroad (RMOZ), the organizers could recruit only about two hundred Russian emigrants to attend, two-thirds of them too poor to pay the admission fee.45 For Sabaneyev and other composers of his ilk, having RMOZ or lectures on Russian music as their only concert venue was virtually a public announcement of their failure.46 As Sabaneyev knew fairly well, Russian composers did not want to write exclusively for the emigrant audience. Dreaming of international success when they left Russia, they wanted a broader public.47 Paris became their mecca less for its vibrant musical life than as the place where Stravinsky had gained world fame. More than the city itself, it was Stravinsky’s example that drew them. Those, like Sabaneyev, who could not break out of their emigrant circles, quietly faded away. Only those who could enter Stravinsky’s circle and connect to a broader audience through Russian music’s two most influential enterprises, Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet or Koussevitzky’s concerts, had a chance of a significant career.

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11

No wonder that the two stars of the Russian music scene, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, kept a certain distance from émigré circles. Prokofiev, who traveled on a Soviet passport that he had to renew periodically at the Soviet Embassy in Paris, was especially cautious. On February 16, 1924, he attended a meeting of the Russian colony and listened to talks by the writers Ivan Bunin and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, the historian and theologian Anton Kartashov, and others. He had little sympathy for what they said: “They all inveighed against the Bolsheviks, wept for trampledupon Russia and in the name of Christ called for hatred.” Although he listened to them with interest, he tried to remain neutral.48 He was flattered when in 1925 B. A. Zak, secretary of the Russian Conservatory in Paris, approached him to sound him out whether he would consider becoming the director of the institution. But after learning more about the conflicts between different factions from the music administrator Pierre Blois, he lost interest.49 If not always to Prokofiev, to his friends at least it was clear that he should distance himself from the Russian emigrant community. On January 8, 1926, he was invited to play at a festive meeting of Russian writers, poets, and composers celebrating the “Day of Russian Culture,” “to demonstrate to Parisians that the Soviet Revolution has not yet entirely destroyed Russian culture,” as Prokofiev reported sarcastically in his diary. Suvchinsky, Prokofiev’s Eurasianist friend, blew up at what he considered the composer’s incomprehension of his stature. Declaring that Russian music was “wholly sustained” by Stravinsky and Prokofiev, he advised Prokofiev to avoid such pitifully nostalgic emigrant gatherings.50 Neither did Stravinsky have any need for emigrant support. On February 8, 1931, Lourié, who was serving as his unofficial secretary at the time, reported to him that members of RMOZ came to him to “test the waters” about whether Stravinsky would be willing to become a member. Likely offended by not being invited himself, Lourié gave Stravinsky a sarcastic account of the rebirth of the musical society that he had considered passé already in Russia. Tcherepnin and “his hangers on” called a general meeting in the Salle Gaveau, he informed Stravinsky, hoping to find “gullible and stupid people who are ready to serve the ‘cause’ of Russian art.”51 Stravinsky, who two days later declared to Gavriil Paichadze, managing director of Édition russe, “God preserve me from getting mixed up with these activities of the Russian emigration!!!!!!,” was obviously not interested.52 In Sabaneyev’s position it was hard not to feel bitter. Instead of a coherent group of Russian composers, he saw only those who rubbed shoulders with Stravinsky and Prokofiev, and thus with success, and had the luxury of ignoring those who could barely cobble together a living. Obviously irritated by Stravinsky’s overwhelming influence, Sabaneyev devoted his initial reports from Paris to the Soviet Union to the demystification of his famous contemporary. Although politically biased, his social analysis of Stravinsky’s immense success and of the failure of most of his compatriots was not without insight. He did not question Stravinsky’s talent, especially since he

12

Introduction

admired Firebird and Petrushka, which, in Sabaneyev’s view, were the only works that would survive their creator.53 But Stravinsky, Sabaneyev argued, would not have been so stratospherically successful without Diaghilev, whose magic turned Russian works into a sensation in the West. Nobody would deny, Sabaneyev wrote, that the fame of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, as well as the Western reputation of Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, was due in large part to Diaghilev’s sorcery. Unfortunately, by the time most Russian composers reached Paris, Diaghilev’s magical powers were on the wane. With no one to fill Diaghilev’s role, perplexed Russian composers came to realize that the Parisian public was moving on to a new type of exotica, the art seeping out of Soviet Russia. While emigrants were being unapologetically pushed aside, “everything ‘Soviet’ was arousing snobbish interest,” Sabaneyev complained.54 In 1927 Diaghilev made a feeble attempt to meet the new demand by producing Prokofiev’s Bolshevik ballet Pas d’acier, but the work failed to catch on. Sensitive to changing fashions, Diaghilev began to worry that “Bolsheviks were no longer à la mode” already before the premiere and proposed changes to the ballet’s scenario.55 Especially after Diaghilev’s death, composers, whose work Sabaneyev compared to delicate, greenhouse plants, had to face the rough conditions of the open market where money, connections, and advertising power mattered at least as much as talent. Destitute emigrant composers did not have the financial means to present themselves effectively to the Parisian audiences. Unlike poets, who could give poetry reading at virtually no expense, composers required financing.56 Even Nina Berberova, who struggled to survive in Paris as a writer and thought that painters, artists of the theater, and musicians “lived a more ‘normal’ life,” admitted that painting was an easier sell than music.57 Apart from Stravinsky, Sabaneyev detected no center in the musical life of Russian Paris. He saw only warring factions, rapidly changing fashions, and the destabilizing effects of modernism. Composers, Sabaneyev tried to explain to his Soviet audience, acted like sportsmen: breaking records, chasing after novelties, reinventing themselves in order to secure their marketability. Most Russian composers could not negotiate this rapidly changing scene. Composers such as Sergei Rachmaninoff (who had no residence in Paris), Medtner, and Gretchaninov who, in Sabaneyev’s account, represented the “Old Testament of music,” continued to compose in the style they had already developed in Russia. Rachmaninoff especially stood firmly “in opposition to all currents of contemporary music.”58 Stravinsky and Prokofiev belonged to the New Testament of music, destroying earlier traditions and opening up new directions. In Sabaneyev’s view, with The Rite of Spring Stravinsky “became the leader of the most leftist maximalistic currents in music,” acting, he added with apparent enjoyment, as Lenin and Trotsky did in politics. Already by 1926 Sabaneyev declared Stravinsky victor in the battle between the two stars of Russian music, Stravinsky forcing Prokofiev, Sabaneyev added in 1937, to “escape” the rough capitalist battlefield by returning to the Soviet Union.

Introduction

13

What was Stravinsky’s secret? For Sabaneyev the answer was simple: Stravinsky’s protean genius perfectly matched the demands of the Western market economy. His cold, dry, calculating, and soulless music, the critic argued, fit the spirit of his anti-musical epoch. According to Sabaneyev, Stravinsky’s breathtaking career was built on a business model. By quickly changing styles he satisfied at once the thirst for novelty and dictated fashion. Sabaneyev recognized Stravinsky’s gift for publicity, intimating that Stravinsky owned “a secret advertising apparatus” and was able to manipulate even negative reviews of his work to his advantage.59 In the cutthroat atmosphere of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, only Stravinsky managed to secure for himself immunity from real criticism, not because critics liked his music, but because nobody dared to cry out, “Look, the king is naked.” And so, as in the fairytale, “the naked king coquettishly walked in the alleys of world fame, enjoying the universal confusion he created.”60 In Sabaneyev’s belief it was precisely this businesslike attitude that distinguished Stravinsky from his fellow emigrants. Stravinsky, Sabaneyev argued, clearly did not belong to the Russian emigrant community. How could he be considered an emigrant when he had been living abroad since 1910 and had been a French citizen since 1934? Stravinsky could be called a Russian composer only by elimination: by being neither Soviet nor French. But did being Russian mean anything beyond Stravinsky’s ambiguous national attachments? Sabaneyev detected nothing specifically Russian in Stravinsky. Although his fame was established with works that were still worthy successors of Russian national trends, the new Stravinsky seemed to have had a completely different psychological makeup than his Russian predecessors. His calculating mindset, Sabaneyev insisted, would have been more at home in warehouses than in Russian composers’ workshops.61 Sabaneyev’s unstated conclusion was that Stravinsky’s fame ultimately did not promote the cause of Russian composers abroad. If they tried to follow in his footsteps, they ceased to be Russian; if they remained Russian, they had little chance of succeeding in the competitive Western market, dominated by Stravinsky. Nevertheless, Stravinsky provided the only center in a musical scene in Paris that Sabaneyev otherwise described with a pun as “ex-centric,” that is, lacking a center. In his Modern Russian Composers (1927) he recounted the experience of Russian composers finding themselves “under the heavy and despotic hand” of Stravinsky. But Stravinsky’s influence, according to Sabaneyev, provided no coherence. In the penultimate chapter of his book he denied the very existence of what in the title of the chapter he called, misleadingly, “The Russian-Parisian School.” Composers who ended up in Paris “did not possess any ‘tendency’ as a unit,” he argued. They did not hold similar views or definite musical convictions. Their gathering in one geographical place was merely accidental, for they fled Russia not because of common political persuasion but “to escape the discomforts of life and out of fear of the social explosion.”62 Not seeing any coherence among Russian

14

Introduction

composers, Sabaneyev divided his discussion into a general introduction describing the musical scene, followed by a brief entry on a few individual composers. In his short survey in Modern Russian Composers he featured only three emigrant composers, Alexander Tcherepnin, Lourié, and Obukhov.63 Curiously, in 1937 he replaced the three with composers of more conservative leanings: Medtner, Gretchaninov, and Nikolai Tcherepnin, father of Alexander, as the only ones, besides Stravinsky and Prokofiev, whom he considered at all successful in emigration.64 The composers about whom he had written earlier still appeared in his discussion of Russian composers in 1937, but he gave them short shrift, assigning the evaluation of Obukhov’s work to the psychiatrist rather than the music critic, and describing the music of Lourié, whom in 1927 he considered to be the composer most under the influence of Stravinsky, as only a clever assemblage of elements from the surrounding culture.65 S AT E L L I T E : L OU R I É

Lourié, who for almost a decade acted as Stravinsky’s confidant and thus had, or at least wanted to believe that he had, direct access to the sanctum sanctorum of Russian music abroad, had a different perspective on the state of Russian music than Sabaneyev. In 1931 he published a short essay on Russian composers in Paris in La revue musicale as part of a broad survey of “the situation of music in all countries.” Like Sabaneyev, he felt obliged to give a short lesson on the history of Russian music, which he described as mainly a process of liberation from the German yoke. Also like Sabaneyev, he presented Stravinsky as the central figure who managed to break “the traditional bonds of Russian and German music.” Unlike Sabaneyev, Lourié explained the stratospheric rise of Stravinsky not as the result of the composer’s brilliant marketing ability but as a logical outcome of the development of Russian music. The Rite of Spring, Lourié declared, was “the coronation of Scythian-accented music and provided the inspiration for breaking with all the ideologies that sought to impose a Western language on Russian music.”66 Lourié distinguished the two postrevolutionary scenes of Russian music, calling the one in the Soviet Union “intra muros” and the one in Western Europe “extra muros,” and defined the latter by the active engagement with Western life and its loosened ties with the homeland. Music in the Soviet Union was slow to react to the political changes, Lourié wrote, relying on his experience of working as a commissar of music under Lunacharsky. In his estimation, composers stuck to prerevolutionary decadent trends or retreated to academicism not knowing how to respond to the radically new political reality by a radically new musical language. Lourié did not deny that in the future music in the Soviet Union could overcome its provincial status and doctrinaire formulas, but he clearly saw the future of Russian music as outside the Soviet Union.

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15

Who were the composers in the “extra muros” Russian group? Stravinsky was obviously too great to be listed as a member of any group, so Lourié created a separate category for him, the “European as only a Russian can be,” and placed him, at least in the French version of the article, “on the margins” of the Russian school, granting him the exalted genius status of a permanent outsider. The editor, Prunières, added a footnote to this statement: “The same could be said of the tendencies of Arthur Lourié.” This footnote was probably the biggest boost to Lourié’s ego at the time and seems to have emboldened him to include his own name directly after Stravinsky’s and Prokofiev’s in the significantly expanded English version of the article a year later. Since all of the composers Lourié considered first tier (Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Dukelsky, Nabokov, and Markevich) were employed by Diaghilev, he was obviously exaggerating his status by including his own name in the list. Even as Stravinsky’s satellite, he had never been included in Diaghilev’s circle. Lourié’s choice of composers for his second tier was more random. In the French version, he included as Russian composers in Paris Nikolai Berezovsky and Lopatnikov, who had never lived in the city; Julian Krein, an eighteen-year old Russian composer who spent seven years in Paris before he returned to Soviet Russia in 1934; Obukhov, who had his fifteen minutes of fame when Koussevitzky premiered excerpts from his Book of Life in 1926; the more prominent Alexander Tcherepnin; and the quarter-tone composer Ivan Vishnegradsky. Not even a common geographical location unified this group. But like composers of the Mighty Five (or the French “Les Six”), seven of Lourié’s “Paris composers”—Vishnegradsky, Dukelsky, Lourié, Nabokov, Alexander Tcherepnin, and their lode stars Stravinsky and Prokofiev—appeared together in a concert on June 9, 1926, in the Salle Pleyel.67 Lourié made no effort to justify his list, and in the English version of the article he dropped Krein without explanation. The only musical common ground he mentioned was the sentimental, nostalgic tendencies in some members of the “extra muros” Russian group. Lourié ended the French version of his essay on a brazenly optimistic note, declaring that “with the European Stravinsky and the Russian Prokofiev at the helm, our young school pursues its march unfailingly, even if with some detours.”68 There was little basis for such optimism. The English version of the essay gave Lourié the opportunity to elaborate on the subject at greater length. But the expanded version revealed even more the logical glitch regarding Stravinsky’s status in Russian music, which Lourié, although practiced in ideologically tendentious polemics, was unable to evade. Could Stravinsky’s “desertion to international shores be regarded as treachery to Russian nationalism?” His answer to this crucial question was a resounding no, but, like most committed ideologues, he failed to support the assertion. He defended Stravinsky’s turn by the composer’s modernist obligation to seek novelties. After all, the “Scythian problem had been developed to its full extent, and further progress in this direction was impossible.” He declared that the new Stravinsky confined

16

Introduction

himself “exclusively to the question of form,” renouncing “musical nationalism pure and simple” and turning “towards the formal canons of the West,” establishing thus for himself “a durable connection with the heritage of Western musical culture.” This formalist definition left nothing particularly “Russian” in Stravinsky’s Western orientation besides what Lourié saw as a parallel between the universalist Stravinsky and the universal mission of Soviet Russia, with the difference that in Stravinsky’s music the transformative “role of Karl Marx [was] played by Bach.”69 Trained in the internationalist version of the Marxist doctrine in the early years of Soviet Russia, Lourié still saw nationalistic principles antagonistic to Soviet ideology and logically concluded that the “Paris group . . . may be considered the modern representative of the national Russian school.” Like Russian literature, Russian music thus moved abroad and gained a mission of providing Russian national music with a historical continuation, impossible in Soviet Russia. Unlike literature, which, according to Lourié, suffered from “the rupture with the national territory,” music was “not necessarily connected with any country.” Being politically and geographically separated from Russia had both positive and negative consequences. Among the positive, Lourié listed Russian composers’ overcoming provincialism and acquiring “a formal and technical equipment equal to that of the West.” On the negative side he mentioned “a decadent ideology and a kind of reactionary aestheticism” that appeared among some of the younger members of the group, who “nourish their creative powers on memories of the old Russian culture, which has already accomplished its course and to which there can be no return.”70 But was Lourié’s first tier of composers indeed “representatively Russian?” Lourié felt obliged to ask the question because it was so “frequently raised in Russian émigré circles with regard to Russian literature.” He answered the question in the affirmative, but again he failed to justify his position and move beyond such generalities as claiming that the group represented the evolution and continuation of the work of the Russian school because composers in the group continued to employ the same Russian musical language. As if wanting to evade the follow-up question, Lourié declared that he could not “dwell on the nature and meaning of this language and must limit [himself] to a mere statement of the fact.” Lourié’s inability to back up his statement indicates that his seemingly firm assumption expressed more his wish than the facts. Lourié’s failure to move beyond generalities in his definition of what he meant to present as a coherent Russian school of music abroad demonstrates the challenges emigrants faced when they tried to define their culture. More specifically, Lourié’s struggle to integrate Stravinsky into the narrative of Russian music abroad and at the same time preserve a separate category for him outside the Russian fold points to the difficulty of finding the unifying characteristics of Russian composers in Paris. Like other émigrés, Lourié also seems to have been torn between his

Introduction

17

modernist principles, which required constant innovation, and the nationalist mandate for preserving national traditions. He emphasized the group’s modernist tendencies and its connection with “the contemporary musical life of the West,”71 which he considered necessary for losing one’s provincial status, a sensitive topic for Lourié who, being of Jewish heritage and from the provinces, did his utmost to rid himself of remnants of his origins. But completely losing one’s accent runs the risk of also losing one’s national identity, which, as Stravinsky’s international career demonstrated, served as an indispensable vehicle for his cosmopolitan success.72 In a way Sabaneyev’s description of the existential difficulties Russian composers faced in Paris does point to a common ground, a shared experience of exile that can be a more fruitful ground for discussing these composers than the stylistic details of their compositions. How exile affected these composers’ lives was drastically varied, as a comparison of Stravinsky’s success with others’ failures demonstrates. As Taruskin has pointed out, Stravinsky, like Vladimir Nabokov, “can be an impediment to studying the Russian musical diaspora” because his giant figure and spectacular career unavoidably overwhelm others.73 But even Stravinsky’s aesthetics were affected by the same malaise. His proposed cure, neoclassicism, although more effective than his fellow emigrants’ nostalgia, bears the unmistakable mark of being preoccupied with his relationship to his Russian past, that is, with the condition of exile. •

•

•

Focusing on Vladimir Dukelsky’s oratorio The End of St. Petersburg, the first chapter probes the main topic of the book: the irreconcilable conflict between the emigrants’ nostalgic vision of the past and the Soviets’ radical rewriting of history. Because it was inspired by Pudovkin’s 1928 film of the same title, Dukelsky’s oratorio is a peculiar work in which the emigrants’ nostalgia clashes with Soviet triumphalism. Conceived in the 1920s and completed in the 1930s, the creation of The End of St. Petersburg encompasses the entire time period of the book and thus demonstrates how Paris, site of Russian emigrants’ dreams of their lost homeland in the 1920s, turned into the site of the exhibition of Soviet power at the end of the 1930s, a new cultural space that left little room for Russian emigrant nostalgia. Planned for Paris, rewritten for an unrealized Moscow performance, and finally receiving its exiled premiere in New York, Dukelsky’s oratorio also displays the difficulties emigrant composers faced as they tried to negotiate different cultural markets. The Soviet vision of Russia dominates the second chapter. But Prokofiev’s Pas d’acier, the central work in the chapter, is not a genuinely Soviet work. Rather, it is an emigrant’s fantasy about Soviet Russia, an attempt to exchange emigrant nostalgia for Soviet artistic radicalism. What Prokofiev and Diaghilev imagined as a politically neutral ballet found itself embroiled in politics. As the ballet’s confused reception shows, political neutrality was not an option for Russians in interwar Paris and

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Introduction

Diaghilev quickly learned that yielding to the Bolshevik temptation was a cul-de-sac in the West. Emigrants, feigning political neutrality, could not speak the language of Bolshevism with conviction. Pas d’acier shared the fate of Dukelsky’s oratorio in trying to serve conflicting markets: Paris, London, Moscow, and New York. The story of the ballet demonstrates that the border between Soviet Russia and the West was permeable only in one direction: the temptation of Bolshevism seeped through the border to the French capital, but Prokofiev’s Western product could not cross the border of the composer’s politically transformed homeland. The cul-de-sac of both retrospective nostalgia and Bolshevik progressivism left emigrant composers with a conundrum. Neoclassicism offered a possible solution, proposing an artistic vision that fit perfectly into postwar Paris in the 1920s. Nabokov’s Ode, a cantata Diaghilev performed in 1928 and the topic of chapter 3, drew on Russian emigrants’ attraction to what they conceived was their “classical” past. Nabokov’s classical aspirations, however, were still too freighted with nostalgia for Russia’s aristocratic eighteenth century. A near failure, Ode demonstrated that simply revisiting a Russian past free of dark, revolutionary forebodings was not enough to escape the emotional confines of emigration. In the ballet Apollo, staged in the same season as Nabokov’s Ode, Stravinsky created what could be conceived as the perfect neoclassical work. Chapter 4 describes Apollo both as a response to Diaghilev and Prokofiev’s yielding to the Bolshevik temptation in Pas d’acier and Stravinsky’s desire to free himself from the Bolshevik associations of his own radical Rite of Spring by creating a neutral past. I argue that Stravinsky’s neoclassicism in Apollo was not only a postwar, posttraumatic artistic response that corresponded with French artistic trends, but also Stravinsky’s own solution to a problem created by emigration. Modernism tamed, national identity neutralized, nostalgia pushed into the background, Stravinsky’s neoclassicism seems to have managed to sidestep the debilitating condition of exile. A means of purifying Stravinsky of his Russian past, Apollo nevertheless had strong Russian resonances in its evocation of prerevolutionary Russia and its imperial capital, St. Petersburg. The emigrants’ fervent embrace of this past is the topic of chapter 5. Russia’s double past, one dark, uncontrolled, Dionysian revelry leading to the Revolution, the other bright, rational, Apollonian, manifested in St. Petersburg’s clear lines, was on display in 1937 when both the emigrants and the Soviets at home celebrated the centenary of Pushkin’s death. Emigrants claimed Pushkin as their Apollo, a sun god of rationality and classical values, associated with the image of a Russia culturally holding itself equal to the West. The Communist campaign to transform Pushkin into a revolutionary cut deep into emigrant sensitivities. Again, the two visions of Russia’s past clashed as the emigrants outside Russia and the Communists in the Soviet Union mounted their celebrations. As the French reception of these celebrations attests, by the end of the 1930s the drumbeat of Soviet propaganda had the power to drown out the voices of the emigrants.

Introduction

19

I show this upcoming silence in chapter 6, in which I discuss Lourié’s operaballet based on Pushkin’s little tragedy A Feast in Time of Plague. A lifelong devotee of the Symbolists, Lourié evoked a Pushkin who embodied Apollonian and Dionysian elements, trying to transcend both in the end by offering a mystical, religious vision of salvation. Never staged, A Feast in Time of Plague is a typical emigrant work, incomprehensible in its complexity in Paris at the end of the 1930s. Lourié, one of the most forgotten figures among emigrant Russian composers, also serves as an example of the challenges of building an artistic career in the shadow of Stravinsky in interwar Paris. Lourié’s gradual disappearance from the musical scene was the fate of many other Russian emigrants who perished in the centrifugal force of Stravinsky’s frequently changing aesthetics. Apparently, the Pushkin cult was not strong enough to unite the crumbling emigrant community in Paris. As Sabaneyev wrote, most likely thinking of Prokofiev, by 1937 those composers who wanted to return to the Soviet Union had already returned, and those who wanted to assimilate had already assimilated, which meant that Russian music as such was about to cease to exist in emigration.74 But Sabaneyev forgot about an additional category, which Taruskin assigned to those who, like Lourié, “could neither assimilate nor go home” and who “quite literally disappeared” during or after the 1930s, remaining permanently suspended between memories of old Russia and the unwelcoming West.75 In the Epilogue, I examine this peculiar act of disappearing, ending the study that began with the protagonists’ arrivals to Paris with their departures from the French capital. By the end of the 1930s, Paris, like St. Petersburg before it, emptied of its Russian intellectual elite. Like the former capital of imperial Russia, it became a city haunted by its departed Russian inhabitants who yet again withdrew into the illusory space of memory. During its ten-year gestation from 1928 to 1938, Dukelsky’s End of St. Petersburg gradually turned from a nostalgic trip to an imagined Petersburg into an attempted trip to Paris, with the hope that the composer could relive, as the Americanized Duke’s popular song called it, his “April in Paris” (1932).76 But again like St. Petersburg of imperial Russia, the Paris of the 1930s was not a place to which to return, and for many Russians their springtime in Paris was followed by, to cite another Duke standard, “Autumn in New York” (1934).77 From the perspective of this second dislocation, Paris became another target of the Greek nóstos or return home, the root from which the word nostalgia was coined. Stravinsky, yet again, followed another route and, like a phoenix, renewed himself in the United States, choosing, as Suvchinsky and later Brelet described it, to celebrate the present or the perception of real time instead of binding himself nostalgically to the past like most of his fellow Russian emigrants. For the emigrants Stravinsky’s conversion to twelve-tone music in the United States signaled his final severing of ties with the Russian community in exile. No one was able to repeat with the twelve-tone Stravinsky the feat Schloezer performed when he reclaimed

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the neoclassical Stravinsky as ultimately still Russian. His final betrayal deprived Russian music abroad of its center. This book is about this nostalgic space of Russian Paris, which, in turn, became itself an object of nostalgia, and about the various ways in which composers tried to untangle the inherent contradiction between their nostalgic attachment to an obsolete Russian culture and the modernist demand for novelty, a conundrum that ultimately only Stravinsky succeeded if not to solve at least to bypass.

1

Double Narratives or Dukelsky’s The End of St. Petersburg Other poets and novelists sang the praises of the city—its eerie beauty, cold and forbidding, but ever an irresistible magnet; its stone and granite, the white Arctic nights, the cameolike faces of our great-grandmothers flushed with the excitement of their first “écossaise,” the steel-gray waters of the mighty Neva, the romantic trips to the far-famed Nevsky Prospect, Petersburg’s unique main thoroughfare. Nicholas Gogol wrote a miraculously imaginative story about Nevsky; “La Belle Inconnue” of Alexander Blok appeared unexpectedly in the street’s cafés and restaurants; the foppish silhouettes of Onegin, of Tchazky [i.e., Chatsky] (Griboyedoff ’s cynic), of Lermontoff ’s “Hero of Our time,” of the returning Turgenev’s globe trotters, and finally the effeminate esthetes created by Sologub and Kuzmin—they all haunted the immaculate pavements. Crossing the street any minute now may be the ghost of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, followed by Dostoievsky’s Idiots [sic], or, perhaps, the gesticulating neurotics of Andrey Biely. vladimir dukelsky’s remarks on the end of st. petersburg 1

On January 12, 1938, Vladimir Dukelsky’s oratorio The End of St. Petersburg received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall with Hugh Ross conducting the Schola Cantorum and the New York Philharmonic. In the oratorio’s grand finale, the three soloists and mixed chorus join forces to express the euphoria of the Russian revolutionary masses declaring full throatedly the ecstatic lines by Vladimir Mayakovsky, poster child of the new Soviet power, whose impressive, thunderous barking Dukelsky remembered from his youth in Paris in the 1920s.2 The oratorio, as Dukelsky described it, ends with “the workmen’s proclamation of victory, the triumphant hymn of the new order, which brought the city’s poetic history to a close, did away with its time-honored proud name and stripped it of its former supremacy as Capital of all Russias.”3 This final chorus, which New York Times critic Olin Downes characterized as “one of grim joy in revolt,” and which received the most enthusiastic reception at the premiere, did justice to the oratorio’s 21

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inspiration, Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1928 Soviet propaganda film, the title of which Dukelsky borrowed for his work. Dukelsky, who by the time of his oratorio’s premiere was a successful Broadway composer who could adapt easily to the quickly changing fashions of popular music, showed equal facility in writing music that matched Pudovkin’s didacticism and pro-Soviet rhetoric. His finale’s extreme dissonance did not seem to disturb the critics: cacophony was an appropriate tool with which to convey the chaos created by the Bolsheviks. Dukelsky marshaled all his creative resources for this climactic movement. The predominant dynamic of “Moy mai” (My May) is fortissimo, rising to triple forte at the conclusion; the chorus, impersonating the celebrating workers, peasants, and soldiers, sings in unison, switching to polyphony only for the people’s appropriation of the first of May on the culminating refrains. The orchestra partakes in this joyful brotherly gathering either by playing in thick unison textures or by hammering brutally dissonant tone clusters, ordered into forceful ostinatos (ex. 1.1). The frequently changing meter, generally narrow range, and the unstable third of the initial tune evoked, according to Downes, Russian folk music,4 or, more familiar to the audience, Igor Stravinsky’s folk-inspired works, especially Les Noces, at whose 1926 London premiere Dukelsky played one of the piano parts along with Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc, and Vittorio Rieti.5 Sudden, unexpected woodwind chords in the Mayakovsky movement underline the Stravinsky association, while the irregularly placed, low-register harmonies (sounding eerily distorted by contrabassoon, trombones, and tuba) forecast Sergey Prokofiev’s music for Sergey Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky in 1938. The structure of the movement is easy to follow: three strophes, with gradually thickening accompaniment, all ending with the emphatic lines spelling out the triumph of May. To make the conclusion even more didactically hard-hitting, Dukelsky repeats the phrase “This May is mine!” (eto moy mai) in the last strophe, pushing the final note on the word “mai” up a whole step. Below the brutal force of the chorus’s seven-part B, the orchestra continues its screeching ostinato, until it clears for a B-major triad. The last three measures bring back the unison theme from the orchestral introduction, concluding on a triple forte B (ex. 1.2). Despite Dukelsky’s repeated reassurance that the movement had no political intention, the oratorio’s early reception shows how hard it was not to read this final push— indeed, the entire final movement—as the composer’s willingness to represent the new Soviet order as a great leap forward. Dukelsky did his best to downplay such political reading of his triumphal ending. “Doubtless many will discover a germ of propaganda” in Mayakovsky’s “earthy, fervent outspoken hymn of the victorious masses,” he admitted in his program notes, but “they will be wrong as the advent of the Soviets was a historical fact and I am merely describing here this victory.”6 The last movement, he reassured Oscar Thompson, was “entirely without propagandist intent.”7 Not all were convinced. Samuel Chotzinoff, Dukelsky’s most hostile critic, sounded skeptical while report-

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example 1.1. Two-bar dissonant ostinato in movement 9 (Mayakovsky) of Dukelsky’s End of St. Petersburg (piano reduction, Duke Coll., LC, Box-Folder 79/2).

ing that “Mr. Dukelsky found it necessary to apologize for including Soviet impressions in his musical history, claiming the impartiality of an artist and historian.”8 In William King’s review one senses that Dukelsky feared that the triumphant ending of his oratorio could call into question his loyalty to the United States. The composer is “very anxious to have it understood that the work has no political bias,” King reported. “I have no political beliefs,” Dukelsky told him, “except the selfish one that the country where I can work most successfully is the one in which

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example 1.2. Ending of movement 9 (piano reduction).

I wish to live.’ ”9 Despite his seeming embrace of Soviet triumph, Dukelsky had obviously no intention of returning to his native land. Neither did he have any sympathy for Soviet power. A typical White Russian émigré, Dukelsky would not have been caught dead saying anything positive about Stalin’s Russia. In the end, the oratorio sent a confusing message. As one reviewer noted, Dukelsky’s reluctance to present the fall of the tsars’ city from a political angle was a flaw. The composer’s supposed neutrality exposed the work’s “weakness, because neither the pride in the past, the mourning over what had vanished, nor the jubilation for the new seem completely genuine.” All in all, the oratorio “leaves an ambiguous impression . . . one does not necessarily have to believe that it deals

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25

with the end of St. Petersburg; with a modified text it could just as well represent the fall of Troy or Carthage.”10 Yet with its Soviet finale and confused political message, Dukelsky’s tribute to the former imperial capital was a typical product of the emigrant cultural space that had to reckon with its rejected, repressed, yet never absent Soviet double. The emigrant experience was shaped by other doubles as well. Geographical and cultural displacement created shadowy reflections that eased the pain of the emigrants’ phantom existence in an alien physical reality. In the poet Georgy Rayevsky’s vision, the Seine in Paris morphed into the Neva in St. Petersburg (“Suddenly I see when awake / Not the frozen Seine,—/ [but] The ice, the snowy wind, and the Neva, / Unique in the universe”).11 St. Petersburg became the natural locus of the emigrants’ longing for a lost paradise. And since they could never return to the physical space, they became obsessed with its literary double, texts that clung so tightly to the city that Ivan Bunin could claim that Petersburg was created not only by Peter the Great but also by Pushkin. For the poet Aleksandr Topol’sky, Petersburg’s real creator was “not Peter but Dostoevsky.”12 Russian literary critic Vladimir Toporov called this densely intertwined network of poems and novels that reflect the city’s rich physical and cultural layers the “Petersburg Text.” He considered Pushkin and Gogol its founders, Dostoevsky its brilliant designer, Andrei Bely and Aleksandr Blok the leading figures of its renaissance, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam the witnesses of its end and the custodians of its memories, and Konstantin Vaginov, the self-designated “coffin maker,” its mortician.13 But, as Toporov’s disciples and critics point out, the Petersburg Text can be broadened and does not have to cease with the end of St. Petersburg as the imperial capital. In Olga Matich’s reading, the Petersburg Text is a palimpsest on which overwriting never completely erases the past, not even after the Revolution when the political necessity of changing history seemed to have threatened the very existence of memory. In what Julie Buckler portrays as “simultaneous processes of remembering and forgetting, erasing, reconstructing, and rewriting,”14 the Bolsheviks’ attempted erasure of the Petersburg Text became just another layer of the ever-growing palimpsest. Following in the footsteps of Roman Timenchik and Vladimir Khazan, I add to the palimpsest of the Petersburg Text the emigrants’ nostalgic recreation of it, showing how this emigrant cultural “text” was shaped by the impulse to repress its Soviet double. This chapter is thus about manifold doubles: St. Petersburg and its cultural double in the Petersburg Text; the prerevolutionary cultural and political text of the former capital and its radical reshaping in Soviet Russia, more specifically in Pudovkin’s film The End of St. Petersburg; and the imperial cultural text and its nostalgic reflection in Russian emigration. It is fitting that the musical protagonist of the chapter is Vladimir Dukelsky, alias Vernon Duke, who himself lived a double existence as a composer of both popular and classical music. Doubling is also manifest in his oratorio The End of St. Petersburg, in which the emigrants’ nostalgic transposition of the Petersburg

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Text is juxtaposed with the Soviets’ future-oriented, optimistic vision. Incomprehensible for its New York audience and ultimately unsuccessful, Dukelsky’s The End of St. Petersburg epitomizes the emigrant Petersburg Text. A D O U B L E E X I S T E N C E : DU K E L SK Y & DU K E

Dukelsky’s career path was unusual among Russian émigrés. Born in 1903, he was only seventeen when he escaped civil war–torn Russia with his family in the company of Colonel Alexei Fedorovitch Lvov (grandson of the composer of the Russian national anthem “God Save the Tsar”). From Constantinople, the first stop for most émigrés fleeing the country along with the retreating White Army, he traveled not to Western Europe but to the United States. When, at Arthur Rubinstein’s advice, he returned to Europe in 1924 to try his luck as a composer, he became famous with breathtaking speed. He sought out an acquaintance from Constantinople, Pavel Tchelitchew, a Russian painter who, after making a name for himself in Berlin by painting sets for Russian operas, transformed himself into a Surrealist artist in Paris. Tchelitchew sent the easygoing, attractive young man to Walter Nouvel, Sergey Diaghilev’s business manager, who arranged an audience with the legendary Russian impresario. Diaghilev took a fancy to the young composer and his music and, to everybody’s surprise, immediately commissioned a ballet. The spotlight was on Dukelsky, a new Diaghilev protégé who had emerged from out of nowhere. Dukelsky quickly became acquainted with Diaghilev’s retinue of young French composers, Auric and Poulenc, who took him to Diaghilev’s “first son,” Stravinsky, whose condescendingly benevolent verdict on Dukelsky’s Piano Concerto, his “passport to Paris,” was that it was “good honest conservatory music.”15 Pyotr Suvchinsky, another acquaintance from Constantinople, introduced him to Diaghilev’s “second son,” Prokofiev, who became a close friend. Prokofiev’s opinion on Dukelsky’s music was more generous than that of Stravinsky. Hearing Dukelsky play his new ballet Zéphyr et Flore on the piano, he announced his new acquaintance “a genuinely important composer. I do not think I am mistaken,” he recorded in his diary.16 Zéphyr et Flore premiered on June 15, 1925, with Leonid Massine’s choreography. As a new Diaghilev discovery, fondly called his “third son,” the twenty-twoyear-old Dukelsky became famous practically overnight. Critics compared him to Stravinsky: Dukelsky’s score, Poulenc wrote, “so new and so alive, seems to me, next to the gigantic production of Stravinsky’s, one of the most significant works of modern music, and Russian music in particular.”17 Diaghilev’s approval and Prokofiev’s recommendation also opened the door to Sergey Koussevitzky, whose support in Paris was indispensable for young Russian musicians. The conductor rightly noticed that Prokofiev’s influence on Dukelsky’s music was much stronger than Stravinsky’s. When Prokofiev tried to seek Koussevitzky’s approval, the conductor teased Prokofiev, suspecting that he supported Dukelsky because he

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sounded like him.18 Nevertheless, Koussevitzky bought Dukelsky’s score for his Édition russe and commissioned the composer to write a symphony, which he conducted, by then as head of the Boston Symphony, in 1928. As Dukelsky later acknowledged, this early success offered him almost unprecedented opportunities to build a career as a composer of classical music. With Diaghilev and Koussevitzky at his back, he had “an entrée to almost any conductor.” Maybe because of his youth, and also because he lacked the ambition of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, he let his opportunities slip and did “little of consequence for the next three years—except,” he confessed wistfully in his memoirs, “have myself a ball.”19 A dandy blessed with youth and good looks, he threw himself into Paris society without thinking much of his career. In fact, Dukelsky did more than enjoy his too-quickly-earned fame. In London, where Zéphyr was an even bigger hit than it had been in Paris, he picked up his aborted New York career as a composer of lowbrow show tunes and earned a contract from C. B. Cochran, a theater manager of the most successful musical revues in the 1920s and 1930s. Cochran was Diaghilev’s show-business rival and enjoyed luring away promising young men, among them Massine, from the Russian impresario. With constant financial worries, a taste for high-society life, and a real gift for tunes, Dukelsky was easily lured into composing what Prokofiev called “theatrical dregs” or “tra-la-la.”20 Diaghilev, predictably, disapproved, and, as Dukelsky remembered, flew into rage after he discovered his new composer’s lowbrow activities. In his memoirs, Dukelsky gives a vivid description of his confrontation with his protector. “Diaghilev knocked my top hat off my head with my own stick, trampled upon it savagely, reducing it to a messy pulp, and with a one-syllable parting shot, ‘Whore!’ disappeared in the dark.”21 Prokofiev shared Diaghilev’s opinion about Dukelsky’s “whoring.” When, in 1932, his friend sent him the manuscript of his Epitaph, a memorial work for Diaghilev, Prokofiev put it aside with a sudden feeling of disgust when he “saw that it was written on jazz paper.”22 Two years earlier he severely castigated his friend, dismissing Dukelsky’s hackneyed argument that he needed to write popular music in order to support himself. Prokofiev rightly sensed that Dukelsky was proud of his success. “No matter how you might pretend and prevaricate,” he scolded his friend, “the fact is that you like your half-respectable bread. You can’t hide the excitement you feel because your lousy record is number one in sales.” Selling out and wasting time on such lowbrow activity had its price, he warned. “If I were to ask you what you have accomplished in the last year in the field of real music, then aside from two rather dry piano pieces you couldn’t show me a single thing.” Prokofiev also detected that Dukelsky’s double personality took its toll on the quality of his “real” music. The dryness of these pieces very accurately reflects your present situation: when, after a long hiatus, you decide to take up “serious” music once again, you’re very fear-

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Chapter One ful to display some sign of the “operetta-ness” that has now become (even though you haven’t noticed it) your very flesh and blood [ . . . ]. Let’s look forward to the year 1931, and hope that you will succeed in rehabilitating your name, which is now halfforgotten in Europe.23

The Duke-Dukelsky dichotomy earned the composer a freakish reputation: in various feature articles he was described either benevolently as a “versatile” or “ambidextrous” musician, or neutrally as a composer with a dual personality, possessing an alter ego, or, more inimically, as music’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Succumbing to popular clichés, Dukelsky characterized himself as “a fine example of aesthetic schizophrenia,” dreading, he admitted, that people “consider [him] either as a highbrow slumming on Broadway, or as a Tin-Pan Alley boy trying to go highbrow.”24 The serious Dukelsky insolently defended his intention to keep alive the light Duke, arguing that the glorious profession of a composer of serious music is financially unprofitable. By putting the emphasis on financial gains, Dukelsky openly endorsed the hierarchy between “high” and “low” music. “Mr. Duke (or Mr. Dukelsky) would love to write serious music all the time,” Alfred Hart reported, “but unfortunately he has taste for caviar and night clubs, and composing music for the Carnegie Hall trade is, he says, one of the least profitable occupations known.” Dukelsky, Hart continued, would not “quit writing for the theater or the movies. ‘My inclinations,’ he explains, ‘do not run toward living in a garret.’ ”25 To put it more crudely, Dukelsky “writes for Carnegie Hall and glory,” while Duke “writes for Tin Pan Alley and cash.”26 Financial calculations, usually considered too vulgar to be included in interviews with composers of classical music, were frequent in conversations with Duke: It takes Vladimir Dukelsky 500 times longer to compose a Violin Concerto as it takes Duke to toss off a popular song for a musical comedy, and a popular song is apt to bring in 500 times as much money as the Concerto. Duke’s greatest song hit, “Taking a Chance on Love,” from “Cabin in the Sky,” has sold over 150,000 copies. This number is roughly 1,000 times the number of copies sold of all published music by Vladimir Dukelsky.27

“You see,” he explained to another reporter, “I believe I can still be two personalities. Perhaps Vernon Duke is earning enough to permit Vladimir Dukelsky to continue his serious writing, which I do in moments of relaxation.”28 It was precisely this practical arrangement that enabled him to produce his oratorio The End of St. Petersburg. “I worked on it four and a half years,” he said, highlighting the oratorio’s high style. “I am paying for the production myself. I suppose it will cost me two to three thousand dollars.”29 Maintaining the balance between his two activities was not easy, and by 1939, when he took U.S. citizenship and officially changed his name to Vernon Duke, Dukelsky seems to have publicly acknowledged which side of his double personal-

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ity had won. Yet for a while he still believed that the two sides could coexist without the one compromising the other. In the 1930s, Dukelsky tried to neutralize the split between high and low by organizing what he called High-Low Concerts in New York “to interest socialites in the more amusing sides of modern music scorned at serious concerts.” One concert, Elliott Carter reported, included music by Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, and Paul Bowles and “ended with swing bands, the Duke and Count, Ellington and Basie.”30 Ultimately, Dukelsky seems to have accepted the shameful label of prostitution and kept his taste in classical music pure. Even his designation—High-Low Concerts—indicates that despite his success on Broadway, he never disagreed with Prokofiev about what was respectable and what was disrespectable in music. Prokofiev was right when he suspected that the severe, harshly modernist style of Dukelsky’s serious music was an attempt to neutralize the composer’s shameful popular side. The curse or allure of double identity was habitually conjured in reviews, as if praise could be granted only if Dukelsky was first absolved from the sins of the morally dubious Duke. The greatest compliment, granted him by Carter, was the dismissal of the lighter Duke in favor of the serious Dukelsky. His “standardized popular songs . . . written under the less frightening name of Vernon Duke,” Carter wrote in his benevolent review of The End of St. Petersburg, “have absolutely no connection with his original and imaginative serious music in either style or content.”31 Despite his graceful and successful revue music, another critic wrote, Duke “has maintained his Dukelsky identity in ‘The End of St. Petersburg,’ and the absence of Ducal influence is evident in his sincerity.”32 Although well meaning, these reviews show that a performance venue away from New York, the site of the popular Duke’s successes, would have better served Dukelsky’s oratorio. P E T E R SBU R G M Y T H

Since its foundation in 1703, St. Petersburg had been the subject of myth. The miraculous city came into being by Peter the Great’s will, vision, and cruel determination, sparing neither cost nor human lives in order to fulfill his wish. “The city will be here,” Tsar Peter declared, and, in Pushkin’s famous description in his poem “The Bronze Horseman”: “the young city, / The grace and wonder of the northern lands, / Out of the gloom of forests and the mud / Of marshes splendidly has risen.”33 Lacking ancient layers, St. Petersburg arose as the perfect classical city. Its design was neoclassical and rational, with splendid, luxurious palaces on the banks of the Neva, spacious squares, canals, and bridges. Looking back at the capital from Paris in 1926, philosopher Georgy Petrovich Fedotov (1886–1951) saw the city as the embodiment of the Renaissance architect Palladio’s neoclassical dreams moved to the extreme north.34 Palladian architecture indeed became a governing

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principle in St. Petersburg after Catherine the Great invited the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi to the imperial capital. Because of its miraculous founding, Petersburg quickly acquired a mythical status. Pushkin called it the Northern Palmyra, but it was also compared to Venice and Amsterdam with which it shared its foundation on the water; to the fictional city of Atlantis, which, because of its hubris, eventually became submerged in the Atlantic Ocean; to the sacred cities of Constantinople and Rome, whose religiously central positions Peter the Great had intended to replace with Petersburg’s secular splendor; and to biblical Jerusalem, to which Jews in the diaspora longed to return. Erected at the mouth of the Neva, St. Petersburg existed in defiance of nature. Yuri Lotman explains that as opposed to the “eternal” cities such as Rome and Athens, which were built on hills and thus able to mediate between heaven and earth, cities founded at the edge of cultural spaces—on seashores or banks of rivers—exist in constant struggle with the elements, and their cultural image is defined by the antagonistic relationship between human creation and nature. The establishment of such cities can be viewed both as victory over nature and as perversion of God’s natural order. Unlike the eternal cities whose mythology centers on their genesis, cities that arise from the struggle with nature are preoccupied with mythologies about the end.35 The splendid new city has always been shadowed by its gloomy origin. The price in human lives and suffering of building St. Petersburg on the extreme northern marshes was so high that Peter’s command “Let there be a city” was almost immediately countered by the annihilating curse of the tsar’s exiled wife Eudoxia: “May St. Petersburg stand empty.” During the reign of Peter the Great, anyone repeating the curse was punished with “whipping, exile to the galley, and the cutting out of tongues.”36 In vain: Eudoxia’s alarming prophecy could not be repressed, and by the nineteenth century it dominated the Petersburg Text. The Apollonian, Golden Age vision of the city governed by rationality, symmetry, and clear vistas was overwhelmed by its Dionysian, chaotic, disorganized, and apocalyptic antipode. Gogol saw irrationality and the devil lurking behind the perfect facades of the imperial capital, while Dostoevsky’s ecstatic, feverish characters, who are constantly on the verge of spiritual revelation or psychological collapse, judged the tsars’ classical city as a phantasmagoria, created without material foundation and perpetually balancing on the verge of nonexistence. Many writers tried to capture the irrational fear awakened by the city. “A hundred times,” Dostoevsky wrote in an oft-quoted passage from The Adolescent, in the midst of this fog, a strange but importunate reverie has come to me: “And if this fog breaks up and lifts, won’t this whole foul, slimy city go with it, rise up with the fog and vanish like smoke, and leave only the former Finnish swamp, and in the middle, perhaps, for the beauty of it, a bronze horseman on a hot-breathed, overridden steed?”37

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Mandelshtam gave a personal touch to the same fear: “We will die in transparent Petropolis, / Where not you [Athene] are the queen, but Proserpina.”38 Akhmatova recalled it as a sign of coming doom in her “Poem Without a Hero”: “And under Tsaritsa Avdotia’s curse, / Dostoevskian and possessed, / The city withdrew into its mist.”39 In Bely’s 1913 novel Petersburg, it is this irrational vision of the city that governs the characters (one of whom is named Apollon Apollonovich) as the Dionysian principle of ecstasy and chaos gradually overtakes the Apollonian principle of rationality and order in the events leading to the 1905 Revolution.40 These negative texts, which, as Polina Barskova points out, described the city as “fading and sickly” while in reality it was “growing and blossoming,” formed a quintessential part of the Petersburg Text. But, as Barskova asks, what happens to this negative Petersburg Text when “the prophecy of end comes to be experienced as reality and predictions give way to reactions?”41 Predictably, solutions were different in Soviet Russia and emigrant Paris. The Bolsheviks turned the prophecy of doom into revolutionary ecstasy, the emigrants mourned the city’s apocalyptic end and dwelt in nostalgic paralysis on its never-to-return, idealized past. Although something of an anomaly, the coexistence of the two visions in Dukelsky’s The End of St. Petersburg was a symptom of the incongruities prevalent in the emigrant experience. P E T E R SBU R G SY N D R OM E

For the refugees of the Russian Revolution, Petersburg, an apparition made, in literary critic Vladimir Veydle’s words, “not of stucco, not of stones,” was the perfect city of nostalgic fixation.42 Paris was a curious location for dreams about transparent Petersburg, whose culture was, from the outset, intended to incorporate rational Western values but whose new, Bolshevik rulers threw it back into a cultural isolation that Peter the Great had sought to counter by reshaping the disadvantageous location in the Finnish swamps into a “window to Europe.” For most emigrants return was impossible, so St. Petersburg’s literary double replaced the actual city as the object of nostalgia. In this context, engagement with the city’s literary text acquired a therapeutic function, linking emigrants to a lost culture without which their splintered emigrant culture lacked coherence. Nostalgia and patriotic pride mixed in events such as the gathering organized by the Society for “Immediate Relief ” on January 7, 1933. Georges Bourdon, founder of the International Federation of Journalists, introduced the evening with a talk on the “Old Petersburg.” A singer from the Opera Comique, wearing a costume from the time of Catherine the Great, sung a bergerette and a pastourelle from eighteenth-century Petersburg. Maria Krïzhanovskaya from the Moscow Art Theater recited Tatyana’s letter from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. St. Petersburg in the 1780s was evoked through Polina’s aria from Chaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, the

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1830s through Olga’s aria from Onegin. Late nineteenth-century St. Petersburg opera was brought to life by an aria from Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, sung in French, and imperial ballet by the performance of Lyubov Rudenko, a frequent performer at the Society’s benefit events. Elena Benois, daughter of Alexandre Benois, Diaghilev’s collaborator in Russian artistic spectacles in Paris, made the sets using her father’s sketches for the design. The program culminated in a ball, in which the audience was invited to dance waltzes and mazurkas.43 The Golden Age of St. Petersburg and its francophone taste rang strangely hollow in the culture of Russian émigrés in Paris. At such events, eighteenth-century Paris, seen through the eyes of eighteenth-century Petersburg, was revived in the nostalgic atmosphere of Russian Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Nobody seems to have noticed the irony as Russian emigrants, scattered in the brilliant centers of Europe, dreamed of St. Petersburg, the city that Peter the Great founded in the image of these very capitals. The anxiety-ridden, Dostoevskian, phantasmagoric layer of the Petersburg Text fascinated the emigrants in the early years of their exile. The poet Antonin Landinsky compared the city’s fate “with the bitter glory of Rome.”44 Raisa Blokh grieved when she looked at the dead city in which “the crosses [were] burning from the cathedrals’ summits.”45 As Ivan Lukash wrote in 1929 in the émigré paper Vozrozhdeniye, the Revolution swept away two centuries of amazing victories . . . two centuries of grandiose creation, achieved by Pushkin and Petersburg, the city-image of the Russian genius in its full power, beauty, and intensity, two centuries of passionate creativity of the Russian nation [ . . . ] The organic creation of its people was replaced by the mechanical battering ram of the revolution [ . . . ] [A]ll is extinguished—Peter and his St. Petersburg.46

The memory of the destroyed city evoked a sense of guilt in Lukash, who feared that their abandoned Petersburg would sink into oblivion if the emigrants stopped cultivating its old image. The nostalgic longing for the city gradually washed away its poetically unappealing associations. As Akhmatova ironically remarked, for the emigrant Sasha Chornïy, Petersburg turned from the city of vulgarity, petty bourgeois values, and stench into a paradise, surpassing in beauty any of the European capitals.47 For Georgy Adamovich, Petersburg was “the only capital on earth. / All the others were simply cities.”48 Leningrad was no replacement. Dukelsky thought the renaming of the city an “unthinkable sacrilege.” For him, Leningrad was no more than “merely a gigantic museum within the gates of a Soviet port.”49 When composer Nicolas Nabokov visited the reconstructed city in June 1967, he redisplayed all the sentimental symptoms of the emigrants’ Petersburg syndrome:

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There it was, all of it, intact or reconstructed with infinite love and care by its inhabitants: The “Queen of the North” standing proudly on the shores of the Neva and the Neva’s many confluents and those canals dug by Czar Peter to make it look like another Amsterdam. Splendid, spacious, airy, curiously absent-minded, yet the most extraordinary city human beings have ever conceived and built! Parallel only, but on a much grander scale, to such jewels as Venice before its present decline, or to Peking, I suppose, at the time of the Ming Empire.50

He found the splendid facade an empty shell, a city without soul as its old inhabitants vanished in exile. Entering the city he felt “like an explorer discovering . . . an inviolate Pharaonic tomb, with all of its beauty intact but with a hopelessly dead Pharaoh and grains of wheat that will never grow again.” Not being a native did nothing to diminish Nabokov’s acute nostalgia for Petersburg. Like most emigrants, he claimed the city as a central piece of his cultural identity. His rejection of the reconstructed former capital was also typical of émigrés. Journalist Arkadiy Borman described his imagined encounter with the renovated city in similar terms, as a tour of restored Pompeii with splendidly renovated buildings still exuding death.51 The only way to preserve the soul of the city was to overwrite the physical reality of Leningrad with cultural memory, to detach the Petersburg Text from its Bolshevik ending. BAC K T O N O STA L G IA

To understand Dukelsky’s The End of St. Petersburg as part of the emigrant Petersburg Text, we need to imagine the work without its Soviet finale. No manuscript or note by Dukelsky survives that delineates the original ending of the oratorio.52 We know only that the Mayakovsky finale, although preserved in all the sources we know today, was not part of the original plan. As Dukelsky reported to Koussevitzky in 1937, he added the Mayakovsky setting as an afterthought.53 An accomplished poet himself, Dukelsky arranged his selected Petersburg poems in roughly chronological order, starting with an excerpt from Mikhail Lomonosov’s “Ode to the Arrival of Her Majesty the Great Empress Elizabeth Petrovna from Moscow to St. Petersburg in 1742 for her Coronation” (1751); followed by two strophes from Gavrila Derzhavin’s “The Procession Along the Volkhov River of the Russian Amphitrite” (1819); Pushkin’s confession of love to St. Petersburg from “The Bronze Horseman” (1833); the first three strophes of Innokenty Annensky’s “Petersburg” (1910); the first, second, and fourth strophes of a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev, “I stood by the Neva . . . .” (1844); the third poem from Mikhail Kuzmin’s collection of poems Autumn Lake (1912); a 1915 poem from Akhmatova’s volume Anno Domini MCMXXI (1922); and concluding, likely, with the second poem from Blok’s Dances of Death (1912–14), “Noch’, ulitsa, fonar’ ”

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(Night, street, lamp).54 From the bright, brilliant colors of the first three poems, the images gradually darken, and the cycle comes to an end with Blok’s scene of night, in which the only source of illumination is the dim streetlight. In the cycle of poems, three seasons are represented: the first poem anticipates spring and Kuzmin’s poem celebrates it; Pushkin, Annensky, and Tyutchev capture Petersburg at its most earnest, in winter; and Akhmatova evokes summer in the burning August sun, in the anxious anticipation of war.55 Repeating images are woven through the texts: the Neva, with its granite banks and icy, deadly calm waters; the canals, bridges, and islands; cloud and fog; north wind; and the gray colors of nature, contrasted with the golden cupolas and the artificial beauty of the city that rose at the command of the magician tsar. To keep the focus on Petersburg, Dukelsky omits Tyutchev’s longing for the warmer climate of the south in the concluding strophe of his poem.56 Like the poems that are connected by shared images and colors, the music of the choral movements is interconnected by recurring themes. The melody in the English horn and clarinets with which the oratorio begins reappears in the original last movement, the setting of Blok’s poem (ex. 1.3a-b). The stacked perfect fifths placed thirds apart in the voices at the beginning of the Derzhavin movement (no. 2) return a major third lower toward the end of the Annensky movement (no. 4). The wordless chorus introducing Annensky’s yellow fog in the fourth movement introduces also the fourth strophe of Akhmatova’s “That August” (no. 7). The two solo movements (from Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman,” no. 3, for tenor solo; Tyutchev’s poem for baritone solo, no. 5) and the duet (Kuzmin’s poem for soprano and tenor, no. 6) are less integrated into the oratorio as a whole. Kuzmin’s movement may have been leftover from Dukelsky’s “languorous, magnoliascented” settings of that poet’s “Voyage in Italy” in 1931, undertaken as “a pleasantly purposeless pastime.”57 “Kak radostna” preserves some of the magnolia scent of this earlier cycle: after a Stravinskiesque orchestral introduction featuring alterations between 44 and 83 meters, the voices enter with broad melodies, culminating in an operatic outburst reserved for climaxes of love duets.58 Dukelsky’s chronologically ordered poems gradually approach the city’s tragic ending. The excerpt from Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman,” the paradigmatic text about Petersburg’s impending doom, is followed by Annensky’s “Yellow Fog,” which captures the irrationality of a city that, although founded on the principal of rationality, remained enigmatic—as Dostoevsky described it, “a fantastic, magic vision.”59 Annensky’s poem (no. 4) ends with the grim scene of executions at dawn hidden by the fog (“and the deserts of mute squares, / where people were executed before dawn”), recreated by Dukelsky with sotto voce chorus and static, highregister harmonies in the first violins, along with percussive effects on the harps and the piano. The recurrence of the movement’s eerie choral vocalise in the Akhmatova movement (no. 7) creates a connection between the two poems’

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example 1.3a. English horn and clarinet melody in movement 1 (Lomonosov) (piano

reduction).

example 1.3b. English horn and clarinet melody in movement 8 (Blok) (piano reduction).

shared colors (“yellow fog” in Annensky and “yellow flame” in Akhmatova).60 But the musical reference calls attention to a deeper resonance between the two: the implicit violence in Annensky’s poem becomes explicit in Akhmatova’s concluding lines, in which the war-torn city turns into “a savage camp.”61 Dukelsky considered the Akhmatova movement “the salient point of the whole work” because of its content and length. “Rumblings of war and impending tragedy are its theme,” he wrote in the program notes. He evokes the nervous anticipation by building the movement on a six-note passacaglia, sounded first in the low strings, low brass (tuba and trombones), and low woodwinds (bassoons and contrabassoon); the male chorus joins in measure 12 singing the passacaglia in octave parallels. Two measures later the horn starts playing the ostinato in canon (ex. 1.4). Dukelsky sets only the first and the last strophes of the poem as a passacaglia: the

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example 1.4. Ostinato in movement 7 (Akhmatova) (piano reduction).

five strophes in between abandon the ostinato and change the key of three flats to two sharps. The returning passacaglia in the last strophe reinforces the circular effect created by the incessant ostinato. Darkest of all is Dukelsky’s setting of Blok’s short meditation on what the composer described as “the futility of existence in a dead city.”62 Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека, Бессмысленный и тусклый свет. Живи ещё хоть четверть века— Всё будет так. Исхода нет.

Night, the street lamp, the chemist’s; A dim and apathetic light: Though you lived on a quarter-century Nothing would change. There’s no way out.

Умрёшь—начнёшь опять сначала И повторится всё, как встарь: Ночь, ледяная рябь канала, Аптека, улица, фонарь.

And if you die, it’s but beginning Over again. All things repeat. The night, the river’s frozen ripple, The chemist’s shop, the lamp, the street.63

Dukelsky assigns the text to the male chorus that recites the words rhythmically without pitch, with the women chorus and a soprano solo providing wordless counterpoint. In contrast to Mayakovsky’s dynamic, future-oriented lines that would eventually become the finale, Blok’s poem is static and circular. The two four-line stanzas are symmetrically arranged: the inert, dim-colored urban landscape depicted at the beginning of the poem is reflected on the icy surface of the canal portrayed at the end. No verbs indicate motion in these framing lines. The four middle lines, though more active, are also reflective of each other: the verb live has its contrasting counterpart in the verb die in the second part, just as the fourth line’s indication of future sameness can be mapped onto the sixth line’s reference to the

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restarting of the process after death. Thus, instead of being a breakthrough toward the transcendental vistas or sudden rapture imagined by the Symbolists, the afterlife Blok depicts is an endless recycling. Curiously, although questions of life and death provide an eschatological center for the poem, Blok’s circular lines seem to deny the possibility of an end. Dukelsky’s choice of this end-deprived poem to conclude the first version of his oratorio indicates that in its first conception, he figured the end of the city not as the violent closure of its existence but as the cessation of the forward march of time. Because Blok’s death in 1921 signaled for many a “threshold between the death of old Petersburg and the birth of the new Soviet Petrograd,” it would have made sense to end the oratorio with a setting of his poem.64 A poet himself, Dukelsky must have been aware of the symbolic connection between Blok and the mythologized demise of his city. Internal evidence also suggests that the Blok setting could have been intended as the original ending. The reappearance of thematic material from the beginning of the oratorio illustrates Blok’s idea of eternal return, but recapitulating the melody also lends the oratorio a circular structure. The same melody, which Dukelsky described in his memoir as “the sad street song of the opening measures,” returns again as the melody of the soprano vocalise in measure 31, underlining the composer’s presentation of the tune as a “street song” (ex. 1.5).65 This is not the only theme in “Noch’ ulitsa, fonar’ ” that refers back to a previous movement in the oratorio. At the beginning of the orchestral introduction, the bass clarinet brings back the syncopated melody that followed the wordless chorus in the Annensky episode, “Yellow Fog.” Both references can be explained poetically as ways of specifying the Petersburgian locale, marked in Blok’s poem only by the word “canal.” Dukelsky’s reference to his own Annensky setting indicates that the dim color of Blok’s landscape originates in the “yellow fog” of the imperial city, recalled also by the chorus’s wordless humming, itself reminiscent of the Annensky movement. But bringing back previous themes at the end of the oratorio is also a framing device, a gesture of summing up, which marks the Blok movement as a potential conclusion, as is the ending on an A-minor chord, the “sad” relative minor of the first movement’s C major. Several layers mask the male chorus’s rhythmic recitation of Blok’s poem. Above the monotonous recitation, the women’s chorus sings a two-note figure. Dukelsky describes their singing as wailing, a word choice that calls attention to the similarity between Dukelsky’s melodic line and the crying of the yurodivïy, the Holy Fool, at the end of the revised version of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov. As in the opera, F and E alternate, the E rhythmically stretched in Dukelsky’s version to lend a less regular pulse to the wail (ex. 1.6, cf. ex. 1.5).66 Referring to what in at least one version served as the ending to Musorgsky’s opera points again to the possibility that Dukelsky intended this movement as an ending. In Boris Godunov, Musorgsky’s simpleton mourns Russia on the verge of political chaos: in Dukelsky’s The End of St. Petersburg,

example 1.5. Reappearance of the “street song” in the orchestra and in the vocalise in movement 8 (piano reduction), cf. ex. 3a–b.

example 1.6. Crying yurodivïy in Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov (piano reduction).

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example 1.7a. Nervous ostinato in Chaikovsky’s Queen of Spades scene (piano reduction).

example 1.7b. Nervous ostinato in movement 8 of The End of St. Petersburg (piano

reduction).

the women’s chorus mourns prewar Russia on the verge of the violent change brought by the Revolution. In Symbolist fashion, Dukelsky wove even more semantic layers into the texture of this movement. The ostinato that first appears in the flutes recalls the beginning of the bedchamber scene of act 2 in Chaikovsky’s Queen of Spades (ex. 1.7a-b). Dukelsky

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intended this allusion to be the most obvious reference to St. Petersburg, as the operatic rendition of Pushkin’s terse story, as Dukelsky well knew, is considered to be one of the rare successful musical representations of Petersburg’s black magic. “No one who has heard that opera can successfully shake off the horror of the music,” Dukelsky was quoted in the program notes.67 The “obsessive magic and unsolved puzzle” of Pushkin’s story and Chaikovsky’s opera, Timenchik writes, haunted the imagination of emigrant poets. The opera’s status was due partially to the plot’s origin in Pushkin’s story, but its allure as a subject of poetry owed more to Chaikovsky’s ability to evoke, through spectacle, scenery, and theatricality, the memory of the city’s physical aspect.68 In The End of St. Petersburg, Dukelsky turns Chaikovsky’s frantic sixteenth-note figures, which in the opera underline Herman’s nervous agitation as he awaits his fatal encounter with the Countess, into a tension-producing device. After its first hesitant appearance in the flutes, the motive gradually overtakes the entire woodwind section, culminating, through intervallic expansion, in fortissimo renditions accompanying the central part of the poem: “And if you die, it’s but beginning / Over again. All things repeat” (ex. 1.8). The eruption of fortissimo figures provides Dukelsky’s setting with an emotional climax obviously lacking in Blok’s monochromatic poem. To ensure the audibility of the text, Dukelsky removes the upper parts of the chorus, leaving the male recitation uncovered for one measure, and adding, in the next two, only the soprano vocalise. The effect is a sense of sudden clarity, the lifting of the fog. It is hard not to hear the unfettered soprano part as a liberated spirit that, at least momentarily, is able to break out of the meaninglessly repeated cycle of life and death, much in the way the Symbolists envisioned porïv, spiritual breakthrough. The relief, however, is only temporary. The cycle restarts, with only slight variations, and with the end evaded: the movement fades out, first the recitation and the soprano vocalise, then the quietly lulling middle voices come to a halt. There is no conclusion, no resolution, leaving the impression that the cycle could restart at any time (ex. 1.9). Building tension by piling up ostinato figures is a technique that Dukelsky knew well from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, but his musical language in “Noch’, ulitsa, fonar’ ” is closer to a composer outside of the circles of his Parisian years: Alban Berg, the only composer from among the hated atonalists in whom Diaghilev was at least vaguely interested.69 Dukelsky’s movement conspicuously features a low B pedal, which, in Berg’s opera Wozzeck, is the note on which the scene of Marie’s murder is built. Rising scalar figures at the end of the movement also recall musical figures Berg used to illustrate the rising water around Wozzeck. In the context of the Petersburg Text, these musical figures inevitably relate to the famous floods of St. Petersburg, one of them commemorated in Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman,” another occurring in 1924, a few years before Dukelsky began composing his oratorio. Many understood this last flood as a punishment for changing the name of the city to Leningrad. But the musical image of the rising water also

example 1.8. The ostinato overtaking the texture in movement 8 (piano reduction).

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example 1.9. Ending of movement 8 (piano reduction).

evoked a fundamental element of the Petersburg Text: the legendary curse that made the city, like the mythological Atlantis and the legendary Kitezh, sink beneath the water and thus reunite with nature. In this last movement, Dukelsky combines musical references to the rising tension preceding a gruesome death (Chaikovsky’s Queen of Spades), the rising water

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around a suicidal murderer (Berg’s Wozzeck), the weeping yurodivïy foreseeing the tragic future of Russia (Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov) with the rhythm of lullaby and a closed, symmetrical form that cancels the intensity of the tense forward motion, producing stasis and indifference toward the ending. The original conclusion of the oratorio did not mark an endpoint in time, but rather a state of obsession without the possibility of moving beyond to a potential future. This goaldeprived ending reflects the émigré experience of a state lacking purpose and a time that had moved history in a direction of which many emigrants disapproved. By the end of the 1920s it had become clear to even the most optimistic emigrants that Soviet Russia was not a transitional nightmare but an internationally recognized political entity that would not go away. Unless one was willing to transform the Petersburg Text into a new, Bolshevik narrative (as Pudovkin did with conviction and Dukelsky as an afterthought), evoking the old imperial capital became an exercise in sterile nostalgia. T H E B O L SH EV I K D O U B L E O F T H E P E T E R SBU R G T E X T

What for emigrants marked the end of St. Petersburg served for the Soviets as a birth ritual of the new order, commemorated with suitable pomp on the first anniversary of the Revolution and reenacted in Pudovkin’s film The End of St. Petersburg and Eisenstein’s October. One of Soviet Russia’s wunderkinds, Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953) is best remembered as the director of three classic silent films: Mother (1926), The End of St. Petersburg (1927), and Storm over Asia (1928). The End of St. Petersburg was commissioned as a commemorative film and was presented at the November 7 gala at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik coup.70 Pudovkin shot the film simultaneously with Eisenstein’s October, another important commission for the anniversary year. Both belong to what Peter Kenez called “revolutionary spectacle,” films that instead of presenting plots with personal interest are built on mass scenes, character types, and symbols.71 Only Pudovkin’s film made it to the gala screening. Eisenstein’s mammoth production lagged behind because of the endless revisions, typical of Soviet artistic projects, required to accommodate the changing political scene.72 Eisenstein remained sore over his defeat, but Pudovkin’s victory was not lasting.73 Embodying most of the myths surrounding the Revolution and thus endorsing the Bolsheviks’ claim to legitimacy, Eisenstein’s October became one of the most important Soviet films after its delayed premiere on March 14, 1928. Images from it were used later as ersatz documentary footage for such never-filmed events as the storming of the Winter Palace. Pudovkin’s End of St. Petersburg was a more personal view of the Revolution than Eisenstein’s October. Pudovkin believed that the director’s job was “to depict the refraction of historical events in the psyche of the characters in such a way that

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figure 1.1. Facade of St. Isaac’s Cathedral with the truncated inscription from Psalm 21 (“The king shall joy in thy strength”) in Vsevolod Pudovkin’s silent film, The End of St. Petersburg (Mezhrabpom, 1927) [7:33].

those events served as their impulse for their actions.”74 The End of St. Petersburg portrays the historical events through the personal experience of a worker’s family. Even in Natan Zarkhi’s revised scenario, which placed the family drama “against a background of historical montage,” Pudovkin’s representation of history remains emotionally accessible.75 Pudovkin’s Petersburg Text conspicuously lacks what Buckler calls the “undocumented middle ground of St. Petersburg” and focuses instead on the extremes of Petersburg society: the working poor and the profiting rich.76 In Pudovkin’s didactic presentation of prerevolutionary Petersburg, the aristocracy as a class has already dissolved in the bourgeois democracy of the Provisional Government. He evokes Petersburg’s aristocratic past only through images of imperial monuments: the equestrian statues of Peter the Great, Alexander III, and Nicholas I; St. Isaac’s Cathedral; the Alexander Column; and the Winter Palace. And although the target of Pudovkin’s social criticism is capitalism, the greedy system that readily sacrifices human lives for profit, he systematically dismantles the three main ideological pillars of the tsarist state: Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. In the film, fragmented shots of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, strangely cropped images of imperial statues, and a brutally realistic depiction of war discredit the values of the Russian imperial state (fig. 1.1). These shots of imperial monuments are didactically contrasted with images of the starving workers’ tenements and the factories on the outskirts of the town. The blurred vision of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in the fog—a quintessential image of St. Petersburg—is juxtaposed with less poetically blurry scenes of smoke and steam in and around the Lebedev factory (figs. 1.2a-b). The fog enwraps the monuments in timeless, motionless space: the smoke and steam in the Lebedev factory, by contrast, are signs of bursting energy, movement, motion, time pushing forward. The most didactic contrast is saved for the end of the film, as images of the extreme richness of the interior of the Winter Palace are cut with close-ups of the empty pail

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figure 1.2a. St. Isaac’s Cathedral in the fog from The End of St. Petersburg [7:38].

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figure 1.2b. Smoky factory scene from The End of St. Petersburg [8:17].

carried by the Bolshevik worker’s wife (figs. 1.3a-b). These images are viewed through the eyes of the two main characters: the country lad who comes to the city in search of work and who is transformed from a politically naïve, hungry peasant into a selfsacrificing, politically conscious participant in the Revolution, and the stereotypical, brave worker who acts as the instigator of events and serves as a role model for the peasant boy. Both the working-class neighborhoods and the picturesque imperial center are shown through the eyes of the lad, who, when he arrives at the imperial city with his mother, is dwarfed by the massive monuments (fig. 1.4). Selecting St. Isaac’s Cathedral as the first image of St. Petersburg is an ironic comment on Nikolai Antsiferov’s 1922 The Soul of Petersburg, a sophisticated tour of the city that recommends starting with a panoramic view from the cathedral’s cupola, “from where one will recognize the will—and power—of Peter the Great.”77 Such a panoramic view is accessible only to the idle urban explorer; the same perspective has a diminishing effect on the working-class protagonists of the film. Pudovkin’s social message is straightforward: Petersburg’s inhumanly large imperial monuments overshadow the life of its inhabitants. The cameraman Anatoli Golovnia’s shots of the monuments, approached from below, are all frightening; the perspective is that of a miniaturized human looking up at an enormous object that underscores the viewer’s insignificance. Golovnia truncates the images, adding to the startling camera angle a disquieting uncertainty as to the monuments’ identity. The first image of the equestrian Alexander III, the anti-reformist tsar who opposed all liberal forces in Russia, shows only the back of the horse and its visually decapitated rider, as if underlining the statue’s creator Paolo Trubetskoy’s description of the monument as “one brute sitting astride another.”78 Wanting to show Alexander III “as an embodiment of autocracy,” Golovnia chose “a camera angle to make the monument look

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figure 1.3a. The opulent interior of the Winter Palace from The End of St. Petersburg [1:26:32].

figure 1.3b. The empty pail of the worker’s wife from The End of St. Petersburg [1:26:41].

figure 1.4. Peasant lad and his mother,

shown as ants from the top of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, from The End of St. Petersburg [16:52].

monolithic and raised high in the composition” (fig. 1.5).79 Progressively more complete shots of the monument appear in the film, culminating in a close up of the face of the tsar’s decorated statue. The images are shot through scenes depicting the euphoric patriotic fervor at the beginning of the war. In the last shot, tears are pouring down the statue’s face, indicating that even the brute tsar has more empathy with war-torn, suffering Russia than the country’s present government (fig. 1.6). The reviewer of Rul’ found the combination of sentimentality and propaganda tasteless.80 While didactically propagandistic, Pudovkin’s gesture of lending human emotions to a statue is also an obvious reference to Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman,” another monument that comes to life to pass judgment on Petersburg’s inhabitants.

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figure 1.5. First image of the equestrian monument of Alexander III from The End of St. Petersburg [7:29].

figure 1.6. The crying statue from The End of St. Petersburg [50:28].

The first image of the statue of Nicholas I, the tsar who mercilessly repressed the Decembrist revolt and thus went down in history as the most reactionary of Russia’s monarchs, is also a truncated shot that shows only the front legs of the rearing horse from below. The angle is purposefully unnerving and provides yet another reference to Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great, the protagonist of Pushkin’s epic poem. The position of Falconet’s statue is ambiguous, as Peter simultaneously holds his horse back from the abyss before him and drives it recklessly toward it (figs. 1.7a-b). Pudovkin maps the equestrian statues of the three tsars into one visual idea, a threatening monument that overshadows living people. The stormy sky behind the statues, as well as the shadows cast around them, evoke both Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman,” the primary inspiration for Golovnia, and Alexandre Benois’s series of watercolors in 1905–1906 and 1916–1922, which provide another visual layer of the Petersburg Text underlying the film’s images (figs. 1.8a-b).81 Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman” is an obvious subtext of Pudovkin’s narrative, and, like the Petersburg Text in general, it is gravely subverted to fit the film’s Bolshevik perspective. Pudovkin keeps the basic contrast of Pushkin’s epic poem, the autocratic power of the tsar and his unnatural city standing in opposition to

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figure 1.7a. Truncated image of the statue of Nicholas I from The End of St. Petersburg [7:42].

figure 1.7b. The Bronze Horseman as shown in The End of St. Petersburg [8:03].

the little man Yevgeny, who, in Pushkin’s words, “lives in Kolomna, works / Somewhere, avoids the paths of the famous, mourns / Neither dead relatives nor the forgotten past” and who has to pay dearly for Peter’s misconceived idea of founding his city on the marshes. When, in his maddened grief, Yevgeny dares to confront the tsar, he goes insane from fear of punishment. The statue indeed comes to life and punishes the irreverent Yevgeny, who flees from the animated horseman galloping after him until he drops dead on the threshold of his beloved’s shattered home. Pushkin pities the poor madman, but he gives the victory to the demonic rider, the autocratic tsar who would not tolerate criticism of his great creation. Pudovkin follows Pushkin’s narrative by moving from the center of the imperial city to its working-class outskirts. But his protagonist, the naïve peasant lad who is first intimidated by St. Petersburg’s imperial grandeur, gradually gains political consciousness and changes his perspective on the city. Unlike Yevgeny, he confronts not the rigid statues but the actual governing political power and, by joining the revolutionary masses, he triumphs over what the city’s monuments

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figure 1.8a. Shadow of the statue of Alexander III in The End of St. Petersburg [16:17].

figure 1.8b. Alexandre Benois’s

illustration for the poem “The Bronze Horseman” by Alexander Pushkin, 1905–18 (Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia/Bridgeman Images), © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, used by permission.

symbolize, becoming a force that eventually crushes the old imperial power. In Pudovkin’s vision, the traditional Petersburg Text turns into the Old Testament, overtaken by the Bolsheviks’ New Testament, which reinterprets the old text either as a prophecy of the new (in this case, about the end of the imperial city) or writes it out of existence as irrelevant. In this respect, Pudovkin’s End of St. Petersburg is not only the depiction of the end of the city as the capital of imperial Russia but also as the end of the traditional Petersburg Text.

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As Pudovkin’s film demonstrates, the old historical layers of the city’s cultural text were not completely erased under the drastically changed surface of the revolutionary facade. The old city, its imperial monuments, its myths, its greatest poet, his “Bronze Horseman,” and Benois’s visual reimagining of Pushkin’s classic evoked bittersweet nostalgia in the emigrant Russian viewer despite the revolutionary ending, which resonated both with Dostoevsky’s feverish dreams and the Symbolists’ apocalyptic prophecies. Pudovkin’s silent film ends with a villagerturned-revolutionary proclaiming: “St. Petersburg is no more. Long live . . . the city of Lenin!” Yet what lingered in the mind of the critic of Rul’ was the landscape of the “Russian plains, the expanse of land and sky”—images, in other words, from the Russian heartland.82 Intention and effect do not always coincide, and that is why Pudovkin’s film, celebrating the annihilation of imperial Petersburg, could have served as the inspiration for Dukelsky’s oratorio that commemorated the city in its old splendor. CONFRONTING REAL CITIES

When the second version was completed in 1937, Dukelsky considered The End of St. Petersburg his most important work. He assured Koussevitzky that the oratorio represented “the best of which [he was] capable.”83 He labored on the music for almost five years, starting on January 1, 1932.84 His early reports to Koussevitzky indicate that he had hopes that the Russian conductor, with several Dukelsky premieres to his credit, would take on this new work. To his disappointment, Koussevitzky, who had just premiered Dukelsky’s Epitaph, refused.85 Koussevitzky also seemed to have taken offense that Dukelsky, used to making financial arrangements concerning performances of his music, proposed to contribute to the cost of production.86 A Koussevitzky premiere was only one of the options Dukelsky explored. On September 3, 1937, he happily reported that he had received an encouraging note from Leopold Stokowski, indicating that the conductor was interested in premiering the oratorio.87 He was also counting on Prokofiev who, in his effort to promote his friend’s serious side, tried to sell the oratorio both in Europe and in the Soviet Union. Already in 1933 Prokofiev started negotiations with Koussevitzky’s publishing house in Paris and approached the music agent Marcel de Valmalète, who seemed to be willing to take steps for arranging the performance of Dukelsky’s Second Symphony and the first version of his oratorio for 1,000 francs in the French capital.88 Negotiations dragged on, and by 1937 Prokofiev’s personal secretary, Mikhail Astrov, who worked in Koussevitzky’s publishing house, was also discussing the oratorio’s potential performance with Charles Munch.89 Munch being unresponsive, Astrov turned to other conductors: one possibility he enter-

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tained was Philippe Gaubert, who conducted the Conservatory Orchestra, the other Roger Désormière, who worked with Diaghilev between 1925 and 1929, and conducted Prokofiev’s ballet Le pas d’acier in 1927. By 1937 plans included not only the premiere of the oratorio but an entire Dukelsky festival in Paris. Gaubert came up with two suggestions: the festival should be part of the World Exhibition in the summer under Désormière, or scheduled for October during the regular season in the Conservatory’s Bernard Hall under Gaubert. Plans were far enough along that the event was announced in the New York press.90 Dukelsky assured Koussevitzky that Paris was expecting the work: the previous summer, he wrote to the conductor, “Nadia Boulanger . . . the Polignacs, Poulenc, and many others” were much impressed with the score.” “With the money I am making now,” he bragged somewhat brazenly to Koussevitzky, “it will be extremely easy for me to secure a Paris performance. . . . I can even have a festival in which I could demonstrate to Parisians the full range of my work during the years of my absence from Europe.”91 But a triumphant return to Europe was much more complicated than Dukelsky, still cherishing memories of his easy success from the 1920s, imagined. The cultural landscape of Paris in the 1930s was no longer that of the Roaring Twenties. Prokofiev was losing his patience already in 1934. “Most Paris orchestras shut down in April,” he wrote to Dukelsky on March 22, 1934. In May only the Orchestra Symphonique functions, but it does in a state of constant bankruptcy, not knowing whether it closes down the next day or continues its existence for a while. Heading this establishment is one of the orchestral basses, an inferior species, with whom it is difficult to speak in a musical dialect.92

But practical matters aside, Paris, especially Russian Paris, was hard to assess, and as plans evolved Dukelsky must have realized that his nostalgic oratorio, conceived at the end of the 1920s and written mainly in the early 1930s, was out of step with the times. If we believe Dukelsky that the first inspiration for writing the oratorio was Pudovkin’s propaganda film, which Dukelsky could have seen on February 28, 1928, when it was shown in Berlin’s Marmorhaus, we have to assume that the original conception was indeed the commemoration of the imperial capital and the old Russia that perished in the flames of the Bolshevik Revolution—in other words, that the oratorio was meant to be a White Russian emigrant affair, still saturated with nostalgia and self-pity. Unfortunately, the letter in which Dukelsky described the original conception of the oratorio to Prokofiev some time before June 3, 1932, has vanished, but one gets a sense of its content from Prokofiev’s reaction to it. Prokofiev, who since his triumphant concert tour of Soviet Russia in 1927 maintained strong ties with his homeland, disapproved of his friend’s new work.

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Chapter One But what sort of decadent idea is it to write a monumental piece about dying Petersburg! There I can see the influence of your fraternizing with the fading emigration, this branch ripped from its trunk, which dreams in its decline about the lush springtime of the past.93

“This is the first, for me unexpected, half-admission of Prokofiev’s pro-Soviet attitude,” Dukelsky penciled on Prokofiev’s letter at a time when his friend’s 1936 return to Soviet Russia was already a fact.94 The oratorio’s first conception could have matched what Serge Lifar, who danced the role of Zéphyr in Dukelsky’s ballet in 1925, imagined when during a chance meeting in Paris he encouraged Dukelsky to bring his new composition to the French capital and present it as part of the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937. “We met through Diaghilev,” Lifar told Dukelsky after a few glasses of vodka, “we meet again under Pushkin’s Northern Star.”95 Lifar was dreaming of a Pushkin Gala, featuring Dukelsky’s Petersburg oratorio and his Pushkin opera, Mistress into Maid, which, he later boasted, incorrectly, he commissioned from the composer.96 Dukelsky played the music of both to the choreographer at the music shop of Koussevitzky’s Édition russe, sending Lifar into ecstasy. Fired by Lifar’s enthusiasm, Dukelsky had the opera copied and sent it to him, never receiving even an acknowledgment from Lifar, who was too busy organizing an exhibition in Pushkin’s honor.97 Dukelsky’s participation at the Pushkin feast quickly faded into fantasy. “The Pushkinists managed to meet under their idol’s Northern Star without my help,” Dukelsky concluded stoically.98 Practical obstacles to performing the oratorio in Paris also existed. Keeping the Pushkin anniversary in mind, Dukelsky wanted the oratorio to be sung in Russian. But, as Astrov warned him, it would have been difficult to find a professional chorus in Paris that could sing in Russian or even in English (the second language of the oratorio).99 Dukelsky had the text translated into French and send it to Astrov, but the translation was disastrous and Astrov had to ask for it to be redone.100 Promoting the oratorio’s clearly out-of-date subject matter proved to be even more difficult. From May 24 through October 27, 1937, Paris hosted the International Exposition Dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life, with 46 countries participating, including the Soviet Union. Pitching the premiere of The End of St. Petersburg as part of the world exhibition was one of Gaubert’s propositions, but the oratorio’s nostalgic tone fit uneasily with the exhibition’s general spirit. In the three hundred pavilions, spread over about 103 hectares from the Trocadéro through the Champ de Mars, the more than 31 million visitors encountered demonstrations devoted to electricity and light, press and cinema, aviation and railway, to name a few.101 The Soviet Pavilion, in particular, celebrated the progress achieved since the October Revolution. The building was designed by Boris Iofan, architect of the

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never-realized utopian Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. For practical reasons the Paris structure was less ambitious in scale, but it was still more than 34 meters high, topped by Vera Mukhina’s 24.5-meter sculpture Worker and Collective Farm Woman. The dynamic, modern building emphasized its detachment from the past: it purposefully avoided any resemblance to any old buildings in the Soviet Union. This was a new Russia, with Moscow as its modern capital, which seemed to have become oblivious to its St. Petersburg imperial past. Inside the pavilion the Soviet Union proudly displayed statistics demonstrating its progress in science, education, architecture, art, and health, emphasizing the positive effects of the Five-Year Plans on the population. They exhibited models of the Palace of the Soviets, the Kuznetsk Iron and Steel Works, the House of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, the Red Army Theater, and the Gorky Park of Culture and Rest. Art works included Aleksandr Samokhvalov’s Soviet Physical Culture, Pavel Malkov’s Politburo of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party at the Eighth Extraordinary Congress of Soviets, and Sergey Merkurov’s 3.5-meter-high statue of Stalin. Attending the exhibition, the Russian emigrant community of Paris was able to see the Soviet Union on display. Although most knew that what they saw was a monumental lie—the show trials were still going on, and the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) organized kidnappings and murders among the emigrant Russian communities, reported in emigrant newspapers—some could not help feel pride seeing the achievements of their native country. Sympathizing with the Soviets was made easier by the location of their exhibit opposite the pavilion of Nazi Germany, which, as Albert Speer, the architect of the German building, made sure, towered over its Soviet totalitarian counterpart (fig. 1.9).102 The French, who wished to present the exhibition in the spirit of international collaboration and erected the Monument de la Paix in the center of the Place du Trocadéro, frowned at the competition between Germany and the Soviet Union, which they considered to be in monumental poor taste.103 But it was not only taste that the two competing pavilions offended but also the hope for peace. Stalin’s words, “We are determined to pursue the policy of peace with all our might and with all means. We do not want even a plot of land from others, but we do not surrender an inch of ours to anyone,” displayed on the wall right behind the model of the Palace of the Soviets, read like a declaration of war wrapped in a peace offering.104 The visitors could be disturbed by the implications of the “gesticulating colossi of the Soviets” defying “the eagle of Germany that lies in wait for them” (fig. 1.10).105 In this cultural environment there was no room for Dukelsky’s elegy for old St. Petersburg. As Dukelsky knew perfectly well, for the Soviets and their French friends the mere name of the imperial capital had a “dangerously reactionary ring.”106 Keeping the oratorio’s marketability in mind, Prokofiev advised Dukelsky

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figure 1.9. The Soviet and German Pavilions facing each other in 1937, photographer unknown.

to change the original title, Petersburg, into something more progressive, highlighting, potentially, new Soviet achievements.107 “If you want to write something like that, then why not Leningrad or Dneprostroi?” he asked his friend in 1932.108 To satisfy Prokofiev’s demand for a more optimistic ending, Dukelsky added a “triumphant close.”109 It may have been in the same spirit that Dukelsky eventually decided to replicate the title of Pudovkin’s film, The End of St. Petersburg, in his oratorio. Both the oratorio’s final title and its Mayakovskian ending reflected Dukelsky’s hope that his work might be performed in the Soviet Union. After returning to the Soviet Union in 1936, Prokofiev tried hard to secure a performance for his friend’s oratorio by circulating the score. Although Dukelsky had no intention of reestablishing ties with his old homeland, he was flattered when he heard from Prokofiev that so prominent a composer as Nikolai Miaskovsky was impressed with the work.110 Unsurprisingly, Prokofiev’s efforts to persuade the Committee on Arts Affairs to approve the oratorio’s performance did not bring the desired results. By 1938 he wisely gave up pushing for it. As he sadly reported to Dukelsky, “Unfortunately, for the moment it has not been possible to play your ‘Leningrad’ [sic] in the USSR; the time isn’t right: they’re playing the classics, and of contemporary composers only Soviet ones.”111 Prokofiev, whose own Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October had just been rejected, knew well enough that there were serious political reasons why Dukelsky’s End of Petersburg could not be performed in Stalinist Russia.112

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figure 1.10. The Soviet and German and Pavilions in competition (caricature in Candide, July 15, 1937).

Dukelsky could have hoped that the Pudovkin reference would temper the reactionary associations of his oratorio’s title. But in Paris the reference was too obscure to change the fate of the work. Astrov, working on Dukelsky’s behalf in 1937, asked the composer to change the title yet again to avoid anti-Soviet associations. Pyotr Lyublinsky’s suggestion, Astrov reported to Dukelsky, was “to replace the title ‘The End of St. Petersburg’ with something more current: presumably the beginning of Leningrad would be more appropriate.”113 Neither the Pudovkin title nor the Mayakovsky ending availed. After all negotiations came to a halt, the disappointed composer turned to Ross, conductor of the Schola Cantorum, who had showed the most enthusiasm for the work. To cover the expenses of hiring the New York Philharmonic, Dukelsky decided to

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finance the production from his Hollywood earnings; as he wrote in his memoirs, he let “the fairly solvent Duke pay for Dukelsky, the pauper.”114 He suggested that Ross add another choral work with orchestral accompaniment to the program. The conductor chose Frederick Delius’s monumental Mass of Life on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra for soloist, double chorus, and orchestra, assuring the nervous Dukelsky, who feared that Delius’s work would overshadow his oratorio, that “there was no possibility of a ‘clash,’ as Delius was dead, his work already a classic in England, and written in a style that couldn’t fail to put the modernity of [Dukelsky’s] idiom in better relief.”115 The premiere proved that Dukelsky’s anxieties about the potential dangers of such juxtaposition were well founded. Apart from Carter, who in his unyielding loyalty to new music dismissed Delius as uninteresting and devoted his short report on the concert to Dukelsky’s oratorio, claiming that it contained “some of the best music by [Dukelsky] since he wrote his exquisite Zéphyr et Flore for Diaghilev,”116 reviewers complained that Dukelsky’s “unworthy concoction should share the bill with Delius’s ‘masterpiece.’ Little did they know,” Dukelsky added sourly in his memoirs, “that they wouldn’t have had the opportunity to hear the masterpiece were it not for the offending concocter.”117 Petersburg looked less splendid from faraway New York. The poems about the city Dukelsky selected for the oratorio were sung in clumsy English translations, provided by the conductor’s wife, Elaine de Sincay Ross, a seasoned but not particularly poetic translator of Russian vocal music.118 The New York of 1938 was very different from 1937 Paris, which had defied its Russian emigrants by rejecting Dukelsky’s nostalgic commemoration of old St. Petersburg in favor of monumental displays of Soviet power. New York provided only a practical solution for Dukelsky, a performance venue free of disturbing historical associations. As the composer’s somewhat clumsy efforts to negotiate the various markets of Paris, Moscow, and New York attest, there was no smooth continuity, only uneasy coexistence or crude juxtaposition between the emigrant nostalgia displayed in the first part of his oratorio and the Bolshevik euphoria of the finale. •

•

•

Nor could a work conceived in the spirit of the 1920s easily transition to the late 1930s. The end of the 1920s marked also the end of the first phase of Russian Paris and its exciting artistic transformations. On August 19, 1929, Diaghilev died. Suvchinsky brought the news to Prokofiev who, following some disagreements about the staging of his last ballet The Prodigal Son, had been estranged from the impresario. Prokofiev did not mind ending his ballet career, but he felt sorry for the cohort of young Russian composers, among them Dukelsky, whose future depended on Diaghilev.119 Dukelsky indeed was hit hard by the news. He received it in New York, where he was visiting his mother. “My heart almost stopped beating,” he

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reported in his memoirs. “I remember crying out, as if in pain, then dropping my head in stunned silence and crossing myself. . . . I stayed in bed for two days, unable to touch food.”120 He had already given up his career prospects in England and was losing hope in Paris since Koussevitzky, now in Boston, had abandoned his Paris concert series. Before receiving the news, he still entertained hopes of returning to the French capital and producing, with Diaghilev’s help, his opera Mistress into Maid. After Diaghilev’s death, there was no reason for him to return to Europe. And as the failure to bring his oratorio to Paris showed, Europe of the 1930s had no need for him either. The American Duke triumphed over the Russian, nostalgic Dukelsky. Prokofiev chose another route and went in the opposite direction. With both Diaghilev and Koussevitzky gone, he could no longer ignore the temptation of Soviet Russia, the only place where he felt his music was understood and appreciated. It was not so much the Bolshevik temptation that drew him to Stalin’s utopia but a cold, rational calculation. Being a composer first and foremost, he was tired of making his living with exhausting concert tours. Returning to Russia was a route many other emigrants chose. Even Diaghilev was attracted, briefly, but being a shrewd entrepreneur, he had a more realistic view both of the Soviet Union and of what he was willing to endure there. Prokofiev’s decision to return came after a long period of flirting with the Soviets, starting when he signed a contract with Diaghilev in 1925 to write a “Bolshevik ballet.” He wrote the ballet not to ease his way back to the Soviet Union but to smooth his return into Diaghilev’s enterprise. Yet working on the ballet put him in touch with artists from the Soviet Union who were staying in Paris. The history of the creation of what became Prokofiev’s Pas d’acier shows how porous the borders were between Soviet Russia and Russian Paris. These seemingly permeable borders gave the illusion to Prokofiev that Soviet Russia was a viable option to continue his career. St. Petersburg was no more, but a new, socially dynamic young country opened its arms to embrace its former enemies. Happy were those who, like Dukelsky, were never asked to return.

2

Soviet “méchanique” or the Bolshevik Temptation

An incurable fop, Vladimir Dukelsky spent a sizable portion of his income on fashionable clothing. He was wearing his best tailcoat on the evening of the premiere of Sergey Prokofiev’s Pas d’acier on June 7, 1927, when he got into a fight with another dandy, Jean Cocteau, who showed up in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt “in his light-tan gabardine suit, with shocking-pink lining displayed by artfully unbuttoned sleeves.” In Dukelsky’s account, during the intermission Cocteau overheard Dukelsky’s praise for Prokofiev’s “massive, sinewy music,” which, he hoped, “would deliver a crushing blow to the decadent Parisian musiquette.” Cocteau, who could have understood only the words “Parisian musiquette” in the Russian conversation, took offense, slapped the surprised Dukelsky, and disappeared as suddenly as he appeared. Accounts by Dukelsky and Cocteau differ on what happened next. Dukelsky claimed that, Russian fashion, he had challenged the poet to a duel. Cocteau wrote that instead of a challenge Dukelsky apologized and Cocteau graciously “withdrew the slap (to whatever extent one can withdraw a slap).”1 What mattered to Prokofiev, who did not witness the incident, was that Cocteau questioned the originality of his ballet, claiming that the French have seen “all this before in music-hall.”2 Producing novelty was crucial in the fickle artistic atmosphere of 1920s Paris. After the relative flop of Chout (The Buffoon, 1921), Prokofiev needed his new ballet to cause a sensation. For Diaghilev, who knew that his company’s survival depended on his ability to supply new attractions to the ever-hungry Parisian audience, nothing was more desirable than a scandal. If he warned Dukelsky against fighting Cocteau in the theater, he did so because the two dandies’ petty squabble was not the scandal he was desperate to incite by presenting Paris with a 58

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“Bolshevik ballet.” Indeed, it was hard to imagine that the ballet’s “triumphant Soviet plot,” which Dukelsky, despite his enthusiasm for the music, admitted he found “personally antipathetic,” would not cause a stir in a Paris swarming with White Russian emigrants.3 But it was unclear whether Bolshevism would rouse hatred or enthusiasm in Paris in the 1920s. As Cocteau emphasized, his criticism concerned not the music or the stage design of Pas d’acier but Leonide Massine’s choreography that turned “something as great as the Russian Revolution into a cotillion-like spectacle within the intellectual grasp of ladies who pay six thousand francs for a box.”4 Like many French intellectuals, Cocteau admired the Soviet experiment and flirted with Communist ideals. Yet despite their different political sympathies, Cocteau and Dukelsky’s scuffle was more a matter of rivalries between the French and Russian factions within Diaghilev’s cosmopolitan circle. Prokofiev’s new ballet, in Dukelsky’s judgment, indicated a return to Russian values and a temporary abandonment of the French fashions that, at Cocteau’s instigation, had guided Diaghilev’s recent productions. This new Russian direction proved unsustainable. In the remaining three seasons before Diaghilev’s untimely death, the Soviet experiment was abandoned and Diaghilev turned to more palatable subjects, presenting Nicolas Nabokov’s Ode (1928), Stravinsky’s neoclassical Apollon musagète (1928), and Prokofiev’s biblical Le Fils Prodigue (1929). His experience with Pas d’acier taught Diaghilev about the risk of throwing his company’s productions into a volatile political arena. The ballet’s many alterations bear the mark of irreconcilable political tensions, misunderstandings, and confusion. This chapter will follow the curious transformations of Prokofiev’s Pas d’acier, from its inception and premiere in Paris, its reception in London, its creators’ failed attempts to bring it to the Soviet Union, through its drastically altered version in New York, showing the changing reactions to Prokofiev’s Bolshevik experiment in different environments. The conception and fate of Prokofiev’s ballet demonstrate that nobody, not even Russian emigrants in Paris, could resist the temptations of Bolshevism. B O L SH EV I K T E M P TAT IO N

The idea of a Bolshevik ballet came not from Prokofiev but from Diaghilev. In his diary, Prokofiev recorded his first meeting with the impresario to discuss the new ballet and his astonishment at Diaghilev’s suggestion. “Nobody has any interest in another Russian ballet on an Afanasiev folk tale or on the life of Ivan the Terrible,” Diaghilev explained to the composer. What he needed from Prokofiev was “a contemporary Russian ballet.” “A Bolshevik ballet?” the astounded Prokofiev asked. “Yes,” Diaghilev confirmed. That was not what Prokofiev expected, but he soon adjusted to the idea.5

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White émigrés like Dukelsky could not comprehend why “the aristocratic, cosmopolitan Diaghilev” would commission a ballet on the theme of Soviet labor.6 Serge Lifar thought that Diaghilev’s interest in Soviet Russia was rekindled by three people: Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who was living in Paris at the time; Boris Krasin, director of Rosphil (Russian Philharmonics); and the Soviet People’s Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky.7 Ehrenburg’s or Krasin’s influence on Diaghilev is not documented. But we know that Lunacharsky, who had come to Paris specifically to persuade Russian émigré artists to renew contact with their native land, made a positive impression on Diaghilev.8 He met the Soviet commissar through the Armenian painter and set designer Georgy Yakulov, who later made the sets for Prokofiev’s new ballet. Lunacharsky and Diaghilev had lunch with Yakulov and Mikhail Larionov, who had designed the sets for Prokofiev’s previous Diaghilev ballet, Chout. As Diaghilev related to Prokofiev, Lunacharsky launched an attack on the decadent West, to which Diaghilev retorted that the West still produced plenty of talents. Trying to charm Diaghilev, Lunacharsky boasted that an exhibition of old icons that he recently took to Vienna scored an enormous triumph for Russian art. Diaghilev was astonished to hear this “from the lips of a Soviet minister of culture and official atheist.”9 What interested Diaghilev more than hearsay about contemporary Russian art was what he saw of it in Paris. In 1923, Alexander Tairov’s Kamernïy Theater toured the French capital with Charles Lecocq’s three-act opera buffa Giroflé-Girofla. Tairov’s experimental theater employed the most advanced artists in Russia, such as Alexandra Exter and Yakulov, and, before they moved to the West, Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, and Sergey Sudeikin. With Exter’s and Yakulov’s sets, consisting of geometrical shapes, cones, pyramids, and flights of steps, theatrical space became dynamic. The group’s 1923 tour to the West was a great success, despite the paranoia of anxious critics such as André Antonie, who saw in Tairov’s methods a systematic attack on French dramatic traditions.10 Diaghilev, always at the helm of new artistic trends, must have been intrigued by the success of Soviet art. According to his secretary Walter Nouvel, he attended all Tairov’s performances at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, “watching every detail eagerly and jealously.”11 He had occasion to admire Yakulov’s art again in 1925 when the artist came to Paris for the International Exhibition of Industrial and Decorative Arts. The exposition allowed Soviet Russia to present itself as an equal trading partner with the West as well as to exhibit its modernist art. The Soviet committee sent Alexander Rodchenko to set up the exhibition and build his Constructivist workers’ club on site. In its modernist design, Konstantin Mel’nikov’s wood and glass pavilion was matched only by Le Corbusier’s building. Both the pavilion and Rodchenko’s exhibition aimed to present the Soviet Union as a rationalized country, revitalized by the Revolution. In his memoirs, Ehrenburg declared the Soviet Pavilion to be the “chief attraction of the exhibition.”12

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Among the objects exhibited by the Soviets was the model of Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivist Monument to the Third International, which was supposed to be one-third higher than the Eiffel Tower, as well as Yakulov’s scale model for Tairov’s production of Giroflé-Girofla. Most of the exhibitors were “left” artists, such as Lyubov Popova, who exhibited textiles, and El Lissitzky, whose posters decorated the walls. In addition to the exhibition, the Soviets brought to Paris Sergey Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, Tairov’s production of Phèdre, and Yevgeny Vakhtangov’s Turandot. Ehrenburg may have been right in his assertion that Parisians considered Soviet art the most advanced.13 The Soviets chose the artists whom they would allow to go abroad carefully. The trustworthy Ehrenburg was frequently in the West, cultivating contacts with leftist intellectuals and sending reports about the “decadent” West to his Soviet compatriots. The futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky also traveled often to Berlin and Paris in the 1920s. He helped plan the Soviet Pavilion in 1925 and attended the opening ceremony on June 4 as an official representative. His powerful readings attracted Russian intellectuals and inspired the poet Marina Tsvetayeva to greet him in the first issue of Pyotr Suvchinsky’s Eurasianist paper Yevraziya. Tsvetayeva recalled her last meeting with Mayakovsky before her departure from Russia in 1922 and Mayakovsky’s words to the West, “The truth is over here!”—a message she belatedly confirmed in 1928, when, after hearing Mayakovsky reading his poems in Paris, she admitted that real artistic power resides indeed “over there,” in the Soviet Union.14 After the Soviet Embassy opened on Grenelle street in Paris in 1924, the former Bolsheviks, who, according to Ehrenburg, had recently been depicted “as men with knives between their teeth,” started to entertain “various deputies, prominent journalists, businessmen, society ladies.”15 Mayakovsky roamed the streets, often with Prokofiev, and as Dukelsky remembered, “read his thunderous poems eagerly and with great pathos.”16 Dukelsky was willing to overlook the poet’s frequent social blunders when he saw him falling into a trance while listening to Prokofiev’s music. Prokofiev met Mayakovsky in Berlin in 1922, then the center of Russia Abroad, and found him “a fearful apache.” The poet, Prokofiev reported in his diary, was very attracted to Diaghilev. The two spent every evening together, arguing furiously about contemporary artists. Mayakovsky, who had just arrived from Moscow and cared only about his own Futurist group, intended to declare to the world that the future was in Moscow. Diaghilev, who knew more than anybody else about goings on in Western artistic circles, easily rebuffed him. But when Mayakovsky recited his poems, “à la Mayakovsky, gratingly, with a cigarette between his teeth,” everybody—including Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Suvchinsky— fell into ecstasy.17 While Mayakovsky’s views on contemporary art might have sounded provincial, the power of his personality and poetry won over even those who had otherwise no sympathy for the Soviet utopia.18

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But who was provincial and who was up-to-date was not completely settled, and Diaghilev was always afraid that he might fall accidentally into the first category. The French capital lagged behind Berlin, Brussels, and Milan, and, according to Soviet artists, definitely behind Moscow. It was thus tempting to rejuvenate the Parisian art scene with an injection of new Soviet art. Although the Soviets carefully monitored Paris, which they regarded as the “West,” the French capital was also the Western city most positively inclined toward the Soviet experiment. French intellectuals tended to be pro-Soviet, many being infatuated with Communism. Russian émigrés tried in vain to dispel the myth of the Communist utopia. As Nina Berberova recalled in her memoirs, on June 10, 1927, three days after the premiere of Prokofiev’s Bolshevik ballet, an émigré newspaper printed an anonymous letter from the Soviet Union about freedom of speech being brutally curtailed by Stalin. While intellectuals in the West protested the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti, the article claimed, they remained silent about “the persecution of the best Russian people, who cannot even propagate their ideas because of the complete impossibility of such expression.”19 The Soviet official organ Pravda immediately retorted, claiming that the letter was forged. According to Berberova, no response came from French writers, not even when the émigré writers Konstantin Balmont and Ivan Bunin pleaded with French intellectuals in L’Avenir. Only Romain Rolland paid attention, but his letter, printed in L’Europe on January 20, 1928, only confirmed his pro-Soviet views.20 There were exceptions.21 Jacques Maritain and his circle, for instance, staunchly resisted the Soviet temptation. Nor were the émigrés united in their hatred of the new Soviet State. Many fluctuated between anger, revulsion, fear, curiosity, and outright attraction to the Soviet experiment. Tsvetayeva’s husband, Sergey Efron, a former Russian officer in the White Army who fought the Bolsheviks, became a Soviet agent, willingly participating in terrorist actions. Suvchinsky, as his editorials in Yevraziya demonstrate, also flirted with pro-Soviet ideology. The Soviets exploited the emigrants’ confusion. In August 1925, Nadezhda Bryusova, a musicologist and member of the Arts Department of the State Academic Council, sent letters to Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and the pianist Aleksandr Borovsky in Paris informing them, at Lunacharsky’s request, that they could travel to the Soviet Union. Stravinsky and Borovsky rejected the offer.22 But Prokofiev was intrigued and the fight for his soul began. In 1932 Levon Atovmyan, a composer and Soviet official, sent further invitations to Prokofiev, Koussevitzky, and Nikolai Malko, trying to persuade them to relocate. Koussevitzky ignored the offer, Malko politely evaded it. Feeling insecure about his position in the West, Prokofiev alone took the bait.23 Even Diaghilev was tempted to travel to the Soviet Union and see the new artistic trends for himself, but was mortally afraid that he would become trapped. Overconfident after his triumphant visit in 1927, Prokofiev advised him to go but also to assure the Soviet officials beforehand that he would not siphon off their

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dancers and that he wanted to visit “purely to look.”24 With the help of Mayakovsky, Diaghilev received a visa to the Soviet Union, but he abandoned his plan to visit because the authorities refused to guarantee that his assistant Boris Kochno could return to France.25 It was definitely safer to play the Bolshevik game in the free West where the worst that could have happened to a Bolshevik ballet was a scandal, something Diaghilev would have welcomed toward the end of the tediously peaceful second decade of his ballet company. BAC K I N T O T H E F O L D

Prokofiev’s relationship with Diaghilev started off happily. After commissioning him to write a ballet in 1915, Diaghilev explained to the twenty-four-year-old composer that besides him and Stravinsky, there was no Russian composer who mattered.26 Stravinsky, whom Prokofiev met shortly thereafter in Milan, seconded Diaghilev’s opinion. Hearing Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, Toccata, and the Second Sonata, Stravinsky declared that Prokofiev was “a real Russian composer, the only one to be found in Russia.”27 Prokofiev played the piano-duet version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring with his new friend and admitted that it was “a magnificent work.” Diaghilev’s two favorite “sons” reunited a year later in Paris, where Stravinsky repeated that Prokofiev was the only living Russian composer he loved.28 Diaghilev placed great hope in Prokofiev’s new ballet Chout, not the least because he felt that “the fickle French” had started to accuse him of “having no more discoveries to make after Stravinsky.”29 Prokofiev suspected that Diaghilev intentionally scheduled Stravinsky’s Firebird, his first ballet for the Ballets Russes, and Chout, Prokofiev’s first, on the same night. According to later accounts, Chout did not hit the mark. But after the first performances Prokofiev felt elated, especially since he heard the whispering that, compared to the faded Firebird, his Chout had made a favorable impression and made Stravinsky jealous.30 But Chout, in the end, was a failure. All agreed that it was too long and overcomplicated. It would have needed an experienced choreographer to shape it and not Larionov, who, although he had a theoretical knowledge of dancing, was primarily a painter and set designer.31 London also rejected Chout, ruining Diaghilev’s chances for playing up his new discovery. Prokofiev, who previously considered himself an insider in Diaghilev’s circle, now felt cast out. His ferocious fight with Stravinsky in October 1922 over The Love of Three Oranges did not help the situation. Both Diaghilev and Stravinsky attacked Prokofiev for writing operas, for being “on the wrong path.” At the height of the row, Prokofiev yelled that he did not believe that Stravinsky was “immune to error” himself and that he, being the younger, was ahead of him. “Yours is the path of the past generation,” he shouted at his rival. They parted as friends, but relations definitely chilled after their argument.32 When, in June 1924, Prokofiev went to see the premiere of Georges Auric’s

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Les Fâcheux (The Bores) with the Ballets Russes, Diaghilev ignored him (“the first time he has pulled a weird stunt like that,” Prokofiev recorded in his diary).33 Prokofiev suspected that Stravinsky had been pulling strings behind the scene. Suvchinsky reported that Stravinsky, who was on his way back to Orthodoxy, criticized Prokofiev for wanting to remain a modernist.34 Diaghilev, with Stravinsky’s encouragement, was setting a new tone, which Prokofiev found incomprehensible. They both became promoters of French music, especially of Auric and Francis Poulenc, and suddenly turned away from Prokofiev. Not liking what he heard, Prokofiev placed himself against Diaghilev’s new French coterie, detesting the music of Poulenc and Darius Milhaud, not sparing even Auric, whose music he liked better, from sharp and witty criticism.35 He blamed Stravinsky for Diaghilev’s change of taste. Disparaging Prokofiev, Diaghilev now promoted the French group. This, for Prokofiev, also signaled an incomprehensible and unwelcome change in Stravinsky’s aesthetic outlook. In his diaries, comments on Stravinsky’s music became more critical. The Rite remained sacred, but he was dismayed by Stravinsky’s neoclassical works. Of the two influences on the Piano Concerto, American ragtime and Bach, he approved the former but he hated the latter, which he had already judged fake in the finale of the Octet. He did not mind Stravinsky’s ascetic orchestration “up to a point,” but he found himself “missing the mezzo-tints and softenings that come with the strings.”36 Feeling rejected by Diaghilev, he was not thrilled in 1924 when Dukelsky appeared on the scene. Boasting a new ballet commission, Dukelsky paraded around as Diaghilev’s “third son” shortly after his arrival from New York. Dukelsky soon became a friend who, enjoying his insider position in the Diaghilev circle, fed Prokofiev the freshest gossip about the impresario and his entourage. According to Dukelsky, Diaghilev thought Prokofiev talented and appreciated his melodic gift, but found Stravinsky more intelligent. Prokofiev “always can be counted on doing the wrong thing,” he grumbled.37 To Prokofiev’s delight, Dukelsky agreed with him that Stravinsky’s new Serenade “contains melodic turns of phrase derived from Rachmaninoff and sonorities that sound like [Nikolai] Medtner.”38 They liked Marva better, but they traced even there “some of the pastiche back to [Aleksander] Dargomizhsky.”39 With glee Dukelsky reported to his friend that Stravinsky hated Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, judging it to be “a sort of Russian-style pseudoclassicism, a musical Vasnetsov!”40 Dukelsky prided himself on his role in reconciling Diaghilev with Prokofiev. He casually let drop that Prokofiev was about to accept a ballet commission from Berlin, thus arousing Diaghilev’s jealousy. A new commission was soon forthcoming, which Dukelsky attributed to Diaghilev’s getting bored with the “deliberate musical infantilism” of Poulenc’s Les biches (The Darlings), Henri Sauguet’s La chatte (The Cat), and Milhaud’s Le train bleu (The Blue Train), that is, with “the French ‘musiquette.’ ”41 According to Dukelsky, Nouvel was also dissatisfied with the new

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French direction of Diaghilev’s company and pushed for a Prokofiev commission. In the end, Diaghilev yielded, pretending that commissioning Prokofiev was his own idea.42 Like Dukelsky, Prokofiev also believed that the French group—Poulenc, Auric, and Milhaud—although promoted by Stravinsky, left Diaghilev dissatisfied at the end. The “white knight” Dukelsky, who was supposed to have saved Diaghilev’s season, did not deliver because, although talented, he was too young and inexperienced. His relative failure put Prokofiev into a favorable position vis-à-vis Diaghilev, who soon sought out his neglected “second son.” But the most important element of the changed situation was Stravinsky’s gradual distancing himself from the theater and from Diaghilev’s group. With the “principal persecutor of Prokofiev” out of the picture, Diaghilev now needed Prokofiev’s services.43 Considering the crucial role Stravinsky played in Prokofiev’s sense of his career opportunities in Paris, it is hardly surprising that he was delighted with Yakulov’s suggestion that his new ballet be called “Ursignol.” Yakulov based the title on the French acronym for the name of the Soviet Union (URSS, L’Union des Républiques Socialistes Soviétiques). Prokofiev immediately recognized that the title also contained the French word for bear, “ours,” traditionally associated with Russia. What appealed to Prokofiev the most was that the word suggested, “half-jokingly but without giving offence,” not only the little bear but also “a punning caricature of Stravinsky’s Rossignol,” a 1920 ballet version of Stravinsky’s 1914 opera, revived by Diaghilev in 1925, which Prokofiev found “slow and boring.”44 Like Beethoven on Wagner and Wagner on everybody after him, Stravinsky was casting his shadow over Prokofiev. Ursignol, as initially conceived, was to be a playful revenge: the White Russian Stravinsky’s primitivism turned into bright red Bolshevism. LET IT BE PINK

Excited after Dukelsky’s news about a potential Diaghilev commission, Prokofiev came up with a plot about a clef leading semiquavers and rests, and a key ruling over sardines for his future ballet.45 Diaghilev quickly dismissed the plan, explaining to Prokofiev that he did not want “symbolic figures or constructivist costumes” taking attention away from the human body in a ballet.46 For help with a Bolshevik ballet, Prokofiev turned to Suvchinsky, who at the time gave the impression of being well informed about Soviet Russia. Like some other Eurasianists, Suvchinsky considered the Russian Revolution not a cataclysmic disaster but an unavoidable step in Russia’s development into a non-Western country. Believing that the Eurasianists could mediate between Soviet Russia and foreign states, he was enthusiastic when the Soviets invited Pyotr Arapov, a Eurasianist sympathizer, to Moscow.47 Suvchinsky did not realize that what he thought to be his “knowledge” of Soviet Russia was actually spoon fed to the emigrants by

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the Soviet spy program Trest (The Trust) and that his Soviet connections were agents.48 Prokofiev also hoped that involving Suvchinsky would prevent Diaghilev from assigning the job to Kochno, who provided librettos for Stravinsky, Auric, and Dukelsky, and whom Prokofiev disliked.49 Suvchinsky sought out Ehrenburg and the painter and stage designer Isaak Rabinovich, who was in Paris for the exhibition, and discussed with them the possibility of creating a politically neutral ballet about Soviet life. Predictably, they thought the project ill-fated. “The present situation is so acutely contentious that there would be no chance of creating a neutral work,” they explained to Suvchinsky. Russia was sharply divided between the Red and the White factions. “‘Whoever is not with us is against us’: consequently a neutral point of view would be rebuffed from here and from there.”50 Prokofiev would need to write “either a White ballet or a Red ballet.” They doubted that for Prokofiev either could be a real option. A real Red ballet, at least according to Ehrenburg and Rabinovich, was out of the question in bourgeois Paris. How could a Russian composer living in the West comprehend what was going on in the Soviet Union? And why would Prokofiev write a White ballet and thus sever his ties with Russia at a time when there was increased interest in his music there? Probably wary of endangering his politically sensitive position among Russian émigrés in Paris, Suvchinsky pulled out of the project.51 Surprisingly, despite his initial attitude, Ehrenburg, who left a disagreeable impression on Prokofiev and Suvchinsky, wanted to get involved. He was eager to discuss the subject with Diaghilev, obviously forgetting that initially he had advised Suvchinsky against the project. It remains unclear what sort of scenario Ehrenburg had in mind—Red or White— because Diaghilev never hired him for the job. After insisting that he was unwilling to serve as an adviser and wanted to be a librettist for the ballet, Ehrenburg asked for 5,000 francs.52 It took very little effort for Prokofiev to persuade Diaghilev, always short of money, to let the composer devise the scenario with Yakulov. Yakulov’s work made a strong impression on both Diaghilev and Prokofiev. He had all the right credentials: he was a cutting-edge artist in the Soviet Union, with plenty of experience in set design, which he gained in Tairov’s experimental Kamernïy Theater. He told Prokofiev that he managed to live through the most turbulent times in Moscow calmly painting, protected by his war credentials. He seemed to have been comfortably settled into Soviet life. Prokofiev admired him as an artist, although he found him “slightly repellent,” as he found everybody who could reconcile with Bolshevism.53 But, most important, Yakulov wanted Diaghilev’s commission badly enough to be willing to design a politically neutral or “pink” ballet that would please the Parisian bourgeois audience and not offend the Bolsheviks at home. Topics of Parisian high-society life already exhausted, Diaghilev wanted to apply the formula on Soviet everyday life as a scenario for the new ballet. “In Russia today,” Diaghilev explained to his collaborators, “there are twenty million people” who live, laugh, and dance, and “they do all these things quite differently from how

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they are done here. And this is typical of Russia today. We don’t have to have anything to do with politics!”54 Prokofiev was equally adamant about political neutrality. When, in 1925, Krasin started negotiations with him about a Soviet tour and a commission from the Central Executive Committee to compose a “cinema symphony” to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution, Prokofiev hesitated, fearing that “saying yes would mean signing up to Bolshevism” and possibly endangering his career in the West. But neither did he want to refuse, so he used his new Diaghilev commission as an excuse to decline Krasin’s proposal while leaving the door open for further negotiations.55 Yakulov’s original plan was to show three different aspects of Bolshevik life: a bustling market at Moscow’s Sukharevskaya Square (the Bolshevik Moscow version of Stravinsky’s nineteenth-century Petersburg fairground in Petrushka), featuring bagmen, commissars, and sailors; the period of the New Economic Policy or NEP, designed as a comic number with dubious rich speculators; and a scene representing a Soviet factory or collective farm. Diaghilev disliked the second scene, thinking that poking fun of the nouveaux riches might offend the Parisians, many of whom became wealthy during the war. Prokofiev also felt uncomfortable with the NEP scene, doubting that he could represent it musically.56 Prokofiev and Yakulov’s final scenario remained close to Yakulov’s original plan. At Prokofiev’s insistence they took Ehrenburg’s advice and replaced the market with a train station (as Ehrenburg explained to Diaghilev, railway stations were places for trade in the early stages of Bolshevism).57 Prokofiev may well have been inspired to try his hand at train music by the success of Arthur Honegger’s popular Pacific 231, which premiered on the same program in which he played his Second Piano Concerto with Koussevitzky on May 8, 1924.58 The comic aspect of the proposed and eliminated NEP scene migrated into the first scene at the train station, where impoverished city dwellers bartered their old belongings for food. A nouveau riche man with a pig also appears. The main target of ridicule is the orator, who tries to reconvert a pretty female worker to the old values. For comic effect, the orator has a book on a rubber band that makes the book bounce when it is dropped. From Yakulov’s original scenario they kept the bagmen or meshochniki, postrevolutionary entrepreneurs who brought food from the villages and sold it at high price to those starving in the cities; commissars, the officials of the new regime; and sailors, who appear as members of the military, “holding their rifles below and at-the-ready” in the prologue, well-dressed, free and easy characters, buying goods and “flinging money widely” in the first act, and finally transformed into factory workers in the second act.59 They added male and female toffee and cigarette vendors, and petty thieves who, after robbing a commissar, initiate comic chase scenes as they climb stairs, hang on ropes, and slide along the board. For the second act, Prokofiev wanted to show a factory working at full speed, with machinery revolving and hammers pounding. To introduce plot into this scene of

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heavy industry, Prokofiev suggested bringing back the orator, whose anti-regime speech is greeted with the workers’ satirical response. The managing director appears and tells the workers that the factory will have to close because of shortage of materials. During the workers’ discussion, “a children’s procession passes by . . . to the noisy accompaniment of side-drums and capering somersaults.” Children’s processions, Yakulov explained to Prokofiev, occurred every day in Moscow. After the procession, the sailors persuade the workers to do gymnastic exercises. The ballet thus ends with “vigorous PT.”60 Gymnastic exercises, Yakulov might have confirmed, were also typical, if not of everyday life, at least on the stage in the 1920s.61 Prokofiev was exceedingly pleased with what he thought a politically neutral scenario. Yakulov had some reservations, knowing that humor was a dangerous device. He feared that the Bolsheviks might find the ballet offensive, which could endanger his position in Moscow, where he had to return. Diaghilev approved the scenario but he required more development of the individual characters and more subplots. He also rejected the suggested gymnastics, arguing that ending the ballet with “the factory going at full blast with plenty of hammering on stage” was a more effective conclusion. Prokofiev agreed and reworked the scenario, developing the love interest of the sailor and the worker woman, and pulling out all the stops in the last scene, in which, as Yakulov designed it, a blow on a pedal sets into motion a system of wheels, which becomes the starting point of the movement of the whole factory: again the work on the first machine at the left wing begins and also on the highest, furthest platform (rolling work) and the work on the machine at the right wing continues. From the center platform where the soundless hammering took place, two workers come down with gigantic hammers, wooden with hollow centers, and they begin to loudly strike them . . . other workers with smaller hammers remain on the middle platform and also strike them rhythmically. From the top a complex pulley system is lowered and set into motion. During the whole finale, which lasts from three to four minutes, lighted signs flash in various parts of the stage.62

As Prokofiev’s description shows, the emphasis was on visual effects, machines taking over the stage as men and women worked in perfect harmony with them. Gone were the colorful comic characters, swindlers, vendors, city dwellers, bagmen, commissars, and sailors. As the stage transformed into a factory between the two acts, so, too, did the individual types—among them the principal sailor—turn into uniformed workmen and working women. R E D BA L L E T O N W H I T E K EYS

In a letter to Diaghilev on August 16, 1925, Prokofiev described the music he was composing for Pas d’acier as “Russian, often impetuous, almost always diatonic, on

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example 2.1. Factory song and the theme of Pas d’acier.

white keys. In a word white music for a red ballet.”63 Prokofiev followed Diaghilev’s directive to write contemporary Russian music. In his autobiography he partially explained the stylistic change initiated with Pas d’acier as “a turn toward a Russian musical idiom,” a tendentious statement one suspects had more to do with 1941, the date of the writing, than with Prokofiev’s actual inclination in 1925.64 But he did pick what Israel Nestyev recognized an “old factory tune” and transformed it into the emblem of the ballet, starting the music with a unison rendition and ending with the tune’s return in a rhythmically augmented noisy apotheosis, blasted on the trumpets (rehearsal 176).65 Aside from the first three measures, Prokofiev left little intact. Some of his transformations made the tune even more recognizably Russian: he added grace notes, reminiscent of the vocal hiccups in Stravinsky’s Les Noces; and turned the E minor of the original tune into a mode that hangs between A minor (with emphasis on E and its fifth, B) and C major, the modally ambiguous territory frequently inhabited by Russian folk music (ex. 2.1). Prokofiev’s technique of varying simple melodies is also reminiscent of Russian folk music. The three-note primitive melody he presents on the contrabassoon, trombones, and tuba at rehearsal 2 of the prologue is arranged in four lines, all slightly varied, the second shortened into three measures (ex. 2.2). The central tune of the prologue is also a four-line song that evokes primitive chastushkas (ex. 2.3a). Prokofiev toyed with the idea of using a real chastushka for the ballet, composing “a theme whose contours and rhythm would be related to ‘Yablochko,’ and then through symphonic development would gradually transform itself into the actual ‘Yablochko,’ whereupon it would immediately revert to its former self.”66 The popular “Yablochko” (ex. 2.3b), sang with different texts on the opposite sides of the civil war in Russia, would have been particularly appropriate for Prokofiev’s ballet, but eventually he changed his mind about using it. Neither did he pick from the chastushkas Kochno sang for him to give the composer an “idea for the sort of thing that was in the air and being sung in Russia at the start of the Bolshevik era.” Prokofiev liked some of them, especially some rural

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Chapter Two example 2.2. “Primitive” tune in the Prologue of Pas d’acier.

ones, but dismissed the urban songs as “sentimental rubbish. The new regime brought a new vocabulary, but not new tunes,” he wrote in his diary.67 For the dramatically most significant theme in the ballet, which is associated with the sailor and the worker girl’s budding romance, Prokofiev returned to his more lyrical impulse. Already at its first appearance in the sixth movement (at rehearsal 88) the theme has a lyrical tone completely different from the rest of the ballet’s music. It is played first by the solo flute in the high register, underlined by gently rocking string accompaniment. The harsh brass sound gone, the woodwinds are reduced to an oboe and a bassoon, quietly backing the cello line. As emotions heat up, the theme predictably moves to the first violin, dolce then espressivo (at rehearsals 89, 94). But it is not only the instrumentation that contributes to the romantic aura of this theme. Its falling fourths and descending melodic contour are gently balanced by the rising tetrachord in the bass line and the static inner voices. Significantly, besides the sailor’s theme that is built on falling and rising chains of thirds, the love theme is one of the few in the ballet devoid of the grotesque tritones that otherwise permeate the score and lend it the insouciance Prokofiev proudly described to Diaghilev. The lack of irony in the love theme indicates Prokofiev’s sincerity as well as a romantic inclination perhaps not quite fitting for an industrial ballet. The inappropriateness of the theme’s lyricism is even more obvious when it returns in

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example 2.3a. The four-line tune in the Prologue of Pas d’acier.

example 2.3b. “Yablochka.”

the midst of the industrial noise in the factory. According to the scenario, the sailorturned-worker catches “sight of his sweetheart, strives towards her,” but cannot reach her.68 The theme nevertheless transcends the noise and floats over it dolce e cantando (rehearsal 127), thus putting the lovers and their passion center stage. Not only was Prokofiev following his lyrical instinct, he was also obeying Diaghilev’s request to have “more development of the individual characters’ subplots.”69 Instead of the gymnastic exercises that he and Yakulov originally imagined for the ending, the ballet concluded, as Diaghilev wished, with an industrial apotheosis, which

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served, Prokofiev wrote to Diaghilev, “as the accompaniment to the dance of the two main protagonists.” The love theme thus transcends even the brutal hammering (rehearsal 152) as the lovers mime from different platforms until they descend to the first level and dance in the front of the stage during the finale. Diaghilev’s insistence on the development of individual characters, coinciding with Prokofiev’s lyrical inclination, contradicted the new Soviet ideal of anti-individualism. In this respect, at least, Pas d’acier failed to confirm Bolshevik values. Nevertheless, the main impression of the last scene remained an industrial orgy, achieved by extreme polyphonic density. As Miaskovsky described it, Prokofiev piled Cyclopean blocks in terrifying polyphonic and harmonic strata to create an effect of grandiosity and cruel power.70 The music pulses at all metric levels: quarter-note ostinatos are divided by chromatic triplet ostinati, measured by further half-note, whole-note, and double whole-note pedals. Above this pulsing, dissonant sheet of sound the oboes play a diatonic melody, its simple rhythm moving obediently with the ostinatos. The density of the texture increases in the next movement, “Hammers,” which Prokofiev and Yakulov imagined with the visual effect of big and small hammers working soundlessly on stage. In the finale, from rehearsal 73, Prokofiev adds the sound of the hammers to the already thick texture. On a separate sheet he notated the rhythm of the hammer blows, half notes for the big hammers, quarter and eight notes for the small ones. He wanted the hammering to come from the wings with precise timbre to be worked out during rehearsals. But rehearsal time was limited, and Diaghilev remembered that something needed to be done with the hammers only at the last rehearsals, when he “ordered the rhythm simply to be drummed into the dancers on stage.” Prokofiev was embarrassed about such “a crude and clumsy solution,” especially when he heard Stravinsky’s caustic remark about the onstage hammering. “Stravinsky is in London in a great state of nerves, depressed by the failure of Oedipus in Paris,” he noted in his diary. “Someone asked him what he was going to compose next, to which he replied: ‘At least there won’t be any hammers in it’—a dig at Le Pas.”71 Prokofiev’s greatest innovation was what he later called the “new simplicity” of the music. The simplicity practiced by his French colleagues had little appeal for Prokofiev; but, after hearing the rehearsal of his Second Symphony with Koussevitzky, he decided that he would not “rush to embark on another piece as dense and unwieldy” as the symphony. “Dukelsky is right,” he remarked, “one must write more simply and diatonically.”72 After the symphony’s unsuccessful premiere on June 6, 1925, Prokofiev was even more determined to simplify his style. As he reported to Miaskovsky, the overcomplicated work “elicited nothing but bewilderment” from the audience. He himself had trouble following the music. His conclusion was clear: “So—Schluss—it will be a long while before I tackle another complicated work.”73

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He wanted the new ballet for Diaghilev to be “simpler than Chout, with less plot and more symphonic development.”74 He decided “to write diatonic and melodious music” and began by sketching themes.75 In Pas d’acier no movement has key signature, and most melodies—the bartering dance in the second and third movements, the themes associated with the orator, the commissars, the sailor, and even the first part of the love theme—are written without accidentals. Chromaticism starts to permeate the score only in the factory scene, where it serves as a noise effect. The factory theme, however, is also diatonic. Tunefulness and diatonicism were staples of Prokofiev’s score, and when Diaghilev later praised Stravinsky’s new ballet, Apollon musagète, for its melodies and tonal purity, Prokofiev felt again that he was unjustly ignored as the inventor of the new style.76 After Prokofiev’s return to the Soviet Union, many interpreted his new, simpler style as the beginning of his retreat from high modernism to an aesthetics more acceptable in Stalinist Russia.77 In his 1941 “Autobiography,” the composer hinted at the Soviet inspiration when he described his reaction to Diaghilev’s commission for a Bolshevik ballet “as if a fresh breeze had blown through my window, that fresh breeze of which Lunacharsky had spoken.”78 Yet for his Paris audience, neither the Russian inspiration nor the simpler style was obvious at first. Soviet reception was no more generous. Confirming Soviet dogma, Nestyev eventually dismissed the ballet as “only another Diaghilev extravaganza, portraying for the Paris snobs their own idea of ‘Bolshevist exoticism.’ ” The Russian tunes, Nestyev wrote in Prokofiev’s Soviet biography, “lost their national character when subjected to artificially coarsened harmony . . . which was not in keeping with their simplified melodic patterns.” Most themes, Nestyev noted, became “distorted by harsh counterpoint [ . . . ] The Russian melodies woven into this rattle and din are imperceptible.”79 However biased, Nestyev was right both about the spuriousness of Diaghilev’s Bolshevik extravaganza and the imperceptibility of Prokofiev’s new simplicity behind the extreme dissonance. The diatonic melodies were drowned in the sheer density of sound, dissonant even when played only on the white keys. Obviously, Prokofiev’s new simplicity did not mean that he was ready to renounce the bourgeois Western values of modernism. P OAC H I N G F O R F U N

The combination of extreme dissonance and simple tunes was, of course, hardly novel, and it reminded many of Stravinsky’s neonationalist Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces, the works Prokofiev most admired. Le Pas d’acier, Raoul Brunel wrote in L’Oeuvre, “brings to mind The Rite of Spring (dances of primitive and barbaric Russia), transposed into modern Russian environments and just as barbaric.”80 Even today Stravinsky’s neoprimitive Rite casts a shadow on Prokofiev’s

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Chapter Two example 2.4. a) Motivic gestures in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (“Spring Rounds”); b) Motivic gestures in Pas d’acier (6 after rehearsal 40).

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(b) (b) (b)

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barbaric Pas d’acier. In his Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin juxtaposes the two, suggesting that Prokofiev “poached a bit” from Stravinsky’s ballet.81 Indeed, certain measures in Pas d’acier echo motivic gestures in The Rite. The heavy tenuto quarter notes on the bassoons backed by soft trombones in the third movement of Prokofiev’s ballet recall the repeated tenuto quarter notes in the “Spring Rounds” (ex. 2.4a-b). Starting his ballet with a unison, supposedly “authentic,” melody is also a Stravinskian gesture. Both Stravinsky’s and Prokofiev’s melodies occupy only white keys and are rich in grace notes. One can even detect similar melodic turns, although scattered in Prokofiev’s tune in a way that masks potential melodic parallels (ex. 2.5a-b). But while Stravinsky’s folk melody is quiet, rhythmically free, and cast in the mystical aura of the past, Prokofiev’s factory tune is a noisy affair, rhythmically tight, energetic, blasted into the audience’s face with aggressive

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example 2.5a. The beginning of The Rite of Spring.

example 2.5b. The beginning of Pas d’acier.

directness. The grace notes have nothing to do with grace: they are clumsy and feel incongruous with the general tone of the introductory melody. The effect is parodic: the gesture of an old, authentic melody turned into the noisy emblem of the present. Sounding the simple three-note melody in the indecent register of the contrabassoon and trombones at rehearsal 2 can also be heard as a gesture of mocking primitivism. Even more telling is Prokofiev’s juxtaposition of this primitive tune with the next section, starting with staccato bassoons and double basses that produce something of an Alberti bass. Prokofiev seems to be nodding toward what he called the “scratched-up Bach” type of neoclassicism, appearing here, as in

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example 2.6. Alberti bass in the Prologue of Pas d’acier.

example 2.7. Dactyls at the beginning of movement 2 in Pas d’acier.

Prokofiev’s judgment of Stravinsky, without any logical transition from the previous neoprimitive style (ex. 2.6).82 Like the neoprimitive tunes, the neoclassical gestures in Pas d’acier—and there are quite a few—are parodistic, understandable in a ballet, the original title of which, “Ursignol,” was intended as an innocuous Stravinsky mockery. As Prokofiev replaced Stravinsky’s folk tune with the bombastic factory song, so did he substitute Stravinsky’s neoclassical dactyls with ones that imitated the movement of the train at the beginning of movement two. Motoric rhythms à la Bach are transformed here into the actual rhythm of engines (ex. 2.7). In movement seven, the C-major scale in the walking bass of the finale of Stravinsky’s Octet is turned into fast sixteenth notes, accompanied by mechanically ascending and descending lines of trampling ostinatos (ex. 2.8a-b). Prokofiev both embraces and mocks white-key music and the centrality of C. The end of the second movement is a parody of a C cadence. A bombastic C-major

examples 2.8a. Stravinsky’s walking bass in movement 3 of his Octet (Arthur Lourié’s transcription).

examples 2.8b. Prokofiev’s trampling bass in Pas d’acier

(rehearsal 99).

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examples 2.9. Ending of movement 2 in Pas d’acier.

chord arrives at rehearsal 39, but it is first disturbed by a still sounding leading tone, then by insistent Ds in the bass. The piece seems to end on C not because C is its logical conclusion, but because C is more aggressive than the other notes (ex. 2.9). Stravinsky might also be lurking behind the figure of the “orator” of movement 5. Prokofiev insisted that this movement was the only parodistic one, in keeping with the Bolshevik habit of making fun of the representatives of the old regime. Stravinsky, at this point, was surely a representative of old Russia, and Prokofiev frequently voiced his irritation at hearing Stravinsky preach about how one should compose—namely, how one should stop being a modernist and “move to a purer classicism.”83 Prokofiev used what he considered the more tolerable element of Stravinsky’s new style, American ragtime or jazz, and characterized his orator by chromatic slides and ragtime syncopation—a dangerous move considering how much Diaghilev hated everything related to America.84 But for comic effect he slowed down the syncopation to a degree that it loses its relation to dynamic movement and becomes a sign of insecurity, lack of direction, motion sickness—almost tipsiness (ex. 2.10). In the end, the orator’s clumsy efforts to look fashionable are defeated by the appearance of the attractive young sailor, who wins the girl and further highlights the awkwardness of this representative of the old regime. But the charm of the sailor is not enough to make him the hero of this Bolshevik ballet. He must transform into a worker before he can claim his love. In 1925, when Prokofiev conceived the ballet, the versatile Stravinsky, the representative of old Russia, still dominated the musical scene in Paris. The only antidote, bitter and unpleasant as it was, seems to have been Bolshevism, a territory free of Stravinsky’s influence. Beside the exot-

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example 2.10. First two lines in “The Orator” (4 mm. after rehearsal 73) with slowed down ragtime rhythm in Pas d’acier.

icism of Bolshevism, for Prokofiev the appeal of the Bolshevik temptation included gaining a foothold in a Stravinsky-free land.

REALITY CHECK

According to Kochno, Diaghilev wanted to hire the experimental Soviet choreographer Kasyan Goleyzovsky (1892–1970), the founder of the Moscow Chamber Ballet, whose choreographic work was heavily influenced by Constructivism.85 In a letter to Yakulov, Nouvel explained the delay of the ballet’s production by the departure of Bronislava Nijinska, whom Diaghilev seems to have wanted to choreograph the ballet.86 Kochno remembered that Yakulov recommended Larionov, the choreographer and director of Prokofiev’s previous Diaghilev ballet, for the production, but Diaghilev insisted on Vsevolod Meyerhold.87 Like Goleyzovsky, Meyerhold turned down the offer, saying that he was too busy until June. Yakulov interpreted Meyerhold’s rejection as a refusal to be only a director in a production whose concep-

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tion he could not shape.88 Meyerhold recommended Tairov, but Diaghilev did not want him, remembering that his Giroflé-Girofla did not interest the Parisian audience in 1923.89 The result of these failed negotiations was that Diaghilev, who was short of money, postponed the ballet’s premiere until 1927, consoling Prokofiev by promising him a place in the all-Russian gala performance of the Ballets Russes, the company’s twentieth anniversary and the celebration of Diaghilev’s “glorious activities.”90 By 1927, Diaghilev had given up trying to engage Meyerhold, likely realizing that his Bolshevik project needed to be tailored for bourgeois audiences, and assigned the work to his proven choreographer Massine. Prokofiev was pleased, as he considered George Balanchine, Diaghilev’s new discovery and other choice for the choreography, “over-erotic and therefore effete.”91 The composer’s satisfaction, however, soon soured as he realized that Massine had no intention of following Prokofiev and Yakulov’s original scenario. The first victim of Massine’s involvement was Yakulov’s witty title Ursignol, which Diaghilev always considered vulgar.92 Massine suggested Pas d’acier, which Prokofiev immediately translated into Stal’noy skok (Steel gallop). Initially, Diaghilev rejected this title, too, because it reminded him of Nikolai Leskov’s tale about the steel flea (Puce d’acier in French).93 But since no one proposed anything better, Massine’s title remained. Perhaps because Prokofiev and Yakulov worked out the scenario without the involvement of a choreographer, Massine found their plot choreographically uninspiring. To Prokofiev’s surprise, he completely rejected the proposed scenario and started to work out a new one based on Dmitry Rovinsky’s nineteenth-century collection of old Russian prints, many of them, Prokofiev remarked in his diaries, quite indecent.94 Prokofiev did not object too strongly but wanted to make sure that Massine’s choreography would not conflict with his music.95 But at the end of the month he did send a cable to Yakulov, asking him to come before “it’s too late.”96 Massine’s conception of representing the rural and the urban aspects of Russian life in the two scenes of Pas d’acier might have been attractive to Prokofiev who, in preparation for the ballet, had just read Leonid Leonov’s Soviet novel The Badgers (1924), which depicted the effects of the Revolution on the countryside through the lives of two brothers who found themselves on the opposite sides of the civil war.97 All episodes in the first scene went through drastic changes in Massine’s choreography. The music of the prologue, during which silhouettes of the characters move through the stage behind a gauze curtain, and which Prokofiev imagined as an elemental wave of movements, changed in Massine’s choreography into the legend of Baba Yaga’s fight with the crocodile, based on an engraving in Rovinsky’s book (fig. 2.1).98 He assured the anxious composer that there would be no actual witch and crocodile on stage; he just wanted to use the image as an expression of an elemental force.99 Massine followed Prokofiev’s second number more closely. In Yakulov’s design, this scene included the arrival of the train, with dancers moving their arms and

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figure 2.1. Baba Yaga’s Fight with the Crocodile, from D. Rovinskiy, Russkiye narodnïye kartinki, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Izdaniye R. Golike, 1900).

legs in imitation of wheels and levers. Speculators were to move to the front of the stage, while people run to meet the train.100 In Massine’s changed scenario, which he called “The street vendor and the countesses.” a cohort of aristocratic Russian women, dressed from head to toe in multicolored silk and worn clothes, with hats of embossed lampshades, surround a street vendor who carries a sack of flour. All press toward the bagman. He caresses them not without brutality. He pulls at their multicolored rags. They take his sack of flour.101

Strangely, no review mentions the train, the arrival of which is clearly indicated in Prokofiev’s dactylic music. It was the starting point in the original scenario and was an integral part of Yakulov’s model.102 The mechanical motion of the train also provided a connecting link between the first scene and the movement of machines in the second scene. Massine replaced Prokofiev’s commissars, who, according to the original scenario, “appear with peculiar grace and begin to push back the crowd,” with the legend of “the sailor and the three devils.” The devils, wearing firemen’s helmets, tor-

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ment a sailor. Workers come and rescue him. Similarly drastic was Massine’s change to the chase scene. In Yakulov’s original scenario, “two swindlers appear, rob the commissars, a chase begins, and the crowd again fills the stage.”103 In Prokofiev’s Russian list of scenes, which dates from after the Paris and London performances (June 29, 1927), the episode concerns “the sweet sellers and cigarette sellers.” In Massine’s scenario the scene is called “The cat, the pussy, and mice” and includes, as one reviewer wrote, “the dance of a couple of amorous cats, around whom half a dozen ironical mice play.”104 None of the reviewers described the scene in detail, but they all expressed confusion over what they saw on stage. The next scene, which Yakulov planned as the dance of the orator who gives an indignant speech, addressing mainly the pretty female worker, was transformed into “The legends of the drunkards,” in which, according to Henry Malherbe, “a young drunk is collected by two mates dressed in gray oilcloth.”105 Here, at least, Massine maintained the original comic atmosphere of the episode. The love scene between the sailor and the female worker remained in place, but again Massine changed the tone significantly. In the original version, the two dance together “but do not touch.” In Massine’s version the encounter becomes more erotic. The girl first resists the sailor’s attempt to seduce her, but then she yields. “The sailor finally hoists her up astride his shoulders” and “exits like a worker transporting a heavy and precious burden.”106 André Levinson was dismayed by what he saw as “coarse erotic insinuations” in Massine’s dance with Alexandra Danilova. He lamented that Danilova’s noble training was wasted on such a humiliating topic and that the dancer was “reduced to such degrading experiences.”107 Levinson also mistook a scene for the stylization of several workers raping a girl. He was not alone: the critic of La Revue musicale also noted the scene of “workers raping a girl.”108 Prokofiev originally planned two short numbers after the love duet: in the first, the commissars return with the firemen and clear up the bazaar, and in the second, the commissars leave and the firemen rearrange the set. In the final score these two numbers became the “Rearranging of the set” and “The transformation of the sailor into a worker.” Diaghilev requested a longer number for the changing of the scenes and persuaded Prokofiev to add the overture he had composed for Trapèze, a ballet for Boris Romanov in Berlin, to Pas d’acier. Instead of changing the scene in full view, as Yakulov imagined, they lowered the curtain and changed the scene while the orchestra played the four-minute overture from Trapèze. The second part started with a love duet, which Massine called “Le Béguin” (infatuation), danced by Lifar and Lubov Tchernicheva to Prokofiev’s number composed for the transformation of the sailor into a worker. For critics, Massine’s erotic duet made little sense in the context of an industrial ballet. Lifar, dressed in gray breeches, “approaches a young flighty girl, who, to judge from her elegant dress, is no less successful. The couple enters into brutal contortions that lack voluptuousness.”109

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Finally, with the factory coming to life, the “exhausting incoherence” of the first part gave way to something unified and coherent. In the scenario that Prokofiev sent to Diaghilev, the loose episodes are abandoned and, except the sailor and the girl appearing among the workers, no continuation of previous plotlines remain. Massine did not even bother to give separate titles to the last three episodes, uniting them under the simple title “Factory.” All reviewers agreed that the machine dance that Massine created was highly effective. The mechanical gestures of the dancers, which the audience did not comprehend in the first part, finally became meaningful. The dancers first performed gestures of work—raising, pulling, transporting, and hammering. And, as Yakulov intended, they engaged with the set that gradually came alive. The motion of rotating wheels and devices increases, bringing the work of the factory to its maximum intensity. “The wheels and discs begin to turn, faster and faster; belts and pinions do their office; a rim of signal lights flashes and flames.” The steam of mechanized labor soon becomes “torrential. The wheels turn quicker; the lights flash faster and brighter; the hammers and the mauls strike harder; the violence screams and roars.”110 As the work of the factory intensifies, the mechanically working men and women themselves become machines, “actual pieces of metal being worked on and the parts of the machines that other worker-dancers operate with their feet.”111 The dancers transform into gears: they “oscillate, vibrate, revolve alternately as if they were mechanical devices,”112 cogs, cams, levers, and pulleys. Female dancers “twist their elbows, turn their hands, and bend their legs” to imitate “crankshafts moving in delirium.” Half-naked men, “clutched by arms in sinuous circles, move like gears.”113 “They unwind tirelessly like transmission belts, distort themselves as blocks of steel under the blows of hammers.”114 Such depiction of industrial labor did not necessarily spell out Bolshevism. Delighted by the sight of immense hammers, one audience member shouted: “It’s New York!”115 Massine’s strenuous choreography, one reviewer wrote, “borrowed ideas from the knockabout comedians of the music-halls.”116 Cocteau was thus not completely incorrect when he accused Massine of relying too much on cheap effects. Aleksandr Bundikov, the unsympathetic reviewer of the conservative émigré paper Vozrozhdeniye, went even further and compared Massine’s acrobatic dancers to circus clowns, much in fashion at the time.117 The gymnastic ending that Diaghilev had originally rejected in Prokofiev and Yakulov’s scenario thus returned through the back door. It took all the power of Yakulov’s moving, flashing, rotating sets and the strong muscle of Prokofiev’s music to counterbalance the potentially comic effect. In the end, even the sour reviewer had to admit that the finale was successful and thrilled the audience. As one London critic remarked, “the second scene of Le Pas d’acier surpasses anything else [Massine] has done with a large corps de ballet.”118

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Political neutrality, on which Diaghilev, Prokofiev, Yakulov, and Massine all insisted, had its price. The politically shrewd Ehrenburg, who managed to move freely between bourgeois West and Bolshevik East, was right to warn that it was impossible to remain neutral toward Red Russia and create a pink ballet about it. All the new artistic movements that Diaghilev admired in Bolshevik Russia served a clear political purpose. The more the creators of Pas d’acier pushed politics under the rug, the more critics and audiences attempted to read politics into the ballet. Some left the question hanging: the ballet, wrote one London critic, does not “appeal to one’s sense of beauty or to one’s love of the gracious things of life.” Why, then, does the second part move the audience? To what instinct does it appeal? “Let mental specialists and psycho-analysts decide,” he wrote.119 Seeing the confusion about the plot of the ballet’s first part, Diaghilev presented it in London with practically no commentary. “The two acts of this ballet present a series of events in which are summarized two aspects of Russian life—the stories and legends of the countryside, and the mechanism of the factories,” was all the audience found in the London program of the Ballets Russes. No Baba Yaga and crocodile or countesses appeared in the program. Gone was the subtitle “1920” that marked the date of the plot as postrevolutionary in the Paris premiere. Without the advance publicity and with the gray, constructivist decor, only the red screen that hid the platforms “was of the Soviet color.”120 Diaghilev’s efforts to bury politics even deeper might have originated in his fear that his new Bolshevik ballet would incite unrest in the British capital. Unlike Paris, London was a dangerously anti-Bolshevik city, especially a year after the general strike in 1926 that made officials fear that the Bolsheviks were operating already in their midst and the British police’s raid of the headquarters of the Soviet trade delegation in May 1927, a breach of agreement with Russia, which brought the two countries to the verge of war. The critic of the Boston Evening Transcript noted that on the day of the ballet’s premiere, women protested against “the teaching and intrigues of Soviet Moscow” not far from the theater.121 In an interview before the London premiere, Diaghilev did not mention Bolshevism and focused exclusively on the picturesque aspects of present-day Russia. With Milhaud’s Le train bleu and its Deauville scenery behind him, he was ready to replace the exotic “hats of Boris Godunov and the beards of the Boyars of ‘The Fire Bird’ or the early Victorian snows and sleighs of St. Petersburg” with “the decorative side of the Russia of to-day.” Massine, Diaghilev emphasized, knew nothing about present-day Russia and relied on his imagination, “without any special tendency.”122 The impresario also feared, rightly, that his new, politically provocative venture might alienate conservative patrons. The newspaper magnate Lord Rothermere, who was financing Diaghilev at the time, declared that he did not want to give

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money to any “eccentric” ballets. After Diaghilev put on Pas d’acier, he cut off further financial support.123 Prokofiev also had misgiving about the London premiere and tried to dissuade Diaghilev from taking Pas d’acier across the Channel. He had no fond memories of London from the time of Chout and was convinced that his new ballet faced certain failure there. Despite Diaghilev’s efforts to downplay politics, the political commentary was more explicit in London than in Paris. The critic of the Boston Evening Transcript noted that the fear of the Bolsheviks could not deter the high-class audience of the Prince’s Theater from attending Diaghilev’s newest hit. “Apparently in the theater Bolshevy is tolerable and to be enjoyed,” he noted.124 Only one reviewer took Prokofiev to be “an apostle of Bolshevism” without equal. “Writers and orators have been telling us all about it for years, but Serge’s new ballet expresses more of the soul of modern Russia than all their effort put together.”125 Most actually saw the production as a criticism of the Bolshevik enterprise. “Perhaps it is a tractate against the Russian Revolution. If so, it is very powerful,” one critic concluded his review.126 Another wondered whether calling the ballet “Bolshevik nightmare” would have helped in understanding the scenario.127 Interpreting the ballet from that perspective made sense to some. The first scene, in this view, was not simply “legends of Old Russia” but “the distorted views of them, which Bolshevism has inculcated.”128 Londoners seemed to be willing to accept Pas d’acier because they believed it was, as one reviewer said, a “means to comment and instrument for satire.”129 “The ballet, and especially the magnificent final scene of concerted action,” another critic wrote, “can be enjoyed purely for its decorative interest, but it may also be taken as a terrible indictment of the modern standardization of human life.”130 It was clear that Prokofiev’s presentation of “immense hopeless toil” would “not make converts to Bolshevism. On the contrary.”131 Prokofiev and Yakulov might love their native land, yet they do not seem to love the life Russians live “in a united society of Soviet republics. Iakoulov [sic], Massine aiding, chastises it in his actions; Prokofiev lashes it in his music.”132 This was precisely the impression Prokofiev had sought to avoid, especially at a time when he was already flirting with the Soviets. No wonder that when he selected clippings from London reviews for promotion, he limited the citations to short sentences demonstrating the ballet’s success.133 B O L SH EV I K SU B L I M E

Pas d’acier may not have made any converts to Bolshevism, but as the critic of the Boston Evening Telegraph observed, Bolshevism was titillating to watch on stage. Diaghilev was hoping, the reviewer of Vozrozhdeniye mused, that “perhaps the modern audience, their palate sated with the sweet delicacies of the music hall, will find the strong, powerful shock, which is clearly the intention of this ‘Pas d’Acier,’ immediately to their liking.”134

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Moreover, with its clowning gymnastics, Pas d’acier resonated with the music hall, no matter how furiously both Prokofiev and Dukelsky denied it. And despite Diaghilev’s intention to abandon Afanasyev’s Russian fairy tales, the Russia of old crept back through Rovinsky’s old prints. In the new ballet the protagonists of old fairy tales wore the rags of postrevolutionary, destitute Russia, but the ragged costumes gave a dose of the bizarre, so that the audience could choose between interpreting them as those of ruffians or of the poor. Yet there was a difference. The Russian exoticism of Diaghilev’s previous productions was indeed politically neutral. Nobody, at least in Paris, worried about the political significance of Boris Godunov’s hat or the boyars’ beards. Stravinsky’s raw primitivism in The Rite of Spring caused some concern, but as long as its primitivism was safely enclosed in prehistoric Russia, nobody bothered to cry politics. The Soviet “everyday,” by contrast, could not be represented on stage without evoking politics. What reviewers called Prokofiev and Yakulov’s “new musical orientalism,” “Soviet orientalism,” or “exoticism of the mechanical,” was also a “social novelty” that, as Malherbe noted, “the Soviets have given to the world.”135 Not that adoration of machines was exclusively a Soviet matter. The audience was surely familiar with Fritz Lang’s new film Metropolis, which was released on January 10, 1927, and depicted a dystopian society supported by the underground workers, reduced to slaves by mechanical labor. Labor in a metropolis is also the subject matter of John Alden Carpenter’s Skyscrapers, a ballet written at Diaghilev’s instigation but never performed by the Ballets Russes. Instead, Skyscrapers was premiered in New York at the Metropolitan Opera in February 1926, thus preceding Pas d’acier by more than a year. Carpenter depicted New Yorkers at work and at leisure (paralleling Massine’s double scenario of countryside and city).136 The critic for the Boston Evening Transcript compared Yakulov’s proletariat in Pas d’acier with the workers in Carpenter’s Skyscrapers, the only difference between them being that Prokofiev’s workers start with play and end with labor and are “of more satirical temper.”137 A factory, another critic wrote, “is the same the whole world over.”138 Pas d’acier, notwithstanding, made a much stronger impression than Skyscrapers.139 Dukelsky, asked by Diaghilev to play through Carpenter’s score and judge its quality, rejected it as too weak. Prokofiev, although on friendly terms with Carpenter, later admitted that Dukelsky’s judgment was correct.140 But there was something else that Carpenter’s ballet lacked and Prokofiev’s had in spades: a repressed yet emphatic political subtext that both thrilled and repelled. Bolshevism had a sublime aura, evoking both terror and admiration. Many of the reviews of Pas d’acier read as if the critics borrowed their vocabulary from René Fülöp-Miller’s recently published The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, which was reviewed in the same issue of the Saturday Review as Prokofiev’s new ballet. Fülöp-Miller’s book is not an account of the political events in Soviet Russia, but an effort to understand the philosophy behind the Soviet experiment and to describe its effect and social manifestations “in the streets, the theatre, the school, the church and

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the house.” Although Edward Shanks, reviewer of Fülöp-Miller’s book, considered Bolshevism a tumor on the body of European culture, he admitted that some of the monuments Fülöp-Miller described in his book had “a certain expressive grandeur.”141 The same mixture of repulsion and admiration runs through Fülöp-Miller’s fantastic account of life and art in Bolshevik Russia. Bolsheviks, Fülöp-Miller argued, long “for something imposing, surpassing anything that the world has ever seen.”142 Revolutionary art is naturally monumental. The new public of art is “the hundredthousand-headed people” that requires the greatest monumentality in the form of gigantic projects. This monumental art was addressed to a new type of human being, whom Fülöp-Miller called the “collective man” that was supposed to eradicate the former, individual type of human being and that comes into being by the “dogmatic negation of every kind of individual separate existence” (p. 9). Millions are united by “marching, keeping in step, shouting ‘hurray’ in unison, festal singing in chorus, united attacks on the enemy” (p. 2). According to Fülöp-Miller, in Russia the worship of the machine was not simply the “most suitable means for satisfying general needs” but “the best expression of the mechanist-collective principle” (p. 34). Yakulov’s design and choreographic plans, as well as Massine’s machine dance in the last scene, fit perfectly into this description of the Soviet ideal. As one critic noted, in Massine’s choreography there were “only cogs, mechanical or human. In this vast mechanism Man is only a piece, scarcely more detached.”143 Men and women imitating machines come close to what Fülöp-Miller described as the whole human society organized according to technical principles, laboring “to become like the machine and finally to be absorbed into bliss in a structure of driving belts, pistons, valves, and fly-wheels” (pp. 34–35). The mechanized individual, the organized mass, is still in a primitive state in Russia, Fülöp-Miller wrote. The “nameless beast,” the new collective man that roams around, is only a primitive manifestation of the ideal. [W]herever the “collective man” is seen, on the streets engaged in a demonstration, at festivals displaying a vociferous vitality, he at once gives the impression of a creature of the primitive world; his gigantic body is awkward, uncouth, and unwieldy; he rolls through the streets stamping with heavy tread; he surges up like an enormous wave, and bellows and roars like a great prehistoric monster. And, like a prehistoric beast, he rejoices in his fearsome elemental howls; he relishes the joy which all living things feel in the animal working of their vital functions. The collective man is at present living in his primeval state, exercising himself in the most primitive motions in action and speech, which were also the first steps in the development of the individual man (pp. 3–4).

The same fear and fascination took over the Parisian audience in 1913 when they watched the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the prehistoric, pre-individualistic Russian tribes moving around the stage guided not by rationality but by primitive instinct. Stravinsky’s ballet was, in Jacques Rivière’s terms, a ballet biologique, movement before movement was aestheticized in dance. It was “not just

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the dance of the most primitive man,” it was also “the dance before there was man.” Rivière saw “something profoundly blind” in Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography. The dancers were like animals turning in their cage, never tiring of butting their forehead against the bars. For Rivière, Stravinsky’s Rite was a profoundly anti-individualistic ballet in which men and women “still mass together; they move in groups, in colonies, in layers; they are held in a frightening indifference by society.”144 Stravinsky’s prehistoric and Prokofiev’s Soviet men were respectively pre-individuals at the beginning of human history or post-individuals developed as a Soviet experiment. The parallel was not lost on the critics of Pas d’acier. As one reviewer noted, Prokofiev transposed Stravinsky’s barbarism into modern Russia.145 Some thought that the parallel concerned only the barbaric, brutal spectacle and had nothing to do with the music.146 For another critic it was precisely the music that evoked The Rite, although he thought that Prokofiev’s music suffered in the comparison.147 The parallels between Rivière’s interpretation of Stravinsky’s Rite and FülöpMiller’s interpretation of the “mind and face” of Bolshevism reflect the authors’ essentialized notions of Russian predisposition. The contrast between the veneration of individualism in the West and its rejection in Russia had long been conceived as an element of Russia’s supposed otherness, embraced, among others, by the Eurasianists. But one cannot exclude the possibility that some of the parallels between the primitivism of The Rite and the futurism of Pas d’acier were intentional and that Prokofiev enjoyed the opportunity of turning Stravinsky’s politically unspecified savages into socially committed Bolsheviks. What Taruskin has recognized as Prokofiev’s poaching of Stravinsky’s Rite might have been, in fact, Prokofiev’s parody of his dangerous rival. JOKE GOES WRONG

Prokofiev and Yakulov expected Soviet Russia to embrace their Bolshevik ballet. In February 1927, Prokofiev was already thinking about asking Diaghilev’s permission to have it performed in Leningrad along with Chout and Ala and Lolly.148 By April he was discussing the possibility of an entire evening of his ballets with Ivan Ekskuzovich, director of all the principal theaters of the Russian Federation, if not in the former Mariinsky, then in Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater.149 Diaghilev, who seems to have anticipated the request, negotiated a deal with Prokofiev in April 1927. In exchange for the overture to Trapèze, he offered the Russian rights for the ballet to Prokofiev beginning in January 1928, “should Lunacharsky show interest in making an offer for it.”150 Lunacharsky was indeed intrigued. In his report from Paris for Vechernyaya Moskva, he eagerly anticipated the ballet’s premiere, a spectacle in which “there will even be something of our revolution reflected.”151 In the end he was not interested enough to postpone his trip to fashionable Biarritz right before the premiere of Pas d’acier,152 but he did attend the performance in 1928 and reported enthusiastically that “Yakulov,

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who was the most Soviet of the ballet’s creators and who gave the production its most original, Russian character, was called out eight times by the audience.”153 From the reviews Prokofiev should have seen that not everybody read the ballet as pro-Bolshevik, but he never doubted that it could be performed in the Soviet Union. He trusted the influence of his supporters, Meyerhold and Boris Gusman, at the time head of repertory at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Meyerhold, who was supposed to stage Prokofiev’s opera The Gambler in 1917, was an old acquaintance, although his new, elevated status in the Bolshevik system made Prokofiev uneasy. He reconnected with him in Paris and took him to Diaghilev’s rehearsal on May 29, 1926.154 Meyerhold returned the favor: when Prokofiev toured the Soviet Union in January and February 1927, Meyerhold offered to stage The Gambler.155 In the fall of 1929 Meyerhold also offered to direct Stal’noy skok, as Pas d’acier was called in Russian, in the Bolshoi.156 Prokofiev used the offer to negotiate his visa with the Soviet diplomat Ivan Arens in June 22, 1929. He showed Arens reviews, carefully selected “to lay stress on the factory workers and general Bolshevik aspects of the ballet,” and, to impress him even more, presented him with a personally inscribed score of Pas d’acier.157 But if maintaining the ballet’s political neutrality was difficult in the West, it proved to be, as Ehrenburg predicted, utterly impossible in the Soviet Union. The ballet’s career started under an ill omen in Moscow. In April 22, 1928, Prokofiev gave permission to Vladimir Derzhanovsky, then head of the Association of Contemporary Music, to schedule Stal’noy skok on the Association’s concert on May 27. The performance was already a compromise, as Prokofiev hoped that the famous conductorless orchestra in Moscow, Persimfans, would premiere his new ballet. He asked Derzhanovsky “to stress in the program that this is a ballet about Soviet life in 1920, that it was performed in Paris and London last spring, and that, in spite of its coinciding with the severing of anglo-soviet relations, it enjoyed a huge success.” He also encouraged Derzhanovsky to lobby for the ballet’s stage performance in the Soviet Union.158 When the Association asked him to send more “literary material concerning ‘Le Pas d’acier,’ ” he categorically refused, citing his distaste for detailed programs and his disagreement with the ballet’s production under Diaghilev. Subheadings, he argued, should be enough to “point the imagination of the audience in the right direction.”159 The performance on May 27 was a failure. Prokofiev blamed the conductor, Vladimir Savich, an old acquaintance from New York, whom he considered not up to par. His friend Miaskovsky thought that the Moscow audience “expected the familiar and rejected the unfamiliar.” Prokofiev was disappointed and felt that at his next visit to Soviet Russia he needed to rehabilitate the ballet.160 Partial rehabilitation was achieved with the suite’s next performance on January 7 and 14, 1929, by Persimfans. The performance was of much higher quality and, as Miaskovsky reported, even those musicians who disliked Prokofiev admitted that they liked

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the strong, original, picturesqueness orchestration.161 But Prokofiev’s next visit, in the fall of 1929, further undermined the possibility of a Soviet production. On October 31, 1929, Prokofiev played through the ballet for Meyerhold and Gusman and was satisfied with the effect the music produced. On November 11 he gave a talk in the Bolshoi, mainly about the recently deceased Diaghilev, but also about his experience in America, Belgium, and England. After the talk he answered questions for about an hour and a half. Representatives of the Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) asked Prokofiev about Stal’noy skok. Prokofiev found the questions irritating and irrelevant. RAPM representatives were offended by Prokofiev’s responses and seem to have prepared a tougher attack on the composer three days later when he presented Stal’noy skok at a meeting in the Bolshoi. Dmitry Gachev, a member of RAPM, considered Prokofiev’s behavior disrespectful and the defense of the ballet by the leadership of the Bolshoi sycophantic. He gave vent to his frustration in a long diatribe published in RAPM’s official journal, Proletarskiy muzïkant.162 In the same issue Yuriy Keldïsh, then a twenty-twoyear-old student of the Moscow Conservatory and a member of RAPM, published a detailed analysis of Prokofiev’s music for Stal’noy skok, arguing that the political problems RAPM detected in the work were not limited to its scenario and Diaghilev’s staging but were inherent in the music.163 At the meeting, Prokofiev was asked again to describe the ballet’s plot: as always, he evaded the question and explained instead that the “underlying physical movements had been drawn originally from sport, but later from machines,” and that the “costumes and characters were all intended to be a novelty to Western audiences.”164 He tried to separate the roles Massine, Yakulov, and he played in the creation of the ballet. “The choreographer was interested in realizing new balletic forms based on rhythms and movements of machines,” Yakulov “was interested in new Soviet costumery,” while he “wanted to find musical expression for the new ‘spirit’ of Soviet Russia.”165 He admitted that the Paris production had been different from what he intended, and that for a Soviet production many aspects of the ballet would need to be reinterpreted.166 According to Gachev, Gusman hurried to Prokofiev’s aid and described a potential Soviet version of Stal’noy skok. The scene with the bagmen, Gusman proposed, would feature red sleds; commissars would be replaced with bandits or something of that type; and in the factory scene cadres from the Five-Year Plan would appear.167 RAPM members, Gachev reported, immediately called attention to Gusman’s “incorrect, nihilistic relationship” to what Gachev and his comrades considered to be the best part of the past. Real trouble started when RAPM members began to ask Prokofiev provocative questions. Having learned from the previous meeting, Prokofiev prided himself on his savvy. But he remained himself and did not hide his contempt when he thought the question was stupid.

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Despite his own experience in Soviet Russia, Prokofiev believed that he could maintain political neutrality. As Gachev reported, he either ignored questions concerning the content of the ballet or answered in an irritated or mocking tone. “Why is the entire second part of the ballet saturated with machines and with mechanical rhythms?” somebody asked. “Because the machine is more beautiful than man,” Prokofiev answered. The most pointed question concerned Prokofiev’s lack of experience with Soviet life. He was asked whether he meant to depict “a capitalist factory where the worker is slave, or a Soviet factory where the worker is master,” and if the latter, how did he know what a Soviet factory was like since he had been living abroad since 1918. This was a sensitive topic, and Prokofiev had no witty response. “This concerns politics and not music and because of this I won’t answer,” he retorted, stubbornly ignoring that the whole point of the meeting was to clarify the political feasibility of a Soviet performance of Stal’noy skok.168 Like Prokofiev, Meyerhold and Gusman looked down on RAPM members and endured them only out of political necessity. Gusman’s defense of the ballet alternated between explaining that Prokofiev had little or no control over the Diaghilev production in Paris and hinting at a supposed approval for the ballet’s premiere at the Bolshoi by the agitprop of the Central Committee. Gusman also quoted reviews from White Russian and bourgeois newspapers that declared Pas d’acier a Bolshevik ballet, quoting also Lenin’s statement about the usefulness of listening sometimes to the “truth of the enemy.”169 Meyerhold managed to close the meeting on a positive note, dismissing objections to the ballet. “What difference did it make if it had been produced in the West?” he asked. “What we should be interested in is how we are going to do it here.” He explained Prokofiev’s attitude as political ignorance. “As for the way the factory had been conceived,” he said, “it was obviously the view of an enquiring but politically illiterate comrade.”170 Prokofiev and his Pas d’acier were inadvertently thrown into the struggle between the Bolshoi leadership and RAPM. The accusations piled on the ballet were serious. Gachev declared it counter-revolutionary and hostile to Soviet values, claiming that Prokofiev’s music mocked the heroes of the revolution. Gachev based his accusations on Keldïsh’s article, in which the budding musicologist made the smart move of reading counter-revolutionary ideology not into the scenario but into the music itself. He heard Prokofiev’s characterization of the commissars as grotesque, the “rhythmic eccentricities and clamorous melodic ascents” as “the jerking movements of a fairground clown.” This “spirit of buffoonish taunting” was offensive, he argued, because it degraded the protagonists of a heroic era. Prokofiev, he complained, presented these heroes “through a vulgarized, hostile, philistine refraction.”171 Keldïsh showed particular talent for interpreting stylistic features as ideological statements. He compared the “extreme primitivism of the musical vocabulary” in the ballet to a device Prokofiev had used in Chout in order “to highlight utter stupidity and senselessness.” “Whether willingly or unwittingly,” Keldïsh

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concluded, Prokofiev followed the “hostile prejudice” of depicting Soviet Russia as “some backward, half-savage, all-but-idiotic country,” and the Bolsheviks “as coarse Barbarians with primitive, prehistoric morals, concepts, and customs.” Prokofiev, Keldïsh argued, echoing Cocteau’s criticism, reduced the revolution to “a fascinating, unheard of and exotic” event, “an exotic fairground show.” Stal’noy skok, Keldïsh concluded, is no better than a bourgeois philistine’s feeble jest. Prokofiev’s machine music, a hit in Paris and London, fared no better in Keldïsh’s analysis. The mechanical aspect of the music served, in Keldïsh’s eyes, as a tool for depriving the audience of control. The music hypnotized them through “constant, automated tempi” and deprived them of willpower. “In the end, these rhythms act as a narcotic, killing consciousness and the vigilance of the will.” Ultimately, Keldïsh drew a damning parallel between Prokofiev’s “tendency towards an extreme schematism, towards primitivism . . . a bare non-emotional constructivism,” and Fascism. Quoting Alfredo Casella, he compared the “objective” musical form and its limit on the expression of personal feelings to Fascist ideology, according to which “the individual must forgo his rights in the service of the common interest.” The Fascist goal can be achieved “by the kind of music that deadens the human intellect and feelings through its mechanistic soullessness and meaninglessness. This kind of art contains an element of fatalism that paralyzes the active element of the will,” Keldïsh wrote, thus assigning Prokofiev’s Bolshevik ballet “to the most reactionary trend of bourgeois art,” which was most hostile to Soviet Russia. Prokofiev’s refusal to provide political interpretation for his ballet gave his enemies free rein to explain it as they wished. Ultimately, unable to ignore the politically charged attacks, Meyerhold and Gusman quietly abandoned their plan to stage Stal’noy skok. Prokofiev learned about the cancellation from Miaskovsky— Gusman kept silent.172 Offended, Prokofiev bragged about the ballet’s performance in the United States to Gusman: “the work travels around the world, [while] our good old chauvinists are still arguing about whether Massine visited a capitalist or a proletarian factory.”173 But there was nothing to be done. Gusman did not survive the next purge in the Bolshoi and transferred his activities to the Belorussian State Cinema. Prokofiev did not realize that Meyerhold’s support originated not in his genuine enthusiasm for the ballet but in his plan to present Pas d’acier as a professional-quality counterweight to such composers as Aleksandr Davidenko, founder of the Production Collective of Student Composers of the Moscow Conservatoire, an association of composers searching for new methods and forms to answer the revolutionary times. Meyerhold was annoyed when Dmitri Shostakovich agreed with Keldïsh’s criticism, but in the end he admitted that Stal’noy skok was “not really such a good work.”174 In the fall of 1930, Meyerhold informed Prokofiev that RAPM was agitating not only against Stal’noy skok but singled out the composer “for official persecution.”175 Stal’noy skok was kept off the Soviet stage even after RAPM was liquidated on April 23, 1932.

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A M E R IC A N I N C OM P R E H E N SIO N

The tortuous saga of Pas d’acier did not end with the cancellation of its Moscow premiere. Like Dukelsky’s The End of St. Petersburg, the work also reached New York, thereby acquiring yet another layer of political interpretation. As early as 1929, Prokofiev started negotiations with the League of Composers about the potential U.S. premiere. Claire Reis, president of the League, met with Prokofiev on January 17, 1930, in New York and told him about the League’s large-scale performances with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, “hiring for the purpose no less a venue than the Metropolitan Opera,” Prokofiev, clearly impressed, noted in his diary.176 Founded in 1923, the League of Composers did a great service to the musical life of New York by regularly bringing new music to the otherwise conservative city.177 The League was proud of featuring cutting-edge European fare in the United States, but, as Reis explained to Prokofiev, they were not about “imitating something which has been done in the past.”178 In 1930 they gave Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring its American stage premiere, and they were eager to create a new scenario for Prokofiev’s Pas d’acier. Reis suggested renaming the new ballet The Age of Steel, using Pas d’acier as a subtitle, but Prokofiev insisted that the original French title should remain, as the ballet was known by this title both in Europe and the United States.179 The League commissioned scenic designer Lee Simonson to come up with a new scenario. As the preperformance publicity announced, Simonson’s scenario was meant to be “a satirical and skeptical commentary on the rhythm of machine industry and its large-scale ‘efficiency.’”180 John Martin, dance critic of the New York Times, interviewed Simonson and published his scenario on April 19, 1931, two days before the New York premiere of Pas d’acier. Simonson designed three levels on the stage, the top for a group of laborers who, “first under the lash of the overseer and then controlled by the foreman’s switch, move in the weary rhythms of archaic slave labor.”181 The middle level was occupied by symbolic figures of modern industry: Iron, Coal, and Steel, moving slowly and heavily, symbolizing untamed forces. On the stage level, three peasant figures, representing the freedom and happiness of bucolic labor, appeared, their dance watched by members of the bourgeoisie: dowagers, a clergyman, a financier, a labor leader, flappers, boy scouts, and soldiers, wearing transparent costumes. Prokofiev’s satirical music, designed to represent colorful figures from Russia in 1920, now served to accompany the “pompous and ridiculous movements” of the members of the bourgeoisie who try to imitate rustic labor, “applauding themselves and crowning the bucolic figures in a mincing, bowing dance.” The symbolic figures of Iron, Coal, and Steel fail to join the dance of the bucolic laborers. The message is clear: for these elements to be tamed, a new form of labor is required. This new labor develops under the supervision of the main characters of the ballet, the two “efficiency experts,” danced by the ballet’s choreographer Eric Strawbridge and the Japanese dancer Yeichi Nimura. After failing to speed up the

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bucolic laborers, they strangle them, succeeding thus to animate Steel, Coal, and Electricity. They bury bucolic labor with an oratory and speed up human labor, making it “faster and faster, more and more efficient, until it reaches the point of intolerable frenzy.”182 The action that follows this scene was probably the closest to what could be described as a revolution. Exasperated by their frenzied labor, the workers revolt and try to strangle the bourgeoisie. “The bourgeoisie are bound, gagged and trampled on by the human belt which has now joined the symbolic figures on the stage. The steel rollers in back send down bales of red cheese cloth. The symbolic figures symbolize revolution while the human belt enacts it.” The workers’ bacchanal does not last long. “The soldiers have their bombs and gas masks ready. Labor is driven back to the belt. Cowed and subdued, it reverts to its monotonous rhythm of feeding machines faster than before.” Triumphant, the “bourgeoisie applaud and wave red, white and blue [cloth]” that “is now coming from the rollers.” Simonson’s ending is dystopian: “The machine triumphs at the expense of human dignity, human health, and human happiness. All is for the best in the best of all of possible machine worlds. And the efficiency experts pirouette in triumph.”183 Prokofiev received the scenario from Reis on February 25, 1931, less than two months before the Philadelphia premiere on April 10, 1931.184 He was appalled and dispatched an angry letter to Reis on the same day. He was surprised that after he had described the plot of Pas d’acier to John Hays Hammond, an inventor and friend of Stokowski who visited the composer on November 10, 1930, Simonson had ignored his wishes.185 He understood that the League wanted to stage something less nationally specific, and he did not mind staging the work as a “machine ballet.” But, especially after his recent experience in the Soviet Union, he adamantly opposed any politicization of the ballet and demanded “the immediate elimination of all political elements such as revolution, counter-revolution, soldiers, tricolor flags, etc.”186 It was obviously too late to change anything. Reis assured the irritated composer that the ballet’s design was “purely social, not political. The revolt of the workers against a system of ‘speeding up’ is not revolutionary.” She felt confident that if Prokofiev could see the production he “would feel satisfied with it as presenting an important and novel idea which is coordinated in every way with [his] very splendid music.”187 It was hard to take Reis’s reassurance of political neutrality seriously when toward the end of the ballet the “shadow figures of a hammer and a sickle” appeared, finally crossing “as in the emblem of political communism,” as Martin reported after the premiere.188 The scenario indeed indicates the appearance of “two enormous arms, one with hammer, and one with the scythe.”189 Prokofiev complained to Miaskovsky about the “emblems of Soviet daily life,” which, he thought, contributed to the distortion of the story line and choreography of the ballet.190 No critic missed the reference. Olin Downes, for one, called Simonson’s staging of Pas d’acier “a gratuitous and Marxian interpretation of the music.”191

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What might have been just as annoying to Prokofiev as the political reinterpretation of the ballet was that yet again his music had to compete with Stravinsky’s. Although initially Reis told him that they might present Pas d’acier together with Prodigal Son, the League decided to stage Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex instead, as if deliberately repeating the pairing of the two Russian composers in Diaghilev’s 1927 season.192 While in Paris Oedipus was a flop, in Philadelphia and New York it literally towered over Prokofiev’s ballet: “ ‘Oedipus Rex’ Gets American Première: Stravinsky Work Hailed in Philadelphia as 15-Foot Figures Expound Grim Tragedy: Music is Called Somber,” the headline of the preview article announced in the New York Times. Set in smaller letters, the banner modestly added: “On Same Program Stokowski and Composers’ League Give Satirical Ballet by Prokofieff.”193 Reis sent two carefully selected reviews to Prokofiev, explaining that the League’s work always solicits “a variety of opinions,” but added that while some critics “were more impressed with the ‘Oedipus Rex,’ others felt that our production of ‘Pas d’Acier’ was the more important.”194 This was not the opinion of many. Downes devoted four long paragraphs to Oedipus, writing only one short, devastatingly dismissive paragraph about Pas d’acier: “As for the ballet of Prokofieff, it does not justify very much discussion. . . . The music is very poor, forced, imitative, and manufactured—one of Prokofieff ’s poorest efforts of his later period.” He found Simonson’s scenario “singularly uninteresting and ineffective.”195 Martin’s opinion was similarly dismissive. He complained about the “appallingly trite and literal” symbolism of the set. Whereas Massine’s incoherent scenario irritated the critics for its incomprehensibility, Simonson’s plot frustrated by its “entirely literary” attitude.196 But even with more original sets, the contrast between conventional labor and mechanical work was too hackneyed a subject. At the end of March 1932, Carlos Chavez’s ballet, titled “H. P.” (abbreviation of horsepower), was given in Philadelphia with Diego Rivera’s sets and costumes and Catherine Littlefield’s choreography. The scenario had no plot and presented the contrast between “the productivity of the tropics and the mechanistic absorption of the north.” “Though the tropical aspect is an unfamiliar one,” Martin reported, “the subject itself is little more than ‘pas d’acier’ from another angle of vision.” The supposed novelty, the machine dance, was by 1932 a boring affair, “done to death,” Martin wrote.197 Simonson’s version of Prokofiev’s Pas d’acier had only added one more piece to a worn-out genre. POROUS B ORDERS

In hindsight, it is easy to mistake Pas d’acier for a work in which Prokofiev expressed sympathies for the Soviet regime. But, as this chapter has shown, that was far from the case. Both Prokofiev and Diaghilev thought that they could have it both ways; both insisted that the ballet had nothing to do with politics, yet marketed it to the Soviet

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Union as a genuinely Bolshevik item. Prokofiev went so far as to offer it instead of a new piece he was asked to write for the anniversary of the October Revolution while on his triumphant first tour of the Soviet Union in 1927.198 But, as his Soviet critics noted, Pas d’acier had much more to do with the everyday life of a Russian émigré composer in Paris than with everyday life in Soviet Russia. As Lunacharsky reported in Vechernyaya Moskva, even the successful Diaghilev was chained “to a rootless idle crowd wandering the world in search of fresh entertainments,” to a “gilded mob, which all great artists have always deeply loathed.” Lunacharsky compared Diaghilev to the legendary wandering Jew Ahasuerus, in whose ears “there rings the constant command, ‘Go forth!’ And he goes forth, searching a country that is often beautiful and fertile, and goes into the desert searching for shadowy mirages.”199 The result, Pas d’acier, also showed Prokofiev’s yielding to the Bolshevik assumption that the politically most advanced country must be the producer of the most advanced art. The political ambiguity of Pas d’acier reflected not only Prokofiev’s confused political allegiances but also the ambiguous political sentiments toward Communism in Paris. Borders between bourgeois West and Communist Russia were especially porous in the 1920s when Paris served as the number one site of Bolshevik exhibitions and exhibitionism. The French capital nurtured a Sovietophile intelligentsia that became even more pro-Soviet in the 1930s when Fascism and Nazism turned into serious political threats. But while visiting the embassy was chic for Parisian intellectuals, it was an altogether different matter for Russian emigrants, as Prokofiev realized in March 1929 when, after long hesitation, he felt he could not refuse the invitation to play at a reception there. As he feared, the reaction in the emigrant press was harsh— in the reactionary Vozrozhdeniye the composer was accused of being “a rubber doll.”200 Prokofiev calmed himself by reading about Christian Science, a religion he adopted in the early 1920s and which provided him with the promise of physical and psychological self-control. Gavriil Paichadze tried to defend him from the fury of the Russian colony, explaining to everyone that “Prokofiev was asked five times to do this, and simply could not go on refusing, as he has plans to visit Russia.”201 On a personal level, Pas d’acier was indeed a first step for Prokofiev. For it was this ballet in which he first tried to use Bolshevism as the sure-fire medicine against Stravinsky’s overbearing influence. Writing a Bolshevik ballet was definitely an anti-neoclassical move and was supposed to prove that Prokofiev was ahead of Stravinsky in the incessant rush for innovation, a rush Lunacharsky identified as one of the defining aspects of the bourgeois artistic scene in Paris. Stravinsky, in a way, was right when he said that Prokofiev still cared too much about being a modernist, in the sense that he wanted to be ahead of everyone else.202 In the 1920s and 1930s this “ahead” could mean both the voluntary behind, the politically benign leisure time spent in neoclassicism’s imagined past, and the voluntary submission to the Bolshevik temptation, the politically dangerous excursion to the utopian future that ultimately trapped Prokofiev in the cruel reality of Soviet Russia.

3

Neoclassicism à la Russe 1 or Reclaiming the Eighteenth Century in Nabokov’s Ode

Upon seeing the title page of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, Stravinsky supposedly remarked: “What a fool the man is! Only Prokofiev could have given it a title like that.’ ”1 The young Prokofiev, who failed to write a successful symphony as his graduation piece in 1908 and desperately needed to make up for the lost opportunity, had his reasons for adding the hubristic subtitle to his first mature symphony.2 In later years, Prokofiev would claim that the subtitle was a tribute to his favorite classical composers, Haydn and Mozart, whose symphonies he came to admire in Nikolai Tcherepnin’s conducting class at the Conservatory.3 But he also hoped that the epithet “classical” would become true in the word’s second meaning, “regarded as of first historical significance.”4 Calling his first symphony “classical” was also “teasing the geese,” the conservative establishment of Russian music that resisted Prokofiev’s innovative, modernist style. Working on the symphony in May 1917, the composer fancied that the “classically inclined musicians and professors” would revile “this new example of Prokofiev’s insolence.” Prokofiev, they would say, “not let even Mozart lie quiet in his grave” and would contaminate “the pure classical pearls with horrible Prokofievish dissonances.”5 By the time the “Classical” Symphony was performed, on April 7, 1918, that old musical establishment had been ravaged by the Revolution. The former Court Orchestra, renamed the State Orchestra, “played the Symphony with evident enjoyment.”6 It was Prokofiev’s farewell to Russia. Twelve days after the premiere he left Petrograd with Anatoly Lunacharsky’s reluctant official blessing to take the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow. His departure and his valedictory piece were both indications of his indifference to the history that was sweeping away the 97

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old institutions in his homeland. For Prokofiev, classical meant timelessness, or, to put it in less flattering terms, obliviousness to the present. There may also have been another target. The stylization of Haydn and Mozart, which the composer described in the program notes of the first performance as the resurrection of “the ‘good old days’ of strong traditions, the days of hoop skirts, powdered wigs, and queues,”7 could have also been addressed to Diaghilev’s Mir iskusstva (World of Art) group, known for their admiration of the eighteenth century. Later Prokofiev himself rejected the eighteenth-century pastiche. “In general,” he wrote to the symphony’s dedicatee Boris Asafyev in 1925, “I don’t think very highly of things like [Stravinsky’s] Pulcinella or even my own ‘Classical’ Symphony (sorry, I wasn’t thinking of this when I dedicated it to you), which are written ‘under the influence’ of something else.”8 Looking back at his “Classical” Symphony from emigration changed Prokofiev’s perspective. “A classic is a daredevil who discovers new laws that are then accepted by those who follow,” he wrote to Nikolai Miaskovsky in 1924, trying to convince his friend that Alexander Glazunov, whose “clumsy and dead influence” he detected in Miaskovsky’s Fifth Symphony, could not be counted among the classics.9 Prokofiev’s “daredevil” had anticipated the Stravinsky of the 1920s, who by that time had stopped dismissing classicism. In fact, he started to preach the old style as the new mandatory fashion. The change took Prokofiev by surprise. When Stravinsky asked him to do a second proofreading of the overture to Pulcinella, Prokofiev noticed the parallel between his own excursion into the “antique style” and Stravinsky’s new fad.10 Annoyed by Stravinsky’s insistence that one had to be neoclassical, he complained that Stravinsky does not see neoclassicism “as a case of ‘monkey see monkey do,’ and now he’s written a piano sonata in the same style. He even thinks this will create a new era.”11 As was often the case, Stravinsky’s prophesy turned out to be accurate. In the 1920s, Russian Paris transformed into a cultural space in which France and Russia could jointly celebrate their own distinctive anciens régimes, one trying to recover from the trauma of World War I, the other intending to reclaim a Russian past obliterated by the October Revolution. For the Russians, as Diaghilev’s prerevolutionary obsession with bygone times had already demonstrated, the eighteenth century and Russia’s imperial past had special significance as a time of enlightenment, progress, and Europeanization. Russia’s eighteenth century also stood for the political stability offered by autocracy and serfdom, a stability nostalgically remembered by the emigrants devastated by the destabilizing effects of the Revolution. Just like Stravinsky’s brand of neoclassicism in Paris, Russia’s eighteenth century, as Luba Golburt observes, had a dual status of “both modern/significant and archaic/superseded.” The century’s most important literary form, the ode, reflected the archaic layer by presenting a uniform historical vision in which, Golburt writes, “the historical narrative is not that of progress but of repetition and synthesis.”12

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Nicolas Nabokov’s Ode, the topic of this chapter, paid tribute to this vision of Russia’s eighteenth century. An exercise in nostalgia, Nabokov’s first and only Diaghilev ballet evoked not only Russia’s aristocratic eighteenth century but also Mir iskusstva’s attempted restoration of it. Nabokov’s music, heavily influenced by Stravinsky, shared an important element with Stravinsky’s neoclassicism in Apollo: the inclusion of nineteenth-century Russian music. But unlike Stravinsky’s and Prokofiev’s pastiches, Ode was weighed down with nostalgia for Russia’s ancien régime, celebrated in Mikhail Lomonosov’s Ode, which Nabokov set to music in his cantata. The classicism of Ode was thus a Russian emigrant affair, pompous, disconnected, and too specific to succeed in Paris. T H E HO U R O F R E C KO N I N G

When he accepted Nabokov’s cantata on Lomonosov’s Ode: Meditation Upon the Greatness of God (1743) for performance by the Ballets Russes in 1927, Diaghilev knew exactly what he wanted. He had little appetite left for further experimenting with Bolshevik themes and was eager to do a volte-face: to return to pre-Bolshevik times, to a past untainted by the disturbing effects of the present. Reimagining the historical milieu of Lomonosov’s Ode, which served as the text of the cantata, Diaghilev envisioned an eighteenth-century court divertissement akin to his 1922 Aurora’s Wedding, a shortened version of the third act of Chaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, revived by Diaghilev in 1921 as The Sleeping Princess. As Nabokov later remembered, Diaghilev decided to transform the cantata “into a ‘ballet-spectacle,’ into an eighteenth-century allegoric pageant.”13 Both the neoclassical court context of Ode and the personal titillation of producing a work that would indirectly celebrate Peter the Great’s daughter, Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (1709–1762), to whom Diaghilev believed he was related on his mother’s side, appealed to him. The final product, which premiered on June 6, 1928, fell short of Diaghilev’s neoclassical dreams. Retrospective classicism, which the dance historian Lynn Garafola defines in the context of the Ballets Russes as the mirroring of the “French elite’s fascination with the aristocratic culture of the grande siècle,” did not start with Diaghilev’s recreation of Marius Petipa’s choreography for Sleeping Beauty in 1921. Despite its French resonances, Diaghilev’s retrospective classicism was not necessarily, or at least not exclusively, French. He did not have to rediscover “the glories of the French past,” taking inspiration, as Garafola argues, from Picasso’s discovery of Ingres.14 Russians, especially the ones of noble descent who were forced into emigration after the Bolshevik take-over, had their own grande siècle to rediscover. Indeed, the urge to preserve or resuscitate Russia’s rapidly fading time of glory had emerged even before the 1917 Revolution. Retrospective classicism was the lodestar of Diaghilev’s Mir iskusstva movement, described by Richard Taruskin as “the self-avowedly classicizing reassertion of aristocratic taste in the face of materialist and utilitarian esthetics.” It was this

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aristocratic taste that led Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois “to their discovery of ballet, a classical art that had been preserved in aspic by the Russian autocracy.”15 In his effort to preserve this past, Benois created a series of paintings of Petersburg’s eighteenth-century palaces in 1900, turning his attention from his beloved Versailles of Louis XIV (subject of an earlier series of paintings) to his native city. Benois’s turn to Russia’s eighteenth century exemplified attempts within Mir iskusstva to rejuvenate contemporary art by giving relevance to a past more distant than the nineteenth century. St. Petersburg and its architecture became focal points for this new artistic vision: Benois celebrated the city’s bicentennial in 1903 with a series of articles in Mir iskusstva on the paintings and architecture of St. Petersburg.16 Diaghilev’s enormously successful exhibition of Russian portraits, which he presented from March 6 through September 26, 1905, in St. Petersburg’s neoclassical Tauride Palace, displayed the same impulse for preservation. For the exhibition, Diaghilev collected roughly four thousand portraits from Russia’s crumbling eighteenth-century palaces to showcase both Russia’s art and its gentry culture. The portraits were of the Russian aristocracy from the time of Peter the Great to the late nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the period of Alexander I (1801–1825). Diaghilev traveled thousands of miles to recover these lost treasures of Russian art. He was dismayed to see the decay of country estates. Later he liked to talk about his adventures during his travels. “You can’t imagine how many of these palatial estates, these jewels of eighteenth-century architecture, were falling in ruins at the time,” he told Nabokov in 1927. “Their gardens were unkept forests, the floors of their empty salons and ballrooms were littered with fallen plaster. The pigeons and swallows had made their nests in the galleries.” Russian aristocracy, “the pygmy heirs of a great period,” could neither “keep the past alive” nor “cope with the ideas of the present, the new trends, the new desires and the new needs of our times.”17 His project of saving and publicly displaying these portraits was a last effort to pay tribute to a moribund Russian gentry and a Russian state that was already on the verge of eradication.18 Diaghilev’s speech, “At the Hour of Reckoning,” called attention to the precarious present hovering between the decaying past and the threatening future. Do you not feel that the long gallery of portraits of people great and small with which I tried to populate the splendid rooms of the Tauride Palace is but a grand and convincing reckoning up of a brilliant but, alas, dead period of our history? . . . [W]e are witnessing a great historical moment of reckonings and endings in the name of a new, unknown culture . . . that has arisen through us, but will sweep us aside.19

In the speech, Diaghilev used the retrospective impulse not for summoning nostalgia but as an impetus for new beginnings, a fitting reflection of the eighteenth century that was also a time of brave new ideals, free of the anxiety and decadence that had been stirring Russia toward apocalyptic reckonings by 1905. Diaghilev emphasized the energy of the eighteenth century and reprimanded Léon Bakst,

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whom he commissioned to construct an eighteenth-century trellis garden for the exhibition, for setting up a “cemetery.” Diaghilev’s Mir iskusstva, Golburt argues, reclaimed the eighteenth century by “rereading it for its own purposes of artistic renewal and historical divination.”20 Yet nostalgia for the time of enlightened absolutism still lurked behind Mir iskusstva’s frequent evocation of the eighteenth century. Anna Nisnevich traces the legacy of Russia’s ancien régime in the artistic practices of the Silver Age, which, she points out, would later be transformed into useful tools in the hands of the Soviet totalitarian regime and which would still resonate in emigrant Russian culture. Neoclassicism has its roots in Russia, and especially in St. Petersburg’s aristocratic culture that had to fight for survival even before the Revolution. As Nisnevich shows, a strain of what she calls “assertive retrospection” existed along the more turbulent strains of the Silver Age’s occult, exuberant, decadent artistic projects and social unrest.21 The return to pre-Romantic styles and genres and the revival of court rituals and celebrations around the turn of the century reflected the aristocracy’s resistance to modernity and its refusal to disappear. The cult of the Russian ancien régime resulted in the resurgence of the cantata that came into being in the eighteenth century and waned in the nineteenth. Nisnevich documents a boom in cantata production at the turn of the century. New cantatas created for festive occasions included Glazunov’s Coronation Cantata, Festive Cantata, and his unfinished cantata intended to celebrate the bicentenary of Lomonosov; Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov’s cantata commemorating Nikolai Gogol; Nikolai Tcherepnin’s cantata for the centenary of St. Petersburg’s Elizabethan Institute; Anton Arensky’s cantata Under the Peaceful Canopy of the Arts, dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the reign of Alexander III; and César Cui’s Cantata in Commemoration of the 300th Anniversary of the Reign of the House of the Romanov, op. 89.22 Like early opera and the ballet, cantatas were originally brought to Russia in order to educate Russian aristocracy in court rituals. Now, at the turn of the century, they served to signal the unrelenting intention of the aristocracy to continue to rule. Diaghilev’s neoclassical inclinations carried memories of both eighteenthcentury Russia and its reflection in turn-of-the-century Russian aristocratic culture. Diaghilev ruled his company as a veritable Russian barin, caring for his dancers and artists but also reigning over them imperiously. The young Serge Lifar was shocked to see how the early collective enterprise of the Ballets Russes reverted to “customs borrowed from the days of serfdom” in the 1920s. Diaghilev’s inner circle was like a court around the sovereign, an inaccessible divinity who was kind and irritable by turns.23 Stravinsky meanly yet astutely described Diaghilev to Nabokov as a “mixture of an eighteenth century vel’moja (seigneur) and of a capricious, Russian provincial barynia (squire).”24 Coming from wealthy aristocratic stock, Nicolas Nabokov fit perfectly into Diaghilev’s enterprise. Cousin of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, Nicolas moved

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with ease in high society and among the artistic elite. Showing promise in composition, he took lessons with Vladimir Rebikov (1866–1920) in the Crimea, and, after his emigration, he continued his musical studies in Stuttgart and Berlin. But his real talent was in organization, which made him, many years after Diaghilev’s death in 1929, his heir as European taste-maker. Moving from the social to the artistic elite was easy for Nabokov, who describes his childhood as “milk-and-honey days” out of a fairy tale: “a fairly large group of people was constantly around us to bathe and clothe us, to take us out for walks, to teach us to read and write in several languages, to protect and pamper us, and to fuss over us in a hundred ways.” The Nabokov children traveled around Europe, stayed in villas, on enormous family estates, and ate meals the variety and size of which can hardly be believed. Their mother instructed them in table manners, asking them to hold their hands “as the Emperor does,” the two index fingers touching the edges of the plate. With the help of their numerous governesses and tutors, the children put on shows, played music and tennis, and participated in shooting and hunting. By the time Nabokov wrote his memoir, he felt some uneasiness about his charmed childhood spent in their “opulent castle with its picnic forays, its sports, pleasures, and distractions,” all of which “stood in stark contrast to the squalor and poverty in which our nextdoor neighbors lived—the Belorussian peasants of Lubcza,” who lined “the path to the church, chanting supplications in sad, nasal voices, while our Starosta, the church elder, brushed them aside to make way for the Kastelyna (us, the inhabitants of the castle) so that our clothes would not be contaminated by the beggars’ multiple sores.”25 Nabokov’s grandmother, Sophia Bogdanovna Falz-Fein, née Knauff, who in 1918 would be shot by Red Army guardsmen, lived on an estate in Preobrazhenka, in “a white, sprawling, Miramar-like palazzo” surrounded by vast, beautifully manicured parks, fruit orchards, vineyards, greenhouses, a plantation of young trees, and flower and vegetable gardens. Bogdanovna insisted on following a ceremonial, courtly way of life on her estate. “Grandmother’s band, in Navy uniform,” her grandchild recalled, “looking like a shoal of trained seals, played waltzes, marches, and polkas, blowing their woodwinds and brasses amid a setting of semi-tropical greenery.”26 Nabokov had fond memories of Russia’s patriotic years: 1912, the Centennial Jubilee of Russia’s victory over Napoleon; and 1913, the festivities surrounding the tercentennial of the Romanov dynasty. As a member of the aristocracy, he witnessed the nationwide shows, military parades, balls, and other festivities. His most exciting childhood experience was attending a gala performance of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar with their majesties Tsar Nicolas and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna; Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna; and other members of the imperial family present.27 In 1913 ten-year-old Nabokov was regularly taken to concerts given by the Imperial Court Orchestra to hear a concert series called “Historic Concerts of Russian Music.” To contribute to the Romanov Jubilee, the orchestra played, beside the

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regular symphonic fare, oratorios, cantatas, and excerpts from operas, works with clear patriotic or nationalistic contents.28 What the young Nabokov experienced as the “long and fairly dreary” concerts exhibiting many second-rate talents in these jubilee years, the budding composer trying his luck in Paris in the 1920s remembered fondly as the soundtrack to bygone days of old Russia. T H E A R I S T O C R AT IC LU R E O F RU S SIA’ S E IG H T E E N T H C E N T U RY

Using family connections as an excuse (Nabokov’s stepfather’s first cousin married Diaghilev’s half-brother), Nabokov’s mother was eager to introduce her son to the great impresario. The meeting took place in a Russian restaurant in Paris in the summer of 1924, a year after Nabokov moved from Berlin to Paris. After identifying herself as Diaghilev’s relative, Nabokov’s mother presented her youngest son as someone “who writes music.” Diaghilev showed no enthusiasm for the mother’s plea to listen to her son’s compositions, and Nabokov thought that the affair was settled in the negative.29 He finally made his way to Diaghilev through a chain of wellmeaning people who eventually secured a performance of his settings of three poems by the medieval Persian scientist and poet Omar Khayyam. Prokofiev, who knew Nabokov, dragged Diaghilev to the concert. The concert was a fiasco, but Diaghilev was intrigued enough to ask Nabokov to show him some of his other music. The audition took place in 1927 in Paris’s Grand Hotel in the company of Prokofiev, Walter Nouvel, Boris Kochno, and Lifar. Nabokov played a movement of his piano sonata and excerpts from a cantata he had been working on for a year. Diaghilev was not impressed and took a hurried leave, telling the eager composer to return when he had more music to show. Despite this unpromising introduction, Diaghilev eventually took an interest in Nabokov’s Ode, subjecting it, as always, to Stravinsky’s judgment first. The ritual of presenting a new Diaghilev composer was always the same: first lunch, then introduction “to the Master [i.e., Stravinsky] on a beat-up piano in the rehearsal studio of Diaghilev’s ballet company,” culminating in the hoped-for approval and blessing of the master.30 Ignoring Diaghilev’s advice to play “only a few bits” of the music, Nabokov played through the score, with Stravinsky and George Balanchine helping out on the piano.31 Everyone was delighted. “Of course you must play this music,” Stravinsky advised Diaghilev. Nabokov’s sweet nostalgia for a lost aristocratic Russia would have had little resonance with Paris connoisseurs had Russia’s past not coincided with French admiration of neoclassicism, documented in detail by Scott Messing.32 Initially, Stravinsky was concerned about the feasibility of Lomonosov’s text. “Why did you choose such a stilted, old poem?” he asked, recalling the great father figure of Russian poetry and sciences as “a poor man’s Boileau,”33 the French poet whose 1674 defense of classicism, L’art poétique, Stravinsky later claimed inspired his Apollon musagète. Nabokov

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praised the ode’s “beauty and primitive faith.”34 As he later declared in an interview for Vozrozhdeniye, he felt that “the scientific, almost laboratorial perception of nature combined in [Lomonosov] with a purely Russian mood. In almost all of his lines,” he said, “one feels the majestic tranquility of the soul, an Olympic wisdom.”35 More than Olympic wisdom, Lomonosov is recognizably Russian because of his combination of enlightened scientific curiosity and unquestioning acceptance of religious dogma and political authority. Science was not to challenge imperial authority in Russia. Like the arts, it served the autocratic power of the tsars unquestioningly. In Lomonosov’s poetry the sublimity of nature and the sublimity of autocratic power were concomitant. The miracle of the Aurora Borealis can be presented as a subject for scientific inquiry, but, as Lomonosov’s Ode shows, it can also be read as an allegory for the mysteries of God and for the celebration of the empress.36 Enlightened scientific inquiry, religious devotion, patriotism, and worship of political power unite in Lomonosov’s rhetoric. His unrelenting scientific research also bears the mark of the consciousness, typical of Russia, of lagging behind and needing to catch up with Europe.37 Diaghilev, whose constant push for novelty led critic André Levinson to describe the impresario as someone who “on the seventh day . . . did not rest,” could surely relate to that notion.38 Lomonosov might have been a poor cousin of the French classicists, but his name had all the relevant associations in Paris. His meditation, Levinson wrote in Candide after the ballet’s premiere, “unites the festive elevation of a Jean-Baptiste Rousseau with the compassionate devotion of a Le Franc de Pompignan,” citing two eighteenth-century men of letters the French audience knew well.39 Henry Malherbe, reviewing Ode for Le Temps, and Maurice Brillant in le Correspondant, agreed.40 The ode as a genre struck a familiar chord in a Paris that was celebrating the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of the great French ode poet François de Malherbe (1555–1628) in 1928, and was a fine pretext for the recreation of eighteenth-century pageantry.41 From its first appearance in Russia, at the court of Empress Anna Ioannovna, the ode celebrated coronations, anniversaries, birthdays, weddings, and military victories. Ceremonial aspects of church rituals were thus transferred to the secular sphere of the court, with its allegorical spectacle.42 M U SIC O F S W E E T N O STA L G IA O R DE L A B ON N E M U S I QU E TA RTA R E

Yet there was nothing that signaled “eighteenth century” in Nabokov’s music, which Diaghilev affectionately called “de la bonne musique Tartare.”43 In his memoirs, Nabokov emphasized that Ode already showed what he had learned from Erik Satie since he came to France: namely, how to be “simple, intimate, ‘puerile,’ and even naïve to the point of appearing childish.” Prokofiev was less impressed by what he considered “evil influence” on Nabokov, which he detected most clearly in

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the three instrumental numbers that the composer had added to his cantata at Diaghilev’s request.44 In its newfound simplicity Ode had “little to do with an Imperial Russian pageant” that Diaghilev had envisioned for the ballet.45 The music, nevertheless, sounded unmistakably Russian. When the composer played through the cantata, Stravinsky merrily remarked that the music sounded “as if it were written by a predecessor of Glinka, someone like Gurilyov or Alyabyev,” purveyors of Russian salon music in the 1830s.46 Nabokov admitted that he modeled Ode on the Italian-inflected music of Glinka, Dargomizhsky, Alyabyev, and Chaikovsky, especially their songs, which he heard as a mixture of the German lied and the Franco-Italian romance sentimentale, with special Russian characteristics like “those tiny melismata by which one can recognize any piece of nineteenth-century Russian music” added as national spice. Little known abroad, these songs provided Nabokov with a link to his lost, magical childhood, when they had been “daily companions” of his life. “We hummed them in the woods and in the streets, we sang them alone and in chorus, we played them on our instruments and listened to them in concert recitals,” Nabokov remembered. He knew hundreds of them, and after he had left Russia in 1920 he recalled them “with the nostalgic devotion with which one cherished tender memories and lost hopes.” They were for him “the inexorable symbols of exile.”47 Immediately identifying the Italian lyricism of Nabokov’s music, Stravinsky recommended Vittorio Rieti to help Nabokov with the orchestration, which, he insisted, “should be done à l’Italienne and by no means Deutsch.”48 Nabokov’s original plan was to string together small lyrical vocal pieces into a large-scale oratorio (close in conception to Dukelsky’s similarly nostalgic oratorio The End of St. Petersburg, which Dukelsky conceived around the time of Ode’s premiere). Diaghilev heard it in this vein and imagined the ballet as “tender, mysterious, and gentle,” “romantic, lyrical, with rich, suave, and soft movements, ‘rather of a Fokinesque’ character,” only sometimes brightening into “pure pageantry—festive, glittering, and brilliant.”49 Stravinsky, for his part, advised Nabokov “not to imitate Prokofiev.”50 In the end, some of Prokofiev’s music, especially works written after his return to the Soviet Union, did sound strikingly similar to Nabokov’s immature yet attractive experiment in “Russian nostalgia,” but, as Stravinsky observed, Prokofiev always managed to leave out the saccharine. The longest movement of Ode is just under four minutes, the shortest (movement 9) is less than a half minute. Nabokov assigned Lomonosov’s first through fifth, seventh, and eighth strophes to alternating ensembles consisting of chorus with added soprano and bass solos. For the seventh number he combined the repeated fifth strophe with the new sixth. This one strophe appears in three different forms: first as a bass solo in the middle of a chorus movement (no. 7), then as the text of the double chorus in the “Feast” (no. 9), which returns with a varied second part as no. 11 after the inserted intermezzo (no. 10). These differently folded

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example 3.1. “Usta premudrïkh,” movement 3 in Nabokov’s Ode (vocal score).

repetitions, leading to a festive climax in the movements with double chorus, justified Diaghilev’s desire to stage Nabokov’s oratorio. The atmosphere of specifically Russian festivity is underlined in the third repetitive choral movement, the first few unison notes of which inescapably evoke the “Slava” choruses of nineteenth-century Russian operas (ex. 3.1). Other Russian features include echoes of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (ex. 3.2a-b), lyrical and triumphant choral unisons, modal bendings of major and minor keys, minor sixths evoking sentimental Russian romances, disdain for the effeminate tenor range, and full embrace of the bass voice, which occasionally takes on the tone of Russian operatic heroes from Glinka’s and Musorgsky’s historical operas.

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example 3.2. a) Musorgsky, “The Gates of Kiev” from Pictures at an Exhibition; b) C-major

insertion in the E-major orchestral introduction to movement 1 in Nabokov’s Ode (vocal score).

(a) (a)

(b)

(b)

Despite the bombast, even these celebratory movements preserve a lyric tone. The climactic, triumphant double choruses in nos. 9 and 11 rock gently in 89. Although the bass sometimes moves with the insistence of an ostinato and the line-closing ascending fourths turn into obsessive shouting at the end of the movement, Nabokov’s festive mood is never abrasive (ex. 3.3). There is no harshness in his music, no sharp edges, no shying away from diatonic, brazenly tonal writing. Nabokov is unashamed of writing “nineteenth century” all over his score. Apart from Russian nineteenth-century music, Stravinsky is the most clearly detectable influence in Nabokov’s music. The trumpet fanfares introducing the spectacle, with their perfect fifths, cross relations, and alternating meters, recall Oedipus Rex, the Ballets Russes’ anniversary piece from the year before (ex. 3.4). Short contrapuntal sections orchestrated with woodwinds, such as the transition before the middle section in no. 4, and certain characteristic embellishments also spell out the neoclassical Stravinsky (ex. 3.5).51 Diatonic scalar passages of unpredictable length, contrapuntally juxtaposed, appear in the orchestral introduction to the “Feast” (no. 9). With its irregular beats and changing meters, the passage sounds like neoclassical Stravinsky simplified for children (ex. 3.6). The few dissonant harmonies also bear the mark of Stravinsky’s influence. So do irregular rhythms reminiscent of a tamed Rite, which occasionally break the otherwise regular flow of

example 3.3. Gently rocking double chorus in movement 9 (vocal score).

example 3.4. Introduction to Nabokov’s Ode (vocal score).

example 3.5. Neoclassical embellishment in movement 7 of Ode (vocal score).

example 3.6. Orchestral introduction to movement 9 of Ode (vocal score).

example 3.7. First page of movement 2 in Nabokov’s Ode (vocal score).

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example 3.8. Neoclassical melody of movement 7 of Ode (vocal score).

the music, as in no. 6 (“O vï, kotorïkh”), probably the most original movement exhibiting unison patter in the chorus and less attractive, bombastic climaxes. As Stravinsky sensed immediately, Nabokov is at his best in the lyrical solo movements and sentimental duets. In no. 2 he accompanies the soprano’s melody with ostinatos and gracious counterpoint—the ostinato, the intertwined melodies, and the wide intervals of the vocal line, separating sometimes into Bach-style twopart melodies, are also reminiscent of Stravinsky-style neoclassicism (ex. 3.7). The hundreds of Russian romances that provided a soundtrack for his fairy-tale childhood had trained Nabokov’s ears for lyrical sweetness. Except the sentimental chromatic slide at the end of the line, the tune for the soprano in no. 7 (“O vï, kotorïkh”) might almost have been sung by Anne in Stravinsky’s much later Rake’s Progress (ex. 3.8). The most original aspect of Nabokov’s music is its brave embrace of a lack of originality. Stravinsky, even when rewriting other composers, as he did in Pulcinella or The Fairy’s Kiss, could not help giving anything he touched his

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unmistakable mark. Nabokov was a more passive synthesizer. Satie’s influence gave him license for uncomplicated forms and simple texture. But Satie’s simplicity also carried Stravinsky’s blessing, and as with many things in Russian Paris, it was hard to distinguish the French and the Russian ingredients in Nabokov’s style. Unlike Stravinsky, Prokofiev found the music’s derivative character tedious. He told Nabokov that one passage was too obviously taken from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Kashchey the Deathless. Nabokov, offended, reminded Prokofiev that this was the part Stravinsky appreciated the most. Prokofiev thought that Stravinsky praised the part ironically (“he is a mischievous man,” he warned Nabokov), but he was wrong.52 By the late 1920s, Stravinsky had stopped worrying about the sources of his music. In particular he had become less anxious about mining his own musical past, the nineteenth-century Russian “classics.” Stravinsky’s approval of Nabokov’s score had already signaled the change in his attitude. S W E E T N O S TA L G IA T U R N S SU R R E A L

Diaghilev chose the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957) to design the miseen-scène for Ode and assigned the creation of the scenario to Kochno. The choreography went to Leonid Massine, who had worked on Prokofiev’s Pas d’acier the previous year. Nabokov interpreted Lomonosov’s poem abstractly, in general “Enlightenment” terms, as “one of those rare flowers of the eighteenth century where man still is seen as an indivisible unit—intellectual, spiritual, moral—and science, poetry, and faith form one single world.”53 Diaghilev, according to Kochno, had a more specific period concept and instructed Tchelitchew to base his design “on eighteenth-century allegorical drawings—on engravings of Court balls and the coronation festivities of the Empress Elizabeth.”54 On June 3, 1928, three days before the premiere, Diaghilev still described the ballet as an allegory of the empress’s coronation: “Ode” is an allegorical ballet . . . typical of the eighteenth century. . . . Nature shows her pupil the miracles of the Universe: water, planets, reflection of light, and the last miracle, the coronation festivities at the time of Elizabeth Petrovna. The pupil’s hands are tied so that he cannot move, and cannot try to touch the miracle. At the very end, seeing the Northern Light that symbolizes the empress, the pupil cannot restrain himself any longer and breaks the cords, darting ahead. But at this instant the light is extinguished and the charm vanishes. Nature that appeared at the beginning of the scene as a statue turns to stone again, unyielding to the pupil’s appeal.55

Kochno’s scenario, printed in the program, was less historically specific. It described the ballet in three scenes. In the first, Nature descends from her pedestal to show her Student the Constellations (Kochno specified the scene as danced by nine male dancers), the River (represented by eight female and six male dancers), and the Flowers and Mankind (both represented by images projected on a screen).

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In scene two, the Student asks Nature to show him her festival. In scene three, the Student, trying to reach the miracles of nature, destroys the Aurora Borealis. As in Diaghilev’s scenario, Nature turns back to stone in the last scene.56 Tchelitchew was less ready to follow Diaghilev’s instructions than Nabokov or Kochno. Trained by Alexandra Exter in Kiev and thus attracted to abstraction, he refused to reduce his art to painting period sets. He wanted to create “something new, original,” wanted to get rid of “easel paintings blown-up as backgrounds” and instead “put textures and things on stage to make . . . fantastic theater.”57 By the time Diaghilev and Kochno persuaded him to do the sets for Ode, Tchelitchew was deep into experiments with a new approach to stage design. According to Nabokov, he was “preoccupied by such problems as the relation between pragmatic experience (with its crude and clumsy logic perceived and transmitted to the mind by the senses) and the experience of the unreal (or suprareal) with all its hidden, illogical laws and its ‘journey to the end of the night.’ ”58 After experimenting with neoRomanticism, Tchelitchew was thus well on his way to becoming a Surrealist artist. Ode provided him with a subject matter that could indeed take him “to the end of the night.” Rejecting Diaghilev’s panegyric spectacle or Kochno’s didactic allegory, he proposed for Nabokov’s music “a surrealist vision of a mysterious phenomenon of nature, the Aurora Borealis.”59 He worked in secret, not showing his design to Diaghilev, who, as he told Nabokov, could not “make head or tail of his experiments” but suspected nevertheless that “they have nothing to do with the original conception of Ode.”60 It was not until ten days before the performance that Nabokov was finally allowed to glance at the plans and was shown by Kochno a little model for the opening scene. “The model was all in blue tulle,” Nabokov remembered, “which, when lit with a tiny flashlight, became strangely alive and acquired an extraordinary mysterious and ephemeral beauty.”61 Fittingly, the “textures” and “things” Tchelitchew wanted to put on stage to illustrate the Northern Lights were all made of light: limelights, electric lights, neon lights, phosphorescent lights, and motionpicture projections, for which Tchelitchew asked the help of Pierre Charbonnier, pioneer of neon lighting, with whom Tchelitchew shared an exhibition in 1926. As A. V. Cotton later reported, the ballet’s strongest impression remained the unearthly beauty created in most of the scenes by a revolutionary use of light never before used in any form of Theatre—floods, spots, panoramic effects, projections against a screen and great bursts of light suggesting the sudden animation of pyrotechnical set-pieces, as the groups of dancers and static figures were bathed in pools of glowing illumination, swiftly dimmed and flooded again, almost imperceptibly changing colours.62

The story line—if one can consider Kochno’s didactic allegory a story—ceased to matter “after the first gigantic light-bursts clearly indicated that attention could be

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completely occupied in grasping and assimilating the visual images created without reference to any other factor in the startling picture.”63 Tchelitchew’s roommate Allan Tanner reports that when the painter told Diaghilev that he would need five projection machines “to be placed on a ‘bridge’ near the ceiling of the theatre,” Diaghilev looked as if he were about to have a stroke.64 Some of Tchelitchew’s ideas remained unrealized: no “pinwheels of neon light representing distant nebulae and spirals of neon light representing comets” appear in the final scenario.65 The Student does not float in a boat in the scene representing the River. Instead, he performs a swimming dance while carried on the shoulders of a group of dancers dressed in white leotards. As Brillant described the scene in Correspondant, the dancers “enter, entangled in the mesh of a large net, presenting the image of moving waves.”66 Also left out were the large transparent balloons that were to descend on the brightly lit stage in Tchelitchew’s projected fourth tableau; the luminous, pulsating ball from which air bubbles would burst, finally developing feet and running away in the fifth tableau; and the enormous white horse that would gradually appear and then diminish into a luminous small point. These most fantastic, Surrealist images never made it into the ballet. The creation of man, which Tchelitchew imagined as Nature leading mysterious figures who slowly dance, their various, illuminated body parts gradually coalescing into complete human bodies, would in the end be represented by cinematic projections of acrobats. Diaghilev must have vetoed Tchelitchew’s culminating projection, a “pagan fête, a sort of bacchanal with nude men and women” appearing “as if in the midst of flames.”67 In only one scene of Tchelitchew’s scenario did remnants of Diaghilev’s original court celebration appear. Nature’s feast ends with the appearance of the Aurora Borealis, which Tchelitchew wanted to depict as lights jumping and trembling, multiplying and turning into fixed heavenly constellations, fireworks, stars, balls of fire, lightning, spirals appearing and playing about, the general light turning green, blue, yellow, orange, red in quick successions, then settling in a quivering white that alternates with fiery red, intensifying in brightness.68 For the on-stage spectators, Tchelitchew designed a round podium, with stairs leading to it from each side. The backdrop is a large luminous triangle emphasizing the receding perspective, enhanced by lines of dolls strung on wires getting smaller in the back of the stage. In the foreground, Tchelitchew placed female dancers, dressed, like the puppets, in bouffant dresses of bluish satin and pearl gray decorated with a large phosphorescent star (figs. 3.1–3). These puppets and dancers, despite their eighteenth-century panniers, remained strangely abstract. Tchelitchew covered their faces with a mesh and wrapped their heads, décolletage, and arms with black material so that no skin was visible (fig. 3.3). Rather than puppets representing human beings, human beings turned into impersonal puppets, as if to say that in nature’s grand scheme humans as individuals had little role to play. Tchelitchew had not been joking when he told

figure 3.1. Luminous triangle in the set design by Pavel Tchelitchew for the feast in Ode, Howard D. Rothschild Collection on Ballets Russes of Sergey Diaghilev, Harvard University.

figure 3.2. Pavel Tchelitchew’s set design for scene 3 from Ode, Wadsworth Atheneum

Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, used by permission.

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figure 3.3. Pavel Tchelitchew, costume for a star, c. 1928, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, used by permission.

Diaghilev that instead of painting sets he wanted to draw the sets directly on the dancers’ tights.69 Apart from Irina Belyankin (or Ira Belline), Stravinsky’s niece who, dressed in a white robe looking like a Greek column, personified Nature, and Lifar, who danced the role of the Student, the dancers functioned as moving parts of the set: in the second tableau, for instance, the luminous dots on their pale blue

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leotards were connected by broken lines similar to the illustrations of the constellations found in astronomy books.70 The dancers became undulating waves or a fluid wall, or they performed acrobatics as part of a mobile set that in its perfect unity of colors, lights, and movement could no longer be considered a “set” or a backdrop scenery. The only other period reference was the costume of the Student, designed to recall the time of Louis XV. Lifar’s outfit was that of a French cleric: black coat, white wig, tricorne, and a barrister’s band around his neck. As shown in photographs of Lifar, the Student is constrained by ropes that illustrate the limitation of his mind and ability to act.71 During the scene of the feast, Lifar is bound (in the original scenario even blindfolded). When he finally unbinds his hands, he stands with one foot on the rope, creating various geometric designs with it. Geometry is an important theme in the second tableau, in which the luminous dots on the nine dancers’ blue leotards form, according to Tchelitchew’s scenario, “geometric figures.” Dressed in blue leotards, their faces covered with gauze masks, they dance with ropes in front of the puppets in the scene of the feast. Ropes hanging from the ceiling create the illusion that the dancers are also puppets, controlled by strings. Forming geometric shapes, the dancers become parts of cubist geometric formations. Charbonnier’s film projections enhanced Tchelitchew’s fantastic vision. Nabokov remembered Tchelitchew showing him some excerpts from the films at a time when he was still keeping his concept secret from the composer: “young men wearing fencing masks and tights, diving in slow motion” through what Kochno identified as “the element of water.”72 This became, in the final version, the scene of the “Human Being” shown as the slowed-down motion of acrobatic movements.73 The miracles of nature—the growth of plants, flowers, and fruits—were also presented in film: a large white oval, representing a seed and projected on a black screen, first grows a stem, then gradually turns into a luminous tree, bouquets of flowers, and fruits on a branch. The image divides as a compote dish, becoming a still life. F R OM FA N TA SY T O R E A L I Z AT IO N

Needless to say, Tchelitchew’s production was a logistical nightmare. Diaghilev, who assigned the choreography to Massine because he wanted to reserve George Balanchine, his new star choreographer, for Stravinsky’s Apollo, lost interest in the project after observing one rehearsal. He thought Massine’s choreography was “modern, cold, angular stuff ” that had nothing to do with the music’s lyrical, romantic quality.74 He let Kochno take charge of the ballet, realizing that no real understanding existed between the composer, the choreographer, and the set designer. As he was abandoning the ballet, he gave one final piece of advice to Nabokov: “If all of you finally decide to start working, don’t pull the cart in three different directions. It will get stuck and I’m not going to help you pull it out of your mud!”75

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As the premiere approached and it became clear that Ode was well on its way to disaster, Diaghilev finally stepped in. In his memoirs, Nabokov gave a touching account of the impresario’s intervention. Four days before the curtain rose on Ode, Diaghilev took over. From then on he gave the orders, he made the decisions and assumed the responsibilities. . . . He supervised the dying, cutting, and sewing of costumes. He was present at every orchestra and choral rehearsal and made the conductor, Desormière, the soloists, and the chorus repeat sections of the music over and over again until they blended well with the choreographic motions and the light-play of Tchelitchev’s scenery. . . . [H]e spent two whole nights directing the complicated lighting rehearsals, shouting at Tchelitchev and at his technical aids when the delicate lighting machinery went wrong, at me when my piano playing slackened and became uneven, and at Lifar when his steps ceased following the rhythm of the music and the changes of lighting.76

Thanks to Diaghilev, the premiere on June 6 occurred without a breakdown. But not all the staging problems could be solved. André Schaeffner, writing for Le Ménestrel, saw the opening evening of the Ballets Russes as “an obvious and shameful disorder. Why call something that should be a rehearsal behind closed doors a ‘premiere’?”77 To further complicate matters, the authorities did not allow the use of neon lights in the theater. First exhibited in 1910 by their inventor, Georges Claude, they were still considered unsafe and the police were unwilling to risk an explosion. Without the neon lighting, the stage remained too dark.78 Members of the audience who came to see the dance were frustrated by Massine’s decision to put the star dancers behind a muslin curtain.79 Even Robert Caby, a composer and writer with close ties to Satie and the Surrealists, found Tchelitchew’s staging underdeveloped.80 Some critics, obviously unaware of Diaghilev’s opinion of Tchelitchew’s design, saw it as the product of the impresario’s mad rush for novelties. Malherbe went so far as to accuse Diaghilev of trying to win over a new audience across the Atlantic. “Today he must find especially the trust of the audience from the other side of the Atlantic who thronged to the premiere of Ode the other night.” To satisfy this public, whom Malherbe considered infantile, one had to present even the most serious problems with sensational rowdiness.81 Malherbe found Tchelitchew and Charbonnier’s decorations so simplistic and so obvious that he did not even try to decipher their intended allegoric meaning. He could not comprehend why they would choose such an “arrogant and offensive design” for such a “structurally moderate, short-winded divertissement.”82 Levinson dismissed the spectacle as “tasteless and abstruse.”83 What hurt Ode most was the incongruity between its eighteenth-century allegorical text; Nabokov’s lyrical music; Massine’s modernist, angular, acrobatic choreography; and Tchelitchew’s Surrealist design.84 Kochno’s childish scenario could

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not pull these different artistic tendencies into a coherent artistic project. Brillant excused the incoherence of the libretto as no worse than those of some celebrated French ballets of the eighteenth century. As an example, he reminded his readers of André Cardinal Destouches and Michel Richard Delalande’s highly successful 1721 opera-ballet Les élémens with an incomprehensibly complicated libretto by Pierre-Charles Roy. Other critics also evoked French predecessors. Both Brillant and Louis Laloy identified the scene of the feast with ballet de court’s “grand ballet” or “grand divertissement.”85 Levinson thought that the grand allegorical ballet with the gray puppets evoked “a funeral ceremony in an opera by Rameau.” Schaeffner admitted that the blue-gray colors of the costumes and the sets provided a degree of harmony, but complained about the contrast between the costumes taken from the ancien régime and those that he called costumes of “hotel thieves” or of “larvae from the ice age.”86 Surprising for those who had never heard of Nicolas Nabokov, in the Parisian reviews the music of Ode was treated much more favorably than Massine’s choreography or Tchelitchew’s design. Most critics agreed that the spectacle spoiled Nabokov’s music, which they correctly assumed was never designed for ballet. They hoped that one day they would be able to enjoy the music at a concert performance.87 According to Levinson, the “tasteless and obtuse spectacle grafted on the work compromised its effect.”88 Critics noticed the weakness of the orchestration but forgave it knowing that Ode was Nabokov’s first orchestral work.89 Schaeffner accused Diaghilev of risking Nabokov’s reputation by putting on his debut work after only two orchestral rehearsals and with a significant reduction of the chorus.90 But as Georges Auric, who had worked for Diaghilev, pointed out, even if the Ballets Russes’ performance risked distortion of a composer’s work, Diaghilev offered the greatest exposure a composer could have had.91 In the Ballets Russes’ 1928 Paris season, which lasted from June 6 through June 22, Ode was performed as frequently as the company’s other novelty, Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète. It opened the season in an all-Russian program along with Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’acier and Stravinsky’s Les Noces, thus allowing Nabokov to join, as André George wrote in his review of Ode, “the phalanx of émigrés like Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Dukelsky.”92 Of the twelve evenings, six featured Ode; Stravinsky’s Apollo, premiered on June 12, was also played six times in Paris.93 The two appeared on the same program only once, on June 13. All major newspapers carried reviews of it. Praise was lukewarm, but steady.94 Malherbe thought that the music for the “Feast” showed the composer to be a musician deserving attention, while Auric emphasized the grace and spontaneous nature of the young composer’s music, which lacked impressionistic vapors and overrefinement. Nobody mentioned Satie. The light nature was attributed not to Satie but to Mendelssohn and Italian music; Brillant quoted Roland Manuel calling Nabokov “the gondolier of the Neva.” Nabokov’s approachable style reminded Schaeffner of Pergolesi’s Stabat

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Mater and Mozart’s Requiem. He quoted the recent performances of Mozart’s Requiem, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, and Nabokov’s Ode as illustration of the fertility of combining stern subject matter with sweet music. Schaeffner compared Nabokov’s turn to old Russian music to Auric and Poulenc’s attempt to reestablish connection with French genres from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Malherbe added the name of Anton Rubinstein to the list of Nabokov’s creditors. “Here is a young musician who writes good old music,” he wrote approvingly. Levinson recognized Glinka and Chaikovsky in the melodic flow of Nabokov’s Ode and attributed the “virile energy” and the richness of timbre to Stravinsky’s influence. Comparison with Stravinsky was unavoidable, not only because Stravinsky had become such a fixture in the cultural discourse of Paris in the 1920s, but also because Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète was the other novelty in Diaghilev’s penultimate season. Ode already had generic resonances with Stravinsky, whose Oedipus Rex, premiered a year earlier, turned the cantata, the boring genre of conservatory competitions, into a relevant vehicle for contemporary style. Nabokov’s religious subject matter was also discussed in the context of Stravinsky. Only Auric claimed that Nabokov’s inspiration “owes nothing to Stravinsky.” More significantly, Nabokov proved that Russian culture continued to flourish, as Laloy assured his readers: Those who love Russia have to despair no longer. The political and social malice or madness can ruin the homes, abolish institutions, deny tradition, even change the name of the country, but the national genius resists: the race that gave us Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, Glinka, Musorgsky, and Stravinsky, cannot die. Nabokov is a worthy heir of this illustrious line.95

That was just what emigrant Russians wanted to hear. Brillant went even further, arguing (in advance of Arthur Lourié) that the specific Russian style Nabokov represented was the “real” Russian tradition. It was not the Asian, picturesque style with its “rhythmic and coloristic debauchery, savage voluptuousness and refined timbres” that, since the Mighty Five (or Diaghilev’s spectacular prewar seasons in Paris), came to be associated with Russian music. Instead of savagery, Nabokov brought back the wise and gentle Italian melodiousness that “remained dear to the heart of the inhabitants of St. Petersburg.” Brillant’s reference to Petersburg as favoring gentle, Italian tones evoked the old rivalry between the Russian capitals. Although Dances from Prince Igor and Stravinsky’s Firebird were still on Diaghilev’s programs, he was leaving behind old Rus’ and was gradually turning toward a more familiar, less exotic past—St. Petersburg’s neoclassical, imperial taste. “Some eminent Russian aestheticians tell us,” Brillant wrote, “that this is their authentic tradition and it dates back to the eighteenth century whereas the oriental coruscation of Rimsky and his friends and successors form only a magnificent interlude.”96

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Stravinsky’s Russian style of The Rite had long been passé. Brillant censured Nabokov for still relying on occasionally obsessive rhythms à la Sacre or carelessly overusing brass à la Stravinsky prior to Apollo. The small reminders of modernism in Nabokov’s score that Brillant found in the occasionally harsher harmonies or sharper rhythms were by now frowned upon because, as the critic wrote, this was modernism that “completely rejected the purity of Apollon musagète.” What Brillant meant by the “purity” of Apollo was, of course, yet another myth created by Stravinsky. The power of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism rested in his ability to turn not to an existing but to an imagined past that knew no specific time period or country, and was thus free of the disagreeable odor of emigrant nostalgia.

4

Neoclassicism à la russe 2 or Stravinsky’s Version of Similia similibus curentur

Although he succeeded in rescuing Ode, Diaghilev had little time to spare for Nicolas Nabokov’s restorative experiment. During rehearsals in Monte Carlo, the impresario was completely absorbed in supervising the birth of Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète, which premiered during the same 1928 season. Diaghilev saw in the Stravinsky-Balanchine collaboration the laboratory for creating what he conceived as the ideal version of classicism. “What [Balanchine] is doing is magnificent. It is pure classicism, such as we have not seen since Petipa,” Nabokov overheard the enraptured Diaghilev saying.1 Diaghilev had reason to rejoice at seeing his prodigal son return to ballet. Just a year earlier he had bitterly told the press that Stravinsky refused to compose a ballet for the company’s twentieth anniversary because now he believed that ballet was “the anathema of Christ.”2 For Stravinsky, Apollo served not only as a return to Diaghilev but also as a ritual purification. It was at once a homeopathic and an allopathic cure: it healed both by the principle of using “medicine which can produce a similar malady to the one it is to cure (similia similibus curentur),” and also by bolstering the natural defense of the body with medicine that produces symptoms different from those of the illness it is attacking.3 Stravinsky’s classicism in Apollo could be heard, that is, both as a return to Russia and an embrace of Europe. For many, Stravinsky’s neoclassicism appeared to be the neutral antidote to his earlier nationalistic ballets, offering a remedy for Russian emigrants against nostalgia and also against potential Bolshevik temptation. But for others, like Boris de Schloezer, Stravinsky’s neoclassicism still maintained strong roots in Russian culture.4 The urgency with which Schloezer strove to return Stravinsky to the Russian fold was a symptom of diaspora anxiety, the fear of losing the center of a displaced culture. Schloezer’s 123

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construal of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism created a specifically exilic aesthetic space equally free of the burden of the past and the fear of the future. This view of neoclassicism was particularly suited to the emigrants’ betwixt-and-between cultural space. Thus, despite its claim to universality, Stravinsky’s Apollo can be discussed productively in the context of exile. G E T T I N G I T R IG H T

Stravinsky’s new ballet fell into Diaghilev’s lap unexpectedly. It came as a result of a commission for the new concert hall at the Library of Congress’s Music Division in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1924 with the financial backing of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. The hall, the acoustics of which the New York Times critic Olin Downes described as unrivaled in the United States, was built primarily for chamber music, but in 1927 the annual chamber music festival incorporated an evening of ballet, including the new commission from Stravinsky.5 Regardless of the newly pious Stravinsky’s diagnosis of ballet’s moral pitfalls, he was in no position to reject such a prestigious commission. “Imagine for a moment that you are asked by cable from America to compose a musical work (ballet or pantomime) for a restricted, very selected audience—the small circle of the White House, for example,” he bragged to Gustave Rey in an interview for L’Intransigeant. The only requirements the Americans imposed were the right to the premiere and the deposit of the manuscript in the Library of Congress’s collection.6 There was no reason to say no, Stravinsky assured his interviewer, thus refuting the rumors, spread mostly by Diaghilev, that he was a composer who worked “for the highest bidder.”7 There was plenty of money involved, of course: 1,000 dollars, of which Stravinsky made no mention to his interlocutor. Coolidge’s commission meant that Diaghilev received Stravinsky’s ballet free, although he could not claim the premiere. Luckily, Washington was far away, and by the time Apollo’s Paris performance came around nobody seemed to have remembered that the season’s new Stravinsky piece was actually not written to order. “Neither program nor reviews hint for a moment that the ballet was written on commission from the Coolidge Foundation in the Library of Congress and first produced at Washington in April last,” the offended American critic H. P. Taylor complained in the Boston Evening Transcript. “What ‘they’ do ‘down there’ (là bas) scarcely matters unless ‘they’ are paying a handsome salary and an improper respect to some Parisian mediocrity,” Taylor grumbled, implying that the Parisians pay attention to the United States only if it pays and admires their star composer.8 Stravinsky showed no interest in the Washington premiere, which took place on April 27, 1928, and which he did not attend. He reassured Diaghilev that it was the Ballets Russes that should produce the ballet properly.9 In an interview with Lev Lyubimov in Vozrozhdeniye, Stravinsky further emphasized that the Washing-

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ton premiere would only be a “closed performance for an invited audience. The real premiere will be here, in Paris.”10 To secure Diaghilev’s interest, he promised a major role with “all sorts of flourishes” for Diaghilev’s new favorite, Serge Lifar.11 He was in no hurry to send the score to Adolf Bohm, who choreographed the Washington performance. But he repeatedly played the music and explained his intentions to Diaghilev and Balanchine as he was composing it.12 What he imagined was no simple affair. In his Autobiography, Stravinsky claims that the Washington commission gave him an opportunity to compose what he had had in mind for a long time, “a ballet founded on moments or episodes in Greek mythology plastically interpreted by dancing of the so-called classical school.”13 The Greek topic was not exactly a novelty—it was all the rage at the time. Picasso was painting women à la grecque, and composers could not get enough of Greek themes. In his review of Apollo, Robert Caby listed recent works, such as Erik Satie’s Socrate (1919) and Mercure (1924), Darius Milhaud’s L’Orestie d’Eschyle (1912–23), Arthur Honegger’s Antigone (1924–27), and Stravinsky’s own Oedipus (1927) as the most prominent precedents. Even more proximately, Milhaud had just written three short operas on Greek themes for Wiesbaden: L’enlèvement d’Europe, L’abandon d’Ariane, and La délivrance de Thésée (1927–28).14 Knowing the habits of critics and audiences who constantly read stories into ballets, Stravinsky insisted that his Apollon musagète had no narrative plot. It was what ballets should be: a series of dances “in the traditional classical style of ballet (Pas d’action, Pas de deux, Variations, Coda),” adhering, as much as possible, “to classical forms” in a sequence approximating “some sort of ancient suite.”15 But the topic was much more than a pretext for dance. There was, in fact, a narrative plot: the episode of Apollo’s birth by Leto on the island of Delos, taken from Homer’s “Hymn to the Delian Apollo,” which formed the First Tableau, and Apollo’s apotheosis, his rise to Parnassus, shown at the end. To emphasize Apollo’s status as the leader of the nine Muses, Stravinsky called the ballet Apollon musagète. Curiously, when he had to reduce the number of Muses to three because of the limitation of the Washington stage, he left out Euterpe, the muse of music, likely because her symbol was the double flute or aulos, an instrument that Apollo, who is frequently depicted with the lyre, despised. He picked Calliope, muse of epic poetry, Polyhymnia, muse of sacred poetry and pantomime, and Terpsichore, muse of dance, whose symbol is the lyre and plectrum, as representatives of the nine. In Greek mythology the Muses, wise daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, judge the competition between the satyr Marsyas playing the aulos and Apollo playing the lyre. In Stravinsky’s ballet, Apollo, “master of the Muses,” inspires “each of them with her own art.”16 After watching their dances, he chooses Terpsichore, who combines in her art the “rhythm of poetry and eloquence of gesture,” as his main companion. Dance, the “anathema of Christ,” thus triumphs over the other arts.

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In order to reestablish dance as the triumphant art form, Stravinsky needed to purify it of its former sins. And what better way to do it than by evoking Apollo, the healer god? Since in ancient Greece Apollo could be a bringer of disease, he was part of purification ceremonies conducted to stop illness and ward off evil. Stravinsky’s highly ritualistic Apollo was the rite of consecration that made it possible for the composer to return to the artistic form that had established his reputation as a composer. To express his commitment to classical dancing, Stravinsky decided to compose a “white ballet,’ ” in which, he explained, “the very essence of this art reveals itself in all its purity.”17 Or so he claimed in his Autobiography. In actuality, “white ballet” was not about purity, nor was it associated with classicism. On the contrary: ballet blanc was a Romantic genre in which ballerinas in white knee-length or calf-length tutus danced in pale light as ghosts, spirits, or other unearthly creatures coming to tempt honest earthly men, as witness La Sylphide or Giselle, or, closer to Stravinsky, Chaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Michel Fokine’s 1909 Les Sylphides on Chopin’s music, in whose orchestration Stravinsky had participated, did away with the plot but retained the Romantic atmosphere and the cast of characters. It was, in Cyril W. Beaumont’s terms, “the Romantic Ballet in excelsis,” in which in the subdued lighting “twenty-two dancers in white ballet dresses and one male dancer in white shoes, tights, and shirt” moved around the stage looking not like dancers but like “animated wisps of cloud or mist.”18 Stravinsky’s ballet blanc placed the emphasis on blanc, the “absence of manycolored effects and of all superfluities,” as Stravinsky wrote in retrospect.19 It was the renunciation of orientalism, of exoticism, most specifically of the Russian couleur locale that made the composer of Firebird and Petrushka famous in the West. The purity of the word “white” was all that mattered to Stravinsky, for whom the balletic term for the Romantic “white ballet” evoked neoclassicism’s obsession with the alleged whiteness of antique sculptures. The whiteness of Stravinsky’s ballet was a sonic version of the Apollo Belvedere, which in the middle of the eighteenth century Johann Joachim Winckelmann declared to be the epitome of perfection in ancient sculpture. Winckelmann’s dictum that the way to become great was to follow the ancients’ ideal of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” fit Stravinsky’s neoclassical agenda. As Diaghilev reported in an interview for Vozrozhdeniye a few days before the premiere on June 12, 1928, in Apollo the composer “strove toward a majestic tranquility.”20 Diaghilev, who knew better than anyone else what a “white ballet” really was, must have understood Stravinsky’s intentions when he described Apollo not only as a ballet blanc but a ballet blanc sur blanc. Nabokov, for his part (and even more retrospectively), described Diaghilev’s conception of Stravinsky’s new creation as “Mondrian’s white-on-white and Malevich’s black-on-white square,” that is, an example of purely abstract art.21

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figure 4.1. André Bauchant, Apollon Apparaissant aux Bergers, Wadsworth Atheneum

Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, used by permission.

But just as Winckelmann’s perfectly white ancient sculptures had originally been colorfully painted, Stravinsky’s “white ballet” abounded in unacknowledged colors. There were the sets, to start with, which, against Stravinsky’s wishes, Diaghilev assigned to André Bauchant (1873–1958), a French provincial painter who had been gaining a reputation as the new Henri Rousseau. Diaghilev noticed Bauchant in 1927 when he exhibited six large canvases, including three with ancient Greek topics. Stravinsky wanted a “severely conventionalized theatrical landscape devoid of all fantastic embellishment.”22 Bauchant’s neoprimitive sets, or more precisely, the background drops based on his paintings, were anything but classical. Diaghilev used two oil canvases that Bauchant painted in Monte Carlo, both based on an earlier work, Apollon Apparaissant aux Bergers (1925) (fig. 4.1). Using Bauchant’s paintings as models, Alexander Shervashidze executed the sets consisting of a sky cloth with the chariot and four horses, a row of rocks in the background, and a massive central rock, appearing mainly in the final tableau (fig. 4.2). Diaghilev asked Shervashidze to

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figure 4.2. Serge Lifar as Apollo with Alexandra Danilova, Felia Dubrovska, and Lubov

Tchernicheva as the Muses in Apollon Musagète, final pose showing the ascent to Parnassus. Photographer unknown. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library, Jerome Robbins Dance Division.

eliminate the cherubs and the Muses, but even without these figures the painting had little of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.” No whiter was Bauchant’s 1927 still life showing a huge vase with flowers in front of a peaceful countryside with meandering rivers and with Adam and Eve and two Parisian patrons in the front; Diaghilev used only the landscape for the curtain.23 W H I T E M U SIC O F M A N Y C O L O R S

When Diaghilev first described Stravinsky’s new ballet to Prokofiev in October 1927, he declared the music “full of tunes, and all in C major.”24 C major was the code word for purity, itself the code word for classicism. Needless to say, Stravinsky’s music was not entirely in C major. It featured key signatures up to four sharps and four flats as well as plenty of accidentals. The harmonic language was unquestionably diatonic and triadic but, as in other neoclassical works by Stravinsky, such gestures did not guarantee respect for the rules of tonal harmony. Dominant

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chords frequently sit on tonic pedals (as in the first held harmony in m. 1, or the G-major chord first sounding on top of C at the end of the “Prologue” in the First Tableau). Harmonies indicating keys arrive unexpectedly, like the D-major chord coming right after a brief moment of Aa major in mm. 7–8. Bass progressions act frequently not as foundations of a tonally consistent harmonic texture but as notes that, seemingly unaware of their purported function, arrive at tonic before the other parts can catch up with them. Impulses, such as downward motion, can easily spiral out of control and become independent, as in 2 mm. before rehearsal 13, where the arpeggiated F#-minor triad falls for seven beats, followed by five-beat descending figures in the cellos, initiating a metric dislocation that is further emphasized by strong off-beat accents in the violins and violas. All these are Stravinsky’s neoclassical stock-in-trade, as is the sudden turn to American jazz in the “Coda” (rehearsal 71), where the noble dotted rhythms of the First Tableau are transformed into light-hearted syncopated swinging, reminiscent of the end of the Octet (1923), where rhythms borrowed from the Afro-Cuban rumba or Brazilian maxixe had coincided with the arrival of accidental-free white-key music. Stravinsky made ostentatious obeisance to prescribed forms. The “Prologue” is cast in the form of a slow introduction with the pronounced dotted rhythms of French overtures, ascending from C major through D to E major before the curtain rises. The birth of the god is announced by the recapitulation of the same E-major music, now in C major: this is the signature theme of Apollo, and it will return in the last movement, the “Apothéose” (rehearsal 96). Apollo’s first variation at the beginning of the Second Tableau starts with a conventional unaccompanied violin solo for the lead dancer (the promised “flourishes” for Lifar). The “Pas d’action” (rehearsal 24), the series of short dances that is supposed to advance the plot in a traditional ballet, starts with a noble, heavy unison, introducing a slow, lyric melody in Ba major that later moves to the cellos and bass. The iambic dotted rhythm that provides a unifying element in the ballet appears with a new theme at rehearsal 32, which is augmented in two different proportions and cast as a canon at the recapitulation of the original key at rehearsal 35. This seemingly new theme is in fact a duple meter, transposed version of the original triple-meter lyric theme, its first six notes distributed among different octave ranges to disguise its identity. The coda (at rehearsal 37) features another metric variation on the first theme (ex. 4.1). In the next variation (rehearsal 39), Calliope dances on imaginary Russian Alexandrines, six-plus-six iambs, which Stravinsky touted as a “supremely arbitrary set of prosodic rules,” and which he uses to shape the dolce cello melody at rehearsal 41. Versification in broader terms also served as a means to tame Stravinsky’s wild, primitive rhythms, making them “arbitrary and artificial,” which, for the Stravinsky of Apollo, was at the core of art.25 Such gestures were no novelty by 1928 in Paris. But the luscious sound of the sentimental strings, the warmth that poured from Stravinsky’s score, did come as

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example 4.1. Parallel between first violin’s theme at 1 m. after 25, 32, and 37 in “Pas d’action” of Stravinsky’s Apollo, used by permission from Boosey & Hawkes.

a surprise from a composer who just a few years previously had flagrantly rejected strings because they lent themselves “to more subtle nuances” and could “serve better the individual sensibility of the executant in works built on an ‘emotive’ basis,” something the neoclassical Stravinsky claimed to oppose.26 Now, all of a sudden, he produced a score for strings in which he repeatedly instructed the musicians to play “espressivo.” He confessed taking immense “pleasure of immersing [himself] again in the multi-sonorous euphony of strings and making it penetrate even the furthest fibers of the polyphonic web”—a web made mellow by dividing the cellos into firsts and seconds to match the violins.27 Neoclassicism of the “back to Bach” type had given way to another sort of retrospectivism, inspired now by the classical tradition of ballet, landing Stravinsky at the doorstep of ballet’s greatest composer, Chaikovsky, classical in his posture but exceedingly Romantic in his sonority and emotional appeal. There are still reminiscences of Bach in Apollo, Prokofiev reported to Nikolai Miaskovsky as he was playing through the score.28 Bachian neoclassicism is manifest in contrapuntal textures and the solo violin’s occasional split-register melody in Apollo’s first variation (rehearsal 20). But Bach is far from the first association that comes to mind in listening to Apollo. Prokofiev disliked the score mainly because he thought it contained too much “rented” material, “stolen from the most disgraceful pockets: Gounod, and Delibes, and Wagner, even [Ludwig] Minkus,” the Austrian ballet specialist employed by the Russian imperial theaters in the mid-nineteenth century. “It’s all served up with extreme skill and mastery,” Prokofiev admitted, but mastery did not save the score from boredom.29 “Le Baiser de la fée has disappointed many of Stravinsky’s admirers,” Prokofiev wrote, but he

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found it “more appealing than Apollo: at least there is some real material, even if it is rented.”30 Stravinsky reveled in his license to access unlimited rental property. Later in life he gleefully listed to Robert Craft the “most disgraceful pockets” that, at least his critics believed, he picked for Apollo, calling out measure numbers in the score and going beyond what his critics suggested as his inspirations: Delibes and Chaikovsky, Debussy’s Clair de lune, the “Miserere” chorus from Verdi’s Il Trovatore, and Saint-Saëns from the high end, college songs and American popular music from the low end.31 The critic of The Daily Telegraph heard Richard Strauss’s Rosenkavalier in some of the smooth measure of Apollo.32 Henry Malherbe, writing for Le Temps, boosted the French side by adding Lully, Rameau, Montéclair, Auber, and Gounod to the list. Stravinsky, he wrote, gave up invention and completely submitted “to the doctrines of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and the first half of the nineteenth centuries,” locking himself “in a gallery where only the busts of dead musicians remained.”33 Stravinsky’s constant changing of styles confused his critics. Was not his turn to Bach a rejection of the nineteenth century? What sort of neoclassicism was it that relied on that very century? The critic of The Times expressed his frustration by pushing Stravinsky’s expanding stylistic retrospectivism to the extreme: Stravinsky, we are told, has now entered a third, a “historical” period, in which he writes in a neo-classical style. We have had from him neo-Bach and neo-oratorio (in Oedipus Rex). In Apollo Musagetes he is writing neo-19th century music for strings, which sometimes sounds like neo-Puccini. If this revolving process goes much farther we shall find him writing neo-Stravinsky, and entering upon a neo-Fire-Bird or a neo-Petrushka manner.34

Though meant to be an absurd remark, the assumption that eventually Stravinsky would return to his Russian roots proved accurate. Stravinsky’s open embrace of Chaikovsky did indeed pay tribute to the “classical” era of Russian music. Leonid Sabaneyev had a far less flattering explanation for Stravinsky’s sudden Romantic turn. He suspected that the “daring pioneer and mighty colourist” of The Rite of Spring “who created almost the whole of contemporary music” went on a “(musico-dietetic) path of abstinence and musical asceticism” out of a desperate quest for “new ‘stunts’ in order to keep the capricious attention of the contemporary public up to pitch.” For Sabaneyev, Stravinsky’s new style recalled “the gourmand whose physicians have prescribed for him a strict diet” of “simplification” and “impoverishment” of a vegetarian sort. But Stravinsky, Sabaneyev assured his readers, was “too shrewd, too complex, too much of the man of the present day, to inspire confidence in his suddenly acquired simplicity and fondness for musical ‘garden-stuff.’ ” According to Sabaneyev, Stravinsky’s turn toward nineteenth-century composers was also a way of admitting the defeat of “his not entirely successful ‘back to

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Bach’ experiment” and a longing for melodiousness, for which—and here Sabaneyev agreed with Diaghilev—“the brilliant and ingenious Stravinsky has no heaven-sent gift.” Sabaneyev praised Stravinsky for challenging himself in Oedipus Rex to write music in which “simplicity, melodiousness, sincerity, lyricism,” features lacking in his previous music, had dominated. Ultimately Sabaneyev dismissed even Oedipus because he felt that in the end Stravinsky could not overcome “his innate anti-lyricism and his organic insincerity.”35 Clearly, Stravinsky needed more than Glinka’s help to become truly lyrical. Who but Chaikovsky could midwife the birth of the lyrical Stravinsky? By the time Walter Nouvel was ghost-writing the composer’s Autobiography, Stravinsky was openly touting the “melodic art” that, he believed, congealed into “hackneyed formulas” during the nineteenth century. He gave a brief musichistory lesson to justify his renewed interest in melody, which he intended to bring back in triumph. “That is why I was so much attracted by the idea of writing music in which everything should revolve about the melodic principle,” he declared.36 The “long-line polyphonic style” that Stravinsky considered to be so innovative in Apollo was none other than the combination of old-time counterpoint and Romantic melodiousness.37 Turning to “classical” masters he attempted to “discover a melodism free of folk-lore”;38 in other words, in his attempt to rid himself of the “many-colored effects” of his exotic Russian youth and become “purely” classical, he replaced his use of Russian folk music in his early Russian ballets with classic tunes borrowed from a wide range of sources that excluded the folk. W HO SE ( N E O ) C L A S SIC I SM ?

Neoclassicism had many forms in the 1920s.39 Diaghilev turned to Bauchant not only because he sensed that he was a rising star in Paris’s art world, but also because by incorporating his colorful neoprimitive images, which he described in an interview as “naive, sincere,” and “completely original, rarely different from routine Greek settings,” he hoped to make Apollo feel more contemporary and free of false Hellenism.40 Classically inspired or not, Diaghilev’s productions had to be modern. “When the classic appears to be the ‘restoration of the ancient,’ ” Diaghilev declared in an interview for Vozrozhdeniye a few months after Apollo’s premiere, “we are not only not obliged to save it, but, on the contrary, we should help destroy it as if it were poison that infects the entire organism.”41 Diaghilev’s declaration was a reaction to Aleksandr Bundikov’s criticism of his work, published a few days earlier in the same newspaper. Bundikov reproached Diaghilev for his constant urge to innovate. Innovation was well and good when it came to saving the aristocratic classical ballet, which Bundikov called a “lordly whim,” from the degradations of the Revolution by exporting it to the West. Diaghilev “showed Europe the gods of the Russian Olympus: Musorgsky, Borodin,

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Glazunov, Stravinsky, Chaliapin, Fokine, Pavlova, Nijinsky, Karsavina, Korovin, Golovin, Repin, Benois, etc. etc.” His main achievement, Bundikov claimed, was that of preserving and popularizing classical ballet. But popularization came at the price of “dubious compromise and tinsel decorations.” Obviously still not quite recovered from the shock of Prokofiev’s Bolshevik Pas d’acier, Bundikov disapproved as well of “gallop” replacing dance. By now, he declared, classical ballet was safe, and “the amateurishness of barefoot women and the rhythmic trampling of Dalcroze,” along with the pantomime and stylistic pastiche were already passé. “It is necessary to stun a drowning person so that he will not interfere with his own rescue. But why continue hitting him on the head when he is already on the shore?” The classic, which Bundikov thought Diaghilev was gradually embracing again, is already beautiful. It is “the mysterious reconciliation of the spirit with the finest culture of the body.” One can find all things in the classic, Bundikov reassured his readers, but one: innovation. And that, Bundikov concluded, was the paradox of the “eternally new” Diaghilev.42 Diaghilev agreed with Bundikov’s dismissal of such dance innovators as Isadora Duncan, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Rudolf Laban, and Mary Wigman. He opposed their fight against the “obsolete” classic dance, which, Diaghilev thought, had led Germany into a dead end from which it did not seem to have found its way out. Diaghilev also opposed the fake Hellenism of Ida Rubinstein, whom he claimed he made famous by featuring her in the Ballets Russes’ performances of Cléopâtre in 1909 and Scheherazade in 1910, and who became his rival when she founded her own company in 1928. In Rubinstein’s performances, Diaghilev said, her desire to adapt Greek tradition did not result in perfect harmony. Her productions were confused and unimaginative. Rubinstein’s classicism, Diaghilev said in withering conclusion, amounted to no more than pastiche. Despite Diaghilev’s self-confident tone, his concept of classicism was far from stable. Ode was one sort of classicism, not so far from the nostalgic pastiche he so despised in Rubinstein’s artistic ventures. In his effort to refute Bundikov’s categorical opposition between innovation and the classic, Diaghilev was ready to recognize in the proportions of skyscrapers a contemporaneous sense of the classical. “Our choreography should have the same foundation as our classics,” he argued, but this foundation should not prevent the search for new forms. Saying that buildings have to be harmonious and well proportioned is not the same as “advocating the compulsory ‘cult’ of the classical in the creation of contemporary choreography. The classical,” Diaghilev concluded, “is the means, not the end.”43 Some of Diaghilev’s productions were inspired by French retrospective classicism. During World War I, the French became obsessed with the glory of their grand siècle. They reproduced Lully’s and Rameau’s operas and planned to revive the dances in which the “Sun King” Louis XIV danced himself.44 That enthusiasm did not cease after the war, and Diaghilev was ready with a Russian counterpart. Aurora’s Wedding (1922) was presented to mark the centenary of the birth of its

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original choreographer, the French Marius Petipa. But, as Lynn Garafola argues, with its anachronistic additions of processionals and “fête merveilleuse,” it was also a secondhand vision of French monarchic glory. Apollo still catered to that taste. The many-horsed chariot that was to descend from heaven at the end of the ballet reminded Beaumont of the eighteenth-century victory chariot or gloire.45 The eighteenth-century French opera-ballet also left its mark on Apollo in its allegorical treatment of the subject matter and in the instrumentation, which echoes the famous five-part string ensemble, Les Vingt-quatre Violons du Roy, that accompanied the ceremonies of the French royal court between 1626 and 1761. The evocation of the grand siècle had some unpleasant political overtones. Before Apollo, Garafola points out, choreographic neoclassicism had been a politically neutral affair. But with Balanchine’s return to Petipa, the initial subversiveness of the neoclassical idea in choreography—its modernism, so to speak—gave way to an emphasis on artistic and social order. Rather than a vision of the future, neoclassicism came to define an attitude toward the past, the ordered past that had vanished with modernism.

What Garafola says about Balanchine may also be said of Stravinsky. His music also idealized the hierarchical past, making “peace with the idea of social order and religious orthodoxy,” and thus acquiring “a profoundly conservative aura.”46 TA I L O R E D T O SI Z E : S C H L O E Z E R’ S C L A S SIC I SM

Among the many rival concepts of classicism, Boris de Schloezer’s was the best tailored to fit Stravinsky. Tamara Levitz argues that Schloezer’s application of the term to Stravinsky was a reaction to Pyotr Suvchinsky’s and Boris Asafyev’s interpretations of Stravinsky’s postrevolutionary identities.47 But it was also a way to create a specific emigrant space in which national identities could be neutralized. Having been the first to associate the word neoclassicism with Stravinsky in 1923, Schloezer was bound to return to the subject.48 Acknowledging that the overused opposition of classicism and Romanticism had become meaningless, Schloezer, in a 1929 study, redefined the terms not as designating time periods but as embodying different attitudes. Both attitudes were present at all times and in every artist. It was the proportion between the two that defined the character of the artist. Beyond the trite opposition of freedom and order, excess and moderation, Schloezer’s binary opposition focused attention on the difference between Romantic and classical artists’ relationship to reality.49 There is no novelty in Schloezer’s description of the Romantic artist as open to life, incorporating it into the work in all its limitless variety, instability, and changeability, thus lending his work a certain degree of authenticity. Although unnamed, Beethoven serves as the model for the Romantic composer who fights constantly

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for liberty and the extension of art’s boundaries. Such an artist, according to Schloezer, relates to reality so intensely that his art rises beyond his craft in order to participate in the psychological, social, religious, and mystical aspects of life around him. More than entertainment, such art is a tool for action and change.50 Schloezer’s definition of the classical deserves more attention, especially since Stravinsky, although privately criticizing it, publicly embraced it.51 Schloezer characterizes the world of the classical artist as circumscribed, detached from life and reality.52 For the classical artist reality serves only as raw material to be shaped according to established formal principles. He abandons reality in order to endow a new, reality-free universe, superimposed on the real one but completely separate from it. There is no passageway between the real world and the artificial universe created by the classical artist. Classical art is ruled by artifice, and the classical artwork exists exclusively in the aesthetic realm, a claim Stravinsky happily confirmed.53 It is, as Stravinsky’s Symphonies for Wind Instrument, Octet, and Piano Concerto demonstrate, “cold and pure in the sense that everything is determined technically and every moment flows from the previous one without the intervention of the emotional factor.”54 Schloezer’s “classical” sphere is protected from everything that would interfere with its artificial, utopian nature. He excludes from it social life, life’s psychological dimensions, history, emotions, human beings, even other arts that might exercise unwanted influence.55 In a 1953 essay Schloezer added detachment from the passing of time to the definition. For a classicist, he wrote, “art is only an interlude, a celebration of some sort; it interrupts the course of time and serves as a break in the routine of life.”56 This aspect of Schloezer’s rhetoric of classicism hews closely to Jacques Maritain’s neo-Thomist definition of art in Art and Scholasticism, a book that exerted enormous influence on artistic discussions of the 1920s and governed especially the discourse around Stravinsky’s music. Art, Maritain declared, “delivers one from the human; it establishes the artifex—artist or artisan—in a world apart, closed, limited, absolute.”57 The artist, according to Maritain, creates by relying on his intellect, but he apprehends beauty—Thomas Aquinas’s integrity, proportion, and clarity—through intuition. The act of composition is cold, intellectually ruled—“dry,” emotionless, as, according to Schloezer, many complained about Stravinsky’s music.58 Stravinsky’s 1924 manifesto about the absolute objectivity of his Octet (“My Octuour is a musical object”) sounded like a parody of Maritainism.59 Stravinsky’s music, according to Schloezer, stood for the classical ideals of “order, moderation, clarity, equilibrium, serenity, sometimes also of coldness and detachment,” and opposed the Romantic ideals of “liberty, exuberance, exaggeration, pathos, sentimentalism, uncertainty, disorder, and limitlessness.”60 Schloezer’s classicism created a utopian space that reflected the psychological needs of emigrant artists. Emotional detachment is a natural reaction to trauma, and trauma victims are usually not eager to engage in the highly emotional,

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chaotic world of what Schloezer described as Romanticism. Schloezer’s classicism offered emigrants a safe place where trauma victims were protected from their own emotions and could find solace. Cold and unemotional, perfect and ordered, neoclassicism allowed a space unavailable in real life. Not all Russian emigrants took Schloezer’s offer. Many, most famous among them Rachmaninoff, were not inclined to follow Stravinsky’s lead in abandoning their outmoded, over-emotional style. Nevertheless, Schloezer’s insistence on detaching classicism from reality was as relevant to the emigrant experience as Rachmaninoff ’s nostalgia. The transformation that Schloezer observed in Stravinsky’s Apollo differed from the composer’s previous metamorphoses. It went beyond the simpler harmonic language, the reduction of the orchestra to strings, the abandonment of Bach and Handel, or the revival of the tradition of the eighteenth-century French ballet in the spirit of Lully. Through classicism, Schloezer believed, Stravinsky managed to achieve the sort of serenity and purity that Schloezer found in Mozart’s Magic Flute, a performance of which he attended two days before the premiere of Apollo.61 Stravinsky could announce that he wrote the score as if it were a notary contract; one could accuse the composer of creating a pastiche of Lully and Delibes, evoking, at times, Fauré. None of this mattered to Schloezer. What mattered was his belief that Stravinsky revealed a thirst for renunciation, which, for Schloezer, signaled a new, religious impulse. The equilibrium, the coldness, and dryness of Stravinsky’s classicism were the result of a triumphant act of voluntary renunciation.62 Apollo proposes not only an aesthetic lesson, Schloezer concluded, but a moral, even a religious one. In his score, Stravinsky’s music broke its last ties with reality. It still moved the audience, but the emotions evoked had nothing to do with everyday psychology. Yet the music was not abstract or cold, although Schloezer could not identify the source of its warmth. What could Stravinsky write after Apollo, Schloezer wondered? And here is the over-quoted prediction: “Logically, after Apollo, he ought to give us a Mass.”63 The prediction was off by nearly two decades (Stravinsky wrote his Mass between 1944 and 1948), but by giving the Russian Orthodox Stravinsky permission to join Western music’s greatest composers in producing a Latin Mass, Schloezer seems to have relieved him of his Asian Russian past and welcomed him to the “universal” West. PA S SP O RT T O E U R O P E

Or maybe not. Surprisingly, after Schloezer approved the use of what had been a disreputable term, neoclassicism, in relation to Stravinsky in 1923, he discarded it when he described the Octet a few months later as an example of “objectivism.” By 1925 he had dropped the “neo” from “classicism” and explicitly rejected the term as meaningless in 1929, to be avoided for its unshakeable associations with eclecticism and academicism.64 But Schloezer’s discomfort went beyond bad associa-

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tions. Granting Stravinsky European citizenship endangered the composer’s relationship not only with his homeland but also with Russian music abroad, the vitality of which depended on his fame. To rescue the Russian Stravinsky from the cosmopolitan brand of (neo)classicism he himself advanced, Schloezer now had to reclaim Stravinsky’s classicism as specifically Russian. Schloezer’s reformulation of the concept of classicism along binary axes of subjectivity versus objectivity, or of the individual versus the collective, allowed him to attribute Stravinsky’s classicism to his Russian origin. Many Russian artists, Schloezer argued, had a similar tendency toward depersonalization, toward absorption in the collective. Even the Symbolists in their ivory towers had started to turn toward the people, he wrote, citing Aleksandr Blok’s embrace of the Revolution. In Russia this need for unity and community took many outward forms, Schloezer maintained, but all forms derived from religious impulses, even those that were superficially atheistic, like Communism. Even the exceedingly Romantic, individualistic Alexander Scriabin set out to dissolve his ego in the totality of the universe. Schloezer insisted that the nationalist movement in Russian music, which inspired composers to incorporate folk songs into their music, also originated in the Russian cult of the collective. In this respect, Schloezer declared, Stravinsky was typically Russian. In works ranging from Petrushka to Noces and Renard, “his personality is realized by eminently personal procedures,” yet he remains “in intimate communication” with the community that inspires him “to surmount the limits of his personality.” For Schloezer the fact that Stravinsky had broken “almost all ties with his country and that most of his Russian works have been written for foreigners” was no reason to doubt his Russianness. After all, did not Gogol write his “national epic,” Dead Souls, far from home, in Rome? According to Schloezer, Stravinsky turned to the masters of the eighteenth century in order to rejoin “the common language of a universal scope.” Because of his Russian origin, Schloezer asserted, Stravinsky felt the need even more urgently than others to belong to a community.65 Although Schloezer admitted that French composers such as Fauré and Ravel also had classicizing tendencies, he judged their musical language too personal to be considered “classical.” Instead of explaining Stravinsky’s classicism the way others did, in terms of the composer’s embrace of French fashion, he redesigned the classic impulse as fundamentally Russian. Schloezer gave more thought to Stravinsky’s fundamental Russianness in his 1929 short monograph on the composer. The first chapter, titled “The Russian and the European,” is entirely devoted to the question of how Stravinsky’s first, Russian, and second, neoclassical, periods may be reconciled. Many think, Schloezer wrote, that except for Mavra, in which Stravinsky returns to Glinka, the composer had written nothing Russian since Pulcinella. How can Stravinsky’s turn to eighteenth-century Italy and Germany be reconciled with the composer’s insistence

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that a genius needs an identifiable national identity, Schloezer asked, quoting Stravinsky, who criticized Scriabin for “not having a passport.”66 But what does it mean to be Russian in music? From a Western point of view, “Russian” meant “picturesque”: “violent, motley, nostalgic.” Schloezer quoted Napoleon’s famous saying, “Scratch the Russian and find the Tatar.” But, he argued, Russia had another culture and its own golden age, the early nineteenth century, which had fostered such geniuses as Pushkin and Glinka, who, although deeply Russian, were nourished on foreign literature and Western masters. Glinka had turned for inspiration to Mozart, Pushkin to Molière and Tirso de Molina. Even members of “The Five,” Rimsky-Korsakov and Mily Balakirev, who supposedly rejected Western models, drew inspiration from Berlioz and Liszt, as did Scriabin from Wagner. Stravinsky’s turn toward Bach and Handel fit perfectly into this Russian tradition, Schloezer insisted. In Pushkin’s and Glinka’s works, one finds the same taste, decorum, and equilibrium that are the hallmarks of the classical spirit. Russia’s Empire style, that graceful evocation of ancient Rome, triumphed in St. Petersburg during the reign of Alexander I and in the early years of Nicholas I, the time period to which, according to Schloezer, Stravinsky had the strongest connection. If Western traditions were indeed alien to Russian mentality, Schloezer argued, “Petersburg at the time of Alexander I and the appearance of artists such as Glinka and Pushkin . . . would be absolutely inexplicable.”67 By 1935 Stravinsky was ready to confirm publicly his genealogy. In a short speech given before a concert in New York, the composer used his freshly minted English to declare himself a descendent of “the great Russian composers Glinka and Chaikovsky.”68 Although Schloezer hailed Stravinsky as “the most European, most essentially Western of all existing musicians,” he refused to designate his European style “international,” for that meant not only an academic eclecticism that neutralized all national differences but also a caricature of the true European spirit. As Stravinsky had said when rejecting Scriabin, real artists needed to carry a passport. But this passport was not for staying in one’s own country but “for being able to freely cross borders.” Stravinsky’s possession of this document, Schloezer concluded, “is the essential condition of his Europeanism.”69 Yet Schloezer’s crafty finessing of the contradiction between Stravinsky’s claimed European and repressed national identities missed the most important component in Stravinsky’s stylistic restlessness: his emigrant status. Metaphorically, at least, Stravinsky’s real passport remained a Nansen passport, specially devised for Russian emigrants who were left homeless after the Revolution. N E O C L A S SIC I SM AC C O R D I N G T O ST R AV I N SK Y

In Apollo, Stravinsky aimed to acquire a metaphorical French passport. Apart from the cryptic claim that the cello solo at 41 of the Calliope variation is “a Russian Alex-

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andrine suggested to [him] by a couplet from Pushkin,” Stravinsky never said anything about Apollo having Russian roots. On the contrary, he touted the ballet’s French associations, insisting that “Apollo is a tribute to the French seventeenth century.”70 He wrote “French” all over the score: even in the variation of Calliope that he meant as a musical equivalent of Alexandrines, he inserted a quotation from Nicolas Boileau’s 1674 L’art poétique as an example and as a definition of this type of poetic line: “Que toujours dans vos vers le sens coupant les mots / Suspende l’hémistiche et marque le repos” (May the meaning in your verses always interrupt [the flow of] the words / suspend the caesura and mark the rest).71 He hoped that the French would get the hints, if not from identifying the Alexandrines, at least from the decor: “the chariot, the three horses, the sun disc (the Coda) were the emblems of le roi solei,” he wrote.72 He quoted Racine’s Phèdre to explain the tragic nature of his Apollo: “tous les jours se levaient clairs et serains pour eux” (Every day dawned clear and fair for them). The reference to Louis XIV, who considered Apollo his symbol and danced the role in several ballets, such as in La Ballet de la nuit (1653) and Les Noces de Pelée et Thétis (1654), was, Stravinsky believed, unmistakable. What was clear to all, according to the critic of The Observer, was that Stravinsky’s Apollo possessed “two ancestral homes, Parnassus and Versailles.”73 Malherbe compared the scenario to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century divertissements.74 In Apollo’s chariot Maurice Brillant recognized the “very pretty” cabriolet of the time of LouisPhilippe, which he found incongruent with the ballet’s music.75 Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi noted Stravinsky’s “willful positioning” of his ballet “in bygone days,” adding that “even the flying mechanism hitched to cardboard horses is reminiscent of an opera-ballet by Rameau.”76 Other references to Lully and Rameau abounded in the reviews. Obviously, the French were happy to claim Stravinsky as their own. They were also willing to adopt Stravinsky’s definition of neoclassicism. Brillant quoted from Stravinsky’s “Warning” about misunderstandings of classicism, which had appeared in the English periodical Dominant in December 1927. In this short declaration, Stravinsky elevated form, which he defined as “a quality of interrelation between constituent parts, interrelation of the building material,” as the carrier of “true” classicism. It is not the musical material or superficial impressions that make music classical but deeper “constructive values.” Form, Stravinsky declared, was “the one stable element” that “lay apart from it being unintelligibly individual.”77 This was the point where Rollo H. Myers, responding to Stravinsky’s announcement in The Dominant, disagreed with the composer most strongly. Dismissing everything besides form as “extra-musical” and considering all other elements of music, “color, rhythm, harmony, personality,” as “unintelligibly individual,” made Myers, best known for his work on the music of Satie and Ravel, question Stravinsky’s “rigid and restricted evaluation of what constitutes the essence of music.” Defending old Romantic assumptions about art and artists, Myers declared individuality a necessary value in art.78

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French critics were less squeamish. Brillant took Stravinsky’s “Warning” at face value and quoted it as the definition of classicism—not the imitation of the socalled classics but total adherence to formal principles.79 He was also taking his cues from Arthur Lourié, “an unimpeachable and wise guide,” in emphasizing the purity, simplicity, objectivity, logic, economy, precision, and spiritual striving of Stravinsky’s music, in which the composer was able to elevate even vulgar materials into pure form. Brillant described Apollo as an example of antique serenity, its austerity close to Jansenism, the seventeenth-century Christian movement based on the theology of Cornelius Jansen, who assumed man’s depravity, sin, and the need for divine grace. Conjuring the spirit of Winkelmann, Malherbe recognized “nobility and grandeur” in Apollo’s dance, viewing the music as “devoid of the multi-colors of the orchestra, dressed in the rigid drapery of statues pale as marble.”80 The critic of The Times described Lifar as a moving statue, the “Etruscan Apollo of Veii” come to life. “From the moment when he emerges from the rock . . . until the chariot descends from the sky to carry him and the Muses to their new home upon Parnasse, he maintains the lines and gestures of archaic sculpture.”81 “Nothing picturesque,” wrote Malherbe, “no invention. No abandonment. An almost total submission to the doctrines of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and the first half of the nineteenth centuries.”82 These renunciations did not please everybody. The critic of The Times saw in Stravinsky’s new ballet the demise of Diaghilev’s company. It used to be said that the Russian Ballet would not be much without Stravinsky; his latest production makes us fear that soon it will not be much with him. . . . Apollo Musagetes is a very solemn matter. It is not meant to please, like Cimarosiana, or to be exciting, like The Firebird. It succeeds in avoiding both pitfalls. The music is not even ugly, merely a listless meandering of commonplaces, thickly scored for strings. No percussion, no strident harmonies, no “Zip.”83

André Levinson noted with approval that “the great barbarian Stravinsky of The Rite has embraced the cult of Apollo” and appeared willing to “control the Dionysian tumult and break the flute of Marsyas.” He saw Apollo as a religious offering, an “ex-voto” that “restored a cult . . . renewed a tradition, and rehabilitated a technique.” But the statuesque aspect of the dance did not remind him of Winkelmann’s classicism. He felt that Balanchine’s push toward abstraction and geometrical formulas in the movement only resulted in “refrigerating” classical dance.84 With Apollo, Stravinsky ascended a French Parnassus. As his fame grew, more people declared, with Caby, that “this is not Stravinsky anymore,” meaning that what he was writing was not Russian but “Bach, ‘Haendel,’ ‘Meyerbeer’ in Oedipus, ‘Donizetti’ in Apollo. In fact,” Caby assured the reader, “Stravinsky’s oeuvre is constantly advancing” according to what he vaguely called “universal principles.”85 Apollo, the god of classicism, had delivered Stravinsky from his Dionysian Russian

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past. Gone was the “intoxication of primitive life” that fueled The Rite, the expression of which Caby still celebrated in Les Noces.86 But Stravinsky’s replacement of his own Dionysian Russian past with a “universal” Apollonian art was deceptive. The Sun God Apollo, besides Parnassus and Versailles, had another home: the cold capital of imperial Russia. Stravinsky’s escape was also a visit to a never-quiteforgotten home. T H E SHA D OW O F D IO N YSU S

In his Autobiography, Stravinsky identified his art with the goals of classical dance and Apollonian principles. Dionysian art, he wrote, “assumes ecstasy to be the final goal . . . whereas art demands above all the full consciousness of the artists.” His appreciation of classical dance was not a question of taste but of submission to “the Apollonian principle,” which entailed “the triumph of studied conception over vagueness, of the rule over the arbitrary, of order over the haphazard.”87 Neoclassicism was thus a triumph over the kind of modernism that Stravinsky had learned to associate with the chaotic forces of political revolutions and that he rejected along with his own modernist past.88 Stravinsky’s Russian ballets, in retrospect, were aligned with what was considered, in the last days of imperial Russia, to be revolutionary trends in art. As an old aide-de-camp told the French ambassador in 1915, in Russia classical ballet represented “a very close picture of what Russian society was, and ought to be. Order, punctiliousness, symmetry, work well done everywhere.” Diaghilev’s “horrible” ballets stood for the opposite: “a dissolute and poisoned art” that many equated with revolution and anarchy.89 Stravinsky’s classicism in Apollo was a calculated appendage to Diaghilev’s revival of Chaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, which, as one English critic noted, “delighted those who hated the Sacre.”90 Apollo turned against Stravinsky’s own earlier Russian ballets: The Firebird, in whose orchestra Akim Volynsky, one of Russia’s most revered dance critics, heard “the hissing of Dionysus,” and Petrushka, the subject matter of which Volynsky dismissed because, he wrote, “the fairground booth is not a source of classical dance.”91 If Dionysus was hissing in The Firebird, he was trampling all over The Rite, the primitivism of which, according to Alexis Roland-Manuel, preceded the Dionysiac revels,92 and which a French critic called a “Dionysian orgy dreamed of by Nietzsche and called forth by his prophetic wish to be the beacon of a world hurtling toward death.”93 Despite Jacques Rivière’s casting The Rite as an anti-Debussian, quasi-classical work that was “absolutely pure,” “magnificently limited,” objective, and emotion free, Stravinsky’s most scandalous Russian ballet was the opposite of Apollonian.94 It had the exaggerated “jerkiness,” the “frivolous spurts and disruptive jolts” that Volynsky criticized in Stravinsky’s music as “insufficiently danceable” and thus antithetical to classical dance.95

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Volynsky was not alone in despising what he understood as anti-Apollonian tendencies in Stravinsky’s ballets. In 1923 the exasperated Levinson called Bronislava Nijinska’s choreography of Stravinsky’s Les Noces “Marxist,” accusing Nijinska of being inspired by “the delirious ideology of the Soviet ‘mass’ theater.” Nijinska’s choreography, according to Levinson, recalled “the most debatable elements in the first version of The Rite of Spring—the mechanical reproduction of rhythm.”96 Condemning Nijinska, Levinson remained deferential to Stravinsky’s music, which he judged completely unrelated to Nijinska’s “Marxist” choreography. Nonetheless, the Marxist angle of his criticism still tainted Stravinsky’s achievement. Stravinsky’s proposed cure was not particularly original. Evoking Apollo was well rehearsed already before World War I in Russia as an attempt to repress the revolutionary impulse. In 1909 Sergei Makovsky founded the journal Apollo by announcing: “Apollon. In the very title is the path we’ve chosen.”97 Alexandre Benois greeted the new journal with an essay titled “In Expectation of a Hymn to Apollo.” Léon Bakst wrote “The Paths of Classicism in Art,” in which he declared taste and fashion slowly but unswervingly returning artists “to the path of antique art!”98 Apollo continued where Diaghilev’s Mir iskusstva left off when it ceased publication in 1904. But although many of the contributors overlapped with those of Mir iskusstva, Apollo represented a turn from Russian retrospectivism to what Tim Scholl calls twentiethcentury classicism.99 The Apollonians expanded their sources from the Greek and French classics to include Russian art and considered classicism not simply “the imitation of the perfection of the artists of Greece and the Renaissance,” as Makovsky wrote, but as a “protest against the formless daring of work that has forgotten the laws of cultural continuity.”100 In Russia, the neoclassical revival was not free of “nostalgia for bygone cultural values and a reformulated sense of imperial monumentality.”101 Benois had already published a series of articles on the neoclassical architecture of Petersburg in Mir iskusstva. Georgy Lukomsky continued to promote “a search for primary sources . . . that guided the masters of the flowering of Russian classicism.”102 As if anticipating Stravinsky’s future turn toward classicism, Volynsky advocated classical dance for its purifying, “curative effects.”103 He asked for a return “to the vibrant, efficacious, and purifying Apollo . . . purified from all the chaos of truth and untruth, which is called the orgiastic temperament of Dionysus.”104 Vaslav Nijinsky’s ghost still loomed over Balanchine’s choreography in Stravinsky’s Apollo. Balanchine seemed to have summoned the Sun God to erase Nijinsky’s memory from the history of dance. As danced by Lifar, Apollo started his dance where Nijinsky’s Faun left off: the right hand of the dancer strumming the lute is clearly autoerotic, calling to mind the scandalous conclusion of Nijinsky’s Faun, still in the repertory of the Ballets Russes (played back to back with Apollo in Paris on June 23, 1928).105 Stravinsky’s Apollo was also a dig at Pas d’acier, with which it shared the program on June 21 and 23.106 When Gheusi praised Stravinsky’s “new popular spirit,”

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he emphasized that it was “without communism. It protests against the sickle and the hammer.” Stravinsky, Gheusi suggested, offered an antidote to the turbulent engines of Pas d’acier.107 Likely sensing Stravinsky’s reactionary turn, Prokofiev intensely disliked Apollo. As he noted in his diary, he would have dismissed it as a mediocre ballet had he not known and respected its composer.108 Diaghilev, as if purposefully pushing his two favorites toward confrontation by mixing up their ballets, gave a most incomprehensible account of Stravinsky’s Apollo in an interview for Excelsior. “Life today is a conflict of workers, motor traffic, or wireless waves,” he announced. “Stravinsky’s melody, instead of touching the moon, instead of taking inspiration from the song of the nightingale, will talk about the machine, will be inspired, not by vague murmurings, but by the mechanism of a factory strike, I suppose.”109 Diaghilev’s rambling, aimed at impressionism of the Debussy type, was anachronistic by 1927, the time of the interview. His reference to the mechanism of factories was a leftover from his Pas d’acier publicity and had nothing to do with Apollo, a ballet designed to neutralize revolutionary associations of Stravinsky’s Russian ballets. E P I L O G U E : “A P O T H É O SE”

Even Prokofiev admired the final page of Apollo. Here Stravinsky “made a brilliant display,” he wrote to Miaskovksy, “and figured out how to make even a nasty theme sound convincing.” The theme that Prokofiev judged banal was Apollo’s dottedrhythm royal signature theme, which first appears in the Prologue, accompanied by overstrained anapests right out of Verdi’s Il Trovatore (ex. 4.2a-b). What likely made the theme’s return at the end of the ballet convincing for Prokofiev was the disappearance of the agitated accompaniment. Here the tune, played two octaves apart by the first violins and the first cellos, hovers quietly above the D pedal in the bass, its smooth melody outlined against the shimmering tremolos in the second violins and violas, its metric security undermined by the second cellos’ quarter notes grouped in alternating formations of two or three. The sharp edges of the French overture are smoothed out and the theme turns gentle as if sounding through the fog of memory (ex. 4.3, at 99). The E major of the theme in the Prologue also returns at the end of the ballet as the first chord in the “Apothéose,” the mandatory resolution of conflicts in classical ballets. Stravinsky shadows the bright, forte E–GJ third in the upper strings with piano CJ–E in the lower strings, leaving thus the key suspended between E major and its relative minor. The effect is the contrast between bright light and dim shadow, as if the somber tone of tragedy were lurking behind the celebratory sound of triumph. Above the E pedal in the violas the upper voice rises to the sixth scale degree of E major while the bass descends to the sixth of CJ minor, leaving what starts as a lament bass ultimately incomplete. GJ, the fifth scale degree of

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example 4.2a. “Miserere” from Verdi’s Il Trovatore (Franz Liszt’s transcription).

CJ minor and the missed target of the lament bass is not available as a goal in the modal language of the “Apothéose” in which Stravinsky carefully avoids dominant tensions and their tonal resolutions. Stravinsky does not conclude his white ballet in white C major. After the introductory measures of E/cJ, he switches the key signature to two sharps, paying tribute to the key of royal trumpets and divine celebrations. But the wonderfully complex contrapuntal music that follows is not in D major. Stravinsky avoids using CJ as a leading tone, whether by having it clash against Cs as at 1 m. after rehearsal 98, or by juxtaposing the two pitches in succession, as in the violas at 2 mm. before rehearsal 98. B minor, the key suggested by the melody’s gravitational pull, is similarly undermined as a tonal center. AJ, its leading tone, appears only once, but like the leading tone of D major, the AJ also sounds simultaneously with its uninflected equivalent, A (2 mm. after rehearsal 97). Conventional analytical labels fit Stravinsky’s music awkwardly. He writes diatonic, tonal music that uses all twelve tones, substitutes triads with thirds or open fifths, and avoids a clear tonal center. Romantic gestures are not out of bounds. The melodies are designated ben cantabile, honoring the Italian tradition of lyrical strings. The music swells up three times, reaching toward an emotional and dynamic climax, approached by rising sequences. The first time the goal is B, again the sixth degree, reached at 1 m. before rehearsal 98. The next time the same melodic ascent is tried, Stravinsky boosts it with a contrapuntal line in the bass, expands the range by raising the top voice an octave higher, and makes the dynamics swell more intensely. But the result is the same: the dynamic intensification is dissipated before the climax is reached at 1 m. before rehearsal 99. The ascent starts again from piano, but the contrapuntal texture, with its lack of metric and rhythmic drive, fails to bring the music to an emotional climax. The target note B having been reached, the outstretched hand is quietly withdrawn. Classicism implies containment.

example 4.2b. Overstrained anapests in the Prologue of Stravinsky’s Apollo, used by permission from Boosey & Hawkes.

example 4.3. Stravinsky, Apollo, “Apothéose,” used by permission from Boosey & Hawkes.

example 4.3. (continued).

example 4.3. (continued).

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Stravinsky summons the royal theme of Apollo to build toward a new climax. In the returning melody the long notes start to rise, moving gradually from D (at 99) to B (at 2 mm. before rehearsal 101), first diatonically, then chromatically, omitting as a matter of principle the AJ that would prematurely lend B the function of a tonal center. The second half of the sequential rise reproduces the melody of the introductory measures and quietly achieves the goal. The note B appears already in the repurposed theme’s second measure (at 99) as a natural melodic target, the modal twist in Apollo’s archaic signature theme. The last section of the “Apothéose” is the recognition of this B as the true zenith, the dwelling place of the gods, a place not reachable through human struggle but only through divine grace. The collapse of the last crescendo occurs on this very B. But this collapse does not indicate failure or spur new desires. Like the plucking harps combined with the metallic sound of the piano at the end of the later Symphony of Psalms (1930), the accented quarter notes in the double bass and the second violins suggest the quiet but unstoppable passing of time. Apollo’s royally dotted melody, hovering above this background, becomes hypostatized after the climax, circling infinitely around the B by its fifth, FJ, and its lower sixth, G. Stravinsky emphasizes the important role of these two satellites to B by building the bass movement on an arpeggiated G-major triad and constructing a chromatic ostinato around FJ in the second violins and the violas. How to end after this quiet plateau is reached? Tension has already relaxed—no conflict remained to be resolved. But if not exactly a conflict, time’s ticking still has to subside in order to achieve true apotheosis. It comes at first almost imperceptibly. The quarter-note ticking does not stop immediately, but the long notes in the melody gradually expand, growing by one quarter note every time they sound, from three through seven, reaching the final B that is held for eleven quarter notes. Stravinsky eventually also slows the various layers of the ostinatos, shifting the bass ostinato to half and then to whole notes. The other two ostinatos follow suit and stretch out similarly. By the time the music ends, our desire to reach a goal has ceased. Stravinsky’s way of neutralizing the passage of time ultimately dissolves our concept of time and distance. The penultimate sonority is, curiously, a diminished triad on B, serving at first as part of a G dominant-seventh chord. But the harmony does not resolve to C. Stravinsky moves the chord to B minor instead, raising the F chromatically, replacing thus a logical harmonic resolution with an authoritarian fiat. Stravinsky’s “Apothèose” is meant to be a divine action, free of the sense of human struggle and emotional intervention, which Stravinsky signals by the unconventional treatment of tonality. The musical process is not determined by tonal tensions and resolutions, and although a gradual rise occurs in the music, the ascent is without effort and its outcome never appears to be a climax. With Apollo Stravinsky intended a step out of time not only in the plot of his plotless ballet but also in his aesthetics. Modernism’s incessant innovation and

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aspiration became meaningless in the stylistic pastiche of Stravinsky’s new artistic vision. He himself became Apollo, as Malherbe wrote, “the musagète of the current school,” the divine artistic genius who shed his unrefined (Russian) garb in order to put on the ethnically neutral white mantle of neoclassicism.110 His neoclassical impulse was equally Russian and French; it was both an adaptation of postwar, anti-Romantic, and anti-Impressionist French sensibilities and a determined move back to an imagined prerevolutionary Russia with its aristocratic admiration of everything classic. After Apollo there was no need to expand the palette of possible returns any longer. The Apollonian plateau had been reached; Stravinsky had arrived home without crossing borders. His metaphorical homecoming, unlike Prokofiev’s actual one, did not have to confront the sobering reality of Stalin’s Russia. In its purported purity it integrated Stravinsky’s Russian past into a Western future. Apollo became Stravinsky’s passport: issued in Russia, valid for the entire Western world, yet still bearing the indelible stamp of the emigrant experience. Stravinsky’s neoclassical vision was the safest corner of emigrant culture. Russian and French, backward looking yet emotionally detached, retrospective yet modern, it provided the flexibility emigrant artists needed. Its attraction was irresistible, and when in 1937 emigrants celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death and presented their version of Russia’s golden poet to the world, it was no surprise that their Pushkin bore a striking resemblance to Stravinsky’s radiant Apollo.

5

1937 or Pushkin Divided Russia has its own God, its own Apollo: Pushkin, who, more inspired than all the others, was able to ignite the hearts of the people. . . . Thanks to Pushkin, Russians have their own Parnassus. serge lifar, invitation to his pushkin exhibition 1

Away from Paris on his third American tour, Igor Stravinsky missed the centennial of Pushkin’s death, celebrated with great pomp both in Russia Abroad and the Soviet Union. Eager to add his name to the celebrants, he commissioned his son-in-law, the writer Yuri Mandelshtam (1908–1943), to formulate a tribute to the poet in his name. On January 4, 1937, Mandelshtam dispatched the essay “Pushkin: Poetry and Music,” in which, as Stravinsky’s daughter Lyudmila (Mika) hoped, her husband had “struck just the right tone he needs when he claims to communicate [Stravinsky’s] opinions.”2 Stravinsky’s ghostwritten essay was an unimpressive representative of the well-rehearsed position pieces called “My Pushkin,” with which Russian intellectuals positioned themselves vis-à-vis their greatest poet.3 After rejecting the clichés regularly attached to Pushkin, especially the new Soviet epithet “forefather of the Russian revolution,” the essay zooms in on the aspect of Pushkin closest to Stravinsky’s heart: his craftsmanship and willingness to write poetry for poetry’s sake. “The aim of poetry is poetry,” the essay asserts, quoting Pushkin. What transmits the depth and “spiritual nucleus” of Pushkin’s poems is his “poetic structure of rhymes,” that is, his technical finesse. Pushkin’s artistic credo, the essay emphasizes, coincides with Stravinsky’s own. “The aim of music is music,” wrote Mandelshtam, summing up Stravinsky’s views as formulated in the composer’s Autobiography (1935) to show the “intimate bond” between Stravinsky’s and Pushkin’s aesthetics. Stravinsky’s strongest loyalty is thus offered to Pushkin the formalist. Mandelshtam also recycled the characterization of Pushkin’s Russian mentality from Stravinsky’s Autobiography, first formulated in an open letter to the Times in 1921, which codified Stravinsky’s return to Chaikovsky, whose music he described as being “every bit as Russian as Pushkin’s verse or Glinka’s song.”4 There was another aspect of Pushkin that needed to be upheld in the anniversary essay: his 151

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mixed European and Russian heritage. European in spirit, Pushkin was nevertheless deeply rooted in Russian tradition, the essay insists. Pushkin’s “creative mentality” was unusual for Russians, except for a few creative geniuses such as Mikhail Glinka and Pyoty Chaikovsky, described as Stravinsky’s “glorious musical predecessors,” and Diaghilev, whose mentality the essay claimed Stravinsky himself had learned to cultivate. Calling the art of these outstanding Russians “cosmopolitan” was as unjust as not recognizing the national elements in Pushkin, the author of the essay asserted. The national element was a spontaneous aspect of the poet’s nature, not a willful addition, which the article denigrates as “national ethnographic estheticism,” “sterile” and “dangerous” because it hindered “the free and organic development of a culture” declared to be “forever tied to the culture of Europe.” Simultaneously European and Russian, Stravinsky’s Pushkin was thus a literary version of the composer’s neoclassical self, which he shaped, in turn, by using the classical Pushkin as an important model for his version of neoclassicism. Stravinsky’s views on Pushkin were shared by Russian emigrants living in the imaginary cultural space of Russia Abroad. The emigrants’ surprisingly uniform version of Pushkin bore the marks of the trauma of emigration and developed as the photographic negative of the radically new view of Pushkin shaped in Stalinist Russia. The Pushkin anniversary became a cultural battleground between the factions of a divided Russian culture, both sides claiming ownership of the icon. In this chapter I contrast the Pushkin celebrations in Paris with those in Stalin’s Russia, showing how the French capital in the late 1930s turned from a politically neutral haven into one unsympathetic to Russian emigrants. Aimed to forge unity under the name of Pushkin, the 1937 anniversary in Paris exposed the weakness and gradual disintegration of Russian emigrant culture. That the likes of Lifar, Diaghilev’s former dancer, could play a central role in the emigrants’ Pushkin celebration was already a symptom of a weakened cultural center, destabilized by insider fighting, dashed hopes, and the growing influence of Stalinist Russia. In the 1930s, Soviet ideology turned from a political and cultural threat from afar into a major force shaping the cultural landscape of the French capital. Initially viewed as a utopian political system, Communism changed into what many considered a viable antidote to Nazism, a dangerous political movement that threatened Europe and the Russian emigrant community in Paris. When this new plague reached Paris in June 1940, it shattered what remained of the emigrant Russian culture. Some Russians, like Lifar, chose to collaborate with the Nazis; many others opted to flee, changing countries and trying on new cultural identities yet again.5 PA R I S U N D E R T H E BA N N E R O F P U SH K I N

In Russia Abroad, Pushkin was the object of a veritable cult. In 1925 his birthday was designated a “Day of Russian Culture,” to be celebrated in all the world’s

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capitals where Russians lived.6 Nineteenth-century nihilistic criticism of Pushkin’s lack of “social utility” made him dear to emigrants who detested Marxist interpretations of art’s social function. Especially since, as an aristocrat and an apologist for the tsarist system, Pushkin was initially ignored by the Bolsheviks, the emigrants could claim him as their own. Vladislav Khodasevich and Marina Tsvetayeva hailed his poetry as the model of formal excellence, and emigrant intellectuals found solace in his uncompromising individualism.7 This exclusive ownership changed in 1937 when Russia Abroad faced Soviet competition in celebrating the centenary of the poet’s death. The anniversary, announced as a worldwide celebration of Russia’s national genius, highlighted even more painfully the unbridgeable divide between the two Russian cultures. For Russia Abroad, the celebration was meant to unify the diaspora and bolster what little political, social, and cultural coherence it still possessed. As K. Zaitsev wrote wishfully in his article “Battle for Pushkin,” “the emigrants, like a military family, set aside their political differences in order to line up under the banner of Pushkin.”8 Yet while the Pushkin observances claimed to be apolitical in Russia Abroad, they nevertheless had to confront Soviet propaganda that used the occasion to appropriate the poet for its own political purposes. In the battle for Pushkin, Paris, the center of emigrant intellectual life and the organizational heart of the celebrations, turned out to be a complicated cultural terrain. The ideological split between Soviet and emigrant festivities created confusion in the French capital where Soviet Russia, through its embassy on Rue de Grenelle, had a sizable leverage on French intellectuals and the newly minted government, which, since the victory of the Popular Front in 1936, was eager to strengthen ties with the Soviet Union. According to Lifar, sometime in the middle of 1934 he was invited to the apartment of Pavel Milyukov (1859–1943), founder and leader of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) and Paris editor in chief of Posledniye novosti, to meet Vladimir Zeyeler (1874–1954), another member of the Kadets and secretary of the Central Committee of the Day of Russian Culture, and Mikhail Fyodorov (1858–1949), member of the Russian National Committee and one of the founders of the short-lived journal Bor’ba za Rossiyu (Fight for Russia).9 The meeting, Lifar writes, concerned the formation of a Pushkin Committee that would organize celebrations during the anniversary year. They invited Lifar in the hope that the dancer, together with such famous Russian artists as Feodor Chaliapin and Sergei Rachmaninoff, would lend artistic prestige to the events. The chair of the Pushkin Committee became Vasily Maklakov (1869–1957), who had been a nonaccredited ambassador of the no-longer-extant tsarist Russia in Paris from 1917 through 1924. Maklakov’s ability to mediate between warring political factions of Russian emigrants and the French government made him a perfect choice to chair the committee. In a January 19, 1937, article in Posledniye novosti, the Nobel Prize–winning writer Ivan Bunin, Milyukov, and Fyodorov are

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listed as presiding members of the Pushkin Committee, with the scholar Grigory Lozinsky (1889–1942) serving as secretary.10 The Paris Committee, the newspaper reported, aimed to turn the celebration into an international affair, inspiring the formation of eighty-five committees in thirty-seven countries on five continents. The committee planned celebratory meetings, lectures, performances, and concerts featuring Russian composers who set Pushkin’s texts or were inspired by the poet. On the anniversary of Pushkin’s death, funeral services would take place in every Russian Orthodox Church in France. The committee decided to publish Pushkin’s collected works along with a collection of contemporaneous French reflections on the poet, and dedicate a special issue to him on the “Day of Russian Culture.” The committee also promised an evening of Pushkin’s dramatic works and, for February 11, a celebratory conference in the Salle d’Iéna. French contributions included a festive conference at the Sorbonne on January 26, with keynote speeches by the Minister of National Education and Fine Arts Jean Zay (1904–1944) and the writer Paul Valéry; performances of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel (in January) and Modest Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov (in February) at the Opéra, with Lifar’s guest appearance;11 and the use of the Bibliothèque Nationale for an exhibition “Pushkin and His Epoch.” Some hoped that a street would be named after Pushkin in Paris, for as the French journalist and Pushkin enthusiast André Pierre reminded readers, “Pushkin was killed by a young French aristocrat. It was the bullet of the Alsatian Georges d’Anthès that stopped, at the age of thirty-eight, the greatest poetic genius of Russia.”12 Russian emigrants also wanted to appeal to a French audience, so music played a disproportionately large role in the celebrations. For February 8, the anniversary of the poet’s fatal duel, the Pushkin Committee organized an ambitious concert in the Salle Pleyel.13 The concert opened with Nikolai Kedrov’s four-part male a cappella group performing Alexander Grechaninov’s specially composed setting of one of Pushkin’s most frequently recited poems, “Ya pamyatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornïy . . . ” (I’ve built myself a monument not made by human hands). The group also performed Nikolai Tcherepnin’s setting of Pushkin’s “Tri klyucha” (Three springs). The first part of the concert, consisting of romances on Pushkin’s poems, ended with Alexey Remizov’s recitation of “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Golden Fish,” accompanied by Tcherepnin’s Six Musical Illustrations to A. Pushkin’s Tale, composed originally in 1912 as a set of piano pieces. The second part of the concert was dedicated to arias and ensembles from Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, Chaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov. It was a special treat to see Lifar, arriving at midnight after dancing Le Spectre de la Rose in the Opéra, perform his short “Dance of the Valiant Knight,” created for the evening on music from Glinka’s Ruslan. Although the opening speech was delivered by Pierre, this concert was primarily an emigrant event. Milyukov’s Posledniye novosti expressed at least its chief editor’s

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figure 5.1. Concert poster for the celebratory concert in Salle Pleyel, Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College.

hopes when it reported that the great Russian poet united the Paris emigrant community: “in the first row sat N. N. Milyukov, [the White commander] General Denikin, V. A. Maklakov, [the soon to be abducted] General E. K. Miller, and others. In the first row of boxes one saw the white hood of Metropolitan Yevlogy [Eulogious of Paris, Metropolitan Bishop of the Orthodox Church Outside Russia]. All famous Russian writers, performers, artists, and social figures attended.”14 As speeches given at the celebratory meeting of the Pushkin Committee in the Salle d’Iéna on February 11 emphasized, emigrants still believed in the old Russia and that Pushkin could help them return there.15 Another concert in the Salle Pleyel, on 18 March, was more widely advertised. Lifar claims that he organized the concert to raise money for the publication of Pushkin’s collected works, a project that cost much more than it earned for the Pushkin Committee. Four opera singers performed excerpts from works by Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky, Chaikovsky, Alexander Glazunov, and the more obscure Pavel Kovalyov, with orchestral accompaniment provided by the Symphony Orchestra of Paris, conducted by Michel Steiman (fig. 5.1). The main attraction was, again, Lifar, who participated with special permission from the director of the Opéra, Jacques Rouché.16 The earnings from the concert, Lifar

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proudly wrote in his Pushkin memoirs, covered the committee’s loss of 22,000 francs on its edition of Pushkin’s collected works.17 There was, however, one event from which Lifar was conspicuously absent. Despite his self-assigned role as a Pushkinist, nobody invited him to the great celebration at the Sorbonne on January 26, 1937, an event that was meant to be France’s main tribute to Russia’s greatest poet. The French committee that organized the evening included two ministers, Zay and Yvon Delbos, along with French writers Valéry, Paul Claudel, Georges Duhamel, and André Maurois; Opéra director Rouché; actor and director Jacques Copeau; and Professor Paul Boyer. None of the emigrant celebrities present at the Salle Pleyel seems to have attended. Instead, the committee invited the Soviet Ambassador Vladimir Potyomkin (1874–1946), who, sharing the first row with French government officials, represented Pushkin’s homeland.18 The evening opened with the overture to Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, performed by the orchestra of the Comédie Française under the baton of Raymond Charpentier. In his opening speech, Zay acknowledged the political change in Pushkin’s homeland, but, turning to the Soviet ambassador, he also assured his listeners that “the glory of Pushkin continues to shine” over Russia. French philologist André Mazon also felt obliged to declare that “Pushkin’s greatness is beyond dispute in Soviet Russia just as it was under the tsars.” Pushkin was honored by “the prince of French poetry,” Valéry, who, before rehashing all the wellworn clichés about Pushkin’s role in Russian culture, admitted that as a nonRussian speaker he had only limited access to the poet. Lifar later insisted that Valéry’s speech, which was largely a verbatim repetition of a speech he had delivered a year earlier, on March 17, 1936, in the Salle Pleyel at Lifar’s request, had one telling omission: the confession that before his meeting with Lifar, Valéry had not heard of Pushkin. As the Frenchman explained to Lifar, he was asked on this occasion to omit the reference to his connection with a Russian emigrant.19 A two-hour-long performance of Pushkin’s works concluded the event, including recitation of poems in French translation and a performance of excerpts from Dargomizhsky’s Rusalka, Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Chaikovsky’s Queen of Spades and Onegin, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel, all performed by French singers. A dance from Ruslan and Ludmila was also included, this time without Lifar’s participation. Lifar’s exclusion indicated that the report in L’Intrasigeant on January 28, 1937, about the unifying force of Pushkin’s poetry was wishful thinking.20 It was hard enough to reconcile warring factions within the emigrant community; reconciling the official representatives of Soviet Russia with the emigrants proved impossible, given that the Soviets pretended that the emigrants did not exist. The cult of Pushkin was not strong enough to dissolve the conflict: instead of Pushkin unifying the divided Russian culture, the Soviets and the emigrants divided Pushkin into two irreconcilable parts.

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“P U SH K I N A N D H I S E P O C H”

There were few announcements in the French or Russian press in Paris in which Pushkin’s name appeared without Lifar’s. Lifar carved out a central place for himself in the celebrations, primarily as the owner of important Pushkin manuscripts and memorabilia, among them letters to his fiancée Natalia Goncharova, which he inherited along with other valuable manuscripts and first editions from Diaghilev’s collection; the manuscript of Pushkin’s preface to A Journey to Arzrum (1829), which he found at a book dealer in Paris; and two unknown strophes from chapter six of Eugene Onegin.21 He published Pushkin’s A Journey to Arzrum in 1934, the Goncharova letters in 1936, and a new edition of Onegin in 1937. His collaborator in these projects was the Pushkinist Modest G. Hofman (1887–1959), whom he befriended during his Diaghilev years. Hofman came to Paris in 1922 to negotiate the acquisition of Alexander Fyodorovich Otto Onegin’s Pushkin collection for the Soviet government. Like most émigrés, he was short of money and soon started to work for Lifar as a ghost writer, helping the dancer to establish himself as an intellectual and, especially, Pushkin specialist.22 By 1937, when Géa Augsbourg published his La Vie en images de Serge Lifar, he could place next to Lifar as faun and Lifar as Apollo also Lifar in creative communication with Pushkin (fig. 5.2).23 For the Pushkin anniversary Lifar decided to organize an exhibition to display, as he announced, “the precious documents of Pushkin’s life and work in the framework of Tsar Nicholas I’s Russia.”24 He joined forces with the archivist Jean Porché to mount the exhibition in the Bibliothèque Nationale.25 Working with Hofman on his Diaghilev biography at the time, Lifar was likely inspired by his former mentor’s famous exhibition of eighteenth-century Russian portraits in 1905, which, like his own Pushkin exhibit, was meant to present a lost, glorious epoch.26 Expressing his gratitude to France, Lifar promised to dedicate his exhibition of Russia’s genius to “the good and free France.”27 As it turned out, the French government succumbed to Soviet pressure and blocked Lifar’s access to the Bibliothèque Nationale. The announcements about the exhibition in the newspapers must have caught the eyes of Soviet Ambassador Potyomkin and alerted him to the potential political damage of letting the emigrants feast on Pushkin with the blessing of the French government. According to Lifar, Ambassador Potyomkin asked Zay to persuade the dancer to lend him an official role in the organization of the exhibition. In Lifar’s melodramatic account, Zay was ready to comply but Lifar heroically refused the Soviet demand.28 It is not difficult to imagine that Potyomkin persuaded Zay to withdraw official support from Lifar’s enterprise since it offended Soviet interests. It is less easy to believe that the Soviet ambassador wanted to take credit for an exhibition that was, if not openly anti-Soviet, contrary to the Soviets’ proposed image of Pushkin. Whatever the reason, Lifar had to relocate his exhibition to the two entrance halls of the Salle

figure 5.2. Image of Serge Lifar with Pushkin, from Géa Augsbourg, La Vie en images de

Serge Lifar (Paris: Corrèa, 1937), © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich, used by permission.

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Pleyel and turn what was meant to be a joint French-Russian celebration of Pushkin into a solely emigrant affair, visited, but not officially blessed, by the representatives of the French government.29 Delayed because of the change of venue, Lifar’s exhibition opened on March 16, 1937. Jean Cocteau designed the invitation (fig. 5.3), the back of which contained a strange little squib by Lifar about divine inspiration and his equation of Apollo, leader of the Muses, with the Russian genius Pushkin.30 Lifar was not the first to draw a parallel between Pushkin and the Sun God Apollo. Prince Vladimir Odoevsky’s outcry at Pushkin’s death—“The sun of our poetry has set—Pushkin is no more!”—was echoed by many.31 In 1837, Odoevsky’s hagiographic metaphor elevated the poet to the ranks of princely saints or saintly sufferers.32 But the mysterious brilliance emanating from golden icons gradually faded around Pushkin’s image and was replaced by the natural light of sunny Greece. In 1937, André Gide honored the poet by assigning to him an “Apollonian character,” which, he argued, often confuses foreign readers who expect vagueness and mysteries from Russian writers and mistake the lack of it for lack of depth.33 Although intended as an exhibit of Pushkin’s intellectual legacy, Lifar’s exhibition turned into a monumental bric-a-brac of emigrant taste. Subsisting on notions and memories, emigrants were eager to exhibit objects, the physical evidence of Pushkin’s time, as if to prove that the past, indeed, existed. In organizing his exhibition, Lifar followed Diaghilev’s script, turning to his compatriots for help. “It depends on the Russian people, scattered abroad, whether this exhibition will be an important manifestation of Russian culture abroad,” he pleaded in the March 6, 1937, issue of Vozrozhdeniye. In a “fervent appeal” he asked that any relics related to Pushkin’s time be delivered to him.34 Just as Diaghilev had persuaded landowners to trust him with their old family portraits in 1905, Lifar convinced emigrants to lend him their treasures. In the memorial publication of the exhibition catalog, sixty-six individuals, among them Mikhail Pushkin, the poet’s grandson, and Baron Heeckeren d’Anthès, descendent of Pushkin’s killer, along with eight institutions and groups, including the Turgenev Library and Turgenev Society, the Bibliothèque Slave in Paris, and the Adam Mickiewicz Museum in Poland, are listed as lenders.35 The assortment of objects was inevitably random, ranging from such sensationalist items as the pistols used in Pushkin’s fatal duel to miniature porcelain teacups from the poet’s friend Pavel Nashchokin’s miniature house; silver snuff boxes; beaded purses; and sentimental items, including pieces from a pine tree on Pushkin’s estate at Mikhailovskoye, which was destroyed by a storm in 1895.36 The exhibition had its scholarly side in displaying original Pushkin manuscripts (from Lifar’s collection) and some reproductions from the Parisian Pushkin Museum of Otto Onegin; autographs and first editions of works by Pushkin and his contemporaries; and contemporary journals, including Literaturnaya gazeta, which Pushkin edited with Baron Anton Delvig, and his own Sovremennik, the first issue of

figure 5.3. Invitation to Serge Lifar’s Pushkin exhibition, with Jean Cocteau’s drawing, Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College.

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which appeared a year after his death. In the showcase dedicated to the theaters of Pushkin’s time Lifar also exhibited the manuscript of Glinka’s setting of Pushkin’s “Here’s a health to thee, Mary,” a translation of Barry Cornwall’s “Song,” which Pushkin encountered in the same volume in which he found John Wilson’s play The City of Plague. On Glinka’s manuscript, the song was erroneously designated as Mary’s song from Pushkin’s translation of a scene from the play.37 The visually most attractive side of the exhibition was a series of brilliant paintings from nineteenth-century Russia. Like Diaghilev, who filled his 1899 Pushkin special issue of Mir isskustva with reproductions of paintings from Pushkin’s time, Lifar went out of his way to acquire portraits by Karl Bryullov, Gerhard von Kügelgen, Vladimir Borovikovsky, Orest Kiprensky, Pyotr Sokolov, and Woldemar Hau (known in Russia as Vladimir Gau). The portraits depicted Russian rulers, Empress Elizabeth Alekseevna, Tsars Alexander I and Nicholas I—the last Pushkin’s patron and personal censor—and numerous aristocrats, all connected to Pushkin either personally or by virtue of being mentioned in his work. Imperial Russia came alive through these portraits and through paintings and engravings showing Petersburg the way Pushkin and his contemporaries saw it: a festive city with wide spaces, gardens, monuments, and beautiful buildings. Pushkin’s contemporary Valerian Langer’s twelve drawings of Tsarskoye Selo evoked the poet’s youth and surroundings. Paintings of ballrooms and contemporary interiors were complemented by the reproduction of a room from Pushkin’s time, complete with carpets, birchwood furniture, chairs, desks, vases, a cabinet filled with porcelain, portraits, and a large painting by Maxim Vorobiev depicting sailboats on the Neva. Shards of the past, fragmented and displaced, preserved in the homes of the émigrés, found their context in Lifar’s exhibition. Nikolai Pushkin, the poet’s grandson, who traveled to Paris specifically to deliver the opening speech at the exhibition, admitted that he had feared that under the difficult circumstances the exhibition risked being “poor, incomplete, or unworthy of the one it was supposed to celebrate.” But as soon as he crossed the threshold of the room, his worries disappeared. Expressing his gratitude to Lifar, Hofman, and Alexandre Benois, who helped create the exhibition, the poet’s grandson declared the exhibition to be the most important event of the Pushkin anniversary.38 In his speech Hofman paid tribute to Lifar’s artistic taste, which he proclaimed to be worthy of Lifar’s master teacher, Diaghilev. Putting Pushkin in the context of his epoch made the poet appear alive and familiar, Hofman said. But what Lifar achieved with his exposition was more than that, Hofman insisted. He actually resurrected Pushkin, who had been destroyed not only by the bullet of D’Anthès but also by the constant reinterpretations of his life and work, which had left the poet’s admirers not with the real Pushkin but with a “hundred-year-old Pushkin, weighted down by the judgment delivered on him by Belinsky, A[pollon] Grigoryev, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Merezhkovsky, Aleksandr Blok,” and others. The

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present generation’s task, in Hofman’s view, was to resurrect the real Pushkin, to peel off the accumulated layers of a hundred years of interpretations in order to “recover a vibrant Pushkin, loved by us as one loves those alive and those who are with us and not those who are not with us anymore.” For Hofman the exposition achieved exactly that: it revived Pushkin by placing him into the context of his time. The effect was almost hallucinatory: Pushkin, Hofman marveled, stood in front of the visitor of the exhibition as if he had passed away just yesterday.39 R EVO LU T IO NA RY P U SH K I N

The need to wipe Pushkin’s image clean might have felt specifically urgent as Soviet Russia primed its propaganda machine to remake his image. In their own way the Communists also wanted to wipe away the debris accumulated around the poet. Ironically, while the idealistic emigrants clung to the material reality of Pushkin’s past, the Communists, who officially preached materialism and who had the advantage of celebrating Pushkin in the physical reality of his homeland, chose to exhibit their ideology instead of objects related to Pushkin. In the effort to refashion Pushkin, the presentation of his attitude toward the 1825 Decembrist uprising against Nicholas I created a sharp divide between the emigrants and the Soviets. In Lifar’s exhibition there was only one display dedicated to the Decembrists. The “freedom-loving poet,” Hofman admitted in his description of the exhibition, “was close to the secret society that planned the uprising on the Senate Square.” His worries about the fate of his “friends and brothers” were reason enough to include the topic in the exhibition about Pushkin and his epoch, Hofman wrote almost apologetically.40 Needless to say, Pushkin’s link to the uprising stood at the center of the Moscow exhibition, which opened exactly a month earlier than Lifar’s. The Moscow Pushkin exhibition was organized at the command of the Council of People’s Commissars (SOVNARKOM) in the State Historical Museum. Its main goal, as the brochure openly declared, was to “show the life of the great poet, his fight with the autocracy, and his death in this fight.” In other words, this was another exhibition that could have been called “Pushkin and His Epoch,” but instead of showing tsarist Russia as Pushkin’s context, the organizers highlighted the serfdom of Russia, the Decembrist uprising, and the European revolutionary movements of Pushkin’s time as the relevant background to the poet’s intellectual development. Although only one of the seventeen rooms was dedicated to the 1825 revolt, all rooms included some aspects of the revolutionary theme. In the exhibit about Pushkin’s childhood hung pictures depicting scenes from the French Revolution; in the room dedicated to Pushkin’s southern exile the organizers pointed at the poet’s connection with secret societies and the revolutionary movements in Europe in the 1820s. The exhibit on Pushkin’s travel to the Caucasus included his meeting

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with Decembrists, his stay in Boldino in 1830, and showed also the July Revolution in France and other revolutionary movements in Europe. Pushkin’s interest in the Pugachev uprising—about which he wrote a novel, The Captain’s Daughter—was at the center of the exhibit on historical themes in Pushkin’s work. The organizers dedicated an entire room to the fate of Pushkin’s literary heritage in tsarist Russia, more precisely to how Pushkin’s image was “falsified” before the 1917 Revolution. The last four rooms exhibited Pushkin in relation to the October Socialist Revolution; art created by Soviet children; Soviet music, theater, and film; and finally Soviet fine arts.41 The aristocratic Pushkin of the Paris exhibition was thus transformed into a revolutionary hero who prophetically foresaw and blessed Stalin’s Soviet Russia. As Vadim Perel’muter writes in the introduction to his volume on emigrant Pushkiniana, while Pushkin was a national poet for the emigrants, he became a state poet for the Soviets, carrying out whatever assignment he received from the political establishment.42 In 1937 Soviet Russia, Pushkin had a full plate of political assignments. Gone were the days when, in a provocative manifesto of 1912, Vladimir Mayakovsky and his fellow Futurists declared Pushkin “less intelligible than hieroglyphics” and wanted to throw him off “the ship of modernity.”43 Soviet Russia’s embrace of Pushkin was gradual. By 1924, when postrevolutionary Russia was celebrating the 125th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, Anatoly Lunacharsky could confidently announce that “even the most turbulent Futurist figures are now bowing down” before Pushkin.44 Stalin had more at stake in 1937. He used the Pushkin celebration as a rehearsal for the politically more significant twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, both taking place at the height of the political show trials. Pushkin’s political assignments included helping in the fight against illiteracy, which, in turn, assured that the masses could read and absorb the state’s political propaganda, especially regular reports about the show trials that became part of everyday life in the late 1930s. Pushkin served as an example against “formalist” writers, a category flexibly applied to anybody the state wanted to censor. Propaganda thus turned the reputedly brave opponent of Nicholas I into a meek servant of Stalin. The editorial in Pravda on February 10, 1937, triumphantly announced that “Pushkin is entirely ours, entirely Soviet.” The Soviet Pushkin, Pravda proclaimed, was the “real Pushkin, without the selfish meddling of countless distorters, without the reactionary censor, and without the petty, small-minded commentators who have tried to brush . . . this unruly Pushkin with their bourgeois combs.”45 Turned into a battering ram, Pushkin offered “a friendly hand” to the Stalinist regime in its fight against “the despicable crimes of the Trotskyite bandits” who were “the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie’s direct response to [Stalin’s] liquidation of the exploiters.” Pushkin, whom “foolish vulgarizers” vilely characterized as gentry, the editorial declared, “would have applauded the downfall of the exploitative classes with joy.” In this account Pushkin’s death was turned from a

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personal tragedy into the result of political conspiracy, the main conspirator, Pushkin’s killer, embodying capitalist evils by being “a foreign aristocratic scoundrel and tsarist hireling.” By similar fiat Pushkin became an anti-fascist warrior who served as “an indictment” against the “fascist heretics and barbarians.” By the end of the editorial the eulogy for Pushkin had predictably turned into a eulogy for the Stalinist regime.46 Overblown, politically charged rhetoric resounded in the Soviet press and courtroom alike, as the second Moscow show trial against the “anti-Soviet Trotskyite center” got under way in January 1937, ending with death sentences for thirteen of the seventeen accused less than two weeks before the Pushkin celebrations began.47 The routine piling of accusations on the “enemy” produced a fixed vocabulary that became associated forever with Stalinist propaganda. The accused were, in the public prosecutor Andrey Vïshinsky’s words, “literally a horde of bandits, robbers, document forgers, saboteurs, spies, and murderers.”48 The description of Pushkin’s supposed enemies borrows from the same vocabulary. The same newspapers that printed the celebratory articles about Pushkin also published gruesome descriptions of sabotage, explosions, mutilations, and reports from the trial, in which, as Karl Schlöger writes, “a vocabulary of ritual killing, of lynch justice, was being rehearsed in utter earnestness.”49 Whereas the Paris celebration focused on Pushkin’s aristocratic heritage and presented the poet as a member of the cultural elite, inaccessible to average people, the Soviets went out of their way to show that Pushkin could indeed be fed to the masses.50 By printing 13.4 million copies of Pushkin’s works in 1937 alone, the state declared the poet an object of mass consumption. Workers and sailors performed Pushkin; schoolchildren recited his poems; mass rallies were organized; streets, squares, museums renamed; monuments raised; and his prophetic verse to Chaadayev displayed, posterlike, on the bell tower of the destroyed Strastnoy Monastery on Strastnaya Square, renamed Pushkin Square.51 In Soviet Russia, Pushkin’s actual aristocratic past lay in ruins. By the time it was declared a national monument in 1922, the poet’s Mikhailovskoye estate had been burned down; only the foundations of the manor house remained. As a visitor described it, the “bricks had collapsed and were left there; the walls were long gone.”52 But even if the civil war had spared Mikhailovskoye, preserving objects of Pushkin’s aristocratic past would have conflicted with the goals of the revolution. Emptiness was easier to fill with new content, and thus the guidebook to the estate could confidently state that “Only after the Great October Socialist Revolution did a genuine and caring owner come into this Pushkin shrine—the Soviet people.”53 The celebrating masses in the Soviet Union might have been completely unaware of the parallel jubilee in Western Europe, but Russian emigrants in Paris were informed about the events around the Pushkin anniversary back in the Soviet Union. Readers of Posledniye novosti could regularly read reviews of Soviet

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publications, items taken from the Russian news agency TASS and from Soviet publications such as Pravda, Izvestiya, and Krasnaya gazeta. They were aware of the celebratory meeting in the Bolshoi Theater in February, attended by Stalin, and could read a short excerpt from the Pravda article quoted above.54 Posledniye novosti reported the renaming of streets, the huge mass rally at the Pushkin monument, the renaming of Detskoye Selo (previously Tsarskoye Selo) Pushkin.55 Most of these reports were published without commentary. Occasionally there were ironic political overtones, as in the report on the call for the Pushkin celebration in Pravda (January 5), where the organizers called attention to the fact that “the Pushkin days arrive just at the time ‘when by the hand of the genius thinker and fighter, comrade Stalin,’ a new constitution is being written.”56 A brief note about the shortcomings of Soviet Pushkin “scholarship” informed the reader that in the Soviet Union they mistook Pushkin’s great-grandfather Gannibal for the Carthaginian general Hannibal, and interpreted Pushkin’s Onegin as proof of the decline of the nobility and the decay of gentry youth.57 Nikolai Zabolotsky’s article “Pushkin and Us,” which appeared in Izvestiya and was reported in the emigrant press, demonstrated perfectly what was wrong with the Soviet Pushkin anniversary. Instead of Pushkin, Zabolotsky named Lenin and Stalin as the sources of “the purity and power that can be achieved with the Russian language.” Poetry is still far from matching the “iron logic, wise simplicity, and biting humor [of] the speech of Stalin at the 8th Conference of the Soviets,” Zabolotsky declared.58 The true heir of Pushkin’s literary genius was thus Stalin, a conclusion mocked by a caricature in Posledniye novosti depicting an old professor whose speech about Pushkin was being edited by a government censor. The caption reads: “Comrade Professor, I am crossing out the words ‘great,’ ‘genius,’ ‘our pride’ in your speech: after all, nobody would guess that your speech is about Pushkin; all would think that you were talking about Comrade Stalin” (fig. 5.4).59 The emigrants rightly feared that the bombast of Soviet propaganda could eclipse their Pushkin celebration. Their need to present a different Pushkin to the West was even more urgent because French publications about Pushkin tended to reflect Soviet views. In a centenary French volume the editor J. –E. Pouterman, known for his translations from Russian, announced that the purpose of the publication was to “share with the French public” the Soviet people’s unanimously enthusiastic celebration of their poet, quoting Maxim Gorky as the authority on Pushkin’s significance in Russian literature.60 Pouterman printed a translation of Soviet writer Vikenty Veresayev’s recent popular biography of Pushkin, because, the editor explained, it was simple enough to be distributed in millions of copies in the Soviet Union.61 Pouterman also included excerpts from an article “Pushkin and Us” by the “red professor” Vasily Desnitsky (1878–1958), published originally in Literaturniy sovremennik in 1936. Pushkin’s work, Desnitsky argued, was particularly relevant now, when “the currents of the new proletarian universality

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figure 5.4. “Pushkin days

in Moscow,” caricature in Posledniye novosti, February 11, 1937, p. 1.

assert themselves more and more in the poetry of all countries.” In Desnitsky’s view the “bare simplicity” of Pushkin’s depiction of reality “resonates with the rhythms of the socialist construction of a new culture.”62 What is surprising is not that Desnitsky’s essay put Pushkin in the service of the Soviet state, but that Pouterman thought it suitable for circulation in France. O U R P U SH K I N

Desnitsky’s “Pushkin and Us” was a telling variant on the genre “My Pushkin,” which came into being as an ironic commentary on Nicholas I’s introduction of the poet as “my Pushkin” to his court after their first meeting in Moscow.63 Russian intellectuals’ personal appropriation of Pushkin was an almost ritualistic initiation process that compelled even the revolutionary Mayakovsky to write his own love poem to Pushkin (“The Anniversary Poem,” 1924), in which he drags the poet’s statue from its pedestal to take a walk with him. Mayakovsky’s private conversation with the poet is fairly typical of the genre, which frequently expressed opposition to the “false” public rituals of official Pushkin celebrations.64 Celebrating Pushkin in 1921, the year in which several Russian intellectuals decided to make the anniversary of the poet’s death a day of national mourning, was still a private affair, even if it took the form of a gathering of leading literary

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figures in Petrograd. Speeches by Blok, Khodasevich, and others were deeply felt personal statements. It is easy to read dark prophetic forebodings into Khodasevich’s speech. “Our desire to make the day of Pushkin’s death into a popular celebration has been prompted” by a foreboding that the connection with Pushkin’s time might soon be completely severed. “We are deciding what name to use as a password, how to call out to one another in the gathering gloom,” Khodasevich declared a year before his departure from Russia.65 In Blok’s speech, “The Poet’s Calling,” his contemporaries heard a prophecy of his own death a year later: Pushkin, Blok asserted, was not killed by D’Anthès’s bullet. “He was killed by the lack of air. And his culture was dying with him.” Blok formulated the poet’s mission in musical terms. The poet was “the son of harmony” whose task was to bring “words and sounds into harmonious relation” by first freeing “sounds from the native anarchic element in which they originate,” then giving form to these sounds, and finally bringing “this harmony forth into the external world.”66 There was little chance to shape the chaotic world of 1921 into a harmonious whole. As Khodasevich predicted, tolerance of individualistic Pushkin appropriations in Soviet Russia did not last. Instead of intellectuals, it was the Party, “we the workers,” that claimed the poet. In his 1937 anniversary article “Pushkin’s Legacy and Communism,” Soviet critic Valery Yakovlevich Kirpotin (1898–1997) positioned the poet against the “distorted dream” of Western individualism. The West’s “idealistic-subjective viewpoint,” Kirpotin asserted, “was completely foreign to Pushkin’s genius.”67 In emigration what Kirpotin mocked as the “idealistic-subjective viewpoint” of individualism remained the only viable mode in a fragmented cultural space. On March 2, 1937, Marina Tsvetayeva read her moving personal essay “My Pushkin” in the Salle du Musée Social.68 She talked about her first encounter with Pushkin, at age three, in the form of Alexander Naumov’s painting Pushkin’s Duel with d’Anthès in her mother’s room. “Pushkin was my first poet,” Tsvetayeva confessed, “and my first poet was killed.”69 Pushkin was also a “Negro,” she wrote, adding, “what poet among those that were and those that are, isn’t a Negro and what poet—hasn’t been struck down and killed?” Tsvetayeva’s “My Pushkin” is the most palpable description of a world that ceased to exist in its physical reality and survived only in words and memory. Poetry, Tsvetayeva concluded, remained “the one element with which there is no parting—ever,” not even in the linguistic isolation of emigration.70 Lifar felt no embarrassment in putting his own confessional Pushkin pieces into the mix of brilliant literary essays. Some, such as “The Gleaming Light of Poetry,” could indeed have been his.71 Most must have been the work of Hofman, whose knowledge of Pushkin served Lifar’s literary ambitions during the anniversary year. One suspects Hofman behind Lifar’s 1934 essay “Our Pushkin,” which sets out to explain the emigrants’ Pushkin to a Western audience.72 Pushkin, the article claims, is known to the West one-sidedly, through Dostoevsky, the great

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Russian writer who knew no joy, whose Russia appears as a gloomy, dark, joyless realm of the suffering soul and the sinful flesh.73 Russia’s self-image, according to Lifar/Hofman, was wholly literary, formed by Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky recognized that in Pushkin’s work the two homelands of Russians— Russia and Europe—were united. But how could Western readers, hampered in their understanding of Pushkin by feeble translations, comprehend Pushkin and through him Russia and Russians? M U SIC A L P U SH K I N IA NA

To solve the problem, Lifar/Hofman encouraged foreigners to listen to Russian music inspired by Pushkin, hoping that music could provide a more comprehensible translation than language. As the anniversary’s event calendar shows, music was indeed used widely to celebrate Pushkin in the French capital. There was a rich musical menu from which to choose. Lifar/Hofman’s list, like the endlessly rehashed catalog of Russian composers appearing in essays titled “Pushkin and Music” throughout the anniversary year, starts with the mandatory Glinka, the “father of Russian music,” proceeds through members of the Mighty Five, followed by Chaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, even Nicolas Nabokov and Nikolai Miaskovsky, on the way to Stravinsky’s most recent attempt to provide Pushkin with a more contemporary sound in his comic opera Mavra, based on Pushkin’s “The Little House in Kolomna” and showcased in Stravinsky’s “Pushkin: Poetry and Music” as the composer’s most important contribution to musical Pushkiniana. Lifar/Hofman reserved special praise for Rimsky-Korsakov, whose effortless settings of Pushkin’s poems they judged to be perfectly in tune with the melody of Pushkin’s words.74 Not everybody agreed with the assertion that music could afford a perfect translation of Pushkin. Leonid Sabaneyev, for one, penned a dissent in Sovremennïye zapiski in 1937.75 His “Pushkin and Music” was one of several articles that appeared under that title in 1937. Most of them, like Lolly L’vov’s version in Illyustrirovannaya Rossiya, were content to list composers who set Pushkin’s words to music.76 Sabaneyev’s was undoubtedly the most critical of them, and, even more important, the one most in line with the emigrants’ image of the poet. Sabaneyev’s Pushkin was no connoisseur of music: although a contemporary of Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Berlioz, he appreciated only Mozart.77 Sabaneyev acknowledged that music did a great service in making Pushkin known in the West, as it was through the operas of Musorgsky and Chaikovsky that foreign audiences first encountered the poet’s name. But, he argued, no matter how frequently they drew inspiration from Pushkin’s subjects, Russian composers remained oblivious to the poet’s aesthetics. Even Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, closest in time to Pushkin, displays complete indifference to the dignity of the text because, in Sabaneyev’s judgment, Glinka’s “naïve simplicity” was not up to the challenge of giving ade-

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quate musical expression to Pushkin’s literary brilliance. According to Sabaneyev, Rimsky-Korsakov, whose music he considered much clearer, more balanced, and thus stylistically more appropriate to Pushkin’s texts, also fell short of matching the sparkling “champagne” and youthfulness characteristic of Pushkin. Even Nikolai Medtner, whom Sabaneyev praised as “a real, convinced ‘Pushkinian,” crushed the poet with overly detailed and over-developed music. Musorgsky fared no better in Sabaneyev’s judgment. He declared him a genius worthy of Pushkin, but in the end rejected his musical Pushkiniana because he heard no aesthetic resonance between poet and composer, not even in Boris Godunov, in the first version of which Musorgsky carefully adhered to Pushkin’s text. Nor did Chaikovsky, whose highly popular Eugene Onegin had done probably the most to spread the gospel of Pushkin abroad, have any affinity, in Sabaneyev’s view, with Russia’s Golden Age poet. Sabaneyev’s example of Chaikovskian incomprehension is the most lyrical moment in Onegin, Lensky’s aria “Kuda, kuda vï udalilis” (Ah, whither, whither are ye banished), the open-hearted charm of which amounted to a complete misunderstanding of the poet’s intention. What melts the hearts of the audience in Chaikovsky’s rendition is, in Pushkin’s original, a satirical treatment of the young, aspiring poet’s Romantic plight, which Pushkin characterizes as “limp and obscure.”78 Chaikovsky’s “gloomy elegy,” Sabaneyev concludes, is “completely alien to Pushkin’s poetry.” Most literary scholars agree. Why did even the best Russian composers fail to capture’s Pushkin’s spirit? Sabaneyev does not fault the composers; the problem, he claims, lies in Pushkin’s aesthetics. Pushkin’s world, which he portrays as light, highly rational, aesthetically balanced, brilliant, playful, and sparking even when touching on the deepest subject, “stands in stark contrast with the gloomy and tragic, deeply pessimistic and mystical world of Russian musicians.” Russian music always attracted composers of tragic disposition, “the mystics and the irrational, the ecstatic,” people who would sooner fall into hysterics than create equilibrium—or so Sabaneyev, an expert on Scriabin, wrote. Pushkin was cut from a different cloth. His brilliance was not typically Russian and thus it is not surprising that there were no musicians capable of properly reflecting Pushkin’s genius, which is much more similar to that of Mozart and Raphael than to other Russian literary figures. Many agreed with Sabaneyev’s assessment, except, of course, when it came to Pushkin’s Russian identity, the prize topic of the anniversary year in Russian Paris. C L A S SIC A L P U SH K I N

Sabaneyev’s presentation of Pushkin as essentially classical in spirit was not original. Comparing Pushkin to Mozart and Raphael was a commonplace. But the emphasis on Pushkin’s European, classical side was particularly prominent in emigration as a response to the Soviet’s attempt to appropriate the poet.79 The

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emigrants’ classical, formalist version of Pushkin is best summarized in the writings of literary critic D. S. Mirsky, a titled nobleman (born Prince Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky), who wrote his first essays on Pushkin for Western readers. Mirsky’s Pushkin was an aristocratic, classical, European craftsman whose work was best studied by formalist means. Despite his political disagreement with Mirsky, Khodasevich, one of the most prominent Pushkin critics abroad, approved Mirsky’s approach, rejecting Orthodox theologian Sergey Bulgakov’s attempt to interpret Pushkin from a religious point of view. “Pushkin was not a prophet, teacher, leader of all things Russian; he was purely and simply a poet,” Khodasevich affirmed.80 In his 1926 A History of Russian Literature, Mirsky took it for granted that Pushkin’s poetic style, established by 1820, was “ ‘French’ and classical. Its most characteristic feature—one that is particularly disconcerting to the romantic-bred reader—is the ‘realist’ avoidance of imagery and metaphor. Pushkin’s images,” Mirsky assured the reader, “are all dependent on the happy use of the mot juste, and his poetic effectiveness on the use of metonymy and similar purely verbal figures of speech.”81 In a 1928 essay, reissued in Pouterman’s anniversary volume on Pushkin in 1937, Mirsky characterized the poet’s relationship to Europe as a “tragic irony.”82 “More than any other Russian writer,” Mirsky wrote, “Pushkin loved and felt nostalgic for a West that appeared to him as his true home.” Yet his work, deified in Russia, had not awakened the slightest interest in the West. France’s indifference was particularly striking. “ ‘Your poet is flat,’ Flaubert said to Turgenev.” The judgment of Prosper Mérimé, who translated several of Pushkin’s stories, was no more flattering. According to Mirsky, Mérimé did not regard Pushkin as a great poet, he simply took what this “Athenian among the Scythians” offered to him as a “spicy show.” Even today, Mirsky complained in the essay, when Europe is fascinated by Russian writers, Flaubert’s opinion of Pushkin persists. Indifference to Pushkin stemmed from the poet’s classical qualities, Mirsky explained. He has none of the “Slavic virtues.” He is neither mysterious, nor profound or barbaric. He has an intimate relationship neither with God, nor with nature, nor with the subconscious. . . . His world is a human and rational world, governed by moral and logical laws. His style is sober and chaste, free of egotism, free of the vague and the confusing. How can one make the French believe that Russia produced a great poet who is no less classical than Racine?

The clarity of Pushkin’s poems, which Mirsky equated with classicism, is the opposite of the Romantic dusk; its logical line opposes the emotional colors of Romanticism. “Pushkin did not conceive of poetry as hostile to intelligence; he saw it rather as a form of intelligence,” Mirsky stressed. Appreciating classical poetry, Mirsky cautioned, requires effort. Classical poetry relies on a thousand-year-old tradition and on an elite with sure and

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permanent taste, in possession of prestige and authority. Mirsky contested the idea that Pushkin was “a product of the Russian people.” “The genius of Pushkin was produced by the high and peculiar cosmopolitan civilization of the Russian nobility,” he declared in 1923.83 This aristocratic view eventually damaged Mirsky after his return to Soviet Russia in 1932. It was easy to maintain such elitist attitudes in emigration. Incautiously Mirsky insisted that Pushkin was a poet of the aristocracy even in the Soviet Union. In a 1934 speech he claimed that at the end of his life Pushkin yielded to tsarism and became politically conservative. Two years later Mirsky succumbed to political pressure and confessed his mistake, but his faux pas was too great to be forgiven, especially during the anniversary year. On June 3, 1937, he was arrested. He died in a camp hospital in January 1939. Formalism’s supposed “objectivism” seems to have provided shelter against the dangers of changing politics in Soviet Russia in the 1920s. It must have seemed safer to study literature’s technical means than to engage in ideological battles. But formalism became a bad word in the 1930s. Mirsky’s praise of the bareness and quasi-abstractness of Pushkin’s style, in which small details gain great importance, was unwelcome in the Soviet Union, where Lunacharsky had condemned formalism as “the product of the decadent and spiritually sterile ruling class” already in 1924.84 So was Mirsky’s description of Pushkin’s poems and prose as “objects of beauty,” created by “a sublime and conscientious craftsman.”85 Mirsky directed his readers’ attention to Pushkin’s unmatched literary craftmanship, which, he believed, had “never been approached in later years.” For Mirsky and other emigrants, Pushkin represented a lost paradise because he possessed qualities “of reason and sanity, of virile strength and mental harmony, of clear-cut human passion and of conscious craftmanship” absent from later nineteenth-century Russian literature, not to mention the political chaos of the twentieth century.86 Mirsky’s presentation of Pushkin as a classical poet and a craftsman resonates strongly with the neoclassical spirit of the 1920s, especially with Jacques Maritain’s views on art formulated in his Art and Scholasticism, which served as a model for Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music. Art, in Maritain’s scholastic view, is “a virtue of the practical Intellect . . . which deals with the creation of objects to be made.”87 By rationally constructing objects of art, the artist partakes in God’s privilege. Pushkin might not have been comprehensible for Flaubert and his contemporaries, but the emigrants could have hoped that he would be much more easily appreciated at a time when beauty, perfection, and craftsmanship once again became virtues instead of liabilities. Hofman claimed that the emigrants’ image of Pushkin was the “real” Pushkin, freed from a century of accumulated distortions. In reality, the Apollonian Pushkin was also a construct, created by the trauma of emigration and nourished in the emigrants’ imagination. In turn the classical Pushkin helped rekindle a neoclassical taste in Russian Paris. Stravinsky’s Apollo had danced in his radiance already

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in 1928 and his memory shined from images of imperial St. Petersburg at Lifar’s exhibition. But ultimately this radiant, classical Pushkin was a greenhouse plant, too feeble to withstand the coming political turmoil and the aggressive attack on him by Soviet propaganda. The gradually darkening 1930s were inhospitable to the emigrants’ Pushkin. What was needed was a new Pushkin, a new idol that could channel both the destruction and madness of Dionysus and the hope for clarity Apollo offered. Surprisingly, Lifar seems to have had limited interest in paying tribute to Pushkin in dance. He did not create a ballet on a Pushkin theme, which would have been a more appropriate expression of his admiration of the poet than his faux literary activity. The absence of a Pushkin ballet during the Pushkin anniversary is even more puzzling, as Lifar had the opportunity to create one when he was asked to choreograph Arthur Lourié’s opera-ballet A Feast in the Time of Plague, based on one of Pushkin’s little tragedies of 1830, for the Paris Opéra at the end of the 1930s. Although never performed, Lourié’s Feast is a wholly representative work of emigrant Pushkiniana, a musical-theatrical tribute to Pushkin that, by reopening the poet for Symbolist interpretation, reflected the apocalyptic fear that took over the cultural space of Russian Paris at the end of the 1930s.

6

A Feast in Time of Plague For all that threatens to destroy Conceals a strange and savage joy— Perhaps for mortal man a glow That promises eternal life; And happy he who comes to know This rapture found in storm and strife. pushkin, a feast in time of plague 1

Arthur Lourié, who shared his Russian compatriots’ obsession with Pushkin, knew how to draw the poet into the sphere of music. Unlike Leonid Sabaneyev, he did not attempt to find the perfect musical style that fit Pushkin. Instead, he dug deeper to establish a fundamental relationship between poetry and music. In a lecture he delivered to the Geographical Society in Petrograd in February 1922, five months before he left Soviet Russia for good, Lourié declared that “the poet’s creative ecstasy always arises and blossoms in the spirit of music,” and insisted that “in essence the creative process is a musical process.”2 His guide in his musing about poetry and music was Aleksandr Blok. Lourié’s essay “The Voice of the Poet,” which he subtitled “Pushkin,” is as much about Blok as it is about Pushkin. According to Lourié, both poets partook of a creative ecstasy that crossed into insanity. But what “in the creative process leads Pushkin to lifegiving sunshine, to the spirit of life affirmation, in Blok turns into passionate torment, leading to the affirmation of death.” Unlike Blok, Lourié argued, Pushkin believed not only in the sacred chosenness of the poet but also in his salvation. His Apollonian radiance originated in the perfect harmony between him and his muse. Lourié’s view of Pushkin carried the unmistakable stamp of Blok and the Symbolists. “The Symbolists taught us to understand the dark orgy of Dionysus, ancient carrier of the Spirit of Music,” Lourié declared. “They taught us the fearless and wise attachment to the ancient and native ‘chaos.’ ” But, he added, “they also taught us to contemplate the radiant clarity of the Apollonian sun.” Pushkin, Lourié argued, knew both Dionysus and Apollo. 173

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Chapter Six If Symbolism, the last epoch of Russian poetry, emphasized the preaching of Dionysus, Pushkin, although permeated by Dionysian ecstasy, lives in our memory as a bright myth of the Sunny Hero. For us musicians he is the living carrier of the spirit of music, eternally being born in Dionysus but enlightened in the rays of Apollo.

It is the Symbolists’ Dionysian Pushkin, still emitting some of the radiance of Apollo, that defined Lourié’s adaptation of Pushkin’s little tragedy A Feast in Time of Plague into an opera-ballet. Well versed in Russian culture and with a knack for penetrating the complexities of cultural discourse, Lourié was an ideal person to reshape emigrant cultural notions of Pushkin. Although there is no evidence that he read the exiled poet Marina Tsvetayeva’s brilliant personal essays about Pushkin in the 1930s, his opera-ballet responds to views expressed most strongly in her writing. Lourié’s Pushkin opera also provides an opportunity to explore an unusual emigrant life and artistic career that, in its failure, is probably more representative of what happened to Russian artists in Paris than the success stories of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff, the three best-known Russian musicians in the West. The story of Lourié’s failed collaboration with Serge Lifar on his Pushkininspired opera-ballet integrates Lourié, the most puzzling figure among the protagonists in this book, into the larger story of Russian emigration. An inveterate dandy, Lourié would never miss out on the latest fashion. But as time went on and he failed to gain lasting success, he clung increasingly to his more distinguished past, refusing to shed its outmoded layers when he tried to adopt the new trends around him. Stravinsky could more easily play the amnesiac. On the surface, at least, the cosmopolitan, neoclassical Stravinsky was not on speaking terms with the Russian Stravinsky. Lourié could not let go: Symbolism and the admiration of Blok, Acmeism and fond memories of Anna Akhmatova, Futurism and its outrageous habits, Communism and its tainted heritage all stuck to him in uneasy proximity to cosmopolitan neoclassicism, Eurasianism, and the French renouveau catholique of the 1920s. This crazy quilt of cultural, aesthetic, religious, and political values left its mark on Lourié’s Feast, and that is why he and his opera-ballet serve as such indispensable examples of the emigrant Russian experience in the 1930s. The sharp contrast between the density and weight of Lourié’s Feast and the lightness and flexibility of Stravinsky’s Apollo thus highlights not only the difference between two lives in exile but also the wide perimeter of the emigrant space.

P E T E R SBU R G SN O B

On January 5, 1945, a suite version of A Feast in Time of Plague was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Lourié’s mentor Sergey Koussevitzky. John N. Burk, program annotator for the Boston Symphony, gave a strange introduction to the composer who, after escaping from Paris in 1940 and settling in New York a

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year later, was still an unfamiliar figure on the American concert stage. He had had a few U.S. premieres: in New York, Hugh Ross’s Schola Cantorum performed his memorial for Blok, Chant funèbre sur la mort d’un poète in 1929 and his Concerto spirituale in 1930; in Philadelphia, Koussevitzky’s nephew Fabien Sevitzky played his A Little Chamber Music and Divertissement for Violin and Viola in 1932 with the Philadelphia Chamber Strings Sinfonietta; and Koussevitzky brought to the United States his Sonate liturgique (Boston, January 2, 1931), and performed his two symphonies, Sinfonia dialectica in 1933 and Kormchaya in 1941. Played between two symphonic war-horses, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony and Beethoven’s Seventh, Lourié’s Feast must have created a strange impression. Burk’s presentation of the composer added to the peculiarity. “Arthur Lourie . . . dweller in rare musical byways, tireless seeker in his many writings after the aesthetic verities, once an ultra-radical of exotic dalliance and now a ‘believer’ of the severest sort, is a personality to pique curiosity.”3 Surprisingly, Burk’s source was not Lourié, who, as the author of a monograph on Koussevitzky and the ghost writer of numerous articles the conductor supposedly penned, was a member of Koussevitzky’s inner circle, but Sabaneyev’s 1927 book Modern Russian Composers, in which Sabaneyev portrays Lourié more as an intellectual and aesthete than as a musician.4 Sabaneyev’s summing up of Lourié is just as confusing as Burk’s. He described Lourié as a decadent, neo-impressionist, experimental composer, a typical, skeptical aesthete who loved subtle paradoxes and was a friend of Blok. Burk’s only original contribution to Sabaneyev’s description was his attribution of Lourié’s “keen intellectualism” to his “Jewish descent,” a rare instance in which Lourié’s Jewish background makes an appearance in writings about him and a subtle signal that accusations of Lourié’s lack of a coherent core personality might originate in social assumptions about Jews’ unstable cultural habits. The importance of Lourié being a “friend” of Blok might have been lost on his American audience, but it carried enormous prestige in prerevolutionary Russia, where Lourié was well respected in the cutting-edge artistic groups that attended the famous cabaret The Stray Dog during the prewar years in St. Petersburg.5 “Tot dur’yo, kto ne znayet Lur’yo” (Tis a blockhead who doesn’t know Lourié), Vladimir Mayakovsky joked.6 And, indeed, Lourié managed to transform himself from his modest beginnings in Propoysk, in Mogilev Province, where he was born in 1891, into what Vladimir Milashevsky called a “peterburzhskaya shtuchka” (Petersburg snob).7 Lourié knew and was known to everybody who mattered: he was the Futurist painter Nikolai Kulbin’s protégé; with Benedikt Livshits and Georgy Yakulov he co-authored the Russian Futurist manifesto “We and the West” in 1914; he was the Acmeist Akhmatova’s lover; a friend of Osip Mandelshtam; and an intimate companion of the actress and muse Olga Glebova-Sudeikina. The list of dedicatees (among them Pyotr Miturich, Nikolai Punin, Vladimir Tatlin, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Mayakovsky) on the front page of his Nash marsh (Our march)

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for piano, with a cover page by Miturich, was an open declaration of Lourié’s Futurist standing. It was thanks to his radical reputation that Anatoly Lunacharsky appointed him head of MUZO, the Music Division of Narkompros (short for People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment), a position Lourié held from January 1918 through January 1921. Lourié defected in 1922 while on an officially approved trip to a conference on quarter-tone music in Berlin. His short but memorable Bolshevik service tainted his Western career. It did not help that he kept up his extreme Futurist habits while serving as a commissar in starving Petrograd. Nicolas Nabokov heard and willingly repeated implausible rumors about Lourié humiliating his old teacher Alexander Glazunov by making him wait in the anteroom of his office for an hour, then appearing in front of him “in the costume of a Pierrot with his face painted halfwhite half-black, his lips red, and his eye-brows dark mauve, with a monocle in one eye.”8 He was also accused of abusing his power by printing mainly his own music. Prokofiev, who managed to escape the worst of the civil war and the following chaos, never forgave Lourié for failing to provide Boris Asafyev with the necessary documents to rescue Prokofiev’s manuscripts from his apartment.9 Sabaneyev was more generous, acknowledging that during that turbulent period Lourié managed to “preserve a number of musical treasures which otherwise would have perished in the storms of the revolution.”10 Berlin was not to Lourié’s liking. Always a Petersburg snob, he found the German capital bustling but provincial and tasteless, at one point calling it the “antimusical kingdom of vulgarity.”11 Prokofiev, running into the evidently disappointed Lourié in Berlin, maliciously reported the lack of interest in Lourié outside Russia.12 Because of his Soviet past, he had to wait for a French visa for months after receiving his Nansen passport. He left Berlin on March 25, with Soviet composer Vladimir Shcherbachev’s ironic parting words: “our wonderful Arthur went to Paris, for he did not take to the German atmosphere and, apparently, Paris awaits him with great enthusiasm.”13 His commissar past continued to haunt him in the French capital. In 1924 he was denounced as a Communist spy and deported. On March 7, 1924, Prokofiev unsympathetically recorded in his diary that Lourié had been “chased out of Paris.”14 Lourié explained to Koussevitzky that he was expelled because they mistook him for Mikhail Zalmanovich Lur’e (pseudonym Yuri Larin, 1882–1932), a well-known social democrat and revolutionary.15 Even with the help of a lawyer, it took Lourié seven months to clarify his case and return to Paris from Wiesbaden. He spent his time in forced exile working on a book about Stravinsky, whose acquaintance he had made through the composer’s future wife, Vera Sudeikina, whom he knew from his Petersburg days.16 Stravinsky, whose mother left Soviet Russia with Lourié’s help, quickly recognized his intellectual capacity and unofficially appointed him as his personal secretary and ideological mouthpiece. At least for a while Stravinsky was willing to put aside his prejudice against the former

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commissar, for which Lourié was exceedingly grateful.17 Ernest Oeberg, manager of Koussevitzky’s Édition russe de musique, reassured Stravinsky that Lourié “has a kind soul and suffers for his mistakes committed in his youth.”18 In a letter to Stravinsky, sent from Wiesbaden, Lourié insisted that he “believed in what [he] did” in Russia and he “did it honestly. From these years of work in Russia I am carrying a great mental burden, but there is no blemish on my human or artistic conscience.”19 Becoming, as Sabaneyev put it, Stravinsky’s “satellite” came with its own set of disadvantages.20 Prokofiev was convinced that Lourié’s “hostile attitude” to his music stemmed from his “indissoluble friendship with Stravinsky.”21 Nabokov, who later aspired to be Stravinsky’s confidant, had probably the most unflattering view of Lourié. He called him “Stravinsky’s shadow” and maintained that “somewhere in the back of Lourié was a hidden skeleton.”22 Nabokov, who was also competing with Lourié for the attention of Jacques Maritain, could not keep his antipathy to himself and told acquaintances that Lourié gave him “the Cheka creeps,” associating his rival with the Soviet secret police. Stravinsky, still a close ally of Lourié, took the remark badly and turned his back on Nabokov for a while.23 Lourié’s book on Stravinsky, which Koussevitzky’s Édition russe hoped to publish in English before Stravinsky’s tour of the United States in 1925,24 never materialized, but his articles about the composer appeared regularly between 1925 and 1930 in La Revue musicale and two Eurasianist newspapers, Vyorstï and Yevraziya.25 Lourié’s association with the Eurasianist movement in Paris is another puzzling aspect of his biography, especially since his involvement with the movement coincided with his becoming an important member of Maritain’s neo-Thomist circle. Eurasianists strongly rejected Catholicism, which they saw as “an imperializing papal-Roman drive for world domination.”26 And yet as in Soviet Russia, where Lourié managed to become the musical representative of Futurism without shaking off his Symbolist ties, in Paris he succeeded to fold his idol, Stravinsky, into a Eurasianist narrative while building his own reputation as a Catholic composer.27 In fact, this ability to forge connections between seemingly antagonistic ideologies was what made Lourié a powerful intellectual whose wit and sharp mind prompted the admiration even of the otherwise unsympathetic Nabokov. Jewish and Catholic, Catholic and Russian, Christian and Communist, Futurist and Symbolist, Eurasianist and Catholic, erotically driven and ascetically chaste, former red commissar and ideological guide of the White Russian Stravinsky, propagandist of Soviet Russia and, as Koussevitzky’s ghost writer later in the United States, advocate of art in the Free World, there seems to have been no limit to Lourié’s efforts to try to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable. But, unlike Stravinsky, he was not shifting shapes, for he never renounced his past in favor of the present. Oeberg was wrong to assume that he was penitent for his youth: he unapologetically preserved it all. He never lost his arrogance, not even when his career suffered huge setbacks or when his neo-Thomist belief made him embrace “the blessed

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humility” that Maritain preached in his Art and Scholasticism.28 Because ultimately he did not shape the final narrative, he ended up on the margins of the biographies of his more famous contemporaries. But because of his unwillingness to shed his past, his own art exhibited more clearly the conflicting tendencies of the Russian emigration. He was the most deferential to Stravinsky, but his critical mind kept poking holes in the very aesthetic edifice he helped build around his idol, becoming, in the end, an insightful critic of neoclassicism.29 Although during their close relationship, which lasted from 1924 until about 1934, Stravinsky’s superiority could never be questioned, there is strong evidence that even Stravinsky fell under Lourié’s spell when he discovered the latter’s Concerto spirituale. “He asked me to show him the concerto and approved of it,” Lourié, who had never dreamed of being taken seriously by Stravinsky as a composer, reported enthusiastically to Ernest Ansermet on December 25, 1929. The change was such that I rubbed my eyes to make sure that it was not a miracle that had come about. He is very sympathetic to the direction I have taken; I see the same problems as he does, and what I write interests him to such an extent that he remains at the piano for hours examining the manuscript. . . . Vera says that this behavior is entirely exceptional for him and that I can now consider myself his only pupil.30

A year before his Symphony of Psalms, Stravinsky was thus intently studying Lourié’s Concerto spirituale, a piano concerto with chorus on liturgical texts and orchestra that, except double basses, uses no strings because, as the composer explained in the program notes, strings “are too personally effusive,” and no woodwinds because they are “too willingly picturesque.”31 The direction that inspired Boris de Schloezer to announce the logic of Stravinsky’s writing a Mass after Apollo came from Lourié, and his Concerto spirituale (1929) provides the link between Apollo (1928) and the Symphony of Psalms (1930).32 FA M E , A L M O ST

When he arrived in the French capital, Lourié was not completely unknown to the Paris concert audience. By 1921 his piano music had been played there, in the company of Karol Szymanowski, Alfredo Casella, Béla Bartók, Darius Milhaud, and Arnold Schoenberg.33 At the concert of the International Composers’ Guild in 1923, his highly modernist piano piece Synthèses again held its own among works by Bartók, Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Stravinsky.34 His Cinq rondeaux de Christine de Pisan (1915), dedicated to Glebova-Sudeikina, was described as “delicately archaic” by the critic of Comoedia in 1924.35 In 1926, Claudio Arrau gave the premiere of another of Lourié’s piano pieces at a concert where he also performed, among others, Stravinsky; in 1929 he played Lourié’s Valse and March along with

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Stravinsky’s Piano Rag Music.36 On January 26, 1927, the Roth Quartet performed Lourié’s A Little Chamber Music. The music’s “sumptuous harmonies” and monotonous rhythms reminded the critics of the Stravinskian spirit displayed in the chorale in his Soldier’s Tale, Three Pieces for String Quartet, and Concertino.37 The same critic still heard Lourié’s Sonata for Viola and Double Bass (1924), which he called “one of the most successful explorations in instrumental music,” as derivative of Stravinsky, but he also admitted that in his sensitive handling of the double bass “Stravinsky’s disciple” was becoming “a creator in his own right.”38 The real breakthrough for Lourié’s compositional career was the performance of his Concerto spirituale, occurring six years after the work’s New York premiere in 1930 with the Schola Cantorum. Lourié’s stature already seems to have started to change in 1930 with the premiere of his Sonata liturgique for piano, three double basses, woodwind instruments, and six women’s voices, performed by the Orchestre des Concerts Straram, considered to be one of the best orchestras playing contemporary music in Paris at the time. Some of the reviews recycled the Stravinskian trope of the composer’s emotional detachment, but critics also stressed the originality of Lourié’s orchestration.39 Schloezer’s review in La Revue musicale dug deeper. Lourié, Schloezer wrote, has the culture, the technique, the taste, and the invention to be a great composer. What he lacked, according to Schloezer, was a certain inner necessity without which Lourié’s music seems “skilled, interesting, intelligent, but not indispensable.” This lack of inner necessity or inspiration, Schloezer argued, explained Lourié’s past submission to contrary influences by Alexander Scriabin, Claude Debussy, Schoenberg, and finally Stravinsky. But “Stravinsky’s influence, so dangerous for some, proved to be astoundingly fertile” for Lourié, for it enabled him to find his own voice, which Schloezer heard already in his Sonate liturgique. Although the Sonata reminded him of Giovanni Gabrieli’s church sonatas, he recognized that Lourié’s sense of sacred music had little in common with historical precedents or conventional understanding of liturgical music. The Sonate was the work of a “rich and original talent.”40 As if reacting to Schloezer’s initial hesitation, Henri Daveson (pseudonym of Henri-Irénée Marrou) declared Lourié’s music “necessary” in an article published in June 1935 in Esprit, a magazine that served as the mouthpiece for Emmanuel Mounier’s personalist movement, which attracted important thinkers, among them Maritain. Lourié’s music, Daveson argued, was “essentially religious and mystical,” superior to that of Stravinsky, even to the Symphony of Psalms, which he did not find Christian enough. Stravinsky’s symphony was “an offering addressed to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob . . . but it [was] an offering of an idolatrous musician,” an art that did not move beyond being decorative. Daveson, a fellow Catholic, judged Lourié’s music more sincerely spiritual.41 Lourié’s long-awaited recognition finally arrived in 1936. In his memoir Vladimir Dukelsky fondly remembers the Paris premiere of the Concerto spirituale, calling it a

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“work heavy with music and replete with religious fervor” and deserving “a speedy revival.”42 The performance took place in the Salle Pleyel on June 2 by the Orchestre Philharmonique under Charles Munch, with Yvonne Gouverné at the piano and Alexis Vlasov’s chorus, which had recorded Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms five years earlier. Roger Vinteul, writing for Le Ménestrel, hailed the work as “serious and strong in its strangeness.” “Great is the God of Arthur Lourié,” he declared, “imperious his herald carrying the trumpet of salvation, truly weighed down with sadness and vibrating with the hope” expressed in the chorus singing Psalm 41: “Quando veniam et apparebo ante faciem Dei?” (When shall I come and appear before the face of God?).43 As if to respect the trembling of the human soul at the question “Quare tristis es anima mea: et quare conturbas me?” (Why art thou sorrowful my soul: and why dost thou trouble me?), Lourié stops the instruments and lets the chorus perform what Jean Mouton called a “splendid meditation,” which Schloezer pronounced to be “the most beautiful pages of modern music.”44 Instead of showing off its technical abilities, Mouton observed, “the piano supports one of the most moving interrogations of our heart.” The concerto points here beyond its formerly “fixed and artificial form” to find meaning beyond its genre. The sound that Lourié unleashes to express “the whirlwind of the tempest is disciplined to the point of rigor; the blind forces of the atmosphere are invited in turn to offer a conscious praise to the creator.”45 In his review in La Revue musicale, Frederick Goldbeck went so far as to call the Concerto spirituale “one of the rarest masterpieces of contemporary music.” Goldbeck expressed his frustration that the work had to wait several years to reach the Paris concert stage. He allowed that the Concerto was unusual and difficult, and its composer, being proudly prudent and condescending toward the musical cliques, was unpopular. But the cause of the delay, according to Goldbeck, was more the strict, uncompromising nature of the music than the uncompromising character of the composer. What Goldbeck called Lourié’s modal style was disapproved of equally by academics, progress-obsessed Romantics, neoclassicists, and Schoenbergian modernists. Goldbeck declared that Lourié’s Concerto was a religious work not only because of its mystical character, but also because it resisted “the Romantic heresy of transferring what belongs to the religious act to the work of art.” Goldbeck appreciated the work’s “deep ornamental beauty,” as well as Lourié’s understanding that such beauty is the “unconscious expression” and not the “voluntary explanation of the soul.” Beauty, Goldbeck wrote, “can accompany and illustrate, but never absorb or even less replace the prayer or the confession of faith.”46 None of Lourié’s major works performed in Paris in the 1930s received such eloquent praise. Lourié was about to capitalize on his new fame by writing an opera-ballet after Pushkin, A Feast in Time of Plague. The Feast, his most ambitious work to that date, however, was never performed in Paris. Its nonperformance was the greatest blow to Lourié’s compositional career, a setback from which he never recovered.

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T H E BA L L E T T HAT WA S N O T T O B E

Even when he was close to Stravinsky, Lourié could never have dreamed of receiving a ballet commission from Diaghilev. And yet the opportunity to have a ballet performance in Paris did arise, albeit almost a decade after Diaghilev’s death, when ties with Stravinsky had already been severed. In 1937 Lifar, still in frenzy over his Pushkin exhibition, agreed to choreograph Lourié’s Pushkin opera-ballet at the Paris Opéra. The first draft of Lourié’s Feast dates from six years before the anniversary year. Returning from a vacation in Maloja, Switzerland, in June 1931, Lourié announced to the press that he had completed “a lyric work, A Feast in Time of Plague, based on a text by Pushkin.”47 Both the vocal score and the full score bear two dates and places, “Maloja 1931” and “Paris 1933.”48 Why it took Lourié four years before he approached Jacques Rouché, the director of the Opéra, is unclear, but it is likely that the Pushkin anniversary encouraged him to have his opera-ballet produced.49 On June 11, 1937, the Catholic weekly Sept announced Lourié’s “symphonic ballet in two acts,” naming Lifar as the choreographer and the principal dancer of the production.50 On Rouché’s orders, Édition russe prepared one full score, orchestral parts, and twelve copies of the vocal score. Rehearsals were scheduled to start in October 1937, but, as Lourié noted later, after one or two rehearsals Lifar seems to have lost interest in the project. Sometime in mid-February 1938 he assured the composer that Rouché wanted the opera to go into production as soon as possible. When Lourié contacted Rouché a few days after his meeting with Lifar, the director was already thinking about potential conductors, soloists, and set designers.51 Soon, however, conflicts appeared between Lourié and Lifar, who disliked Lourié’s scenario for the ballet.52 According to an unsigned memo, Lifar handed the composer his own scenario on February 20 and made its acceptance a condition for the production of the ballet.53 Although he judged Lifar’s scenario unsuitable for his music, Lourié yielded, fearing to lose the opportunity of having the work performed at the Opéra. His compromise did not help, though, and a few days later Lifar told him that rehearsals could not begin in May as promised because the chorus of the Opéra was not available at that time. Lifar went on tour in the fall of 1938, which led to the further postponement of the production. In January 1939 Lourié was still trying to get a concrete date out of Lifar. He pleaded with Rouché, reminding him of his previous support of the project, and hinted at the possibility of withdrawing the score and giving it to Tullio Serafin or Leopold Stokowski, who showed interest in the work.54 With the war approaching, he sounded desperate: “This indefinite waiting and uncertainty for two years greatly hinders my life and work,” he confessed to Rouché. His dreams of a Paris success were quickly fading. He admitted that he felt isolated and was unable to defend himself against those who knew how to “manage” their careers better. He

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had no support and could count only on Rouché’s help to have his opera-ballet performed.55 He wrote in a similarly distressed tone to Schloezer in October 1939: “I live in almost absolute solitude. The days, of course, pass somehow, in endless worries and work, but by the evening I fall into savage depression.”56 In his response to Lourié, Rouché explained that a wait of one year was not considered to be long for a production, and that the chorus could not, at the moment, commit to learning his difficult score. On a more promising note, he informed the composer that he had already commissioned Josep Maria Sert to do the sets.57 Unfortunately, Sert soon withdrew because of the illness and eventual death of his wife, Isabelle Roussadana Mdivani, and because he was too busy with other commissions.58 Rouché proposed replacing Lifar with another choreographer and finding a set designer at the Comédie Française. Lourié showed a rare lack of practical sense when he tried to reassure Rouché that staging his opera-ballet would not be difficult. It was only an hour and fifteen minutes, he noted, and required only about fifty musicians and sixty singers, with soprano and baritone soloists. He proposed that instead of an original set design, the Opéra could use Leonardo da Vinci’s “Perspective Study for the Background of the Adoration of the Magi,” because, he believed, Leonardo’s draft was “in complete harmony with the text and the music of his Feast.”59 In the end, it was Lifar’s refusal to either step down or begin to work on the project that delivered the death blow to Lourié’s opera-ballet. Still waiting for the performance of the Feast, Lourié stayed until the very last moment in Paris, fleeing to Vichy in late summer of 1940 among refugees and the withdrawing French army, with German troops only 30–50 kilometers behind them. Reaching Vichy, where conditions were dismal, Lourié seriously contemplated returning to Paris, which, fortunately, he could not arrange.60 By this time it was obviously beyond Rouché’s power to help: Lourié’s Feast, an opera-ballet that was sadly timely, never reached the stage in the Paris Opéra, or, for that matter, any opera stage in the world. The Suite played by Koussevitzky in 1945 was all that ever saw performance before an audience. P U SH K I N E N HA N C E D

In his opera-ballet Lourié set verbatim Pushkin’s “little tragedy” A Feast in Time of Plague. Pushkin’s Feast is a translation of about three-quarters of act 1, scene 4 of Scottish poet John Wilson’s The City of Plague (1816), which Pushkin found in a volume of Wilson’s collected works while staying at his Boldino estate in 1830.61 Because of their brevity, Pushkin’s little tragedies were popular opera subjects: Alexander Dargomizhsky set The Stone Guest in 1872, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov Mozart and Salieri in 1897, César Cui A Feast in Time of Plague in 1900, and Sergei Rachmaninoff The Avaricious Knight in 1906.62 In his Feast, Lourié added other

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texts to Pushkin’s original. In fact, the first act of his opera-ballet, which he called “Jeux latins” (Latin games), has no text by Pushkin. Lourié used instead four Latin poems by the Roman decadent poets Pentadius (fl. 354–361) and Ausonius (c. 310– c. 395) to prepare the stage for Pushkin’s Feast. He found these poems in Erotopaegnia (Love Games), a collection of erotic poems by minor Roman poets that appeared in 1917 in Moscow in Valery Bryusov’s bilingual edition.63 Lourié might already have been aware of the volume in Russia, where it was a fetish item for collectors, but he could also buy it in Paris, where several copies resurfaced from an overflow on the Soviet market.64 Lourié also added a new number to the first act after 1931, a setting of Petrarch’s Remedi utriusque fortunae (Dialogue of Two Fortunes, 1358). Part of Petrarch’s Remedi was published in Charles-Albert Cingria’s Pétrarque in December 1932, both in original Latin and in French translation, and Stravinsky, who received the book from Cingria as a Christmas present, considered setting it.65 Lourié’s ballet scenario, which he sent to Rouché on April 22, 1938, is based on Pushkin’s scene of friends trying to distract themselves by feasting on a street in London during the great plague of 1665.66 Lourié instructs that “the action can take place in any country and in any time period” as long as it “unfolds in an atmosphere of catastrophe: civil war, revolution, etc.” What one sees on stage is neither dream nor vision, Lourié writes in the longer version of the scenario. The scene is supposed to evoke an unknown future that does not resemble any concrete time period.67 In act one a troupe of traveling comedians sets up a stage in the middle of a ruined house to perform “Latin Games” “in the style of ancient Moralities.” Lourié’s “Moralities” are a series of dances depicting an ancient creation story, more precisely a version of the myth of Narcissus. During the orchestral introduction a dancer enacts “the fight of man with the elements of chaos.” The first canto or song, Pentadius’s “Crede ratem,” brings about the appearance of the Earth, on which nymphs and the man dance. In the next canto, Pentadius’s “Cuit pater amnis erat,” the man discovers his image in a lake and, contemplating it, turns into Narcissus, who dances with the nymphs during the next canto, Ausonius’s “Furetis procaces.” Torn from his reflection, Narcissus disappears in the lake, to be reborn “in the form of a flower.” During the fourth canto, Ausonius’s “Dum dubitat natura,” Narcissus, arising from the flower, transforms into the androgyne who, in turn, metamorphoses into the poet. The next number, “Tempo di Marcia,” depicts the awakening of the poet’s consciousness. The poet then dances around “Joy” and “Pain” and “their retinue of masques” during Petrarch’s Dialogue. The plot of the second act largely follows Pushkin’s scenario, except that instead of Pushkin’s Walsingham, in Lourié’s libretto the chairman of the feast, never named, is the leader of the comedians, absent in Pushkin, whom the friends invite to their table and who assumes the role of entertainer, distracting them from the “processions and convoys of death.”68 Lourié also introduces two Christian hymns

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accompanying processions into his second act, which would be alien in Pushkin’s anti-religious narrative. The first dance is assigned to the two female characters, Mary and Louise, two “daughters of joy” who sing and dance accompanied by a duet on Pushkin’s poem “Yunoshu, gor’ko rïdaya” (To the boy sighing bitterly), which is not part of Pushkin’s Feast. When Pushkin’s little tragedy finally begins, its first lines serve as accompaniment to a young man’s dance in memory of their friend who has died of the plague. As in Pushkin, so in the ballet the chairman invites Mary to sing and lift their spirits. Her song is enacted in a great slow dance. The chairman thanks Mary in dance. Mary’s rival, Louise, mocks Mary’s song, but when the death cart passes, she faints in horror. A young man takes over the dance to cheer up his friends, leading them into a general dance that accompanies what Lourié called the “Challenge to Destiny,” the central “Hymn to the Plague” recited by Walsingham in Pushkin’s play. Next, a procession of monks and penitents cross the stage, singing a hymn. As in Pushkin, a priest enters and addresses the revelers, reminding the chairman of his dead mother and wife. The chairman expresses in dance his despair brought about by memories of the past. The friends become aware of their horrible situation. Another procession crosses the stage and the priest, his plea rejected by the chairman, leaves with them. In Lourié’s version, after his final dance the chairman returns to the stage in the ruined house and disappears. Lifar’s scenario has not survived, but it is not surprising that whatever he drafted did not match the composer’s vision, which combined a Symbolist preoccupation with ancient myth, Roman decadent eroticism, admiration of Pushkin’s anti-religious bravado, and Lourié’s deeply felt Catholicism. As was often the case, Lourié’s culturally overstrong brew did not conform to any definable trend. “R A P T U R E F O U N D I N ST O R M A N D ST R I F E”

Pushkin’s A Feast in Time of Plague has a peculiar place in his oeuvre. Some consider it derivative, some hail it as a masterpiece. In an essay “The Feasts of Plato and Pushkin,” Lourié declared the play to be “a symbol of the situation of man in the modern world.”69 In his program notes to Lourié’s Suite based on his opera, Burk, likely inspired by the composer, attributes a specifically Russian meaning to the play, namely “oblivion in the pleasures of life at the very moment of cataclysm.”70 Pushkin’s little tragedies are all short, dramatic experiments focusing on existentially critical moments—as Sergei Davydov writes, on the “mystery of happiness and grave” or on the “contest between Eros and Thanatos.”71 Written amid the cholera epidemic in Boldino, they are concerned with death and the variety of human responses to it. The objects of desire are different—gold in The Avaricious Knight, art in Mozart and Salieri, love in The Stone Guest, and life in the Feast—but a passion that cancels conventional moral considerations and the tragedy that ensues are

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similar. In all of them, but most explicitly in the Feast, “the heroes give themselves to the chaotic and orgiastic force of passion and simultaneously suffer as they try to absolve themselves from it.”72 Madness and death lurk around the feasting characters. Their proximity enhances the protagonists’ lust for life and makes their procreative and creative energies erupt to affirm life in a last, desperate effort to hang on to it as long as possible. To overstimulate their senses, they feast on food, wine, love, song, poetry, and dance. Neither the death cart passing through as a reminder of their real situation nor the priest’s rebuke and call to repentance and prayer can make them give up their chaotic Dionysian revelry. Their chairman, Walsingham, is the most keenly aware of reality, admitting to the priest that it is precisely the “foul despair” and the “horror of the deathly hush” in his house that prevents him from leaving the feast and compels him to taste the “blessed poison” of the infected cup and the deathly sweet kiss of the Scottish harlot Mary. Instead of repentance, the priest’s calling the name of his deceased wife drives Walsingham to mad ravings. Only two sections of the play are Pushkin’s own: Mary’s song and Walsingham’s “Hymn to the Plague.” Both create moments that break the dramatic flow of the scene with powerful lyric utterances. In the case of Mary’s song, the replacement served a practical purpose. In Wilson’s original, Mary sings in a Scottish dialect, which Pushkin, having only a small English-French dictionary at his disposal in Boldino, had difficulties translating.73 By foreshadowing Walsingham’s situation, Pushkin’s substitute text also integrated Mary’s song into the main plot. In Pushkin’s version Mary sings of Jenny, who asks her beloved not to kiss her farewell when she dies but to flee the village and return to visit her grave only when the plague has passed. In his confrontation with the priest, Walsingham is reminded of his angelic departed wife Mathilda, whose “blessed spirit calls” him.74 Unlike Edmund in Mary’s song, Walsingham, the blasphemous reveler who stays to drown his sorrow in the sensuous orgiastic feast, forfeits his right to reach Mathilda’s pure soul. Mary’s song is the conventional, sentimental reaction to the tragedy of the plague. It contrasts the joyful past filled with children’s cheerful voices with present devastation, its silence broken only by the tolling of bells and the rattling of death carts. But since the song tells of a plague from long ago, it offers hope for the future. The last image provides a vision of heaven, where the pious Jenny prays for her love who survived the plague, which, as Walsingham says in thanking Mary for her song, “has only left the barest trace” in her native land, where streams and brooks meander “now once more in joy and peace.” It is no accident that Pushkin’s sentimental lyrical response to the plague is assigned to a woman. In its evocation of verses by the poet’s teacher Vasily Zhukovsky, the song is stylistically derivative, “old” and not “fashionable,” as Louisa says when mocking it in the play. In other words, it is inadequate to the present situation. Pushkin gives Walsingham a bolder, more original response. Unlike Mary’s song, Pushkin’s philosophically complex “Hymn to the Plague” has no relation to

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its counterpart in Wilson, a jolly “Song on the Plague” with a trite choral refrain.75 Pushkin’s Walsingham is blasphemous: not only does he face death unrepentantly while savoring life’s pleasures, he also embraces death as the source of the greatest pleasure of all. There is rapture on the battleground, And where the black abyss is found, And on the raging ocean main, Amid the stormy waves of death, And in the desert hurricane, And in the Plague’s pernicious breath. For all that threatens to destroy Conceals a strange and savage joy— Perhaps for mortal man a glow That promises eternal life; And happy he who comes to know This rapture found in storm and strife.76

Generations of Russian poets have been captivated by Pushkin’s Walsingham, the reveler turned poet. Unlike Mary’s weak response to the plague, a song saturated with nostalgia and traces of pure love promising heavenly postmortem bliss, Walsingham’s response is an artistic act that turns the terror anticus into sacred poetic inspiration. In her 1933 essay “Art in the Light of Conscience,” Tsvetayeva described Walsingham’s ecstasy as more than joy: “bliss, with no equal in all the world’s poetry. Bliss of complete surrender to the elemental—be it love, or Plague, or whatever else we may call it.”77 Creating Walsingham was Pushkin’s way to escape from the plague “into song,” into writing poetry—in other words, into “the element of elements, the word.” To write it, “Pushkin had to be Walsingham,” and at the same time he had to distance himself from his protagonist in order to write the song. Walsingham’s hymn confirmed for Tsvetayeva that Pushkin identified with Walsingham and not with the priest, who does not sing in the Feast. Fascinated with the elemental, Tsvetayeva understood why Walsingham’s hymn challenged God much more explicitly than the act of feasting during the plague. The hymn was blasphemous because in it “we have lost our fear; because we turn punishment into a feast, turn punishment into a gift; because we dissolve not in the fear of God, but in the bliss of annihilation.” For Tsvetayeva, “after the ‘Hymn to the Plague’ there was no longer God.” It is unlikely that Lourié read Tsvetayeva’s essay, which remained unpublished during her lifetime, but he shared her conviction that in the Feast Pushkin had passed a threshold. His understanding of the play was apocalyptic, still bearing the mark of Symbolist interpretations. “Already Pushkin knew that the end was at hand and that the world would have to begin again, and differently,” Lourié wrote in his

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essay “The Feasts of Plato and Pushkin,” in which he compared Plato’s Symposium, “the feast of the beginning,” to Pushkin’s little tragedy, “the feast of the end.” Plato’s feast, Lourié asserted, is a dream, separated from reality by an abyss. Seeing the abyss “Plato preached transfiguration,” the transformation of “the terror anticus into the idyll of a republic and the tragedy of doom into a philosophical and sentimental remembrance of the androgyne,” the symbol of humanity’s primordial unity. In the end, the “uplifting deception” presented in Plato’s work was “only the illusion of victory over reality,” which is “not vanquished, but is merely willfully enchained and brought to a standstill.” Pushkin’s ideal is different, Lourié argues, for he searches for it “in the depths of cruel reality” and approaches it without fear. Lourié, like Tsvetayeva, focused on Walsingham’s “Hymn to the Plague,” on the lines: “We are not afraid of the darkness of the tomb . . . .” Like Tsvetayeva, he believed that Pushkin’s feast was “a very courageous acceptance of absolute finality.” There is no catharsis, no “ecstasy of purification spoken by the ancients,” and, since there is no purification, neither is there any redemption.78 He also understood that the “inevitable peril” that Pushkin faces without fear has “its powerful, irresistible, and mysterious magnetism” that, like a vortex, attracts everything to it. As Pushkin formulates it in his hymn (quoting from the translation that appeared in Lourié’s article): All, all that conceals in itself the threat of destruction Bears for the heart of the mortal An inexpressible rupture, Which is perhaps the pledge of immortality.

These lines, Raïssa Maritain noted, embody the theme of the second act of Lourié’s Feast.79 Like Tsvetayeva, Lourié was also preoccupied with the relationship between art and life, art and reality, art and dream. For Lourié, the uncompromising embrace of reality in Pushkin’s Feast represented art at its most sincere. In his view, art’s feast, the enhanced moment that invites the encounter between art and reality, occurs only rarely, mostly at times of catastrophic events. Romantic art can never produce such encounters, Lourié wrote, for its poetic dream always remains detached from reality. As if searching for the word “feast” in the virtual library of his memory, Lourié folds Arthur Rimbaud, Innokenty Annensky, and Blok into his argument. His first example is Rimbaud’s prose poem Une saison en enfer, which the poet wrote, according to Lourié, in “the already dark hour of French history.” “Once . . . my life was a banquet where all hearts opened. . . . I thought of searching for the key to the ancient feast. . . . Charity is this key.” He does not quote the lines that connect Rimbaud’s poem most obviously with Pushkin’s Feast, the demon’s command to the protagonist: “Meet death with all your lusts, and your selfishness, and all the deadly sins.”80 Lourié uses the first lines of this poem as the epigraph to his opera-ballet. He quotes Annensky’s poem “Moya toska” (My

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anguish) as an example of the “poisoned” feast at turn-of-the-century Russia, and lines from Blok’s Scythians to show the poet’s prophetic warnings of what Lourié describes as the “last feast” in Russia, the feast of the Revolution, to which the poet’s “barbaric lyre” called the people.81 Although written in 1954, Lourié’s essay still bears traces of his youthful decadence. He sees the world as hopelessly fragmented, disintegrated, and longs for a new integrity of consciousness. “What place has art among [sic] modern disintegration,” at the time when the Symbolists’ dreams of creatively transfiguring the world appears to be hopelessly lost? The Russian Revolution destroyed the “myth of the bond between the revolutionary political idea and the creative consciousness of the artists.” What is left from the past is “a somnambulistic, sexless sphere, weak willed, accepting nothing and denying nothing; it is beyond night and day, good and evil, life and death, beauty and ugliness.”82 As Lourié saw it in 1954, art served either torpor or greed—or, as he presented it in the first act of his Feast, distraction or oblivion. His solution for the crisis of art was utopian and restorative. Instead of “sepsis driven into intellectual refinement,” a barb at Stravinsky’s witty art, or “monstrous stolidity and callousness,” a hostile description of Romanticism and its offspring, he offered an “authentic” encounter between life and art, which, he believed, would “move from abstraction to the concrete consciousness and sensibility, from disintegration to reconstruction,” and which, most tellingly, would be accomplished “under the sign of “classicism.”83 This is not the skeptical neoclassicism of Stravinsky, but, in Lourié’s view, the sincere recreation of a Golden Age, made possible by the frank embrace of present catastrophes and honest acknowledgment of spiritual crisis. Pushkin, whom both Lourié and Tsvetayeva turned from the Apollonian poet of balance into a Dionysian reveler of chaos and unbalance in the Feast, provided, in the end, a way toward the restoration of classical values. C R E AT I N G T H E P O E T

But before this restoration could happen, Pushkin, the deliverer of good news, had to be recreated in Lourié’s chairman in his Feast. Tsvetayeva insisted that “even if Walsingham existed—Pushkin would still have created him.” Walsingham, she argued, is “an exteriorization . . . of the elemental Pushkin.”84 In the first act of his Feast, Lourié sets out to create the poet, who can “disclose to us the possibility of grasping the meaning of the present through the perspective of the past.” Poetry, Lourié wrote in his essay about the Feast, is as necessary as bread, especially during catastrophic periods of human history.85 Lourié called his opera-ballet “a myth in two acts.”86 Its first act is indeed a creation myth of sorts. The fast orchestral introduction represents unshaped, dark, chaotic elements: above a constant, rapid pulse of CJs played by six double basses in alternating 85 and 68, eight harps pluck out a primitive, three-note melody, which

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example 6.1. Entrance of the chorus in the Introduction of Lourié’s A Feast in Time of Plague (vocal score, Lourié Coll.).

forms an incessant ostinato. Against it seven timpani (a Lourié staple) churn their own primitive ostinato. Nothing develops, no themes appear. This is dark mass, pulsing, breathing, accumulating, layer upon layer, dynamics gradually rising until the brass bursts in, fortissimo, accompanying the eight-part chorus that enters singing the first line of the text from the next number (ex. 6.1). Lourié’s Latin Games served as light “aesthetic games,” to be contrasted with the tragedy and reality of Pushkin’s play in the ballet’s second act.87 Selecting Pentadius’s “Crede ratem” and “De Narcisso,” and Ausonius’s “Nymphis quae Hylam merserunt” and “In puerum formosum,” Lourié did not go for the most erotically charged texts but chose poems that fit into his ballet scenario. Petronius’s first poem warns against female vice: “Trust your boat to the wind, but do not trust your soul to the maiden,” tenors and basses sing in unison in the first canto. Pentadius’s lines stir the direction of sexual desire toward homosexual targets, honoring thus Plato’s Symposium, which Lourié compared later to Pushkin’s feast. In

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Lourié’s creation myth the first canto represents the creation of man, a human being unaware of himself or the beautiful creatures who populate the earth. The mainly unison, triadic male singing in constantly changing meter evokes “primitive,” unreflective, raw desire. The individual voice appears in the second canto, which brings forth the mythological Narcissus, whose reflection is not introspective but merely self-absorbed. An androgynous alto voice sings the melody, giving lyrical utterance to self-love. In the rich orchestral texture, oboes, oboe d’amore, English horn, and violins bring softness, while brass, harps, celesta, and harpsichords lend brightness to the sound. First a bass voice takes over the solo, then the chorus enters accompanied by gradually thickening orchestral texture. Narcissus’s ecstasy, which can be read as both erotic and creative, is accompanied by enormous masses of sound: bursts of ornate, intertwining vocal lines are combined with several layers of ostinatos in the orchestra, producing overwhelming textures that receive rhythmic pulse from rapid, repeated chords in the horns toward the end of the movement (ex. 6.2). The next canto has only three lines of text, by Ausonius, about Hylas, fair companion of Heracles, who was led astray by water nymphs and who is replaced with Narcissus in the ballet. Among the canti, the third brings the most extreme sensory overload. It is an orgy of sound, produced first by the sharply dissonant, homophonic fortissimo singing of the chorus, which is accompanied by onemeasure-long, densely packed ostinatos in the oboes, strings, harpsichords, double bass, and harps. The climax in textural density comes after the chorus withdraws and the orchestra takes over in faster tempo. Rhythmically intricate fanfares sound above layers of ostinatos, tremolo strings, trilling harpsichord, and timpani pounding sixteenth notes, never lowering the dynamic level below fortissimo. The last canto, “In puerum formosum,” is tamer and more gentle. The dynamic level drops to piano, and the thick mass of sound is replaced by breezy arpeggiating harps and harpsichords and trilling oboes that accompany the male chorus. They sing about the beauty of the “adorable boy, almost maiden,” who is Narcissus reborn in the form of Plato’s restored androgyne. Thus born, the androgyne prefigures the poet, whose consciousness awakens during the next number, the instrumental “Tempo di Marcia.” The poet’s task, as Lourié writes in the ballet’s long scenario, is to “penetrate the mysterious connections between the visible and invisible, spirit and material, dream and reality,” to represent “the double nature of the Universe, which is destruction and creation, sleep and activity, night and day.” Male desire, neutralized or extinguished in the androgyne, is replaced by a higher mission in the poet. Lourié’s “Tempo di Marcia,” which accompanies the transformation of the free but ignorant human being into a conscious creator, is not a conventional march: 4 alternates with 3 and 5 and forward moving, accented quarter notes, half 4 4 4 notes, and dotted rhythms in the brass backed by eighth-note walking bass are interrupted by espressivo, lyrical meditations in the oboe d’amore and solo violin.

example 6.2. Thickening texture in the second canto in Lourié’s Feast (vocal score).

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The lyric insertion also serves as the F-major secondary theme in a sonata form that, in Stravinskyesque fashion, lacks development, relying on juxtaposition and variation to articulate its form. Lourié borrowed the movement from his 1926 Suite for String Quartet, in which it was designated as “Hymn.”88 Despite its nondevelopmental formal principles, Lourié’s “Tempo di Marcia” is the site of transformation in the context of the opera. It fosters dramatically and psychologically significant change—as the scenario indicates, “the awakening of the poet’s consciousness.” The man who appears from chaos in Lourié’s Feast slowly evolves from the general concept of man through the self-aware Narcisuss and the self-contained androgyne into the self-conscious poet. The progression is reminiscent of the Symbolist passage toward revelation or, in Vyacheslav Ivanov’s term, porïv (breakthrough). As Stravinsky applied the surface gestures of eighteenthcentury music to create something contrary to that music’s basic principles, Lourié reinterpreted Stravinsky’s neoclassical technique—meant to generate nonnarrative, static forms—as a means to Symbolist revelation. Stravinsky’s shadow lurks especially behind the last number of the first act in Lourié’s Feast, the setting of Petrarch’s “Dialogue of Two Fortunes.” Whereas in his discarded draft Stravinsky used the text to experiment with the setting of old French, Lourié relied on the original Latin for his “Dialogue.” Although an afterthought, Petrarch’s text fits into the scenario of the Feast. Lourié considered it to be a “lyric commentary” on the spectacle of the first act and also a “revelation of the symbolism of the whole work.”89 In the dialogue, Petrarch contrasts the unreflective pleasure of the allegorical figure “Joy,” who “delights” in music, “enjoys” it, and is “soothed” by its sound with “Reason,” who argues that pleasure’s only function is to distract from the approaching pain. Better to move from sadness to happiness than from joy to tears and sighs, he warns. Reason quotes Proverbs that “rejoicing may end in grief ” and that “the spirit is lifted before it falls” (Prov. 14:13 and 16:18). The sweetest song is the swan’s, sung right before its death. The contrast between the roles of Joy and Reason, between unreflective pleasure and self-consciousness that cannot take pleasure in anything because it cannot ignore the end, is a medieval version of the contrast between the feast and the plague, pleasure and death, Eros and Thanatos. The proximity of death in the plague-ridden city serves as a constant reminder that life’s pleasures have to be savored while they last. Juxtaposing pleasure and pain prepares the mind for the confrontation with the elemental, as Tsvetayeva would see it, or with reality, as Lourié argues in his analysis of Pushkin’s Feast. Focusing on prosody, Stravinsky’s setting of Reason’s words is fairly monotonous, its rhythm consisting mainly of eighth notes occasionally lengthened to quarter or dotted quarter notes.90 The melody moves in a narrow range, a Dorian tetrachord, familiar from Stravinsky’s Russian style. In obvious contrast, he sets Joy’s lines in a higher register and a wider range, and adorns it with frequent sixteenth-note melismas. Lourié sharpens the contrast between the two allegorical

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figures and assigns stereotypical gender roles to them: female for the lines of unreflective Joy and male for those of reflective Reason, each represented by a chorus in Lourié’s antiphonal setting.91 The four-part women’s chorus in 45 sings the words of Joy with exuberant, wide-ranging melismas, their voices intertwined in contrary motion, accompanied by a four-part trumpet chorale (ex. 6.3). Lourié switches to four-part men’s chorus in 44 for Reason’s lines, which he accompanies with three trombones and a tuba. He assigns the lines about the swan’s song to the tenors only, joined for the last line by the basses singing in parallel octaves. He adds a timpani ostinato to the trombone accompaniment and punctuates it with bass drum, creating an uncanny, dark soundscape that brings the apocalypse into closer proximity (ex. 6.4). The poet, born of chaos, matures as he dances between joy and pain that “appear to him with their retinue of Masques in the form of the two Fortunes,” as the ballet’s scenario describes the scene. Joy and pain, joy and reason, feast and plague, life’s pleasure and death’s threat, these are the poles between which the poet creates his art. The presence of reason brings balance and logic into the inherently mysterious act of artistic creation. In principle, reason should be Apollonian, clarifying. Yet the ending of Petrarch’s Dialogue in the opera, while giving the final word to reason, is dark and threatening. The poet’s role is not to side with reason and deny pleasure, but to embrace both, uniting thus Eros and Thanatos, pleasure and pain, unreflective ecstasy and self-aware revelation. According to Tsvetayeva, it is Pushkin’s “Hymn to the Plague,” the utterance of the poetic genius overtaken by a demon, that makes such unity possible. Lourié’s take on the “Hymn to the Plague” is different from that of Tsvetayeva. For him the poetic voice is less personal and more communal, which allows him to end his Feast differently from Pushkin. P U SH K I N ’ S F E A ST

Pushkin’s first appearance in the form of a light duet at the beginning of the second act is modest. The little four-line poem eases the listener into Russian diction with music familiar from nineteenth-century Russian music. The duet also establishes the pattern of the act: Pushkin’s original texts are sung, while his translations of Wilson’s play, all diligently written into the score, are only “interpreted by the choreography” except for short choral insertions that respond “to the danced and not the spoken” soliloquy.92 Mary’s song on Pushkin’s original text serves as a test case for the musical representation of Pushkin. Lourié’s setting, the style of which stands somewhat outside the musical language of the opera, emphasizes the song’s sentimentality. Introduced by harp arpeggios and espressivo woodwinds, the song evokes both angelic singing and the pastoral, transporting us from the plague-ridden city to the green hills of Scotland. The characteristic initial melodic phrase is reminiscent

example 6.3. Joy’s “I’m soothed by singing” from Petrarch’s “Dialogue” (vocal score).

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example 6.4. Timpani and trombones in the lines of Reason in Petrarch’s “Dialogue” (full score, Lourié Coll.).

of the folk song “Along the Road to Piter,” used by Stravinsky in the “Dances of the Nursemaids” in Petrushka. Gently descending melodic lines, wide range, and soring sixths bring lyrical relief to the generally dark tone of the opera (ex. 6.5). The “Hymn to the Plague,” the other original text by Pushkin in the Feast, stands in stark contrast to Mary’s song. Lourié’s rendition of Pushkin’s central text also shows that despite their shared approval of Pushkin’s interpolation, his and Tsvetayeva’s interpretations differ significantly. For Tsvetayeva, Walsingham’s “Hymn to the Plague” is a supremely personal poetic utterance. Lourié also gives a central role to the hymn, but he downplays its personal ramifications. Unlike Pushkin, he gives no name to the master of ceremonies. Even more significantly, as if fearing that the hymn could become an excessively individualistic statement, he assigns most of its text to the chorus, thus turning Pushkin’s individual, philosophical utterance into a communal expression. In the first strophe about winter, Lourié specifies that the chairman’s part is to be sung by the basses of the chorus. The arrival of “the fearsome Queen, the plague”

example 6.5. First page of Mary’s song (vocal score).

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in the second strophe is announced mysteriously by whispering basses and tenors, reciting the text first on one note, then on chromatically expanding lines, accompanied mostly by chromatically descending ninth chords. As the desperate questions “But where to turn? Where summon aid?” sound, chromaticism takes over: the chorus divides first into four then into eight parts, all singing chromatically ascending and descending tetrachords (ex. 6.6).The next strophe preserves the chromatic texture as the chorus bursts into praising “the reign of Empress Pest.” The next two strophes about “rapture found in storm and strife” are the most frequently quoted from Pushkin’s Feast. Tsvetayeva’s discussion of Walsingham is built entirely on these twelve lines, and she also brings them up in her essay on Pushkin and Pugachev, penned in 1937. Pushkin raises the volume of the poem as images of pleasant indoor feasting in winter give way to vast vistas of battlefields, raging oceans, stormy waves, and desert hurricanes. Tsvetayeva argues that although Pushkin’s list of devastating elemental forces in the fourth strophe is incomplete, he makes sure that he includes “all that threatens to destroy” by repeating the word “all” (vsyo) at the beginning of the next strophe.93 Lourié chooses this moment to bring forward an individual voice by assigning these strophes to a solo bass. The fourth strophe, sung in dignified cut time, molto appassionato and cantabile, comes closest to an opera aria. The vocal line preserves vestiges of chromaticism, but it also opens up the range into more triadic melodies, which bring momentary tonal clarity over the bass’s chromatic descent. Instead of sounding the elemental, Lourié gives lyrical, almost sentimental expression to these dark lines (ex. 6.7). The tone softens even more in the next strophe. The military background supplied by the bass drum and brass disappears; flute, harp, and celesta brighten the sound as the voice returns to a mellower, lighter beat in 38, the meter of the first strophe. Lourié repeats the entire strophe transposed a major second higher. The power of uplift does not end here. For the last strophe the chorus returns, bringing back the music of the first strophe, transposed a minor second higher and sung now by the entire chorus. Not quite yet a catharsis, but a communal acceptance of fate. EVO K I N G T H E C R O S S

The sharpest contrast between Tsvetayeva’s and Lourié’s conception of Pushkin’s Feast is Lourié’s incorporation of Christian hymns at the end of his opera, his warding off “the plague with signs of the Cross,” which for Tsvetayeva would have been a complete misrepresentation of Pushkin’s intention. Tsvetayeva insisted that in Pushkin’s play there is no “counterweight to Walsingham’s ‘Hymn,’ ” no “antidote to the plague.” For her this lack of prayer, this intentional unbalance is the Feast’s strongest pull. Had Pushkin written a counter-hymn, she argues, “the work would have been stabilized, and we satisfied, from which no increase of good would have come; for by slaking our thirst for a counter-hymn Pushkin would

example 6.6. Eight-part chromatic texture in the “Hymn to the Plague” (vocal score).

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example 6.7. Bass solo line in the “Hymn to the Plague” (vocal score).

have extinguished it.” Yet she also admitted that the prayer that Pushkin denied us is still somehow unavoidably there, although “outside, as the place we not only aspire to but are thrown back to; the place to which the plague throws us back.”94 In his Feast, Lourié composes out this “unavoidable” implicit prayer in the form of two evening hymns, both coming from the monastic hour Compline in the Roman Catholic liturgy: the hymn “Te lucis ante terminum” (To Thee before the close of day), thought to be an Ambrosian text from the seventh century, and “Nunc dimittis” (Now you may dismiss), the Canticle of Simeon from the Gospel of Luke, which frequently serves to conclude the service. These liturgical numbers were reorchestrations of Lourié’s 1929 Deux prières du soir, originally for three tenors, oboe, and two double basses, to which Lourié added a pitchless speaking bass part and English horn in “Te lucis” and thickened the texture with trombones,

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harpsichords, and timpani in “Nunc dimittis.”95 “Te lucis ante terminum,” which is a choral setting of the original melody of the Gregorian hymn, accompanies the procession of penitents who appear on stage right after Walsingham’s “Hymn to the Plague,” providing precisely the “counter-hymn,” the lack of which Tsvetayeva so exuberantly celebrated in her essay. Whereas Mary’s sentimental song had to be, as it were, cancelled by the intrusion of harsh reality (the appearance of the death cart), the brutally realistic “Hymn to the Plague” opens the gate to a space beyond Pushkin’s drama where salvation is possible after all. Lourié assigns the Gregorian tune to three tenors, moving their lines mainly in fauxbourdon-like parallel motion with occasional dissonances. Their singing is shadowed by the basses’ monotone spoken recitation of the text, a technique Lourié had already used in his Concerto spirituale (and Stravinsky would use later in his Requiem canticles). An ostinato for double bass accompanies the voices, chromatically descending from tonic to dominant like a lament bass, with the oboe and English horn paraphrasing the Gregorian tune in gentle melodic phrases. As the procession moves forward, the rhythmic density of the double bass part increases, the oboe lines become more ornate, and, in the last verse, in which the dynamic rises to forte, the timpani and bass drum join in to give emphasis to off-beat eighth notes. In what had already become a routine for Lourié, this last part leaves behind the bass’s chromaticism and replaces it with white-note diatonicism, with occasional Bas, as is characteristic of Gregorian melodies. Musically the hymn is a process of purification, a catharsis, which prepares the stage for the appearance of the priest who steps out of the procession to censure the revelers’ sacrilegious feast. For Pushkin, as Tsvetayeva observed, the only function of the priest is to “enter” and to “leave.”96 By musically and dramatically preparing his entrance, Lourié engages more closely with the priest’s message of salvation (ex. 6.8). This engagement does not mean that Lourié treats the text of the unnamed priest any differently than the other texts by Wilson. In Pushkin’s play the priest does not sing, nor does he provide a prayer or a counter-hymn. He does what priests do: he condemns the godless feast, evokes hell to frighten the revelers, and pleads with them in the name of Christ. His most effective appeal to the chairman, the calling of his deceased’s wife’s blessed spirit, is not enacted in dance or music: the text is tucked in the corner of the page under a long fermata in the score. His vocal power already exhausted in the “Hymn to the Plague,” the chairman does not respond in song. But the call arouses tender feelings and personal expression, manifested not in song but in the expressive string texture accompanying the wordless declamation of a solo violin (ex. 6.9). In Lourié’s interpretation, the dialogue between the priest and the chairman turns the dialogue between Joy and Reason into a more engaged exchange. Now it is the priest who represents reason and the chairman who sides with pleasure. His pleasure seeking, however, is not unreflective or blind. He casts himself out

example 6.8. Excerpt from verse 3 in Lourié’s setting of “Te lucis ante terminum” (full score).

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example 6.9. Expressive string texture with solo violin in the scene with the priest (full score).

consciously, judging that he has no alternative. Yet, toward the end, some light penetrates the darkness. The priest’s lines evoke heaven with flute, harps, and celesta. He arrives with penitents who sing about the last rays of daylight (“Te lucis ante terminum”). Mathilda’s name serves as a reminder of the continued existence of a “blessed light,” still visible, although beyond the chairman’s reach. The last hymn, which accompanies the chairman’s meditations, is also about “a light to the revelation of the Gentiles,” the promise of the Messiah. For the second procession, Lourié does not rely on chant. While reminiscent of chant, the melody is his own. It moves largely in the narrow range of a Dorian tetrachord, which Lourié extends to an octave in its second phrase. Lourié harmonizes this tune sung by the first tenor in four parts, adding a second tenor and two bass parts. Three trombones double the voices, providing support and a sense of a ritualistic, ecclesiastical aural space. He adds divided double basses and timpani to this ensemble, and highly ornamented lines in the four oboes and two harpsichords. In this procession, Lourié reconciles the restraint of liturgical music and

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the exuberance of melismatic singing, familiar from the lines of Joy in Petrarch’s “Dialogue” in the first act of the opera. Pushkin’s translation of Wilson makes two significant departures at the end of the scene. In Wilson’s original the chairman puts a curse on himself if he follows the priest (“But curst be these feet if they do follow thee”), which Pushkin translates with the less specific “But curst be all who follow thee.”97 Even more tellingly, Pushkin adds “The Master of Revels remains, lost in deep thought” to Wilson’s instruction, “the Priest walks mournfully away”—an addition, which, like the last stage direction at the end of Boris Godunov (“The people are silent”), introduces ambiguity. As Pushkin scholars suggest, the little line serves as a mysterious, additional act that “constitutes the true tragic space of each of Pushkin’s experimental ‘little tragedies.’ ”98 For Tsvetayeva, the ending of Pushkin’s Feast is unambiguous: we know that Walsingham cannot be saved and he is “long since upon the black cart.”99 Only poetry, in its engagement with the elemental, survives. Tsvetayeva is uninterested in the potential salvation Mathilda’s memory can bring. Walsingham calls her “a blessed child of light,” acknowledging the power of the name that served as the name of the “radiant lady” in Dante’s Purgatory, in which Mathilda guided the poet to both the river Lethe and the river Eunoë, one erasing evil memories, the other reviving the memory of virtuous deeds.100 What is Walsingham thinking at the end of the play? Does he finally find solace, is he quietly retracting his blasphemous “Hymn to the Plague” in the hope for salvation? Does his soul depart with the priest, leaving only the shell of his body to continue feasting on life’s ephemeral pleasures? Pushkin’s mysterious instruction, which Lourié reproduced in his various libretti, provides no answer. The priest, enacting his parting words (“Farewell, my son”) in dance, departs, his last gesture quietly resonating for five more measures in the expressive strings and the woodwinds. His figure dissolves in the procession, the words of which linger on with the promise of future salvation. Walsingham, or the chairman as Lourié calls him in the opera, does not remain on stage. He was, after all, not the main character of the drama in Lourié’s version. At the end of his dialogue with the priest he abandons his role as an entertainer and leaves the company of friends to return to the improvised stage in the ruined house, where he disappears from view.101 Like Simeon in the canticle on which the second procession is based, he can be dismissed (“Now Thou does dismiss Thy servant, O Lord, according to Thy word in peace; Because my eyes have seen Thy salvation”). But what was the salvation that he saw, what was the vision that enabled him to depart in peace? In Lourié’s opera-ballet, the musical space of mystery, which takes the place of Pushkin’s enigmatic, metaphorical act, is no more communicative than Walsingham’s losing himself in thought. The last music we hear in the Feast is a “Sinfonia finale,” another procession in 44. Lourié uses the word “sinfonia” in its old meaning, indicating that he means not an overture or the heroic tonal process of

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example 6.10. Dynamic and textural climax in the fourth variation of the “Sinfonia finale”

(vocal score).

classical symphonies, but a conflict-free sounding together in harmony. The musical process, a series of seven variations, is adamantly nonteleological. The first motive, which serves as the eternal, unalterable truth, a religious dogma of sorts, is announced with the same confidence at the beginning of every variation, but the rest is less stable. Elements from previous versions occur in all of them, but there is no sense of moving from simple to more complex or from bare to ornate versions. There are no accidentals at all in the “Sinfonia.” It unfolds in white-key purity, its melodic gestures completely oblivious of tonal obligations, functioning thus in a more modal than tonal space. Maritain might have called this the space of “white” or “sacred” magic, which, he believed, had “its source in the unutterable desires of the Holy Ghost” and which he heard in Gregorian chant.102 Already in the fourth variation the dynamic range reaches its climax as the main motive is shouted out fortissimo with the full force of the orchestra (ex. 6.10). The climax reached, the music retreats into another realm. The volume drops again (subito piano), the brass disappear, their place taken by gentle harps, strings (playing con sordino), and the heavenly celesta. Any crescendo that threatens a new burst of aggression is quickly silenced by subito pianos that lift us, at the end, into white diatonicism frozen into a concluding diatonic aggregate chord. Have we reached heaven, without effort? Or is this the sonorous body of light as promised before the day is over in the two Latin hymns? Or the “tranquil wings of death” that, according to Maritain, the feasting youth saw rising over them in Lourié’s opera?103 In the ballet’s long scenario, after the departure of the priest the geometrical structure of the theater constructed on the stage in the first act gradually disappears. The street, scene of the feast, also vanishes, and in its place a nocturnal

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starry sky reflected on the earth appears. The poet, renouncing life, transfigures the scene. Like Narcissus in the first act, he is attracted to the stars, but now it is not self-love that draws him to the new vision but the “universality of the world.” Passionately giving himself to the starry abyss, he perishes in it.104 Whatever the final vision, its achievement came as a result of reading Pushkin’s text sincerely, and recognizing its dark, elemental power. Lourié’s deliverer, at least in the context of the Feast, is Pushkin, a poet who, Lourié believed, through his brave acceptance of reality and rejection of Romantic falsehoods, allowed what Maritain heard in Lourié’s music as “the progressive stripping and sharpening of intuition.”105 •

•

•

Lourié’s A Feast in Time of Plague is a complex specimen of the genre “My Pushkin.” It draws on conventional tropes of Pushkin reception, but it also reads the poet’s work in the thick context of accumulated layers of Russian culture. Instead of trying to peel back Pushkin’s image to an idealized early nineteenth century, to Apollonian clarity, Western orientation, aristocratic decorum, and universal reach, as other emigrant narratives tried to do, it integrates Pushkin into a specifically Russian postrevolutionary and French postwar cultural space. Like the French neoclassical movement in music that claimed to return to the eighteenth century in order to cancel the nineteenth century and its Romantic debris and perform a ritualistic purification after World War I, for most emigrants Pushkin served as a vehement reaffirmation of a national identity that deemphasized the later nineteenth century in order to disconnect its Dionysian dark forces from the violence of the Russian Revolution. Lourié’s Pushkin image was different: it was less ideologically driven, less straightforward, and more accepting of the potentially dark implications of Pushkin’s text. Lourié appealed to a Pushkin-Apollo who still had the ancient savagery and could thus communicate with “the shadows of the human depths,” as Maritain understood them.106 Sabaneyev, who saw Pushkin as a classical figure, thought that the Symbolists lacked the classical luminosity of Pushkin.107 He may have been right, but he mistook his own nostalgia for Apollonian clarity for the real Pushkin. It is no accident that the newly “classicized” Pushkin received such a warm welcome in Paris, and that the poet’s aristocratic “classicism” was so insistently repressed in Stalinist Russia, where he swiftly metamorphosed into the harbinger of Dionysian revolutionary revelry. Lourié, who was incapable of shedding outmoded past convictions as he yielded to more fashionable trends, created a Pushkin much like himself: weighted down by the Silver Age, Revolution, civil war, and ultimately the effects of exile. His god was the radiant Apollo bringing clarity, but also the mad Dionysus who wrought havoc, if for no other reason than to make revelation possible. Lourié’s Pushkin is not a revolutionary. Neither is he a pure, golden figure, steeped in nostalgia. He is an infinitely expandable repository of cultural traits,

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Eastern and Western, Russian and European, classical and Romantic, at once an elemental force that threatens darkness and an angelic messenger who brings the promise of light. In Lourié’s vision he could assimilate everything, including the seemingly antithetical universal language of Latin and Catholicism and the mystical Symbolism of Lourié’s youth. He was indeed “our all,” as Apollon Grigoriev had said in 1859, but he was no longer easily comprehensible.108 Despite incorporating this “all,” Lourié’s Pushkin, like the composer himself, became unintelligible, his Latin uttered with too heavy a Russian accent. Lourié’s Feast presents this newly assembled Pushkin. In the opera-ballet, elements of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, such as nondevelopmental forms and static ostinatos, are still present, but despite the opera’s mythological backdrop, Lourié’s Feast does not resemble Stravinsky’s almost contemporaneous Persephoné. It speaks the language of Symbolism, which tends toward the mystical and the ecstatic, appearing first as erotic tension, then as creative, poetic exuberance, and ultimately as religious transcendence. Christianity tames somewhat the Dionysian, elemental force, but the desire to achieve a potential porïv is felt constantly under the surface. Lourié’s inability to leave behind Symbolism is nostalgic. But his nostalgia is not wholly retrospective, for it does not aim to recreate the past. Instead, it draws on it as if it had never passed. Neither neoclassical, nor nostalgically Romantic, nor yielding to the Bolshevik temptation, Lourié’s Feast is something of an anomaly. Yet no other work demonstrates so clearly the inherent problems of the betwixt and between cultural space of emigration. Its most understanding audience already dead, its ideal cultural environment in ruin, Feast was created in a cultural vacuum, which ultimately became an inescapable attribute of emigrant art. Daring to revisit Russia on the verge of the Revolution, the Feast was overburdened by the past and thus was artistically incoherent. Lourié’s attempt at celebrating a culture that could have been was ultimately a failure, which was also a sadly accurate display of the emigrant experience. For moving successfully in the emigrant space, one needed to travel with lighter baggage—ideally, one needed to be able to abandon one’s baggage altogether.

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Epilogue or Firebird to Phoenix Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change. The phoenix renews her youth only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down to hot and flocculent ash. Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest with strands of down like floating ash shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle, immortal bird. d. h. lawrence, 1932

In his unpublished monograph on Stravinsky, Nicolas Nabokov wondered about what he called his famous contemporary’s “Phoenixoidal” nature, which he attributed to the “egocentric necessity” of Stravinsky’s genius. “It makes me think of European politics of the seventeenth century in which alliances changed abruptly and vehemently and where a Protestant prince of Germany would suddenly find himself overnight an ally of the Catholic League,” he wrote.1 Nabokov’s comparison was not extreme, considering that Stravinsky, a vocal critic of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, had suddenly converted to the previously despised creed. As Vladimir Dukelsky, by that time calling himself Vernon Duke for more than two decades, wrote in 1964 in an unusually malicious appraisal of Stravinsky’s career, the composer of The Rake’s Progress “courageously freed himself of neoclassical chains to enter the Prison of Total Freedom—serialism.”2 Stravinsky’s last conversion removed him even further from the Russian musical community that had lost its geographical center in Paris at the end of the 1930s and now, with Stravinsky joining the twelve-tone camp, also lost the lodestar around which many emigrant Russian composers had orbited.

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Stravinsky’s cutting his ties from the “Frivolous Twenties” seems to have been a calculated move. According to Nabokov, Stravinsky cast out most of his former friends, reminders of “those years of insecurity,” relegating them either to the “[pig]pen of enemies,” as he had done already in the 1930s with Arthur Lourié, who, Nabokov reports, was discarded like “a used engagement book,” or turning away from them in indifference. Even the faithful who remained close to him— Nabokov names Nadia Boulanger, Vittorio Rieti, and himself, but one can add, among others, George Balanchine and Pyotr Suvchinsky to the list—tiptoed carefully around the great old man, avoiding discussion of the composer’s new aesthetics.3 At least for some, Stravinsky’s latest “Phoenixoidal” rebirth seems to have succeeded at burning his Russian past to ashes, and together with it his Parisian Russian years and the memory of his musical associates. This personal holocaust, Duke wrote bitterly, allowed only one survivor, Stravinsky himself, who dedicated the rest of his life “to one cause alone—The Stravinsky Cause.”4 Stravinsky’s ego, or as his admirers liked to say, his genius, broke national boundaries, and thus discussing the American Stravinsky as a representative of Russian music came to require much more abstract reasoning than reinterpreting his neoclassicism as essentially Russian, a feat Boris de Schloezer had achieved decades earlier. In what follows I sort out the loosening ties that connected Russian composers abroad to Stravinsky’s whimsical persona and discuss the intellectual tour de force, initiated by Suvchinsky’s explanation of Stravinsky’s seemingly neutral anti-expressive aesthetics as a morally responsible representation of real time, required to keep the nationally estranged Stravinsky in the Russian fold. This specific perception of time, which was shaped in exile, also helped congeal Stravinsky’s protean aesthetics in the timelessness of classicism. D E PA RT U R E S A N D C O N F R O N TAT IO N S

Leonid Sabaneyev was right when he predicted a short life span for the Russian musical diaspora. But what put an end to Russian music in Paris was not musicians’ return to their homeland (except, of course, Prokofiev’s ill-fated homecoming) or their assimilation to French culture. Most protagonists of this book took a third route by choosing a second exile, moving to the United States to try their luck in a less coherent and more unpredictable cultural environment. Dukelsky was the first to leave Europe behind. With his family already in the United States and with hope for a second beginning, he boarded the ship Laconia on June 22, 1929, to New York. A two-week vacation turned into a prolonged and then permanent stay when it turned out that rehearsals for the musical Make Hay (later renamed Open Your Eyes) were postponed in London. Diaghilev’s death on August 29, 1929, dispelled all illusions about his continued career possibilities on the Continent. Diaghilev’s Europe, the one Dukelsky cherished, died with the impresario.5 With Diaghilev

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gone, Dukelsky felt free to transform himself more fully into a Broadway composer, pursuing a more lucrative career. His Russian past, still reverberating in his name, poetry, and occasional ventures on the classical side, slowly faded, especially after he changed his name permanently to Vernon Duke in 1939. The next to depart was Nicolas Nabokov. As he later remembered, he decided to leave France “because one needed to find, somewhere, a place to eat.”6 He left on August 9, 1933, on board the SS De Grasse, to fulfill his contract with Albert C. Barnes, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur and art collector who was willing to pay Nabokov an acceptable salary for a few lectures at his foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, on aesthetic trends in music and the visual arts.7 After the Merion engagement Nabokov cycled through a few teaching positions, one of the options he listed as a way out for a “gifted and striving” young composer who could not make a living by composition alone. The other options were conducting; writing film or incidental music for theaters; working in radio in an advisory capacity; or balancing the composition of both “popular and serious music,” which, he argued, using Duke as an example, never succeeds because “sooner or later, and usually sooner than later, the popular, more lucrative stuff gets the upper hand.”8 He also considered but dismissed the option of earning money as an arranger, teacher, or music critic. Lacking independent means, the best solution would have been for him to find a patron to finance his compositional career. As none of these options was available to him, Nabokov invented another career for himself and turned into a cultural impresario, cashing in on his aristocratic upbringing that provided him with fluency in four languages, erudition, high-society connections, organizational skills, and, last but not least, a vehemently anti-Soviet political stance. As Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, he launched lavish festivals in Europe after World War II in order to lure Western intellectuals back from the temptations of Communism. Diaghilev would have been ecstatic to have had Nabokov’s seemingly limitless funding, which, as it turned out, came largely from the CIA.9 In his new role as cultural ambassador, Nabokov had the opportunity to move into the close circle of Stravinsky’s friends in the United States. In Paris, his relationship with “the gracious master” had had its ups and downs. Their first falling out had concerned Stravinsky’s defense of Lourié against Nabokov’s hostility, so it gratified Nabokov greatly that in 1947, while he was working for Voice of America and helped, at Koussevitzky’s request, to arrange a job for the penniless Lourié, Stravinsky refused to visit Nabokov in his offices on West 57th Street because he did not want to run into his former confidant.10 Stravinsky was also cross with Nabokov in Paris because the latter could not properly praise Apollon musagète after its premiere in 1928. Even worse, Stravinsky turned “apoplectic” when, in an impassioned obituary for Diaghilev, Nabokov suggested that Diaghilev “supplied the original idea and influenced” Stravinsky’s creation of Petrushka and Les Noces.11 Stravinsky published an angry rebuttal in La musique, accusing Nabokov of not

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knowing his facts. Although a month later he “forgave” the young composer as a gesture of Christian reconciliation, the two remained estranged until a chance encounter in New York in 1937.12 Nabokov established his status in Stravinsky’s life with an obsequious article on the composer in Partisan Review in 1944.13 Having arrived to the United States in 1939, Stravinsky still felt insecure and needed champions. He had no regrets about leaving Europe. In the nine months before his departure, he had lost his daughter, his wife, and his mother, burying them in close succession in the Russian cemetery in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, south of Paris. “My house, my family is destroyed— I no longer have anything to do in Paris,” he reported from a sanatorium, where he was being treated for tuberculosis.14 His health and family shattered, his European concert venues dried up, Stravinsky had no choice but to accept Harvard University’s offer, brokered by Boulanger, to be the first musician to occupy the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry and give a series of lectures, later published as Poetics of Music. Nabokov’s article, which pleased Stravinsky tremendously, touched his most sensitive nerve, namely, the question of whether he had “fulfilled his promise” or whether his creative powers had declined since his “Russian period.” Was Stravinsky a “good Russian composer with Parisian overtones who has outlived his time?” The question, according to Nabokov, presupposes that “the presence of national characteristics is not only an asset but a necessary virtue of musical art.” If music is supposed to represent national culture, Stravinsky’s turn to neoclassicism might be seen as “a perverse aberration, designed to camouflage the decline of his creative powers, his loss of confidence and national deracination.” Indeed, neoclassicism did make some critics view Stravinsky as a less progressive composer, especially compared to his older contemporary, Arnold Schoenberg. Nabokov defended Stravinsky valiantly if sophistically, asserting the empty praise that Stravinsky’s neoclassical music “is consistent with his former genius” and his new style is “quite as ‘radical’ as it was at the time of the Rites [sic] of Spring.”15 His return to traditional form was a sign of his craftsmanship, which did not negate his concern for continuous renewal, Nabokov argued. It was much harder for Nabokov to digest Stravinsky’s turn to twelve-tone composition. As he confessed in “The Gracious Master,” he was “unable to acquire and exercise even to an infinitesimal degree” Stravinsky’s “Phoenix-like gifts of change and rebirth without betraying” his own “Russian ‘self.’ ” Ironically, as he became closer to Stravinsky as a friend and as an agent of his music, he found himself promoting the kind of music he least understood, music whose structural devices and style “were the most remote” from all Stravinsky’s music that he instinctively comprehended. Nabokov understood that Stravinsky’s last conversion was brokered by the composer’s new “Figaro,” Robert Craft (1923–2015), a young and ambitious conductor who took over Stravinsky’s affairs at the end of the 1940s. With Craft,

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Nabokov felt that he could occupy only second place in his relationship with Stravinsky, yielding his position to one who was ready to sacrifice his own career in order to become Stravinsky’s “familial adjunct,” friend, colleague, mentor, and executor of his will. Craft, Nabokov wrote, quickly learned that Stravinsky needed to be “in the forefront of the ‘avant-garde,’ ” to “dominate any given style and technique,” and accomplished what Nabokov considered to be the “extraordinary feat” of not only making Stravinsky understand and respect serial music, but actually adopt it for his own compositions. Stravinsky’s statements in the thirties—namely, that serial composition inevitably leads to atonality, that atonality is “disorder, while art is order,” and that “music must have a root, a center, a gravitational pole”—were forgotten. Stravinsky also seems to have failed to recall how annoyed he was with European composers who lost themselves in the dead end of serialism and gave up their freedom to play with music. Nabokov recognized that becoming a serial composer gave Stravinsky the “invigorating feeling of being a new leader, if only in an illusory fashion, of the young, post-war generation of composers,” who gradually replaced Stravinsky’s old Russian friends in the composer’s orbit.16 The replacement definitely hurt Russian sensitivities. Even the faithful Nabokov struggled to give fair treatment to Craft in his monograph. Hardest to digest was Stravinsky’s remaking of his past in the first three volumes of conversations with Craft, published between 1959 and 1962.17 To avoid jeopardizing his warm relations with Stravinsky, Nabokov refused to read the first volume Stravinsky gave him. “I read a few pages and then closed the book and stopped reading,” he reported. Instead of Stravinsky’s “voice” he heard Craft’s who, by assimilating Stravinsky’s thoughts, ideas, and statements, “ ‘Bobicized’ them. It was a bit like reading a speech-writer’s speech for an American president.”18 Although he must have been aware that Stravinsky’s idiosyncratic language was unpublishable, Nabokov still missed the composer’s English that displayed Russian, French, and German semantics and thus was demonstrably the language of a Russian emigrant. He defended his rejection of the book to Stravinsky by telling the composer that he wanted to preserve his own memories about the master. But clearly in the co-authored books there was, for Nabokov, more lost than Stravinsky’s emigrant tongue. Duke, who did not have the privilege of being among Stravinsky’s friends and who steadfastly took Prokofiev’s side in the rivalry between Diaghilev’s first two “sons” even after Prokofiev’s death in 1953, reacted much more malevolently to the publication of the Stravinsky-Craft dialogues. Although interlaced with passages of foxy humility, the three Stravinsky-Craft volumes, reflecting as they do the Master’s “nervous and acid hates,” are a formidable chamber of horrors, Stravinsky emerging as possibly the most horripilating of them all. . . . Clearly, he is not the Grand but the Angry Old Man of Music: a passionately angry old man, at that, who “spits” on fellow composers—dead and living ones both—composers whose music also makes him want to vomit or scream.19

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His essay, “The Deification of Stravinsky,” originally a chapter in Duke’s volume of essays Listen Here (1963), also appeared in two installments in Listen in 1964 and solicited an equally malicious response from Stravinsky, published along with the second part of Duke’s article.20 Duke’s irritated, below-the-belt attack was a reaction to Stravinsky’s last betrayal of his Russian compatriots, as well as to his own failed career as a serious composer. Duke’s public condemnation of Stravinsky dealt a blow more to his own reputation than to Stravinsky’s. The two Russian composers’ unabashed backbiting added a sad, embarrassing epilogue to the history of Russian composers abroad. I evoke it here only because Duke’s offended feelings, however crudely expressed, would likely have been shared, as Nabokov’s reaction demonstrates, by others from Stravinsky’s former Russian circle. Duke was “grimly fascinated” by Stravinsky’s dialogues with Craft. Like Nabokov, he heard Craft’s voice too strongly and doubted that Stravinsky, whose English he called “notoriously poor,” could have fashioned the lengthy answers to Craft’s leading questions.21 He took offense at Stravinsky’s treatment of Russian composers; his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whom Stravinsky declared shallow both as a person and as a composer; and his former mentor Diaghilev, whom Stravinsky accused of selecting his choreographers according his own erotic interests.22 He was most upset by Stravinsky’s degrading appraisal of Prokofiev, whom Stravinsky dismissed as intellectually inferior (“the contrary of a musical thinker”) and “startlingly naïve in matters of musical construction.”23 Duke countered Stravinsky’s denigration of Prokofiev with statistics, citing 105 performances of 17 works in 1962, which Stravinsky could match only with 83 performances of 15 works. He interpreted Stravinsky’s attack on other composers as a sign of insecurity caused by the contrast between Stravinsky’s immense fame and the actual slimness of his musical portfolio. His deification by young American composers, he warned, “should cause us even more melancholy reflections on the future” of music in the United States.24 What may have sounded the most damaging for Stravinsky was Duke’s contention that the composer’s creative powers declined, that “not a single work of his after the superb Symphony of Psalms could by any stretch of anyone’s imagination . . . be called a lasting success,” and that “nothing from the composer’s pen created an effect comparable with those memorable early victories.” Experienced in the fickle world of popular music, Duke was ready to deliver the fatal blow on Stravinsky’s recent music: “For the past thirty-two years—1931–1963—Stravinsky’s music brought him fat dividends and meager applause,” or, he should have said, plenty of professional recognition but no popular success. Measuring success by the volume of the applause, Duke was not impressed with Stravinsky’s unexpected leadership in serial music. He thought that Stravinsky had turned to dodecaphony simply because he had grown “tired of rewriting the same piece for the last thirty years.” Like Sabaneyev before him, Duke attributed Stravinsky’s elevated status in the

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United States to the composer’s talent for self-promotion. Landed in the mecca of capitalism, Stravinsky, Duke asserted, profited greatly from his “inspired salesmanship and unfailing business acumen” that helped him exploit the financial opportunities in the United States.25 Stravinsky, famous for barbed and witty responses to attacks, responded to Duke’s “blasphemy” (as he called it) in kind, relying heavily on Craft in formulating his rebuttal, which, in the event, was more crude than witty. Taking his cue from Duke’s calling him A.O.M (Angry Old Man), he addressed Duke as V. D., titling his article “A Cure for V. D.,” crudely equating the composer with venereal disease.26 He attributed Duke’s animosity to the composer’s failure and jealousy, countering Duke’s accusation of his declining creative powers by calling him a bad, impotent composer in need of father figures to attack. “The spectacle of a bad composer going sour is not new,” he wrote, and that “the composer of Zéphyr et Flore became the composer of April in Paris [was] the very definition of the composer who fails and who, growing bitter and rebarbative, devotes his decline to Philistine diatribe.”27 He admitted that back in Paris he recommended Dukelsky’s music to Diaghilev, but in retrospect he withdrew his support and minimized his personal contact with his younger Russian colleague whose path, he claimed, crossed his only “briefly and ineffectually.” He expressed surprise to see Dukelsky wanting to join “the company of qualified chroniclers of those very exciting events in which he played so peripheral and insignificant a role.”28 He ended with an insult as petty as any of Duke’s, suggesting that Duke had provoked him in order to get a mention in one of his books. The second part of Duke’s article was printed alongside Stravinsky’s vitriolic response and thus could not address Stravinsky’s allegations. Duke dedicated this part to savoring the “inglorious flop” of Stravinsky’s Flood, describing it as the “only TV show within memory, wherein the commercials provided a welcome and soothing relief,” and to the volte-face of Stravinsky’s surprising visit to the Soviet Union, a country he deprecated for decades.29 But after reading Stravinsky’s response, Duke felt annoyed enough to send a six-page letter to Leonard Altman, editor of Listen, in which he countered point by point Stravinsky’s accusations and repeated his criticism of Stravinsky lacking in melodic invention. Stravinsky’s “kindergarten cracks re. ‘April in Paris,’ ” he wrote to Altman, “caused me to suspect that the Master would gladly give up flooding the music market with agonizing sounds if he but would write as good a tune.” In conclusion, he challenged Stravinsky to write a “really fetching melody” for a song “March in Moscow,” to which he volunteered to supply “a suitable lyric as a sincere tribute to his versatility.”30 Duke’s response remained unpublished, because after five issues Listen went out of business.31 Stravinsky’s closest associate of the Parisian years, Lourié, never denounced his former idol in public, expressing his changed feelings toward Stravinsky in private asides and in aesthetic debates. The first sign that his deeply held belief in Stravinsky’s genius and artistic mission was cracking was an article he published in Modern

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Music in 1929.32 The article concerned the nature of melody, its ethical and moral necessity, and its relationship to time, and could be read as a veiled critique of Stravinsky who, as Duke liked to emphasize, was no genius when it came to melodic invention. Lourié’s article on melody is one in a series of essays and books in France in the 1930s and 1940s that addresses the question of time in music and that uses Stravinsky to demonstrate a new perception of it. Lourié’s is the only argument, however, that questions the superiority of Stravinsky’s aesthetics. Of the protagonists of this book, only Lourié had a truly harrowing escape from Paris. Having no opportunities waiting for him in the United States and still hoping to produce his opera A Feast in Time of Plague in Paris, he waited too long to leave. Jewish by birth, his life was endangered by his dawdling, though he was obviously unaware of the risk at the time. Lourié fled with his third wife-to-be Ella, Countess Elizaveta Belevskaya-Zhukovskaya, who was the great-granddaughter of Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich, fourth son of Tsar Alexander II. First they went to Vichy, the destination for most who were escaping Paris. In Vichy, Lourié had to watch helplessly as the authorities began to expel people, 50 or 100 a day, giving the them 48 hours to prepare.33 His turn came on August 30. They traveled first to Aurillac, continuing to Marseille, where they experienced the refugees’ lot in the overcrowded, expensive city that was also hit by a flood. “These were the days of the greatest despair” he had ever experienced in his life, Lourié wrote to Raïssa Maritain.34 Acquiring a visa to the United States was no small feat. Applicants had to fit within the quotas available for countries of their birth and provide a series of documents, among them an affidavit proving the existence of family or friends who could provide financial support in the United States and a declaration of moral and political standing made by an American citizen, preferably somebody known in the American Consulate.35 Lourié received his visa on April 29, 1941. His sponsors were Sergey Koussevitzky, who assured the authorities that Lourié’s work was indispensable for him in the United States, and Cardinal Charles Journet, who helped with money and information.36 He arrived in New York on May 21, 1941, leaving behind Ella, whom Lourié had married before he left France. His first letter to her, sent a week after his arrival to New York, was assuring. His friend Jacques Maritain met him at the pier and took him immediately to his apartment on Fifth Avenue, where the three of them, Lourié, Maritain, and his wife Raïssa, had a happy reunion. Lourié moved into a two-room apartment in the same building and started to arrange Ella’s trip. He felt immediately at home in New York, a city that turned out to be quite different from what he expected. Despite its monumental buildings, it felt easy, elegant, and “full of mysterious vibrations.”37 Lourié hoped to find work and soon contacted Carl Engel, who immediately paid him 25 dollars to write an article for Musical Quarterly, and Koussevitzky, who offered to finance Ella’s transit from Lisbon.38

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Lourié’s hopes for success in the United States did not materialize. By 1942 he experienced a deep spiritual crisis that almost drove him to suicide. The Easter of 1942 brought relief, and he renewed his strong ties with Raïssa, his Catholic guide who, together with her husband, inspired many of their friends’ conversions and religious development. The Maritains never abandoned Lourié and believed not only in his art but also in his religious sincerity. “What helped me greatly,” the composer confided in Raïssa during a conversation on August 14, 1943, “and what saved me was that you and Jacques believed me immediately when I told you that I had received grace during the Easter week of 1942.”39 The Easter revelation brought him even closer to Raïssa.40 But his renewed commitment to the Maritains was broken when the couple moved to Rome in 1945, where Jacques became France’s ambassador to the Vatican. The departure of the Maritains left a vacuum in Lourié’s life. He found himself alone again, without his close friends and spiritual guides. Engel died in 1944 and Lourié complained to Schloezer that with him gone Musical Quarterly published only “academic trash.” Modern Music, another of his venues, ceased to exist in 1946. Always a snob, Lourié also stopped writing for Russian-language journals because he judged them so “provincial and miserable” that he felt embarrassed to see his name printed in them. He helped found an ecumenical journal, The Third Hour, in which he published a few articles, but it came out irregularly and had no place for discussions on art. By 1948 bitterness set in. He felt “like a shadow among people” with whom he had nothing in common.41 In 1948 he could still count on the support of Koussevitzky, who had regularly programmed his works with the Boston Symphony, programming the Symphony “Kormchaya” in 1941, his Suite from A Feast in Time of Plague in 1945, and his Concerto da camera in Tanglewood in 1948. In the same year Koussevitzky also commissioned an opera from Lourié. It took Lourié almost twenty years to complete the score of The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, his last, monumental tribute to Pushkin and his city, St. Petersburg. Lourié’s preoccupation with this profoundly Russian topic in the last two decades of his life demonstrated his complete inability to adapt to his new country. The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, an opera about Peter the Great’s African great-grandfather, is the last, belated example of the “Petersburg Text” in this book. Not surprisingly, there was no audience for Lourié’s Symbolist undertaking in the United States of the 1960s.42 The opera still awaits performance. Lourié’s reluctance to leave his Russian past behind stood in stark contrast to the “Phoenixoidal” ease with which Stravinsky kept reinventing himself. Already by the 1930s it was clear that Lourié did not want to follow Stravinsky’s constantly changing artistic path. The relationship seems to have already been tattered in 1934 when Lourié, after a chance meeting with Stravinsky, described his former boss to Schloezer as “pathetic, self-righteous, and intolerably bourgeois.”43 Politics might have played a role in their alienation. While Stravinsky was willing to dismiss concerns about Lourié’s Bolshevik past in the 1920s, the political differences between

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them became more pronounced amid the rising political tensions in Europe. Like many other Russians, Stravinsky moved farther to the political right in emigration, and thus his aesthetic insistence on “order as a rule and as a law opposed to disorder” took on political overtones.44 He openly embraced Mussolini’s Fascism, announcing repeatedly his enthusiasm for the new political order not only in interviews but also in his Autobiography. Although his admiration of Italy’s new ruler may have been in part a public relations move in preparation for future Italian performances, there is no doubt that Stravinsky nurtured anti-democratic sentiments. Unlike Stravinsky, Lourié was alarmed by the rise of Fascism in Europe. Although a defector and critic of Stalinist Russia, he remained unapologetic about his participation in early Bolshevik rule. Born Jewish, he was personally threatened by the spread of Nazi power. He received his first payment in the United States for an article in Modern Music in which he publicly denounced what he called the “new order,” which, he claimed, caused “the total eclipse of those values embraced in the concept of ‘Humanism.’ ” Accepting this “new order,” he argued, freed the mind of the moral and intellectual connotations of humanism.45 Ethical considerations likely played a role in Lourié’s reevaluation of Stravinsky’s aesthetics. TA M I N G K R O N O S

Despite his fellow emigrants’ disenchantment with the American Stravinsky, his central position in Russian music remained unaffected. Even Lourié continued to consider him one of the pillars of Russian music, presenting him among his new five—Glinka, Mussorgsky, Chaikovsky, Scriabin, and Stravinsky—in a 1945 lecture on the “evolution” of Russian music.46 In the introduction to a two-volume collection of essays on Russian music in 1953, Suvchinsky redefined Russian music abroad by reducing it to Stravinsky alone, whom he now called a “peregrine, but not cosmopolitan musician,” thus confirming Stravinsky’s durable national ties.47 Frustrated by Soviet Russia’s stubborn rejection of Stravinsky, Suvchinsky faulted the composer’s homeland for insisting that Stravinsky’s art represented the antithesis of their ideal. Stravinsky’s artistic stance might have been a new phenomenon in the history of Russian music, he argued, but it was still essentially Russian and could have found common ground with postrevolutionary Soviet aesthetics. Like Lourié more than a decade earlier, Suvchinsky maintained that Stravinsky’s music was a severe reaction against individualistic principles, thus turning Stravinsky’s antiexpressive creed into a Russian essence, ready to be merged, if desired, with the anti-individualistic Bolshevik diktat. But Suvchinsky also used Stravinsky as an example to disprove the Marxist tenet about the compulsory connection between art and its political-cultural environment. The time of great discovery in Russian music, culminating in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, preceded the immense political upheaval in Russia, Suvchinsky pointed

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out in his introduction, “which proves that the periods of crisis and renaissance in the arts do not always coincide with the time periods of similar phenomena in social and political life.”48 Stravinsky was willing to replace Suvchinsky’s “not always” with a decisive “never,” declaring famously in his 1935 Autobiography that music is “essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.” The purpose of music, he insisted, was to correct the imperfection of man who, by his nature, “is doomed to submit to the passage of time—to its categories of past and future— without ever being able to give substance, and therefore stability, to the category of the present.”49 Stravinsky’s explorations of time caught critics’ attention. In his review of Stravinsky’s Autobiography, Gilbert Brangues set the foundation of Suvchinsky’s later categorization of composers according to their relationship to time. “Before evaluating a musical work,” Brangues wrote, “one has always to ask: what is its attitude to time?”50 Music has the ability to measure time. But measuring time, Brangues warned, quoting Settembrini in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, is not morally neutral. By measuring time, music can lend “an awareness, both intellectual and precious, to the flow of time. Music awakens time, awakens us to our finest enjoyment of time. Music awakens—and in that sense it is moral.” But not all music performs such a morally upright function. Some—and here Mann aims a barb at Wagner—does the exact opposite. Music can “numb us, put us asleep, counteract all activity and progress.” It can have the effect of opiates, which are “the Devil’s tool, for they create dullness, rigidity, stagnation, slavish inertia.”51 Making the listener alert to the passing of time and the limited time frame of human life was music’s moral mission. The opposite, music’s ability to make the listener forget time’s fatal passing by creating the illusion of suspended time, was considered fundamentally immoral according to Mann’s Settembrini. Stravinsky argues along the same line, Brangues wrote, when he claims that man can make time perceptible only in music. Instead of the illusion of suspended time, Stravinsky offers the reality of the present, the intensity of which creates a sense of immobility. In its awareness of the present, Stravinsky’s music, Brangues argued, strives for a timeless absolute, manifest in the scintillating immobility of Le Rossignol or the petrifying music of Oedipus Rex. All that needs to be done after this scintillating immobility has been reached is “to prolong and consolidate this ephemeral equilibrium between the timeless and the moving.52 Brangues compared Stravinsky’s aesthetic stasis to James Joyce’s immobilization of the spirit, raised “above desire and disgust,” to the aesthetic image that Joyce described as “luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time.”53 In the end Brangues, although he admitted that the art of Joyce and Stravinsky could produce such sense of timelessness, evoked Bach as the perfect example of this spiritual attitude, attributing religious

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significance to immobility described by St. Thomas Aquinas as “a principal perfection” of God who never changes. For Brangues, who revealed his neo-Thomist leaning by quoting Raïssa Maritain’s translation of St. Thomas’s Divine Morality, timelessness remained ultimately a religious principle. Suvchinsky’s categories of musical time, which he first described in an article in La revue musicale in 1939, were likely inspired by Brangues’s review of Stravinsky’s Autobiography.54 What Brangues, quoting Mann, characterized as the morally responsible measuring of time, Suvchinsky called the perception of ontological time, and he dubbed the music that evoked the ontological experience “chronométrique.” Suvchinsky labeled the music associated with the morally suspect, psychological perception of time “chrono-amétrique.” Like Mann and Brangues, Suvchinsky placed nineteenth-century German music into the “chrono-amétrique” category because, he argued, its heavily psychological expression distorted the experience of time. “All music in which the will to expression is dominant” belongs to this type, Stravinsky wrote, appropriating Suvchinsky’s ideas, in his Poetics of Music. Chronometric music, which can reproduce the experience of ontological time, is free of emotions. Instead of expressing its creator’s feelings, it makes time audible, as morally responsible music does in Mann’s description. Such music “evolves parallel to the process of ontological time,” Stravinsky wrote, “embracing and penetrating it, inducing in the mind of the listener a feeling of euphoria and . . . of ‘dynamic calm,’” a state Brangues described in Stravinsky’s music as “ephemeral equilibrium.”55 With Suvchinsky’s help, Stravinsky’s anti-expressive aesthetics thus gained moral justification. Dehumanized nonexpression was not a negative aesthetics, for it performed the morally obligatory function of making the listener aware of the passing of time. Suvchinsky went even further when he equated the lack of development and the dwelling in a “permanent present” in Stravinsky’s music with religious properties, something Brangues declined to do in the end.56 Suvchinsky’s categorization of music and composers according to their handling of the experience of time elevated Stravinsky’s music to the divine plateau occupied previously, according to Suvchinsky, by Gregorian chant, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Verdi.57 Suvchinsky and Stravinsky’s definition of musical time inspired the French musicologist Gisèle Brelet to dedicate a two-volume study to the topic in 1949.58 To express her admiration to Stravinsky, she sent the book to the composer with a flattering note, declaring musical time the essence of music and also the essence of Stravinsky’s music.59 Brelet’s philosophical musing on time and music draws heavily on Suvchinsky and Stravinsky’s short dabbling in the topic. Though abstract and wholly within the boundaries of academic philosophy, Brelet’s systematic exploration of the subject nevertheless demonstrates the process of elevating Stravinsky’s music and aesthetics to the status of philosophy and religion. Brelet’s explanation of musical

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time also reveals surprising parallels between Stravinsky’s perception of time and the exilic temporality. In both, the present gains disproportionate importance, as past and future, conceived as fragile and psychologically insecure, are repressed. The “eternal present” that Brelet celebrates in Stravinsky’s music is the rejection of memory and expectations, in other words, of human participation in the musical process. Others shared Brelet’s perception, although not necessarily her positive judgment. Ernst Krenek, for one, claimed that Stravinsky’s repetitive music does not require “sustained attention to the musical process, making constant reference to what went before,” that is, it does not rely on memory or derive “aesthetic sense from the context” of the music, needed for the understanding of music constructed with developmental principles.60 As in Suvchinsky’s essays, psychology and emotion are bad words in Brelet’s Le Temps Musicale, which appeared only four years after the end of World War II in a postwar climate of shameful, repressed emotions and a desperate need for spiritual certainties. Stravinsky’s undevelopmental form, in Brelet’s analysis, does not need to strive for a future to exist, it does not need to know its end in order to comprehend its beginning or contemplate its present.61 Brelet accepts Suvchinsky’s view that in its complete renunciation of the psychological experience of time, Stravinsky’s music became an art of immobility, of perpetual repetition that enhances the perception of the present. Brelet never allows that the repression of the human element in the perception of time makes Stravinsky’s music inhuman. For her the lack of the human element signals what is beyond human perception. The “eternal” in her phrase “eternal present,” which she considers to be the core of Stravinsky’s music, means both a continuous present, free of desires and regrets, but also the liberation from the emotional constraints of human time, in her words the “victory of musical time over psychological duration.” What this victory over time meant was that Stravinsky, like Apollo, reached Parnassus, or more simply, he became classic. Having triumphed over Kronos, the classic Stravinsky became immune to the damage caused by the passage of time, a danger that in his Autobiography he identified as a basic human condition. Brelet grants Stravinsky classical status not because of the composer’s use of classical forms, but because of what she conceived as his particular, rational handling of time. This new definition of classicism allows Brelet to reunite the Russian Stravinsky with his neoclassical double, one representing a primitive, biological, premodern perception of time, the other its postmodern, spiritual overcoming. With Brelet’s understanding of Stravinsky’s classicism it would even be possible to consider the twelve-tone Stravinsky as essentially the same as the composer of his Russian ballets. Erasing memory, the most human faculty according to Nietzsche, and reducing his aesthetics to essences, Stravinsky acquired the attributes of a god. His deification was complete. It is no accident that descriptions of Stravinsky’s music became focused on timelessness rather than the unfolding of real or chronometric time. As when critics first

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began to identify the outlines of what came to be Stravinsky’s neoclassical style in his Russian works, now discussion about measuring time and giving shape to an enhanced present shifted to talk about Stravinsky’s moving beyond time toward eternity. In the Symphony in C—a work that mapped Stravinsky’s departure from France by being composed in Paris; Sancellemoz; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Hollywood between 1938 and 1940—Nabokov claimed that Stravinsky’s greatest achievement was a “kind of ‘perception of timelessness.’” In the coda, which Nabokov called the epilogue of the symphony, the music begins to quiet down as “large, soft, subtly measured chords move slowly on the horizon of vanishing musical time” (ex. 7.1). Where is the “eternal present” that Brelet, following Suvchinsky’s lead, hailed in Stravinsky’s music? Nabokov described the softly moving chords as “the shadows of the ‘present,’ ” which he thought Stravinsky was “about to cease measuring.” The ritualistic, slowly moving melody, the contour of which evokes both the symphony’s first movement and the last measures of the Symphony of Psalms, keeps repeating, acquiring, according to Nabokov, “a serenity, a motionless beauty.” The sense of motionlessness is created by the constant change in the rhythmic value of the melody’s four notes, which makes it impossible to predict when and on which note Stravinsky will end the music. The religious connotations are unmistakable: half notes and whole notes, homophonic chords, diatonic, white-key modality all mark this last page of the Symphony as religious music, reminiscent of the ending of the Symphonies for Wind Instruments, in which Richard Taruskin identified elements of the Russian funeral service, the Panikhida.62 There the evocation of ritual served as a funeral service for Debussy; here, according to Nabokov, the ritual element functioned as the burying of time itself. In his music Stravinsky, whom Nabokov calls the “great Diviner,” gave Kronos “a face and a shape understandable to us humans.” Now the same Stravinsky was moving beyond time. At the end of the Symphony it is “as if the old Kronos . . . were to dissolve itself, vanish, and in departing, give us a glimpse of that peace, that order and beauty which live above our time, our works of art.”63 Stravinsky’s metaphorical dissolution of time had more practical implications. He eliminated the past not only from his perception of musical time, but also from his memory and personal biography, rewritten with the help of Craft in order to annihilate everything and everybody from it that would hamper the renewal of himself. Lourié, Stravinsky’s acolyte for more than a decade, disappeared completely from Stravinsky’s recollections. Being cast out of Stravinsky’s circle, Lourié fell victim to nostalgia and became absorbed in a past constantly recreated by memory. Music, Lourié believed in stark contrast to Stravinsky, is “very rarely concerned with the present. Its fundamental emotion is produced by the voice of memory.”64 Memory, for Lourié, is our only tool to collect the scattered things of the past, and music’s task is to substantiate “the non-return and the irredeemable loss of time.”65

example 7.1. The last page of Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, Schott Music Corporation, used by permission.

example 7.1. (continued).

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Despite the anti-teleological, static character of Stravinsky’s music, the “Phoenixoidal” nature of his personality made him an odd representative of divine eternity or immutability that St. Thomas named as a principal perfection in God. His version of neoclassicism had provided a utopian place for Russian emigrants, imagined and perfect, but still strongly tied to a tradition that they claimed to be their own. But this latest, “divine” Stravinsky had nothing more to offer for his fellow emigrants than an atopia, a nonplace, or, in more positive terms, a drifting habitation without fixed borders, nationality, or stable identity.66 Always practical and sensitive to the music market, Duke could not comprehend that the sound of Stravinsky’s music was no longer the issue. By the time he started to resist the “deification of Stravinsky,” his famous compatriot’s music had ascended from sonority into philosophy, an aesthetic system that absorbed into itself all of Russian music, European modernism, and ultimately also the rigorous and systematic twelve-tone system worshiped by the avant-garde. Reflecting on the career of the seventy-five-year-old Stravinsky, Suvchinsky expressed his admiration for the “prodigious and lucid vitality” that made it possible for the old man to engage with the future, or, as Suvchinsky put it, to renew and miraculously extend his present.67 In Stravinsky’s absorption in the present, Dukelsky recognized a sensibility familiar to Duke from the popular-music market in which success and failure were equally ephemeral and nobody seems to have been concerned with eternal values. Yet Duke was naive not to realize that the market-savvy Stravinsky had not renounced his claim to eternal values after all. For Stravinsky, timelessness and eternity meant an unquestionably valid classicism. Duke was not entirely wrong when he likened the Stravinsky phenomenon to a deification. By renouncing, as Suvchinsky so unctuously claimed, “the human element, the experience of the psychological and lyrical man,” Stravinsky raised his art beyond the human plane.68 His insistence on the necessity of severe rules to govern art assured that “nothing about his inner life would ever be revealed or betrayed.” Stravinsky, whom Suvchinsky described as a life-devouring, frantic sage, belonged to a crafty, nonconfessing type who fashioned his music in what Suvchinsky called a vacuum, bereft of human sympathy and passion. It was the “fear and anxiety” this inhuman emptiness induced that stimulated Stravinsky’s creative powers, Suvchinsky argued. His creative process needed this void in order to beget “a new, hitherto nonexistent reality.” Although it is easy to dismiss Suvchinsky’s philosophical musing as too determined to grant Stravinsky the status of genius, his interpretation of Stravinsky’s need to create ex nihilo resonates with Nabokov’s interpretation of the composer as a phoenix who constantly renewed and redefined his present by altering his past. Stravinsky’s productive, intimate relationship with the emotional void enabled him to weather the emigrant experience without paralysis. What other emigrants experienced as the emotional drain of a cultural void served Stravinsky as a

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creative stimulus. His constantly shifting aesthetic focus, which Suvchinsky attributed to his thirst for new discoveries, allowed Stravinsky to feel, as Charles Ferdinand Ramuz wrote in 1929, “nowhere a stranger on earth.”69 But the increased brilliance of Stravinsky’s fame was deceptive. It signaled the end phase of a star that, as it shines brighter and brighter, sheds its outer layers, thus loosening its gravitational hold on its planets. Russian composers who had orbited around Stravinsky in the 1920s and 1930s drifted away and became scattered in search of new identities.

notes

I N T R O D U C T IO N

1. Translation based on Leonid Livak’s in How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 27. 2. Sergey Prokofiev, “Kratkaya avtobiografiya,” in S. S. Prokof ’yev: Materialï, dokumentï, vospominaniya, ed. Semyon Shlifstein (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye muzïkal’noye izdatel’stvo, 1956), 161, quoted in English in David Nice, Prokofiev: From Russia to the West 1891–1935 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 142. In his diary, Prokofiev describes the meeting slightly differently: “You ought to stay here, what do you want to go to America for?” Lunacharsky asked him. “ ‘I worked for a year and now want to get some fresh air.’ ‘We have all the fresh air you could want in Russia.’ ‘But that is in the moral sense, and my present need for air is a purely physical one. Just think of it, to be cutting diagonally right across the great Pacific ocean!’ ‘All right, just fill in this form and we’ll give you the necessary papers.’” Diary entry, April 7, 1918, Prokofiev Diaries 2:270. 3. From its “entertainer” the “gilded mob” “demands constantly new sensations and their permutations,” Lunacharsky reported in Vechernyaya Moskva, June 25, 1927. Translated in Stanley J. Rabinowitz, “From the Other Shore: Russian Comment on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes,” Dance Research 27, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 25. 4. Robert A. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 72. 5. Leonid Livak, In Search of Russian Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 114, 119. Livak also traces this divide in scholarship of Soviet modernism, which tends to see the USSR in the 1920s as “more amenable to the modernist sensibility than Russia Abroad.” Ibid., 111. 6. Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). See also Gleb Struve, Russkaya 225

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literatura v izgnanii (New York: Izd-vo im. Chekhova, 1956); and Richard Taruskin, “Is There a ‘Russia Abroad’ in Music?” in Russian Music at Home and Abroad: New Essays (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 159n12. 7. Leonid Livak explains that Russian refuges in France insisted on being identified as “émigré” also because that term had the prestige of association with famous exiled French intellectuals, such as Germaine de Staël or François-René de Chateaubriand. Livak, How It Was Done in Paris, 5. 8. Maria Rubins, “A Century of Russian Culture(s) ‘Abroad’: The Unfolding of Literary Geography,” in Global Russian Cultures, ed. Kevin M. F. Platt (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), 23–24. 9. Nicolas Slonimsky, translator’s foreword to Boris de Schloezer, Scriabin: Artist and Mystic (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), vii. 10. Vernon Duke, Passport to Paris (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955), 65–66. 11. Vincent Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. 24–52. 12. Lesley Chamberlain, Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2007). 13. Catherine Gousseff, L’exil russe: La fabrique du réfugié apatride (1920–1939) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2008), 125–26. See also Maria Rubins, Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris, Palgrave Studies in European Literature (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1. 14. Diary entry, November 24, 1929, “An émigré poet, from a poem,” in Ivan Bunin, From the Other Shore 1920–1933: A Portrait from Letters, Diaries, and Fiction, ed. Thomas Gaiton Marullo (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 219–20. 15. Leonid Sabaneyeff, Modern Russian Composers, trans. Judah A. Joffe (New York: International Publishers, 1927). Founded in 1924 by A. A. Heller and Alexander Trachtenberg, International Publishers was the mouthpiece of the Workers Party of America. Among its publications in the 1920s were Leon Trotsky’s Whither Russia? (1926), Nikolai Bukharin’s The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (1927) and Imperialism and World Economy (1929), as well as Joseph Stalin’s Leninism (1928). 16. Arthur Lourié, “Pespectives de l’École Russe,” trans. Henriette Gourko, La Revue musicale 12, nos. 117–18 (July–August 1931): 160–65. English version as “The Russian School,” trans. S. W. Pring, The Musical Quarterly 28, no. 4 (October 1932): 519–29; Russian version as “Puti russkoy shkolï,” Chisla 7–8 (1933): 218–29, reprinted in Igor Vishnevetsky, Yevraziyskoye ukloneniye v muzïke 1920–1930-kh godov. Istoriya voprosa. Stat’i i materialï (Moscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2005), 259–69. Of the three versions, the French is the shortest and differs the most from the other two. For a detailed discussion of Lourié’s article and its Eurasian overtones see Taruskin, “Is There a ‘Russia Abroad’ in Music?” 17. Livak, In Search of Russian Modernism, esp. “Culture and Border Patrol,” 117–27. 18. Taruskin, “Is There a ‘Russia Abroad’ in Music?” Other studies on Russian composers abroad include Vishnevetsky, Yevraziyskoye ukloneniye’ v muzïke 1920–1930-kh godov; Anya Leveillé, “ ‘Slavic Charm and the Soul of Tolstoy’: Russian Music in Paris in the 1920s,” in Russian Émigré Culture: Conservatism or Evolution? ed. Christoph Flamm, Henry Keazor, and Roland Marti (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 165–78; and Katerina Levidou, “Eurasianism in Perspective: Souvtchinsky, Lourié, and the Silver

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Age,” in ibid., 203–28. Natalie Zelensky’s recent book, Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019), expands the study of the Russian diaspora to amateur music-making practices in New York. 19. Taruskin, “Is There a ‘Russia Abroad’ in Music?” 149. 20. Gisèle Brelet, “Essence de la musique russe,” in Musique russe: Études réunies, ed. Pierre Souvtchinsky, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 1:44–79. 21. Richard Taruskin, “Just How Russian Was Stravinsky?” in Russian Music at Home and Abroad, 365. 22. “Pourquoi l’on n’aime pas ma musique: Une interview d’Igor Stravinsky,” Journal de Genève, November 14, 1928, quoted in Tamara Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 310. 23. Already the 1972 conference on Russian literature in Geneva, “One or Two Russian Literatures,” established that the division of Russian literature into two branches “was artificial” and “caused entirely by politics.” Rubins, Russian Montparnasse, 9. 24. Mark Slonim, “Zametki ob emigrantskoy literature,” Volya Rossii 7–9 (1931): 617–18, quoted in Livak, In Search of Russian Modernism, 118. 25. Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalized World,” in Andrew Tacker and Peter Brooker, Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Routledge, 2005), 16, quoted in Livak, In Search of Russian Modernism, 20. 26. Lourié, “Russian School,” 527. 27. Livak, In Search of Russian Modernism, 96. 28. Ibid., 113. 29. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiv and the abridged version at http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html /n/nostalgia/nostalgia-svetlana-boym.html, accessed December 10, 2019. 30. Joseph Brodsky, “The Condition We Call ‘Exile,’ ” in Literature in Exile, ed. John Glad (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990), 106. 31. Robert Craft, Present Perspectives (New York: Knopf, 1984), 220, quoted in Richard Taruskin, “Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology,” in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 387; and Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic, Studies in Musicology 101 (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1988). For a useful short summary of scholarship on neoclassicism see Levitz, Modernist Mysteries, 17–20. 32. Taruskin, “Back to Whom?” 387. 33. Lev Mnukhin, Russkoye zarubezh’ye. Khronika nauchnoy, kul’turnoy i obshchestvennoy zhizni, 1920–1940 Frantsia, 4 vols. (Moscow and Paris: ЭКСМО and YMCA-Press, 1995). 34. Viktor Yuzefovich, Sergey Kusevitskiy: Godï v Parizhe. Mezhdu Rossiyey i Amerikoy (Moscow and St. Petersburg: Tsentr gumanitarnïkh initsiativ, 2013), 29. 35. Leonid Sabaneyev, “Muzïkal’noye tvorchestvo v emigratsii,” Sovremennïye zapiski 64 (1937): 393–404, also in L. L. Sabaneyev, Vospominaniya o Rossii (Moscow: Klassika-XXI, 2005), 203–18. 36. Nina Berberova’s letter, quoted in Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, trans. Philippe Radley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 386.

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37. Yuzefovich, Sergey Kusevitzkiy, 361–62. 38. Diary entry, June 2, 1927, in Prokofiev Diaries 3:592. 39. Diary entry, May 24, 1924, ibid., 48. See also diary entries from May 26 through June 18, 1927, ibid., 589–98. 40. Yuzefovich, Sergey Kusevitzkiy, 48. 41. Diary entry, June 3, 1928, Prokofiev Diaries 3:706. 42. Diary entry, November 3, 1928, ibid., 730. 43. Diary entry, December 15, 1926, ibid., 392–93. Even after Sabaneyev attempted to get into Prokofiev’s good graces by publishing positive reviews of the 1928 concert performance of the second act of The Fiery Angel, his previous sins of “heaving dirt all over everybody” in Russia could not be forgiven. Diary entry, November 3, 1928, ibid., 730. 44. T. Maslovskaya, “L. L. Sabaneyev o proshlom (Vmesto predisloviya),” in L. L. Sabaneyev, Vospominaniya o Rossii (Moscow: Klassika-XXI, 2005), 6–7. 45. Sabaneyev, “Muzïkal’noye tvorchestvo v emigratsii,” in Vospominaniya o Rossii, 204–5. 46. See, for instance, the RMOZ concert on January 23, 1932, on which “published compositions by Russian composers” were played, or Sabaneyev’s public lecture on Russian composers abroad on February 25, 1932. 47. Sabaneyev, “Muzïkal’noye tvorchestvo v emigratsii,” in Vospominaniya o Rossii, 205. 48. Diary entry, February 16, 1924, Prokofiev Diaries 3:21. 49. Diary entry, February 17, 19, and 24, 1925, ibid., 139, 141. 50. Diary entry, June 8, 1926, ibid., 335. 51. Lourié to Stravinsky, February 8, 1931, in I. F. Stravinsky, Perepiska s russkimi korrespondentami. Materialï k biografii, vol. 3, 1923–39, ed. V. P. Varuntz (Moscow: Izdatel’skiy dom “kompositor,” 2003), 417. 52. Stravinsky to Paichadze, February 10, 1931, quoted in Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882–1934 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 518, translation modified. 53. Sabaneyev, “Muzïkal’noye tvorchestvo v emigratsii,” in Vospominaniya o Rossii, 211. 54. Ibid., 206. 55. Diary entry, November 26, 1926, Prokofiev Diaries 3:389. 56. Sabaneyev, “Muzïkal’noye tvorchestvo v emigratsii,” in Vospominaniya o Rossii, 206–7. 57. Berberova, Italics Are Mine, 284. 58. Sabaneyev, “Muzïkal’noye tvorchestvo v emigratsii,” in Vospominaniya o Rossii, 209, 212. See also 211 and 208. 59. Rabis, January 1927, quoted in Stravinsky, Perepiska s russkimi korrespondentami, 775. 60. Izvestiya, March 24, 1927, quoted ibid. 61. Sabaneyev, “Muzïkal’noye tvorchestvo v emigratsii,” in Vospominaniya o Rossii, 204, 210. 62. Sabaneyeff, Modern Russian Composers, 235. 63. In an article of the same year he presented Lourié, Obukhov, and Ivan Vishnegradsky. Leonid Sabaneyev, “Three Russian Composers in Paris,” trans. S. W. Pring, The Musical Times 68, no. 1016 (October 1, 1927): 882–84.

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64. In this article he also listed members of the older generation who did not succeed, such as Alexander Vinkler (1865–1935), Nikolai Artsïbushev (1858–1937), and Fyodor Akimenko (1876–1945) from the Belyayev circle, as well as Sergey Yuferov (1865–?), Nikolai Sham’ye (?),Thomas de Hartman (1885–1956), Mikhail Levin (1894–1995), Aleksander Strimer (1888–1961), Vladimir Pol’ (1875–1962), Yevgeny Gunst (1877–1938), and Pavel Kovalyov (1889/90–1951). Among the innovators he mentions Obukhov and Vishnegradsky, the eclectic Alexander Tcherepnin, Nicolas Nabokov, Sergei Gorchakov, and Vera Vinogradova. He writes with admiration of Igor Markevich, and mentions Lourié, Arkady Trebinsky (1897–1982), Mikhail Konstantinov, Lazar Saminsky, and Joseph Achron. Sabaneyev, “Muzïkal’noye tvorchestvo v emigratsii,” in Vospominaniya o Rossii, 214–17. 65. Sabaneyeff, Modern Russian Composers, 239, and idem, “Muzïkal’noye tvorchestvo v emigratsii,” in Vospominaniya o Rossii, 217. 66. Lourié, “Pespectives de l’École Russe,” 162. 67. Mnukhin, Russkoye zarubezh’ye 1:260. Prokofiev was not present at the concert because he played at a reception at the Rothschilds’ that evening. Diary entry, June 9, 1926, Prokofiev Diaries 3:335. 68. Lourié, “Pespectives de l’École Russe,” 165. 69. Lourié, “Russian School,” 523. 70. Lourié did not provide examples, but he must have had Dukelsky’s 1925 Zéphyr et Flore and Nabokov’s 1928 Ode in mind, both produced by Diaghilev, and both nostalgically relying on what Lourié described as “a musical aesthetic based on the stylization of the 1830s” and a “feeble reproduction of the past.” Ibid., 527–28. 71. Ibid., 528. 72. Brigit Cohen, “The Rite of Spring, National Narratives, and Estrangement,” in The Rite of Spring at 100, ed. Severine Neff et al. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017), 131. 73. Taruskin, “Is There a ‘Russia Abroad’ in Music?” 149. 74. Sabaneyev, “Muzïkal’noye tvorchestvo v emigratsii,” in Vospominaniya o Rossii, 204. 75. Taruskin, “Is There a ‘Russia Abroad’ in Music?” 156. 76. “April in Paris,” with lyrics by E. Y. Harburg, was Vernon Duke’s (alias Vladimir Dukelsky’s) song for the musical Walk A Little Faster. 77. Vernon Duke wrote “Autumn in New York” for the musical Thumbs Up! C HA P T E R 1

1. Quoted in Lawrence Gilman, “The Life and Death of a City,” New York Herald Tribune, January 9, 1938. Originally Dukelsky wrote this passage for his memoirs, Passport to Paris, but then crossed it out from the final version. The manuscript of the memoir, initially titled April in Paris, is preserved in the Duke Coll. 2. Dukelsky to Ivask, April 5, 1964, Amherst Center for Russian Culture; and Vladimir Dukelsky, “Ob odnoy prervannoy druzhbe,” Mostï 13–14 (1968), 259. The article was republished by Izrail’ Nest’ev as “Neizvestnïye materialï o Prokof ’yeve: Ob odnoy prevrannoy druzhbe,” in Istoriya i sovremennost’: Sbornik statey (Leningrad: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1981), 239–60. Original in Russian; unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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3. Vernon Duke, Passport to Paris (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955), 289. 4. Olin Downes, “ ‘End of St. Petersburg’ by Dukelsky Has Premiere,” New York Times, January 13, 1938. 5. Duke, Passport to Paris, 185. 6. Program Notes to The End of St. Petersburg, Duke Coll. 7. Oscar Thompson, “Schola Presents Novelties. Ross Conducts Delius’s ‘Mass of Life’ and Dukelsky’s ‘End of St. Petersburg,’ ” clipping, Duke Coll. Source and author not specified. In another interview, Dukelsky explained that there was “no political significance in the work, as one might think from the title. St. Petersburg is ended—its name and power gone, and it is that downfall which I meant to convey, in a ‘photographic’ history rather than a doctrinal message.” Quaintance Eaton, “Vladimir Dukelsky Work Revives Question of a Double Musical Life. ‘The End of St. Petersburg,’ to Be Sung by Schola Cantorum, Prompts Discussion of Composer’s Twin Activities—57th Street Knows Dukelsky But He’s Duke to Tin Pan Alley—Chorus Described ‘Pictorial History of Famed Ex-Capital,” Musical America, January 10, 1938. 8. Samuel Chotzinoff, “Schola Cantorum Heard In 2 New Choral Pieces. ‘End of St. Petersburg’ and Delius’ ‘Mass of Life’ Directed by Hugh Ross,” clipping, Duke Coll. 9. William G. King, “About Vladimir Dukelsky and Vernon Duke,” clipping, Duke Coll. 10. “Aus der Musikwelt: Schola Cantorum of N.Y.,” clipping, Duke Coll.. 11. Georgy Rayevskiy, “Krepchayet i treshchit moroz” (The Frost is Getting Harder and Cracking), Vozrozhdeniye, February 28, 1928, 3, quoted in Vladimir Khazan, “Petersburg in the Poetry of the Russian Emigration,” in Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia, ed. Helena Goscilo and Stephen M. Norris (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 127. Also in Roman Timenchik and Vladimir Khazan, “ ‘Na zemle bïla odna stolitsa,’ ” in Peterburg v poezii russkoy emigratsii (pervaya i vtoraya volna) (St. Petersburg: OOO Izdatel’stvo “DNK”, 2006), 44. 12. Quoted ibid., 19. 13. V. N. Toporov, Peterburgskiy tekst russkoy literaturï (St. Petersburg: “Iskusstvo—SPB,” 2003), 25. 14. Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and City Shape (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 17. 15. Duke, Passport to Paris, 119. 16. Entry of March 24, 1925, Prokofiev Diaries 3:148. 17. Duke, Passport to Paris, 152–53. 18. Entry of May 18, 1925, Prokofiev Diaries 3:164–65. 19. Duke, Passport to Paris, 169. 20. See entry of December 9, 1927, Prokofiev Diaries 3:671, and Prokofiev to Dukelsky, September 29, 1935, in English in Duke, Passport to Paris, 313–14; also in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 153–54. 21. Duke, Passport to Paris, 175. 22. Prokofiev to Dukelsky, June 3, 1932, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 148. 23. Prokofiev to Dukelsky, November 9, 1930, in ibid., 145–46. 24. Clippings from Duke Coll.: William G. King, “About Vladimir Dukelsky and Vernon Duke”; Alfred Hart, “Garret to Seller: Ambidextrous Vernon Duke Writes Jazz As Well As Concertos Because He Likes Caviar,” New York World Telegram, February 27, 1937; Samuel

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Chotzinoff, “Vernon Duke Finds Fault with Reception of Moderns. Composers’ Pliant of Neglect Is Raised Again—Eight Reasons Given for Failure of American Audience,” March 6, 1937; “Music’s Jekyll and Hyde As Vernon Duke, He Writes Hot Dance Tunes—As Vladimir Dukelsky, He’s a Serious Composer of Symphonies” (undated, author unidentified). 25. Hart, “Garret to Seller.” 26. Daniel I. McNamara, “Vernon Duke, A.S.C.P. A Dual Personality in Music,” March 7, 1939, clipping, Duke Coll. 27. Nicolas Slonimsky, “Composer in Uniform,” The Christian Science Monitor, clipping, Duke Coll. 28. H. A. S., “ ‘Writing Music That Has a Use’ Seen As Legitimate Function of Composers. Vladimir Dukelsky, Known to Broadway As ‘Vernon Duke,’ Knows No Reason Why Jazz and Serious Music Should Not Share Best Work of a Creator,” Musical Courier (1938), clipping, Duke Coll. 29. Hart, “Garret to Seller.” 30. Elliott Carter, “Forecast and Review,” Modern Music 15, no. 3 (1938): 170–71. 31. Ibid., 170. 32. Unidentified clipping, Duke Coll. 33. Alexander Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman,” in The Bronze Horseman: Selected Poems of Alexander Pushkin, trans. D. M. Thomas (New York: The Viking Press, 1982), 247. 34. G. P. Fedotov, “Tri stolitsï,” Vyorstï (1926), reprinted “Litso Rossii,” in Sbornik statey 1918–1931, quoted in Toporov, Peterburgskiy tekst russkoy literaturï, 54. 35. Yu. M. Lotman, “Simbolika Peterburga i problem semiotiki goroda,” in Izbrannïye stat’i, vol. 2, Stat’i po istorii russkoy literature XVIII—pervoy polovinï XIX veka (Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992), 9. 36. Dmitriy Merezhkovsky, “Peterburgu bït’ pustu,” at http://az.lib.ru/m/merezhkowskij_ d_s/text_0200.shtml, accessed April 2, 2015. 37. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 135. 38. Mandelshtam’s 1916 poem, “We Will Die in Transparent Petropolis,” is translated as an epigraph in Avril Pyman’s “The City as Myth: Petersburg in Russian Literature of the Silver Age,” Journal of European Studies 20 (1990): 191. 39. Anna Akhmatova, “Poem Without a Hero,” in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, 2 vols., trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (Somerville, MA: Zephyr Press, 1990), 2:437. 40. Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921, ed. Olga Matich (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 5. 41. Polina Barskova, “Enchanted by the Spectacle of Death: Forms of the End in Leningrad Culture (1917–1934),” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2006, 2. 42. Vladimir Veydle, Bezïmyannaya strana (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1968), 10. Quoted in introduction to Timenchik and Khazan, Peterburg v poezii russkoy emigratsii, 37. 43. Posledniye novosti, no. 4303, January 3, 1933, quoted in introduction to Timenchik and Khazan, Peterburg v poezii russkoy emigratsii, 34. The emigrants kept the old orthography for “posledniya” in the journal’s name. See also Lev Mnukhin, Russkoye zarubezh’ye. Khronika nauchnoy, kul’turnoy i obshchestvennoy zhizni, 1920–1940 Frantsia, 4 vols. (Moscow and Paris: ЭКСМО and YMCA-Press, 1995), 2:367. The event is described as the first in a once-a-month series of evenings on the theme of “Former Petersburg.”

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44. Antonin Ladinsky, “Elegiya,” in Stikhi o Yevrope (Paris, 1937), 11, quoted in Khazan, “Petersburg in the Poetry of the Russian Emigration,” 124. 45. Raisa Blokh, “Petropolis,” in Moy gorod (Berlin, 1928), quoted ibid., 136. 46. Ivan Lukash, “Puteshestviye v Peterburg,” Vozrazhdeniye, June 18, 1929. 47. Introduction to Timenchik and Khazan, Peterburg v poezii russkoy emigratsii, 30. 48. Quoted in Khazan, “Petersburg in the Poetry of the Russian Emigration,” 126. 49. Duke, Passport to Paris, 288. 50. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 285. 51. Arkadiy Borman, “Moy Peterburg,” Novoye russkoye slovo (New York), no. 20501, April 26, 1969, quoted in Khazan, “Petersburg in the Poetry of the Russian Emigration,” 124–25. 52. See piano vocal score with Russian, English, and French texts; full score with Russian text; full score with English text, and condensed piano vocal score in Duke Coll. (79/2; 103/1–3; 80/1–3). At the end of the full score Dukelsky recorded three dates: May 1, 1933, for the first version; March 12, 1937, for the second version; and April 1, 1960, for the extended last version. 53. Dukelsky to Koussevitzky, September 13, 1937, Koussevitzky Coll. 54. For the Russian original of these texts, see I. G. Vishnevetskiy, Yevraziyskoye ukloneniye’ v muzïke 1920–1930-kh godov: Istoriya voprosa; Stat’i i materialї (Moscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2005), 398–402. 55. Only fall is missing, which can be explained by Dukelsky’s sympathies with Diaghilev who, as the composer remembered, “detested that time of the year” and planned to commission a ballet called “The Three Seasons” from Dukelsky before he died. Duke, Passport to Paris, 179. 56. Last strophe of Tyutchev’s poem: “If only some spirit passing by, / wafted through the misty evening, / could swiftly carry me from here / back to my sultry southern skies!” trans. F. Jude, in The Complete Poems of Tyutchev (Durham, 2000) at http://www.pereplet .ru/moshkow/LITRA/TUTCHEW/english.html, accessed July 11, 2018. 57. Duke, Passport to Paris, 261. Altogether Dukelsky set nine poems by Kuzmin between 1930 and 1937. See notes to Dukelsky’s letter to Prokofiev, June 1, 1932, in Sergey Prokofiev, Pis’ma, vospominaniya, stat’i (Moscow: “Deka-VS,” 2007), 41. 58. This movement was omitted at the New York premiere, “owing to the difficulties of intonation,” as the program note explains. Program Notes to The End of St. Petersburg, Duke Coll. 59. Fyodor Dostoyevskiy, “Peterburgskiye snovideniya v stikhakh i proze” (1861), quoted in Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, 22. 60. Discussing Bely’s Petersburg, Pyman argues that “the forces of inertia” are “identified with the sickly yellow colour which slides and spreads about the city, reflected in the water, on faces, on the official chrome of buildings and the damp wallpaper of sordid interiors.” Pyman, “City as Myth,” 212. 61. Akhmatova recalls Annensky’s image yet again in one of the epigraphs to the epilogue of “Poem Without a Hero.” 62. Duke, Passport to Paris, 288. 63. Translation from Pyman, “City as Myth,” 211.

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64. Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, “The Voices of Silence: The Death and Funeral of Alexander Blok,” in Petersburg/Petersburg, 306. 65. Duke, Passport to Paris, 289. In his program notes Dukelsky is less specific: “Against this background, the soprano solo vocalized on the vowel ‘ah,’ the theme first used in the introduction to the whole work and which typified the sad street scenes of Russia.” Program Notes, Duke Coll. 66. The prologue of Rachmaninoff ’s Francesca da Rimini also starts with repeated F-E dyads, to which Rachmaninoff gradually adds D-CJ and then Ba-A dyads. 67. Quoted in Igor Vishnevetsky, “The Birth of Chaos from the Spirit of Harmony: The End of St. Petersburg by Vladimir Dukelsky,” in AION-Slavistica, Annali dell’ Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” 6 (2004): 263–64. 68. Introduction to Timenchik and Khazan, Peterburg v poezii russkoy emigratsii, 19–20. For the Symbolist implications of Chaikovsky’s Queen of Spades see “Chaikovsky and Decadence,” in Simon Morrison, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 45–114. Dukelsky’s own poetic contribution to the Petersburg Text, his “Message to Sergey L’vovich Bertenson,” draws heavily on images from Chaikovsky’s opera. 69. Duke, Passport to Paris, 143. 70. Vance Kepley, Jr., The End of St. Petersburg, ed. Richard Taylor (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 104. 71. Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (London and New York: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2001), 54. 72. Eisenstein was caught between the fight that erupted between the government group, led by Stalin, and the opposition, led by Trotsky, which culminated in Trotsky’s expulsion from the Party and consequent forced exile. 73. See Eisenstein und Deutschland: Texte, Dokumente, Briefe, ed. Oksana Bulgakova (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, Henschel Verlag), 41n15. 74. “The End of St Petersburg: A Conversation,” in Vsevolod Pudovkin, Selected Essays, ed. Richard Taylor (London and New York: Seagull Books, 2006), 125. 75. Viktor Shklovsky, “Mistakes and Inventions” (Oshibki i izobreteniya), Novïy Lef nos. 11/12 (November–December 1927): 29; trans. in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 180. 76. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, 5. 77. N. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga (Leningrad: Leningradskiy komitet literatorov. Agentsvo Lira, 1990), quoted in Petersburg/Petersburg, 14. 78. Quoted in Philip Cavendish, The Men With the Movie Camera: Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 164. 79. Quoted in Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 233. 80. “Das Ende von St. Petersburg,” Rul,’ no. 2226, March 22, 1928. 81. Leyda, Kino, 222. Alexandre Benois, “Picturesque Petersburg” (Zhivopisnïy Peterburg) (1902), quoted in Megan Swift, “The Petersburg Sublime: Alexander Benois and the Bronze Horseman Series (1903–22),” Germano-Slavica: A Canadian Journal of Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Perspectives 17 (2009–10): 3.

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82. “Das Ende von St. Petersburg.” 83. Dukelsky to Koussevitzky, September 13, 1937. 84. He reported to Koussevitzky that by the end of the month he had completed the first two movements and started the third. Dukelsky to Koussevitzky, January 1, 1932 and Jan. 29, 1932, Koussevitzky Coll. 85. He explained to the composer that he could not put two new works by the same composer on his programs in the same season. Koussevitzky to Dukelsky, September 27, 1937, Koussevitzky Coll. 86. The conductor proudly declined the offer; Dukelsky backpedaled, explaining that he mentioned money only because he remembered Koussevitzky talking about deficits and because hiring a chorus meant extra costs. Dukelsky to Koussevitzky, September 13, 1937, and Dukelsky to Koussevitzky, undated, after September 17, 1937. Koussevitzky Coll. 87. Dukelsky to his mother, September 3, 1937. Duke Coll., and Duke, Passport to Paris, 321. 88. Prokofiev to Dukelsky, August 28, 1933, Duke Coll. Special thanks to Simon Morrison, who shared these letters with me. 89. Mikhail Astrov to Dukelsky, March 11, 1937, Duke Coll. 90. “This Summer he is having his oratorio, The End of St. Petersburg, produced in Paris.” Hart, “Garret to Seller.” 91. Dukelsky to Koussevitzky, September 13, 1937, Koussevitzky Coll. 92. Prokofiev to Dukelsky, March 22, 1934, Duke Coll. 93. Prokofiev to Dukelsky, June 3, 1932, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 148. 94. Dukelsky’s penciled note on the back of Prokofiev’s letter, June 23, 1932. Duke Coll. 95. Duke, Passport to Paris, 333. 96. Sergey Lifar’, Moya zarubezhnaya pushkiniana: Pushkinskiye vïstavki i izdaniya (Paris: Editions Béresniak, 1966), 36. Since Dukelsky wrote the opera in 1928, there is little chance that Lifar could have commissioned it. 97. Astrov sent Pyotr Lyubinskiy, who was taking over Dukelsky’s affairs from Astrov, to Lifar, who, clearly pulling out of the project, happened to be away from home all the sixteen times Lyubinskiy tried to call on him. Astrov to Dukelsky, May 11, 1937, Duke Coll. For more about Lifar’s exhibition see chapter 5. 98. Duke, Passport to Paris, 333. 99. Astrov to Dukelsky, March 13, 1937, Duke Coll. The piano reduction of the score shows clearly the layers of languages: under the vocal parts the first text is Russian, then English. The French is added on top of the staves. 100. Astrov to Dukelsky, June 28, 1937, Duke Coll. 101. Data concerning the exhibition is from Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 198–208. See also Exposition international des arts et techniques dans la vie modern (1937). Rapport Général, ed. M. Edmond Labbé (Paris: Imprimerie nationale: 1939), 9:207–12. 102. Speer, who received a gold medal for the building, remembered that “from the cornice of my tower an eagle with the swastika in its claws looked down on the Russian sculpture.” Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970), 81. 103. Albert Flament found Mukhina’s statue completely out of proportion, exemplifying “the bad manners, the excess of pride and the vain pretensions” that “make a distasteful

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impression on the French.” Albert Flament, “Tableaux de l’exposition,” Revue de Paris 44 (August 15, 1937): 948, quoted in James D. Herbert, Paris 1937: World on Exhibition (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 36. 104. Quoted in Rapport Général 9:213. 105. Pierre d’Espezel, “L’exposition international des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne,” Revue de Paris 44 (August 15, 1937): 936, quoted in Herbert, Paris 1937, 36. 106. Duke, Passport to Paris, 288. 107. Dukelsky to Koussevitzky, June 3, 1932, Koussevitzky Coll. 108. Prokofiev to Dukelsky, June 3, 1932, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 148. Dukelsky did change the oratorio’s name to “Epic” in 1934, still hoping to combine its premiere with a performance of his second symphony in Paris. Dukelsky to Koussevitzky, before March, 24, 1934, Koussevitzky Coll. 109. In a letter to Koussevitzky, Dukelsky described the oratorio as “completely revised,” “considerably simplified,” and having a new, triumphant ending, which he added at the suggestion of Prokofiev. Dukelsky to Koussevitzky, September 13, 1937, Koussevitzky Coll. 110. Prokofiev to Dukelsky, January 18, 1938, Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 158. Quoted also in Duke, Passport to Paris, 361. 111. Prokofiev to Dukelsky, January 18, 1938, Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 157–58. 112. On the fate of Prokofiev’s cantata see Simon Morrison, The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. 54–66. 113. Astrov to Dukelsky, April 9, 1937, Duke Coll. 114. Duke, Passport to Paris, 359. 115. Ibid., 361. 116. Carter, “Forecast and Review,” 170. 117. Duke, Passport to Paris, 361. 118. Dukelsky calls Sincay’s translation “clumsy but singable” in a letter to Yuri Ivask (1907–1986), June 25, 1964, Amherst Center for Russian Culture. Dukelsky mentions Sincay Ross in connection to a retranslation of Epitaph, but his judgment about her abilities can be applied to the similarly clumsy translation of the text of The End of St. Petersburg. 119. Prokofiev’s diary entry, August 1929, Prokofiev Diaries 3:856–57. 120. Duke, Passport to Paris, 226. C HA P T E R 2

1. Vernon Duke, Passport to Paris (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955), 196–97; for Cocteau’s account see Cocteau to Boris Kochno, date not given, but evidently between June 7, the premiere of Le Pas d’Acier, and June 13, the date of his second note to Kochno. Quoted in Boris Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, trans. Adrienne Foulke (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970), 265. 2. Diary entry, June 7, 1927, Prokofiev Diaries 3:594. 3. Diary entry, October 24, 1925, ibid., 223. 4. Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 265. 5. Diary entry, June 22, 1925, in Prokofiev Diaries 3:185. 6. Vladimir Dukelksy, “Ob odnoy prervannoy druzhbe,” Mostï 13–14 (1968): 263. The article was republished by Izrail’ Nest’ev as “Neizvestnïye materialï o Prokof ’yeve: Ob odnoy

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prevrannoy druzhbe,” in Istoriya i sovremennost’: Sbornik statey (Leningrad: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1981), 239–60; and by Igor Vishnevetskiy, “Sergey i Lina Prokof ’yevï i Vladimir Dukel’skiy. Perepiska 1924–1946,” in Sergey Prokof ’yev, Pisma, Vospominaniya, Stat’i (Moscow: “Deka-VC,” 2007), 75–109. 7. Serge Lifar, Ma Vie: From Kiev to Kiev; An Autobiography, trans. James Holman Mason (New York and Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1970), 55. 8. Lunacharsky to Stalin, dated February 1925, is quoted in Simon Morrison, The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6–7. 9. Diary entry, May 21, 1927, Prokofiev Diaries 3:586. 10. René Fülöp-Miller and Joseph Gregor, The Russian Theatre: Its Character and History with Especial Reference to the Revolutionary Period (New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1930), 58. 11. Arnold Haskell and Walter Nouvel, Diaghilev: His Artistic and Private Life (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1955), 127. 12. Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs: 1921–1941, trans. Tatania Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp (New York: The Universal Library, Grosset and Dunlap, 1963), 91. 13. Ibid., 92. 14. Marina Tsvetayeva, “Mayakovskamu,” Yevraziya 1 (November 24, 1928): 8. 15. Ehrenburg, Memoirs, 95. On Russian-French diplomatic relationships see Michael Jabara Carley, “A Soviet Eye on France from the Rue de Grenelle in Paris, 1924–1940,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 17 (2006): 295–346. 16. Dukelksy, “Ob odnoy prervannoy druzhbe,” 259. 17. Diary entry, February 25–November 23, 1922. Prokofiev Diaries 2:680–81. 18. Once Mayakovsky signed his letter to Kochno as “Your poor provincial, Mayakovsky.” Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 262. 19. Quoted in Nina Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, trans. Philippe Radley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 229. Berberova must have misremembered her source, because no such article appeared in Posledniye novosti, the newspaper she cites, on the quoted date. 20. Ibid., 233. 21. Leonid Livak, How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 35. 22. Morrison, People’s Artist, 7. 23. Ibid., 17. 24. Diary entry April 9, 1927, Prokofiev Diaries 3:579. 25. Kochno, conversations, quoted in Richard Buckle, Diaghilev (New York: Atheneum, 1984), 444. See also Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 248. 26. Diary entry, February 18, 1915, Prokofiev Diaries 2:22. 27. Diary entry, March 20–22, 1915, ibid., 29. 28. Diary entry, May 6, 1916, ibid., 506. 29. Diary entry, June 13–July 30, 1920, ibid., 528. 30. Diary entry, May 1–31, 1921, ibid., 603–5. 31. Diaghilev trusted Larionov with the choreography of Chout only after other options were dismissed. Haskell and Nouvel, Diaghilev, 313–14. 32. Diary entry, February 25–November 23, 1922, Prokofiev Diaries 2:680.

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33. Diary entry, June 4, 1924, Prokofiev Diaries 3:65. 34. Diary entry, June 8, 1924, ibid., 66. 35. Diary entry, July 22, 1924, and June 17, 1925, ibid., 84 and 178. 36. “I have nothing against Bach’s music, only against counterfeiting it.” Diary entry, May 21, 1924, ibid., 55. 37. Duke, Passport to Paris, 120. 38. Diary entry, March 23, 1926, Prokofiev Diaries 3:279. 39. Diary entry, August 11, 1926, ibid., 358. Translation modified. 40. Diary entry, September 29, 1926, ibid., 375. Viktor Mikhaylovich Vasnetsov (1848– 1926) was a Russian neonationalist painter. 41. Dukelsky, “Ob odnoy prevrannoy druzhbe,” 263. 42. Ibid., 262. 43. Diary entry, June 19, 1925, Prokofiev Diaries 3:183. 44. Diary entry, July 29 and June 17, 1925, ibid., 215 and 178. 45. For the detailed description of the plot see Prokofiev’s diary entry, May 26, 1925, ibid., 167. 46. Diary entry, June 21, 1925, ibid., 184. 47. Diary entry, August, 1929, ibid., 858. Arapov fell into the trap and became a double agent, helping the Soviets in their efforts to disintegrate political movements among Russian emigrants, the Eurasianists among them. 48. About Trest and the Eurasianist movement see Sergey Glebov, From Empire to Eurasia: Politics, Scholarship, and Ideology in Russian Eurasianism, 1920s–1930s (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois Press, 2017), esp. 175–88. 49. Diary entry, June 22, 1925, Prokofiev Diaries 3:185–86. 50. Diary entry, July 12, 1925, ibid., 198–99; and Prokofiev to Diaghilev, June 18, 1925, in Viktor Varunts, “Novïye materialï iz zarubezhnïkh arkhivov,” Muzïkal’naya akademiya 2 (2000): 193. 51. Diary entry, July 12, 1925, Prokofiev Diaries 3:199. 52. Diary entry, July 27, 1925, ibid., 211–12. 53. Diary entry, July 21, 1925, ibid., 206. 54. Diary entry, July 18, 1925, ibid., 202. Prokofiev did not spell out the “unprintable expression related to the climax of sexual desire,” which was what Diaghilev really said about young people’s activities in Russia. 55. Diary entry, July 24, 1925, ibid., 209. 56. Diary entry, July 20, 1925, ibid., 205. 57. Diary entry, July 27, 1925, ibid., 211. 58. “A marvelously orchestrated piece and a prime example of how something interesting can be made without any actual music” was how Prokofiev described Honegger’s piece in his diary. Diary entry, May 8, 1924, ibid., 50–51. 59. Scenario Prokofiev sent to Diaghilev on August 8, 1925 (original in the Prokofiev Arch.). English translation published in Stephen D. Press, Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 212–13. 60. Diary entry, July 29, 1926, Prokofiev Diaries 3:214. 61. René Fülöp-Miller describes the shows in the “Projection Theater” in Moscow, in which “all the appliances used are exclusively gymnastic apparatus, the ‘piece’ is accordingly

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nothing but a three hours’ display of gymnastics, jumping, and running backwards and forwards, and as it is allied with the most extraordinary physical distortions, it makes an impression of complete insanity.” René Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia, trans. F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait (1927; repr., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), 189–90. 62. Prokofiev and Yakulov’s original scenario, sent to Diaghilev, quoted in Press, Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev, 213. See also diary entry, July 30, 1926, Prokofiev Diaries 3:214–15. 63. Prokofiev to Diaghilev, August 16, 1925, quoted in Varunts, “Novïye materialï iz zarubezhnïkh arkhivov,” 196. 64. Sergey Prokofiev, “Autobiography,” in Sergey Prokofiev: Soviet Diary 1927 and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Oleg Prokofiev and Christopher Palmer (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 278. 65. Izrail’ Nest’ev, Zhizn’ Sergeya Prokof ’yeva (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1973), 278. 66. Diary entry, August 5, 1925, Prokofiev Diaries 3:217. Reinhold Glière used “Yablochka” in his well-known ballet The Red Poppy (1927). It is unlikely that Prokofiev knew Glière’s music before he started composing his ballet. 67. Diary entry, June 26, 1925, ibid., 188. 68. Quoted in Press, Prokofiev’s Ballet for Diaghilev, 213. 69. Diary entry July 30, 1925, Prokofiev Diaries 3:215; and Prokofiev to Diaghilev, August 16, 1925, in Varunts, “Novïye materialï iz zarubezhnïkh arkhivov,” 196. 70. Miaskovsky to Prokofiev, May 30, 1928, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 279. 71. Diary entry, June 25, 1927, Prokofiev Diaries 3:599. 72. Diary entry, June 3, 1925, ibid., 169. 73. Prokofiev to Miaskovsky, August 4, 1925, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 258. 74. Ibid., 259. 75. Diary entry, August–September, 1925, Prokofiev Diaries 3:217–18. 76. Diary entry, October 24, 1925, ibid., 652. 77. Taruskin, for instance, discusses Pas d’acier as one of the “first nudges in the direction of [Prokofiev’s] eventual return to Russia.” Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4:776. Simon Morrison attributes the change of style to Prokofiev’s new emphasis on religious sentiments. Morrison, People’s Artist, 14. 78. Prokofiev, Autobiography, 277. 79. Israel V. Nestyev, Prokofiev, trans. Florence Jonas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960), 224. 80. Raoul Brunel, “Saison des Ballets Russes: Le Pas d’Acier,” L’Oeuvre, June 10, 1927, in Lesley-Anne Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927): A Study in the Historiography and Reconstruction of Georges Jakulov’s Set Design for Diaghilev’s “Soviet Ballet,” 2 vols. (Thesis, University of Bristol, 1999), 2:96. English translation here and elsewhere is based on Sayers’s. 81. Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, 4:767. 82. Prokofiev to Miaskovsky, June 1, 1924, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 253. 83. Diary entries, June 8, 1924, and June 17, 1925, Prokofiev Diaries 3:66, 3:180. 84. In an interview before the London premiere Diaghilev bluntly stated: “A great feature of his [Prokofiev’s] music is that its monotonous rhythm is absolutely in opposition to

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the present-day jazz.” “Interview with Diaghilev. The New Ballet. M. Diaghilev and the Music of Prokofiev. How it Broke his Piano,” Observer, July 3, 1927, in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:129. 85. About experimental ballet in the Soviet Union in the 1920s see Elizaveta Suritz, “Soviet Ballet of the 1920s and the Influence of Constructivism,” Soviet Union-Union Soviétique 7, no. 102 (1980): 112–37. See also idem, “Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s: Kasian Yaroslavich Goleizovsky,” Dance Research Journal 20, no. 2, Russian Issue (Winter 1988): 9–22. The only source for Diaghilev’s approaching Goleyzovsky is Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 264. In a letter to Diaghilev, Yakulov explains that there is nobody in Russia he can recommend (“There is a rising star, Miserer, but he is not the type, in terms of his appearance,” he wrote to the impresario). Yakulov to Diaghilev, April 1926, in Varunts, “Novïye materialï iz zarubezhnïkh arkhivov,” 200. Yakulov must have meant Asaf Messerer, who danced in the Bolshoi from 1921 to 1954. 86. Nouvel to Yakulov, April 14, 1926, in Varunts, “Novïye materialï iz zarubezhnïkh arkhivov,” 200. 87. Yakulov to Diaghilev, August 12, 1925, ibid., 195. 88. Yakulov to Diaghilev, April 1926, ibid., 200. 89. Nouvel to Yakulov, April 14, 1926, ibid., 200. 90. Diary entry, March 23, 1926, Prokofiev Diaries 3:277–78. 91. Diary entry, March 27–April 3, 1927, ibid., 3:573. About Diaghilev’s initial plan see diary entry, October 24, 1925, ibid., 3:222–23; 92. Diary entry, November 26, 1926, ibid., 389. 93. Diary entry, April 10, 1927, ibid., 580. The next day Prokofiev notes in his diary that the new title reminds him of “Pas d’argent” (no money in French). Ibid., 581. 94. Dmitry Rovinskiy, Russkiye narodnïye kartinki, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg: Izd. R. Golike, 1900–1901). 95. Diary entry, April 9, 1927, Prokofiev Diaries 3:579. 96. Prokofiev’s text of the cable to Yakulov, dated April 29, 1927, Prokofiev Arch. 97. “Daily life in Soviet Russia is absorbing to me, especially now when I am about to start work on the ballet.” Diary entry, August 3, 1925, Prokofiev Diaries 3:216–17. 98. Massine learned in Rovinsky’s book that Baba Yaga’s fight with the crocodile was an Old Believer satire on Peter the Great’s religious reforms (the Old Believers nicknamed Peter the Great “The Crocodile”). See Prokofiev Diaries 3:580n1. As Dianne E. Farrell explains, the woodcut more probably depicts the fight between a male sorcerer and female sorceress. Dianne E. Farrell, “Shamanic Elements in Some Early Eighteenth Century Russian Woodcuts,” Slavic Review 52, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 725–44. 99. Diary entry, April 10, 1927, Prokofiev Diaries 3:580. The staging bewildered Henry Malherbe, critic of Le Temps. Instead of the crocodile and the witch announced in the program, he saw only “a provocative young proletarian woman” (danced by Vera Petrovna), “pursued by about ten rascals who threw themselves upon her.” Malherbe, “Chronique musicale,” Le Temps, June 15, 1927, in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier ” (1927), 2:102. 100. Yakulov’s drawing with comments, Fonds Kochno, Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra de Paris, reproduced in appendix 3 in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:22. 101. Malherbe, “Chronique musicale.” Another reviewer described the scene more humorously as “a street vendor doing wild gambols in front of women in their finery who

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leap and sway as wildly as he does.” Robert Dézarnaux, “ ‘La Musiques: Theatre SarahBernhardt: Ballets Russes: ‘Pas d’Acier,’ ballet de M. Iakouloff, musique de Serge Prokofieff, choréographie de Leonide Massine,” La Liberté, June 9, 1927, ibid., 2:91. Massine kept Yakulov’s idea of putting lampshades on the countesses’ heads for hats: but, as the reviews indicate, what Yakulov conceived as a comic effect turned into indication of poverty in Massine’s version. 102. Sayers claims that for the 1927 performance they removed the train. Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 1:264. 103. Yakulov’s handwritten notes, sent to Diaghilev as an attachment to Prokofiev’s letter, August 11, 1925, Prokofiev Arch. 104. Malherbe, “Chronique musicale.” 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. André Levinson, “La Choréographie,” Comoedia, June 9, 1927, in Sayer, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:85. 108. Unsigned review in La Revue musicale, July 1, 1927, ibid., 2:98. It is unclear which scene the critics saw as rape. The only one that might indicate rape was “Baba Yaga’s battle with the crocodile,” in which several male dancers threw themselves on Vera Petrova, who danced Baba Yaga. 109. Malherbe, “Chronique musicale.” 110. H[enry] T[aylor] P[arker], “The Play, the Work: Music and Mining; Ballet Out of Life. Prokofiev’s ‘Pas D’Acier’ in London,” Boston Evening Transcript, July 23, 1927. 111. A[leksandr] Bundikov, “Balet Dyagileva,” Vozrozhdeniye, June 10, 1927, in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:108. 112. Malherbe, “Chronique musicale.” 113. André Coeuroy, “Les Beaux-Arts: Ballets russes,” La Revue Universelle, August 15, 1927, ibid., 2:100. 114. Unsigned review in La Revue musicale, July 1, 1927, ibid., 2:98. 115. Jacques Benoist-Méchin, “La Musique: La 20 saison des Ballets Russes de M. Serge de Diaghilev, au theater Sarah-Bernhardt,” L’Europe Nouvelle, June 18, 1927, ibid., 2:88. 116. The Prompter, “Theatre and Hall,” Empire News, July 10, 1927, ibid., 2:119. 117. Bundikov, “Balet Dyagileva.” For the fashion of clowns and acrobats in Parisian music halls see Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, esp. 98–143. 118. H. “The Bolshevist Ballet,” The Saturday Review, July 16, 1927, in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:122. 119. Crescendo, “Wheels and Toil to Music: Ugliness Has Its Night of Power at the Ballet,” The Star, July 5, 1927, ibid., 2:124. 120. P[arker], “The Play, The Work.” See also Yakulov to Diaghilev, September 1, 1925, in Varunts, “Novïye materialï iz zarubezhnïkh arkhivov,” 197. 121. P[arker], “The Play, The Work.” 122. “The New Ballet. M. Diaghilev and the Music of Prokofiev. How it Broke His Piano,” The Observer, July 3, 1927, in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:129. 123. Press, Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev, 73. 124. P[arker], “The Pay, The Work.” 125. The Prompter, “Theatre and Hall.”

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126. A. K., “A Bolshevik Ballet: Epileptic Dancing,” The Daily News, July 5, 1927, in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:117. 127. H. A. S., “A Ballet of Imbecility and Ugliness: M. Diaghileff ’s New Effort,” The Westminster Gazette, July 5, 1927, in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:127. 128. Crescendo, “Wheels and Toil to Music,” in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:124. 129. P[arker], “The Play, The Work.” 130. E. B., “The Russian Ballet: Prokofieff ’s New Work,” The Manchester Guardian, July 5, 1927, in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:120. 131. Crescendo, “Wheel and Toil to Music.” 132. P[arker], “The Play, The Work.” 133. “Judging by the tempestuous reception it received last night, it will become a regular feature of the Russian Ballet programs” (Daily Express); “The ballet had quite a boisterously enthusiastic reception” (Westminster Gazette); “The public applauded frantically” (Daily News); “At the end of the ballet there was only rapturous applause” (Daily Telegraph); “The first performance of ‘Le Pas d’Acier’ was followed by about a dozen curtain calls” (Daily Mirror); “The ballet was applauded with enthusiasm” (Times); “The applause was rapturous” (Star). Excerpts from reviews, typed by Prokofiev. Prokofiev Arch. 134. Bundikov, “Balet Dyagileva.” 135. Malherbe, “Chronique musicale.” 136. For more about the failed negotiations between Carpenter and Diaghilev, see Press, Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev, 222–23. 137. P[arker], “The Play, The Work.” 138. W. M., “Factory Life Ballet: Music and Machinery,” The Daily Mail, July 5, 1927, in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:115. 139. “Besides these tempests from Bolshevy, the American ‘Skyscrapers’ did but blow by as a gentle breeze.” P[arker], “The Play, The Work.” 140. Diary entry, February 28, 1926, Prokofiev Diaries 3:271; see also Press, Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev, 223. 141. Edward Shanks, “The Bolshevist Heresy,” review of The Mind and Face of Bolshevism by René Fülöp Miller (Putnam), The Saturday Review, July 16, 1927, 95. 142. Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, 127. Further quotations will be marked in the text. 143. George, “La Musique,” in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:94. 144. Jacques Riviére, “Le Sacre du Printemps,” in Nouvelle revue française (November 1, 1913), trans. in Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 2:994. 145. Brunel, “Saison des Ballets Russes.” 146. Coeuroy, “Les Beaux-Arts: Ballets Russes.” 147. “As regards music pure and simple, one is continually reminded of Stravinsky’s ‘Sacre du Printemps,’ besides which Prokofiev’s work takes a place, though it does not bear close comparison.” “Le Pas d’Acier: Music by Serge Prokofiev,” unsigned, The Observer, July 10, 1927, in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:121. 148. Diary entry, February 13, 1927, Prokofiev Diaries 3:499. 149. Prokofiev to Boris Asafyev, April 15, 1927, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 112.

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150. Diary entry, April 11, 1927, Prokofiev Diaries 3:581. 151. A. V. Lunacharskiy, “Novinki Dyagilevskogo sezona,” Vechernyaya Moskva, June 23, 1927, reprinted in Lunacharskiy, V mire muzïki: stat’i i rechi (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1958), 347–50. In English in Stanley J. Rabinowitz, “From the Other Shore: Russian Comment on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes,” Dance Research 27, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 25. 152. Diary entry, August 25, 1927, Prokofiev Diaries 3:623. 153. A. V. Lunacharskiy, “ ‘Politika’ i ‘publika,’ ” Krasnaya panorama 33 (August 12, 1928): 9–10, quoted in Elizaveta Surits, “ ‘Stal’noy skok,’ 1927,” Sovetskiy balet 2, no. 9 (March–April 1983): 28. 154. Diary entry, May 29, 1926, Prokofiev Diaries 3:323. 155. Diary entry, February 16, 1927, ibid., 505. 156. The official invitation came from Gusman in May 26, 1929. Diary entry, May 26, 1929, ibid., 834; and Prokofiev to Meyerhold, March 23, 1929, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 77–78. 157. Diary entry, June 22, 1929, Prokofiev Diaries 3: 846. 158. Prokofiev to Derzhanovsky, April 22, 1928, translated in Sayers, “Le Pas d’acier” (1927), 2:58–59. 159. Prokofiev to Derzhanovsky, May 12, 1928, ibid., 60. 160. Prokofiev to Miaskovsky, July 9, 1928, Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 274. 161. Miaskovsky to Prokofiev, January 21, 1929, in S. S. Prokof ’yev i N. Ya. Myaskovsky: Perepiska (Moscow: Vsesoyuznoye izdatel’stvo “Sovetskiy kompozitor,” 1977), 289. Miaskovsky also thought that instead of selected movements, the ballet should have been performed in its entirety. 162. D. Gachev, “O ‘Stal’nom skoke’ i direktorskom naskoke,” Proletarskiy muzïkant 6 (1929): 19–23. 163. Yuriy Keldïsh, “Balet ‘Stal’noy skok’ i yego avtor—Prokof ’yev,” Proletarskiy muzïkant 6 (1929): 12–19, trans. in Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker, Music and Soviet Power 1917–1932 (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2013), 243–52. 164. Diary entry, November 14, 1929, Prokofiev Diaries 3:880. 165. Keldïsh, “Balet ‘Stal’noy skok’ i yego avtor—Prokof ’yev,” 247. 166. Diary entry, November 14, 1929, Prokofiev Diaries 3:880. 167. Gachev, “O ‘Stal’nom skoke’ i direktorskom naskoke,” 21. 168. Ibid., 22. 169. Ibid., 21. 170. Diary entry, November 14, 1929, Prokofiev Diaries 3:881. 171. Keldïsh, “Balet ‘Stal’noy skok’ i yego avtor—Prokof ’yev,” 248. Further quotations in the text come from pages 249–52. 172. Prokofiev to Miaskovsky, December 28, 1929, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 286. 173. Prokofiev to Gusman, January 10, 1930, trans. in Frolova-Walker and Walker, Music and Soviet Power 1917–1932, 243. 174. Dmitri Shostakovich to Ivan Sollertinsky, February 30, 1932, in D. D. Shostakovich, Pis’ma I. I. Sollertinskomu (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo “Kompozitor,” 2006), 53, part of it is translated in Frolova-Walker and Walker, Music and Soviet Power 1917–1932, 243. 175. Diary entry, September 1, 1929, Prokofiev Diaries 3:966. 176. Diary entry, January 17, 1930, ibid., 906.

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177. Olin Downes, “Some Considerations Concerning Experiments in a New ArtForm,” The New York Times, March 8, 1931. 178. Reis to Prokofiev, March 19, 1931, Prokofiev Arch. 179. Reis to Prokofiev, January 15, 1931; Prokofiev to Reis, January 27, 1931, Prokofiev Arch. 180. John Martin, “Social Satire: Prokofiev’s ‘Pas d’Acier’ in a New Version To Be Given on Tuesday,” The New York Times, April 19, 1931. See also a short announcement on April 10, 1931. 181. Summary of scenario sent to Prokofiev on February 25, 1931 (Prokofiev Arch.), from the interview with Simonson, in Martin, “Social Satire,” and published in The Dance Magazine (May 1931): 32–33. 182. Martin, “Social Satire.” 183. Ibid. 184. Two other performances took place in Philadelphia, on April 11 and 13, before the two New York performances on April 21 and 22. 185. Diary entry, November 10, 1930, Prokofiev Diaries 3:976. 186. Prokofiev to Reis, February 25, 1931, Prokofiev Arch. 187. Reis to Prokofiev, March 19, 1931, Prokofiev Arch. 188. John Martin, “Modernism: League of Composers Ballet Raises Art Problems Anew,” The New York Times, April 26, 1931. 189. Scenario in The Dance Review (May 1931): 32. 190. Prokofiev to Miaskovsky, July 7, 1931, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 294. 191. Olin Downes, “ ‘Oedipus,’ a Stage Spectacle,” The New York Times, April 22, 1931. 192. Diary entry, January 17, 1930, Prokofiev Diaries 3:906. 193. New York Times, April 11, 1931. 194. Reis to Prokofiev, May 22, 1931, Prokofiev Arch. 195. Downes, “ ‘Oedipus,’ a Stage Spectacle.” 196. Martin, “League of Composers Ballet Raises Art Problems Anew.” 197. John Martin, “Mexican Ballet in World Premiere: Cryptically Titled ‘H.P.’ Given by Philadelphia Grand Opera Company. Ballet Music by Chavez. Catherine Littlefield Directs Choreography—Dolinoff, Dancer, in American Debut,” New York Times, April 1, 1932. 198. Diary entry, February 16, 1927, in Prokofiev Diaries 3:506. 199. Anatoly Lunacharskiy, “Razvlekal’ pozolochennoy tolpï,” Vechernyaya Moskva, June 25, 1927, quoted in Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: A Life, trans. Jane Hedley-Prôle and S. J. Leinbach (London: Profile Books, 2009), 414–15. See also in Rabinowitz, “From the Other Shore,” 22–24. 200. Diary entry, March 8, 1929, Prokofiev Diaries 3:791. 201. Diary entry, March 9, 1929, ibid., 792. 202. Diary entry, June 8, 1924, ibid., 66. C HA P T E R 3

1. Diary entry, June 18, 1925, Prokofiev Diaries 3:180. 2. Prokofiev wrote two symphonies before the “Classical.” One he composed when he was eleven, the other a year before his graduation from the St. Petersburg Conservatory. His second symphony was read in a closed rehearsal on March 8, 1909, but left Prokofiev

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dissatisfied and determined to write a new one. Yury Kholopov argues that the “Classical” Symphony was Prokofiev’s late fulfillment of this promise. Yury Kholopov, “Why did Prokofiev write the ‘Classical Symphony’?” Three Oranges Journal 13 (May 2007): 11. 3. S. Prokof ’yev, Prokof ’yev Avtobiografiya, ed. Miralda Kozlova (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1982), 409–10, quoted in Kholopov, “Why did Prokofiev write the ‘Classical Symphony’?” 10. 4. “At the end of the day I could turn it to my advantage,” he wrote, “if the symphony really turned out to be classical.” Prokofiev, “Short Autobiography,” quoted in Kholopov, “Why did Prokofiev write the ‘Classical Symphony,’ ” 10. 5. Diary entry, May 1917, Prokofiev Diaries 2:196. 6. Diary entry, April 5, 1918, ibid., 269. 7. Israel V. Nestyev, Prokofiev, trans. Florence Jonas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960), 145. 8. Prokofiev to Boris Asafyev, February 8, 1925, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 95. 9. Prokofiev to Miaskovsky, January 3, 1924, ibid., 249. 10. Diary entry, May 10, 1920, Prokofiev Diaries 2:508. 11. Prokofiev to Asafyev, February 8, 1925, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 95. 12. Luba Golburt, The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 4, 41. 13. Nicolas Nabokov, “The Gracious Master,” 43. Typescript, Nicolas Nabokov Papers, box 4, folder 68, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts. 14. Lynn Garafola, “Looking Backward: Retrospective Classicism in the Twenties,” Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Conference, Society of Dance History Scholars, North Carolina School of the Arts, February 12–14, 1988 ([Riverside]: Society of Dance History Scholars, 1988), 184, also in idem, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 98, 116. 15. Richard Taruskin, “Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology,” in The Dangers of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 389. 16. Tim Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernization of Ballet (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 85. 17. Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951), 119–20. 18. Golburt, First Epoch, 12. 19. I. S. Zil’bershteyn and V. A. Samkov, Sergey Dyagilev i russkoye iskusstvo: Stat’i, otkrïtïye pis’ma, interv’yu. Perepiska. Sovremenniki o Dyagileve (Moscow: Izobrazitel’noye iskusstvo, 1982), 1:193–94, trans. in John E. Bowlt, “Early Writings of Serge Diaghilev,” in The Ballets Russes and Its World, ed. Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 68–69. 20. Golburt, First Epoch, 14, 19. 21. Anna V. Nisnevich, “The Silver Age and Its Echo: St. Petersburg Classicism at Home and Abroad 1897–1921” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007), 7. 22. Ibid., 82–84. 23. Serge Lifar, Ma Vie: From Kiev to Kiev; An Autobiography, trans. James Holman Mason (New York and Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1970), 28.

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24. Nabokov, “Gracious Master,” 14. 25. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 15, 41, and 44. 26. Ibid., 58. 27. Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music, 44–57. 28. Nabokov, “Gracious Master,” 18. 29. Nabokov, Bagázh, 143–47. 30. Nabokov, “Gracious Master,” 43. 31. Ibid., 42. Here Nabokov seems to remember that he first played Ode to Diaghilev at Misia Sert’s and not in Diaghilev’s quarters in the Grand Hotel, as he writes in Bagázh. 32. Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic, Studies in Musicology 101 (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1988), esp. 1–59. 33. Nabokov, “Gracious Master,” 48. 34. Quoted by Vincent Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 69. 35. L. D. Lyubimov, “ ‘Apollon’ i ‘Oda’: Beseda s avtorami,” Vozrozhdeniye, June 24, 1928. 36. Golburt, First Epoch, 36. 37. About Lomonosov and backwardness, see Gary Marker, “Standing in St. Petersburg Looking West, or, Is Backwardness All There Is?” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (May 1, 2009): 1–12. 38. André Levinson, La Danse d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Duchatre et Van Buggenhoudt, 1929), 10, quoted in André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties, ed. Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1991), 23–24. 39. André Levinson, “Aux ‘Ballets Russes’: Ode,” Candide, June 14, 1928. 40. Henry Malherbe’s review in Le Temps, June 13, 1928; and Maurice Brillant, “Les oeuvres et les hommes,” Le Correspondant 267 (1928): 620. 41. T. I. Smolyarova, Parizh 1928: Oda vozvrashchayetsya v teatr (Moscow: Rossiyskiy gosudarstvennïy gumanitarnïy universitet, 1999), 4. 42. James von Geldern, “The Ode as a Performative Genre,” Slavic Review 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 931. 43. Nabokov, “Gracious Master,” 43. 44. Diary entry, February 23, 1928, Prokofiev Diaries 3:180. These instrumental numbers are missing from all the manuscripts and published scores (short score and full score in Nicholas Nabokov Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University), and published vocal score (Paris: Maurice Sénart, 1928). 45. Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music, 98. 46. Nabokov, “Gracious Master,” 49. Alexander Gurilyov (1803–1858) was a pianist and a composer of Russian salon music; Alexander Alyabyev (1778–1851) is known as a composer of Russian song. 47. Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music, 96–97. 48. Nabokov, “Gracious Master,” 48–49. 49. Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music, 112. 50. Nabokov, “Gracious Master,” 50.

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51. The recording (Marina Shaguch, soprano; Alexander Kisselev, bass; Russian State Symphonic Cappella; Residentie Orkest The Hague; Valeri Polyansky, conductor; Colchester, Essex, England: Chandos [2002]) and the manuscript score disagree here. In the score the upper melody is written for flute, the last phrase for English horn, while on the recording the upper line is played by oboe, taken over at the end by clarinet. 52. Diary entry, February 23, 1928, in Prokofiev Diaries 3:691. 53. Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov, 69. 54. Boris Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, trans. Adrienne Foulke (New York and Evanston, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970), 260. 55. L. D. Lyubimov’s interview with Diaghilev, Vozrozhdeniye, June 3, 1928, in Zil’bershteyn and Samkov, Sergey Dyagilev i russkoye iskusstvo, 1:249. 56. Program quoted in Alexander Schouvaloff, The Art of Ballets Russes: The Serge Lifar Collection of Theater Designs, Costumes, and Painting at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 323. 57. Parker Tyler, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 299. 58. Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music, 95. The last line refers to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s first novel, Journey to the End of the Night (1932). 59. Ibid., 95–96. 60. Nabokov, Bagázh, 152. 61. Ibid., 157. 62. A. V. Coton, A Prejudice for Ballet (London: Methuen, 1938), 86. 63. Ibid., 87. 64. Tyler, Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew, 331. 65. Ibid. 66. Brillant, “Les oeuvres et les hommes,” 623. 67. Tyler, Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew, 333. 68. For Tchelitchew’s scenario, written in Charbonnier’s hand, see ibid., 327–36. 69. Ibid., 334. 70. In his review in Le Correspondant, Brillant describes the dots as black, but in some photographs the dots are clearly of lighter color (see the two photographs of Ode in Boris Kochno and Maria Luz, Le Ballet [Paris: Hachette, 1954], 270–71). 71. Brillant, “Les oeuvres et les hommes,” 623. 72. Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music, 122. 73. Henry Malherbe’s review in Le Temps, June 13, 1928. 74. Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music, 112. 75. Ibid., 106–7. 76. Ibid., 125. 77. André Schaeffner’s review in Le Ménestrel, June 15, 1928. 78. André Levinson complained that “because of these aimless experiments the platform is constantly plunged into darkness where waves of changes take place in the corps de ballet.” Levinson, “Aux ‘Ballets Russes.’ ” 79. See Brillant’s review in Le Correspondant. Levinson also complained about putting Massine and Danilova behind a screen. Levinson, “Aux ‘Ballets Russes.’ ” 80. Robert Caby’s review in L’Humanité, June 15, 1928.

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81. Malherbe’s review in Le Temps, June 13, 1928. 82. Ibid. 83. Levinson, “Aux ‘Ballets Russes.’ ” 84. In Massine’s choreography “the classic series of steps are complicated with acrobatic units, which result in a questionable mixture too frequently practiced in our days.” Ibid. 85. Brillant, “Les oeuvres et les hommes” and Louis Laloy’s review in Comoedia, June 8, 1928. 86. André Schaeffner, “Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt. Ballets russes de Serge de Diaghilev, Ode de Nicolas Nabokoff,” Le Ménestrel, June 15, 1928, 269. 87. Brillant, “Les œuvres et les hommes”; and Maurice Bex in Le Revue hebdomadaire (July, 1928). 88. Levinson, “Aux ‘Ballets Russes.’ ” 89. Brillant, “Les œuvres et les hommes.” 90. André Schaffner’s review in Le Ménestrel. 91. Georges Auric’s review in Les Annales politiques, August 1, 1928. 92. George’s review, Les Nouvelles littéraires, June 16, 1928. 93. By the time Ode reached London, Diaghilev had changed strategy. The center of the London season was unquestionably Apollon. Of the thirty-six performances between June 25 and July 29, eleven featured Apollon. Ode appeared only six times, and only in the second half of the season. 94. London was a different story. The critic who signed his name as H. in The Saturday Review dismissed the music of Ode as “hardly worthy even of a composer of M. Nabokov’s negligible reputation.” The Saturday Review, July 14, 1928. Francis Toye in The Morning Post thought Nabokov’s music “vulgar, without being funny. At times in writing for the chorus he shows a certain vigour, but most of the score is redolent of the circus, whether in straightforward or discordant fashion.” Francis Toye’s review in The Morning Post, July 14, 1928. 95. Laloy’s review in Comoedia. 96. Brillant, “Les oeuvres et les hommes.” C HA P T E R 4

1. Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951), 104. 2. Michel Georges-Michel’s interview with Diaghilev in Excelsior, October 27, 1927. 3. Samuel Hahnemann, Organon of the Art of Healing (1810), quoted in Richard Haehl, Samuel Hahnemann: His Work, trans. Maria L. Wheeler and W. Grundy, 2 vols. (London: Homoeopathic Publishing Company, 1922), 1:67. 4. Maureen A. Carr sums up what she considers the sources of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, especially as it is formulated in Poetics of Music, focusing mainly on French intellectual influence on Stravinsky’s understanding of the term. Of Russian emigrant influence, she mentions only Arthur Lourié, whose ideas she compares curiously to Adorno’s. Maureen A. Carr, Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky’s Works on Greek Subjects (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), esp. 1–15. 5. Olin Downes, “Stravinsky Ballet in World Premiere, ‘Apollon Musagetes’ Opens the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Festival in Washington,” New York Times, April 28, 1928, 13.

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6. Gustave Rey, “Igor Stravinsky nous parle du ‘duce’ des muses,” L’Intransiaent, December 2, 1927, 1–2. In the interview Stravinsky translated the Greek “Musagète” to the politically charged Italian “duce.” 7. When Diaghilev grumbled about Coolidge being “completely deaf,” Stravinsky retorted, “She’s deaf but she pays.” Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 32. 8. H. P. T[aylor], “Out of Spain, The Argentina and the Dance,” Boston Evening Transcript, July 14, 1928. 9. Diaghilev to Lifar, September 30, 1927, quoted in Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky’s Ballets (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 119; and also in Carr, Multiple Masks, 98. 10. L. Lyubimov, “ ‘Apollon’ i ‘Oda’: Beseda s avtorami,” Vozrozhdeniye, June 24, 1928. 11. Diaghilev to Lifar, September 30, 1927. 12. Joseph, Stravinsky’s Ballets, 118. 13. Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1936), 134. Carr proposes that the scenario, likely drafted by Lourié, was also inspired by Beethoven’s The Creatures of Prometheus, op. 43, which was later choreographed by Lifar at the Opéra. Carr, Multiple Masks, 99–100. 14. Robert Caby, “Un nouvelle oeuvre d’Igor Stravinsky: ‘Apollon-Musagète,’ ” L’Humanité, June 27, 1928. 15. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 134; and Lyubimov, “ ‘Apollon’ i ‘Oda.’ ” 16. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 134. 17. Ibid., 135. 18. Cyril W. Beaumont, The Diaghilev Ballet in London: A Personal Record (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1940), 13–14. 19. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 135. 20. “Apollon,” Vozrozhdeniye, June 10, 1928, in I. S. Zil’bershteyn and V. A. Samkov, Sergey Dyagilev i russkoye iskusstvo: Stat’i, otkrïtïye pis’ma, interv’yu. Perepiska. Sovremenniki o Dyagileve (Moscow: Izobrazitel’noye iskusstvo, 1982), 1:250. 21. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 164. 22. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 143. 23. Robert C. Hansen, Scenic and Costume Design for the Ballets Russes, Theater and Dramatic Studies 30 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 114. 24. Diary entry, October 24, 1925, Prokofiev Diaries 3:652. 25. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues, 33. On Stravinsky’s use of Alexandrines, see Carr, Multiple Masks, 101–5, 116–26. 26. Igor Stravinsky, “Some Ideas About My Octour,” in Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, Music in the Western World: A History in Document (New York: Schirmer Books, 1984), 458–59. 27. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 136. 28. Prokofiev to Miaskovsky, January 25, 1928, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 271. 29. Prokofiev to Miaskovsky, July 9, 1928, ibid., 275. 30. Prokofiev to Miaskovsky, January 21, 1929, ibid., 278. 31. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues, 33–35.

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32. F. B., “Russian Ballet. Serge Diaghileff Season. ‘Apollon Musagetes,’ ” The Daily Telegraph, June 26, 1928. 33. Henry Malherbe’s review of Apollo in Le Temps, June 20, 1928. Carr adds Puccini’s Gianni Schicci to the list. Carr, Multiple Masks, 118–19. 34. “The Russian Ballet. Stravinsky’s New Period,” The Times, July 12, 1928. 35. Leonid Sabaneev, “Musical Notes from Abroad: Russian Music in Paris,” The Musical Times 68, no. 1015 (August 1, 1927): 749. 36. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 19. 37. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues, 34. 38. Ibid., 32. 39. Here I focus only on the use of the term in France of the 1920s. For more discussion of the meaning of neoclassicism, see Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic, Studies in Musicology 101 (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1988); Richard Taruskin, “Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology,” in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 382–405; and Tamara Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. 17–20. 40. “Apollon,” Vozrozhdeniye, June 10, 1928. 41. “O klassike” (Interv’yu), Vozrozhdeniye, December 18, 1928, in Zil’bershteyn and Samkov, Sergey Dyagilev i russkoye iskusstvo, 1:251. 42. A. Bundikov, “Dyagilev i klassika k predstoyashchim gastrolyam,” Vozrozhdeniye, December 13, 1928. 43. “O klassike,” 251. 44. Lynn Garafola, “Looking Backward: Retrospective Classicism in the Twenties,” Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Conference, Society of Dance History Scholars, North Carolina School of the Arts, February 12–14, 1988 ([Riverside]: Society of Dance History Scholars, 1988), 190. 45. Beaumont, Diaghilev Ballet in London, 284. 46. Garafola, “Looking Backward: Retrospective Classicism in the Twenties,” 190. 47. Levitz, Modernist Mysteries, 305. 48. Scott Messing argues that Schloezer’s chance connection of Stravinsky and neoclassicism in a review of Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments in 1923 was the first step to rehabilitate the term that had a negative connotation before the war. Scott Messing, “Polemic as History: The Case of Neoclassicism,” Journal of Musicology 9, no. 4 (Fall 1991): 490. Schloezer’s review appeared in La revue contemporaine (February 1923), 245–48. 49. Boris de Schloezer, Igor Stravinsky, La musique modern, ed. André Coeuroy (Paris: Éditions Claude Aveline, 1929), 128–30. This part of the book was also published in La Revue musicale 10, no. 4 (February 1, 1929), and reprinted in Comprendre la musique: Contributions à La Nouvelle revue française et à La Revue musicale (1921–1956), ed. Timothée Picard (Rennes Cedex: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011), 195–209. 50. Boris de Schloezer, “Réflexions sur la musique: ‘La rançon du classicisme,’ ” La Revue musicale 6, no. 8 (June 1, 1925), in Comprendre la musique, 195; and Igor Stravinsky, 131–35, also as “Sur Stravinsky,” La Revue musicale 10, no. 4 (February 1, 1929), in ibid., 201–2.

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51. Levitz, Modernist Mysteries, 307–8. 52. Next to Schloezer’s claim that “one can define classical art as anti-realist” (Schloezer, Igor Stravinsky) Stravinsky scribbled: “It’s exactly the opposite.” See Valérie Dufour, Stravinsky et ses exégètes (1910–1940) (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2006), 125. 53. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues, 33. 54. Schloezer, “Réflexions sur la musique,” in Comprende la musique, 194–95. Schloezer’s opposition of classical and Romantic is similar to Lourié’s opposition of what he called “neoclassic” and “neogothic,” describing the first as objective, greater than individualistic, and the second as egocentric and subjective. Predictably he also picks Stravinsky as the epitome of the neoclassical principle (and Schoenberg as the neogothic antipode). Arthur Lourié, “Neogothic and Neoclassic,” Modern Music 5, no. 3 (March-April 1928): 6–7. 55. Schloezer, Igor Stravinsky, 130–31. 56. Boris de Schloezer, “Alexander Scriabine,” in Musique russe, ed. Pierre Souvtchinsky, vol. 2 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1953), 229–48, in English, “The Destiny of Scriabin’s Music,” in Scriabin: Artist and Mystic, trans. Nicolas Slonimsky (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 311–12. 57. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), 9. Since his medieval model, Thomas Aquinas, did not distinguish fine arts from craftsmanship, Maritain collected Thomist references to artisanship to build his own aesthetic theories. He preserved the medieval conflation of artisanship and art, but elevated both to the dignity of divine creation. Caryl Emerson, “Jacques Maritain and the Catholic Muse in Lourié’s Post-Petersburg Worlds,” in Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié, ed. Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 226–27. 58. Boris de Schloezer, “Réflexions sur la musique” (Réponse aux critiques du Stravinsky), La Revue musicale 11, no. 101 (February 1, 1930), in Comprendre la musique, 210. 59. Igor Stravinsky, “Some Ideas about my Octuor,” The Arts 6, no. 1 (January 1924): 4–6. 60. Schloezer, Igor Stravinsky, 129. 61. Boris de Schloezer, “Chronique musicale [Apollon Musagète de Stravinsky],” La nouvelle revue française 15, no. 178 (July 1, 1928), in Comprendre la musique, 394–95. 62. Schloezer contrasts Stravinsky’s voluntary renunciations with natural, not acquired, poverty of musical imagination, which he finds frequent in other composers’ work. Schloezer, “Réflexions sur la musique,” in Comprendre la musique, 195. 63. Schloezer, “Chronique musicale [Apollon Musagète de Stravinsky],” in Comprendre la musique, 394–95. 64. “I don’t say: ‘neoclassical’ art,” he concluded the part of his article about Stravinsky’s “classical art,” “because that term, to my mind, means nothing.” Schloezer, “Sur Stravinsky,” in Comprendre la musique, 209. The sentence is missing from his book on Stravinsky. In his review of Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress, Schloezer calls neoclassicism a “nostalgia for classicism, for a style, a nostalgia that can provide no more than a clever forgery.” Boris de Schloezer, “Igor Stravinsky: Le libertin [The Rake’s Progress]” [Classicism et néoclassicisme], Nouvelle NRF 1, no. 9 (September 1, 1953), in Comprendre la musique, 403. 65. Schloezer, Igor Stravinsky, 124. 66. Ibid., 11. 67. Ibid., 22–24.

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68. Stravinsky’s speech is reported by Yevgeny Ivanovich Somov in a letter to Rachmaninoff, see Sergey Vasil’yevich Rachmaninoff, Literaturnoye naslediye, vol. 3 (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1980), 261. See also Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America 1934–1971 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 8; and Richard Taruskin, “Not Modern and Loving It,” in Russian Music at Home and Abroad: New Essays (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 125–26. 69. Schloezer, Igor Stravinsky, 31–34. 70. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialoques, 33–34. 71. Nicolas Boileau, L’art poétique, chant 1, lines 105–6. The French hémistiche means both the caesura and the two parts of the sentence that are divided by the hémistiche. 72. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialoques, 34. 73. “The New Stravinsky Ballet. M. Diaghileff ’s Novelties,” The Observer, June 24, 1928. 74. Malherbe’s review of Apollo. 75. Maurice Brillant, “Les oeuvres et les hommes,” Le Correspondant (1928): 628. 76. P.-B. Gheusi, “Les ballets Russes,” Figaro, June 19, 1928, translated in Juliet Bellow, “Balanchine and the Deconstruction of Classicism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marion Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 243. 77. Igor Stravinsky, “A Warning,” The Dominant (December 1927): 31–32. Dominant also printed the text’s original French version, titled “Avertissement.” 78. Rollo H. Myers, “Some Thoughts Suggested by Stravinsky’s ‘Avertissement,’ ” The Dominant (March 1928): 32–34. 79. Brillant, “Les oeuvre et les hommes,” 620. 80. Malherbe’s review of Apollo. 81. Unsigned review in The Times, June 22, 1928. 82. Malherbe’s review of Apollo. 83. Unsigned review of Apollo in The Times. 84. André Levinson’s review of Apollo in Candide, June 21, 1928. 85. Robert Caby, “Une nouvelle oeuvre d’Igor Stravinsky, ‘Apollon-Musagète,’ ” L’Humanité: Journal socialiste quotidian, June 27, 1928. 86. Robert Caby, “Ballets russes et Concerts,” L’Humaité, June 15, 1928. 87. Stravinsky, Autobiography, 99–100. 88. As an example, see “Stravinsky ‘Not Revolutionary’. Composer of Les Noces Denies It Himself. Hates Progress. Says Music Is No Longer Servant of Ballet,” Evening Standard, July 8, 1923. 89. Maurice Paléologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs, trans. F. A. Holt, 3 vols. (New York: George H. Doran, 1972), 2:242, quoted in Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), 320–21. 90. Ibid., 331. 91. Akim Volynsky, “Baletï Stravinskogo,” Zhizn’ iskusstva (December 26, 1922): 2–5, in Akim Volynsky, Ballet’s Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in Russia, 1911–1925, trans. and introduced by Stanley J. Rabinowitz (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 75, 77. 92. Roland-Manuel’s review of The Rite, Montjoi! nos. 9–10 (June 14–29, 1913): 13, quoted in Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 1:1003.

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93. Homans, Apollo’s Angels, 319. 94. On Rivière’s review of The Rite in La nouvelle revue française, see Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:992–95. 95. Volynsky, “Baletï Stravinskogo,” 74, 77. 96. André Levinson, “La Danse. Où en sont les ‘Ballets russes,’ ” Comoedia, June 18, 1923; idem, “Russkiy balet. ‘Svadebka,’ ” Posledniye novosti, June 27, 1923; and idem, “Le décor, la chorégraphie,” Comoedia, June 16, 1923. Special thanks to Lynn Garafola, who called my attention to these reviews. 97. Quoted in Tim Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernization of Ballet (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 83. 98. Léon Bakst, “The Paths of Classicism in Art,” trans. Robert Johnson, in idem, “Bakst on Classicism: ‘The Path of Classicism in Art,’ ” Dance Chronicle 13, no. 2 (1990): 176. 99. Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine, 81–82. 100. Quoted ibid., 83. 101. William Craft Brumfield, The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 242. 102. G. Lukomskiy, “Neo-klassitsism v arkhitekture Peterburga,” Apollon 5 (1914): 5–20, quoted in Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine, 89. 103. Akim Volynsky, “Vis medicatrix (Strength, the Healer),” quoted in Rabinowitz, Ballet’s Magic Kingdom, 259. 104. N. Molostvov, “Aisedora Dunkan, Beseda s A. L. Volïnskim,” in Aisedora. Gastroli v Rossii, ed. T. S. Kasatkina and E. I. Ya. Suritz (Moscow: Artist. Rezhiser teatr, 1992), 112, quoted in Rabinowitz, Ballet’s Magic Kingdom, xxvi. 105. Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine, 26. 106. Diary entry, June 25, 1927, Prokofiev Diaries 3:599. 107. Gheusi’s review of Apollo. 108. Diary entry, June 12, 1928, Prokofiev Diaries 3:711. 109. Excelsior, October 27, 1927, quoted in Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882–1934 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 453. 110. Malherbe’s review of Apollo. C HA P T E R 5

1. Invitation leaflet to the exhibition “Pushkin and His Epoch,” copy at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College. The text also appears in Serge Lifar, ed., Centenaire de Pouchkine 1837–1937: Exposition Pouchkine et Son Époque (Paris: [Imp. Coopérative Étoile], 1937), 7–8; and in French and Russian in idem, Moya zarubezhnaya pushkiniana: Pushkinskiye vïstavki i izdaniya (Paris: Éditions Béresniak, 1966), 51–53. 2. Tatiana Baranova Monightetti, “Stravinsky’s Russian Library,” in Stravinsky and His World, ed. Tamara Levitz (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 67. 3. The essay was printed by Harvey Taylor for copyright purposes in 1940. For the full text in English, see appendix A 8 in Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 588–91. 4. Stravinsky’s “open letter,” dated October 1, 1921, printed in English in the Times and in the program book of the Ballets Russes, is reproduced in Robert Craft, ed., Igor and Vera

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Stravinsky: A Photograph Album (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 54; quoted in Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 2:1532. For the passage about Pushkin, see Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1936), 97. 5. On Lifar’s collaboration with the Nazis, see Mark Franko, “Serge Lifar et la question de la collaboration avec les autorités allemandes sous l’Occupation (1940–1949),” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 132 (October–December 2016): 21–41; and Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). 6. Catherine Andreyev and Ivan Savický, Russia Abroad: Prague and the Russian Diaspora, 1918–1938 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 156. 7. Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 96. 8. K. Zaitsev, “Bor’ba za Pushkina,” Vozrozhdeniye, February 6, 1937, reprinted in Pushkin v emigratsii 1937 (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiya, 1999), 535. 9. Ibid., 32. 10. “Pushkinskiy komitet,” Posledniye novosti, January 19, 1937. See also L. A. Mnukhin and I. M. Nebrozova, “Pushkinskiy god vo Frantsii,” in Pushkin i kul’tura russkogo zarubezh’ya. Mezhdunarodnaya nauchnaya konferentsiya, posvyashchonnaya 200-letiyo so dnya rozhdeniya, July 13, 1991 (Moscow: “Russkiy put’, 2000), 310. 11. Le Figaro, March 19, 1937. 12. André Pierre, “Donnera-t-on le nom de Pouchkine à une rue de Paris?” Le Temps, January 19, 1937; and “Où sera la rue Pouchkine?” Le Temps, February 6, 1937. 13. “Pushkinskiy komitet” and Mnukhin and Nebrozova, “Pushkinskiy god vo Frantsii,” 312. 14. “Pushkinskiy kontsert v zale Pleyel,” Posledniye novosti, February 10, 1937. 15. Illyustrirovannaya Rossiya 9 (Paris, 1937): 8–9, quoted in Mnukhin and Nebrozova, “Pushkinskiy god vo Frantsii,” 323. 16. In a list of concerts Le Ménestrel simply announced that Lifar would dance in the Salle Pleyel without giving any detail about the program. See Le Ménestrel, March 12, 1937. 17. Lifar’, Moya zarubezhnaya pushkiniana, 37. 18. “Pouchkine célébré à la Sorbonne,” L’Intrasigeant, January 28, 1937. 19. Lifar’, Moya zarubezhnaya pushkiniana, 64–65. 20. “Poushkine célébrè à la Sorbonne.” 21. Upon Diaghilev’s death in 1929, Lifar, Diaghilev’s cousin Pavel Koribut-Kubitovich, Walter Nouvel, and Boris Kochno took letters, manuscripts, and other documents from the impresario’s Paris apartment. Lifar later acquired Diaghilev’s remaining assets on favorable terms when the property was put up for auction. Patrizia Veroli, “Serge Lifar as a Dance Historian and the Myth of Russian Dance in ‘Zarubezhnaia Rossiia’ (Russia Abroad) 1930–1940,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 32, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 135n49. 22. Ibid. According to Veroli, Hofman was the real author of Lifar’s first autobiography in 1935 as well as Lifar’s biography of Diaghilev (Diaghilev and With Diaghilev, 1939). In the 1940s Hofman’s son, the musicologist Rostislav, took over his father’s role as Lifar’s ghost writer.

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23. Géa Augsbourg, La Vie en images de Serge Lifar, Maître de Ballet, Premier Danseur du Theatre National de l’Opéra (Paris: Corrèa, 1937). Image reproduced also in Lifar’, Moya zarubezhnaya pushkiniana, [11]. 24. Pierre, “Donnera-t-on le nom de Pouchkine à une rue de Paris?” 25. In an interview with André Frank in L’Intrasigeant on January 8, 1937, Lifar announced that his Pushkin exhibition would open at the end of February in the Bibliothèque National. The location was also confirmed in André Pierre’s article in Le Temps on January 19. See Pierre, “Donnera-t-on le nom de Pouchkine à une rue de Paris?” 26. On Diaghilev’s exhibition of Russian portraits see Sergey Lifar’, Dyagilev i c Dyagilevïm (Paris: “Dom knigi,” 1939), esp. 122–26. 27. The same dedication is printed in Lifar’s edition of Pushkin’s letters to his fiancée. André Frank, “Quand Serge Lifar ne songe pas à l’Opéra mais à la Bibliothèque Nationale,” L’Intrasigeant, January 8, 1937. 28. Lifar claimed that Zay offered him the Legion of Honor in exchange for giving a role to the Soviet ambassador in his exhibition. Serge Lifar, Ma Vie: From Kiev to Kiev; An Autobiography, trans. James Holman Mason (New York and Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1970), 144. 29. The French President Albert François Lebrun did not appear at the celebratory opening. He visited the exhibition the next day in the company of Paul Valéry. See Vadim Perel’muter, “Nam tselïy mir chuzhbina,” in Pushkin v emigratsii 1937, 20. 30. Lifar, Invitation leaflet to the exhibition “Pushkin and His Epoch.” 31. See Vladimir Odoyevsky’s obituary for Pushkin in the Literary Supplements to the Russian Invalid (Literaturnïye pribavleniya k “Russkomy invalidu”), January 30, 1837, quoted in Paul Debreczeny, Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 76. The metaphor lived on in Osip Mandelshtam’s essay “Pushkin and Scriabin,” in Mandelshtam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis Press, 1979), 90. 32. Debreczeny, Social Functions of Literature, 224. 33. André Gide’s speech is quoted in Perel’muter, “Nam tselïy mir chuzhbina,” 15. 34. “Pushkinskaya vïstavka sostoitsya,” Vozrozhdeniye, March 6, 1937, quoted in Lifar’, Moya zarubezhnaya pushkiniana, 51. 35. Exposition Pouchkine et Son Époque: Centenaire de Pouchkine 1837–1937, ed. Serge Lifar (Paris: [Imp. Coopérative Étoile], 1937), 55–57. 36. For a detailed description of the exhibition see M. L. Gofman, “Pushkin i ego epokha: Yubileynaya vïstavka v Parizhe,” in Pushkin v emigratsii 1937, 575–618. 37. See Barry Cornwall’s “Song” in “The Poetical Works of Barry Cornwall,” in The Poetical Works of Milman, Bowles, Wilson and Barry Cornwall (Paris: W. Galignani, 1829), 152. This was the volume Pushkin used when translating the scene from John Wilson’s The City of Plague (pp. 25–64 in the volume), which became his Feast During the Plague. Glinka’s manuscript is also reproduced in the centennial special issue of Illyustrirovannaya Rossiya, Pushkin special issue, no. 7, February 6, 1937. 38. “Discours de M. Nicolas Pouchkine,” speech given at the opening of the exhibition “Pushkin and His Epoch” in the Salle Pleyel on March 16, 1937, in Exposition Pouchkine et Son Époque, 60.

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39. “Discours de M. Modest Hofmann,” 62. For more on the debate about Pushkin see Irina Paperno, “Pushkin v zhizni cheloveka Serebryannogo veka,” in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age, ed. Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes, and Irina Paperno (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 19–51. 40. Gofman, “Pushkin i ego epokha,” 604. 41. For the detailed description of the exhibition, see Kratkiy putevoditel’ po vïstavke posvïshchennoy stoletiyu so dnya smerti velikogo russkogo poeta Aleksandra Sergeyevicha Pushkina, 1837–1937 (Moscow: Izdaniye Vsesoyuznogo Pushkinskogo Komiteta, 1937); and [no author], “The Pushkin Centenary: Preparations in the USSR,” The Slavonic and East European Review 15, no. 44 (January 1933): 309–27. 42. Perel’muter, “Nam tselïy mir chuzhbina,” 30. 43. Edward J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 54–55. 44. Anatoliy Lunacharskiy, “Yeshcho o Pushkine,” in Sobraniye sochineniy, ed. I. I. Anisimov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1963–67), 1:39; Lunacharsky, “Alexander Pushkin,” in On Literature and Art, ed. A. Lebedev, trans. Y. Ganushkin (Moscow: Progress, 1965), 93. 45. “Slava russkogo naroda,” Pravda, February 10, 1937, trans. as “The Glory of the Russian People,” in Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda, ed. Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 215, further quotations come from pp. 215–18. 46. “The Russian people have given the world the genius of Pushkin. Under the leadership of the great party of Lenin and Stalin, the Russian people brought about the Socialist Revolution and will follow it through to its conclusion. The Russian people have a right to take pride in their role in history as well as their writers and poets.” Ibid. 47. Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 125. 48. Quoted ibid., 137. 49. Ibid., 140. 50. “Pushkin is a national poet—but not a poet for the masses,” see Vladislav Khodasevich’s negative review of B. V. Tomashevsky’s one volume Pushkin dictionary, quoted in Perel’muter, “Nam tselïy mir chuzhbina,” 29. 51. “My friend, believe me that with thunder, / the star of joy will rise again! And Russia will arise from slumber, / Our names will be incised with wonder / On remnants of oppressive reign!” Pushkin, “To Chadaayev.” 52. Stephanie Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 52. 53. Ibid., 59. 54. “Pushkinskiya torzhestva v Moskve, Sobraniye v Bol’shom teatre,” Posledniye novosti, February 12, 1937. 55. “Pushkinskiya torzhestva v Rossii. Miting u pamyatnika Pushkinu v Moskve,” Posledniye novosti, February 11, 1937. 56. “Pushkin i . . . Stalin,” Posledniye novosti, January 9, 1937.

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57. “Kak prorabatïvayut Pushkina,” Posledniye novosti, January 21, 1937. 58. Quoted in Perel’muter, “Nam tselïy mir chuzhbina,” 29. 59. Posledniye novosti, February 9, 1937. 60. J. -E. P[outerman], “Avant-Propos,” Poushkine 1837–1937. Textes recueillis et annoutés par J. –E. Pouterman (Paris: Editions Sociales Internationales, 1937), 7–8. 61. Ibid., [11]. See Vikentiy Veresayev, Pushkin v zhizni. Sputnik Pushkina (1925–26). On Veresayev’s role in the debate about Pushkin see Paperno, “Pushkin v zhizni cheloveka Serebryanogo veka.” 62. V. Desnitskiy, “Poushkine et nous,” in Pouterman, Poushkine 1837–1937, 139–40. 63. “Gentlemen, here is my Pushkin,” in Pushkin v vospominaniyakh sovermennikov 2:61, quoted in T. J. Binyon, Pushkin: A Biography (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), 242. 64. Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin, 88. 65. Khodasevich, “The Swaying Tripod,” in Sobraniye sochineniy, 2:85, quoted in ibid., 95. 66. Quoted ibid., 96. 67. V. Ya. Kirpotin, “Naslediye Pushkina i kommunizm,” in A. Pushkin 1837–1937. Pamyatka. Stat’i i materialï dlya doklada (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoye izdatel’stvo “Khudozhestvennaya literatura,” 1937), 50. As the editor noted, Kirpotin’s more than one hundred-page essay appeared in the volume in abbreviated form. 68. Lev Mnukhin, Russkoye zarubezh’ye. Khronika nauchnoy, kul’turnoy i obshchestvennoy zhizni, 1920–1940 Frantsia, 4 vols. (Moscow and Paris: ЭКСМО and YMCA-Press, 1995), 3:293. 69. Marina Tsvetaeva, “My Pushkin,” in Marina Tsvetaeva, A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose, trans. and ed. J. Marin King (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980), 320. 70. Ibid., 362. 71. Sergey Lifar, “Siyayushchiy svet poezii,” Dlya Vas, no. 6, February 7, 1937. 72. Veroli did not list this article among the publications (mainly books) she suspects Hofman helped write. But since the article was published in the same year as Lifar’s publication of Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum During the Campaign of 1829, which was edited by Hofman, it seems probable that Hofman also helped with Lifar’s position piece. Veroli, “Serge Lifar as a Dance Historian,” 138. 73. Sergey Lifar’, “Nash Pushkin,” in Moya zarubezhnaya pushkiniana, 109. 74. Ibid., 114. 75. Leonid Sabaneyev, “Pushkin i muzïka,” Sovremennïye zapiski 63 (1937), reprinted in Pushkin v emigratsii 1937, 545–51, further quotations from 546 and 548–50. 76. Lolliy L’vov, “Pushkin v muzïke,” Illyustrirovannaya rossiya, Pushkin special issue, no. 7, February 6, 1937. 77. Surprisingly, Sabaneyev does not mention Rossini, whose music Pushkin loved, becoming addicted to “the ravishing Rossini, / Darling of Europe” during his stay in Odessa in 1823. See “Otrïvki iz puteshestviya Onegina” (Fragments from the Journey of Onegin), in Binyon, Pushkin, 158. 78. “He wrote thus—limply and obscurely. / (We say “romantically”—although, / That’s not romanticism, surely; / And if it is, who wants to know?).” Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin, trans. James E. Falen (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 153, italics mine.

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79. Certain factions in emigration also tried to counter Soviet propaganda by asserting new philosophical, political, and religious identities for Pushkin. For a summary see Robert P. Hughes, “Pushkin and Russia Abroad,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, ed. Andrew Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 178–82. 80. R. A. Gal’tseva, ed., Pushkin v russkoy filosofskoy kritike (Moscow: Kniga, 1999), 488–93, quoted in Hughes, “Pushkin and Russia Abroad,” 184. 81. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 85. 82. D. P. Mirsky, “L’Oeuvre de Pouchkine” (1928), in Pouterman, Poushkine 1837–1937, 125–34, 125; further quotations from 126 and 128. 83. D. S. Mirsky, “Pushkin,” The Slavonic Review 2, no. 4 (1923), 71–84, also in idem, Uncollected Writings on Russian Literature, ed. G. S. Smith (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1989), 122. 84. Anatoliy Lunacharskiy, “Formalism v iskusstvovedeniy,” Pechat’ i revolyutsiya 5 (1924), quoted in Viktor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965), 106. 85. Mirsky, “L’Oeuvre de Pouchkine,” 130. 86. Mirsky, “Pushkin,” 122–23. 87. Jacques Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist (New York: Scribner, 1960), 23. C HA P T E R 6

1. Alexander Pushkin, A Feast in Time of Plague, in Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works, trans. James E. Falen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 172, also quoted in an abridged version in Arthur Lourié, “The Feasts of Plato and Pushkin,” The Third Hour 6 (1954): 27. 2. Artur Lur’ye, “Golos poeta,” in Orfey. Knigi o muzïke (Petersburg: Izdatelʹstvo gosudarstvennoy akademicheskoy filarmonii, 1922), 45, 56, further quotations from 40 and 46. 3. John N. Burk’s program notes in Boston Symphony Orchestra, Sixty-Fourth Season, 1944–1945, Saturday Afternoon, January 5, 682, 686. 4. Leonid Sabaneyev, Modern Russian Composers, trans. Judah A. Joffe (New York: International Publishers, 1927), 235–41. On Lourié’s connection with Koussevitzky see Simon Morrison, “Koussevitzky’s Ghostwriter,” in Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Lourié, ed. Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 212–49. See also Arthur Lourié, Sergei Koussevitzky and His Epoch: A Biographical Chronicle, trans. S. W. Pring (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931). 5. We have only Lourié’s word for his friendship with Blok, though the latter did pen a short note. On April 6, 1918, the poet recorded in his diary: “A meeting with Lourié—he is supportive of my musical inclinations. (Future) declaration of the musical division—about the soul of music.” Aleksandr Blok, Zapisnïye knizhki (1901–1920) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Khudozhestvennaya literatura,” 1965), 455. 6. Quoted in Roman Gul’, Ya unyos Rossiyu: Apologiya emigratsii, vol. 2, Rossiya vo Franstii (New York: Most, 1981), 118. 7. V. Milashevsky, Vchera, pozavchera: Vospominaniya khudozhnika (Moscow: Kniga, 1989), 107.

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8. Typescript of Bagázh, Dominique Nabokov Archives, quoted in Vincent Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 92–93. 9. Prokofiev to Miaskovsky, February 6, 1923, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 248. 10. Leonid Sabaneev, “Three Russian Composers in Paris,” trans. S. W. Pring, The Musical Times 68, no. 1016 (Oct. 1, 1927): 883. For more on Lourié’s Bolshevik period see Olesya Bobrik, “Arthur Lourié: A Biographical Sketch,” trans. Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison, in Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Lourié, 28–62, esp. 43–48. 11. Lourié to Koussevitzky, August 26, October 19, and December 19, 1922, Koussevitzky Coll., courtesy of Simon Morrison. 12. Prokofiev to Eleonora Damskaya, January 7, 1923, in Selected Letters of Prokofiev, 49. 13. V. V. Shcherbachev, Stat’i, Materialï, Pis’ma, ed. R. Slonimskaya (Leningrad: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1985), 130. 14. Prokofiev Diaries 3:29–30. 15. Lourié to Koussevitzky, March 11, 1924. 16. In the early 1920s Lourie had lived with Vera in a ménage à quatre that included Sergey Sudeikin and Sudeikin’s wife Olga. 17. Lourié to Stravinsky, April 10, 1924, in I. F. Stravinsky, Perepiska s russkimi korrespondentami. Materialï k biografii, vol. 3, 1923–1939, ed. V. P. Varuntz (Moscow: Izdatel’skiy dom “kompositor,” 2003), 50. 18. E. A. Oeberg to Stravinsky, February 11, 1924, in ibid., 34. 19. Lourié to Stravinsky, April 10, 1924, in ibid., 50. 20. Sabaneev, “Three Russian Composers in Paris,” 883. 21. Diary entry, May 22, 1929, Prokofiev Diaries 2:832. 22. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 166. 23. Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov, 93. 24. Oeberg to Koussevitzky, August 2, 1924, quoted in Viktor Yuzefovich, Sergey Kusevitskiy: Godï v Parizhe. Mezhdu Rossiyey i Amerikoy (Moscow and St. Petersburg: Tsentr gumanitarïkh initsiativ, 1913), 192. 25. In chronological order: “La Sonate pour piano de Strawinsky,” La Revue musicale 6, no. 10 (1 August 1925): 100–104; “Muzïka Stravinskogo,” Vyorstï 1 (1926): 119–35; “Oedipus-Rex,” La Revue musicale 8, no. 8 (June 1, 1927): 240–53; “A propos de l’Apollon d’Igor Strawinsky,” Musique 1 (1928): 117–19; “Dve operï Stravinskogo,” Vyorstï 3 (1928): 225–27; “Neogothic and Neoclassic,” Modern Music 5, no. 3 (March–April 1928): 3–8; “Krizis iskusstva,” Yevraziya 4 (1928): 8, and Yevraziya 8 (January 12, 1929): 8; “Strawinsky a Bruxelles,” Cahiers de Belgique 3 (December 1930): 330–32; and “Le Capriccio de Strawinsky,” La Revue musicale 11, no. 103 (April 1930): 353–55. 26. Caryl Emerson quotes the volume Rossiya i latinstvo (1923) to show the inherent antagonism between Eurasianists and Catholics. Emerson, “Maritain and the Catholic Muse,” in Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Lourié, 198. 27. Richard Taruskin, “Turania Revisited, with Lourié My Guide,” ibid., 77. 28. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism with Other Essays, trans. Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), 22.

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29. On Lourié’s relationship to Stravinsky see Klára Móricz, “Symphonies and Funeral Games: Lourié’s Critique of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism,” in Stravinsky and His World, ed. Tamara Levitz (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 105–26. 30. Lourié to Ansermet, December 25, 1929 (Fonds Ansermet, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève, Msmus 184), quoted in Katerina Levidou, “The Encounter of Neoclassicism with Eurasianism in Interwar Paris,” P. Phil. diss., Oxford University, 2008, 156– 57. 31. Quoted in Jean Mouton’s review of the Concerto spirituale, Sept: l’hebdomadaire du temps présent, June 31, 1931. 32. Boris de Schloezer, “Chronique musicale [Apollon Musagète de Stravinsky],” La nouvelle revue française 15, no. 178 (July 1, 1928): 104–8, in idem, Comprendre la musique: Contributions à La Nouvelle revue française et à La Revue musicale (1921–1956), ed. Timothée Picard (Rennes Cedex: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011), 394–95. 33. See announcement of the concert in Comoedia, March 6, 1921. 34. See announcements in Comoedia, November 10, 1923; and Le Ménestrel, December 14, 1923. 35. Only three of the five rondeaux were on the program; see Comoedia, November 17, 1924. 36. See Comoedia, December 6, 1926; and Le Ménestrel, April 19, 1929. 37. Le Ménestrel, February 4, 1927. 38. Le Ménestrel, April 27, 1928. 39. Paul Le Flem wrote that the composer “stands outside his subject as if he feared that by showing his own emotion he would desecrate the greatness and beauty of the themes he has chosen.” Paul Le Flem’s review in Comoedia, February 17, 1930; see also Marcel Belvianes in Le Ménestrel, February 21, 1930. 40. Boris de Schloezer “Sonate liturgique d’Arthur Lourié (Concerts Straram),” La Revue musicale 11, no. 103 (April 1930): 355–56. 41. H. Daveson (H. I. Marrou), “D’une musique nécessaire et d’Arthur Lourié,” Esprit 3, no. 29 (February 1935): 838. 42. Vernon Duke, Passport to Paris (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955), 334. 43. Robert Vinteuil’s review in Le Ménestrel, June 19, 1936. 44. Schloezer’s words are quoted in Jean Mouton’s review in Sept, June 31, 1936. 45. Ibid. 46. Fred[erick] Goldbeck, “Arthur Lourié: Concerto spirituale,” La Revue musicale 167 (July-August 1936): 47–48. 47. Comoedia, June 11, 1931. 48. The full score (300 pp.) is at Lourié Coll., JPB 92–61 no. 81. The two-piano vocal score is also there (284 pp., JPB 92–61 no. 48), as is the six-movement Suite (124 pp., JPB 92–61 no. 80, [125] pp., JPB 92–61 no. 49). The Lourié Collection in the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, also contains a photocopy of a vocal score and some sketches. 49. Summary of the events related to Lourié’s Feast survive in three versions: a handwritten detailed memo in Raïssa Maritain’s handwriting, written in first person singular and then corrected to third person singular, kept among Raïssa’s papers in the Maritain Coll.; a significantly shortened version of the memo in Raïssa’s handwriting is also at the Strasbourg

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collection; and the typed, unsigned fair copy of the shortened memo is in the correspondence of Jacques Rouché at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Bibliothèque-musée de l’opéra, among letters sent to Rouché (hereafter Opéra-Rouché). 50. Sept, June 11, 1937. The announcement was repeated on July 2 in Le Ménestrel; in September Lourié’s opera-ballet was listed among new productions in the Opéra’s upcoming 1937–38 season. See announcements on July 2 and September 10, 1937, in Le Ménestrel. 51. Lourié’s letter to Rouché, February 18, 1938, Opéra-Rouché; and March 15, 1938, courtesy of Vincent Laloy. 52. Two scenarios of the ballet survived. One is a four-page, short description in French, titled “LE FESTIN PENDANT LA PEST, Opéra-Ballet en 2 actes, Argument and Musique d’Arthur Lourié,” presently in the Lourié Coll., PB 92–61 no. 88, folder 1. The same scenario can be found also in Opéra-Rouché. This scenario also exists in Russian. A more detailed version of this scenario, titled “Le Festin pendant la Peste, Mythe en deux actes, Argument and musique d’Arthur Lourié,” exists in Raïssa Maritain’s handwriting and in typescript among Raïssa Maritain’s papers in the Maritain Coll. Raïssa’s detailed memo also contains a description of the concept of the opera at Strasbourg. The Lourié Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung also includes a Russian scenario. 53. Unsigned short memo, Opéra-Rouché. 54. In a letter to Louis Laloy, Lourié writes about a plan to have his Feast performed in Rome in the winter, “But, in the present political situation, it won’t happen.” Lourié to Laloy, October 6, 1938, courtesy of Vincent Laloy. 55. Lourié to Rouché, January 18, 1939, Opéra-Rouché. 56. Lourié to Schloezer, October 6, 1939, Schloezer Coll. 57. Rouché to Lourié, January 20, 1939, courtesy of Vincent Laloy. 58. Detailed memo in Maritain Coll. 59. Ibid. 60. Lourié to Schloezer, August 1, 1940, and August 18, 1940, Schloezer Coll. 61. The Poetical Works of Milman, Bowles, Wilson, and Barry Cornwall (Paris: A. and W. Galignati, 1829). 62. Lourié wanted to turn Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri into an opera in one act and three scenes. The undated libretto, in which Lourié adds a poem by Rilke and, following the example of Rimsky-Korsakov, texts from Mozart’s Requiem to Pushkin’s original, survives in the Lourié Coll., JPB 92–61 no. 88. 63. Bryusov might have borrowed his title from the little-known Roman poet Laevius’s similarly titled collection. 64. See Vladislav Khodasevich’s review on Erotopaegnia in Vozrozhdeniye, September 29, 1932, in his Sobraniye sochineniy v chetïrekh tomakh, vol. 2, Zapisnaya knizhka, Stat’i o russkoy poezii, Literaturnaya kritika 1922–1939 (Moscow: “Soglasiye,” 1996), 234–37. 65. Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882–1934 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 512. For a facsimile of Stravinsky’s sketch see Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence 1, ed. Robert Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 371–78. In Lourié’s full score of A Feast in Time of Plague Petrarch’s “Dialogue” is clearly an insertion between the previous number, “Tempo di Marcia,” which ends on p. 102, and the “Duettino,” which starts on p. 103. The “Dialogue” is written in blue ink, while in the rest of the score Lourié used black ink.

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66. Short French scenario, Opéra-Rouché. 67. Long scenario, in Maritain Coll. 68. No complete libretto survives. Lourié’s papers (Lourié Coll.) contain, from the first act, copies of the Latin texts, along with their Russian translation by Bryusov, and Russian translation of Petrarch by Lourié; from the second act, Pushkin’s text in French translation by Louis Laloy, and in Italian translation by Franco Locatelli-Malacrida and Irene Vittoria Graham. 69. Lourié, “Feasts of Plato and Pushkin,” 25. 70. Burk, program notes to Lourié’s Feast. 71. Sergei Davydov, “’Strange and Savage Joy’: The Erotic as a Unifying Element in The Little Tragedies,” in Alexander Pushkin’s Little Tragedies: The Poetics of Brevity, ed. Svetlana Evdokimova (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003): 89. Davydov’s phrase “mystery of happiness and grave” comes from the last line of Pushkin’s poem “Vospominaniye” (Remembrance, 1828). 72. Nikolai Belyak and Mariya Virolainen, “Malen’kiye tragedii’ kak kul’turnïy epos novoyevropeyskoy istorii (Sud’ba lichnosti—sud’ba kul’turï),” in Pushkin: Issledovaniya i materialï (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1991), 86, quoted and trans. in Davydov, “’Strange and Savage Joy,’ ” 91. 73. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy v dvadtsati tomakh, ed. M. N. Virolaynen and L. M. Lotman, vol. 7, Dramaticheskiye proizvedeniya (St. Petersburg: “Nauka,” 2009), 884. 74. Translations of Pushkin’s Feast are from Pushkin, Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works, 165–76. 75. “Then, leaning on this snow-white breast, / I sing the praises of the Pest! / If me though wouldst this night destroy, / Come, smite me in the arms of Joy.” “Wilson’s Poetical Works,” in The Poetical Works of Milman, Bowles, Wilson and Barry Cornwall, 37. 76. Pushkin, Feast, 172. 77. Marina Tsvetayeva, “Art in the Light of Conscience,” in Alexander Pushkin’s Little Tragedies, 62, further quotations from 61. 78. Lourié, “Feasts of Plato and Pushkin,” 26–27. 79. On a piece of paper Raïssa Maritain wrote the strophe “Vsyo, vsyo . . .,” marking underneath in French: “Poem, which is the theme of the second act of A. Lourié’s A Feast in Time of Plague.” Maritain Coll. 80. First part of the quotation in Lourié, “Feasts of Plato and Pushkin,” 28, English translation in Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell: An English Translation from the French, trans. Jeremy Denbow (New York, Lincoln, and Shanghai: Universe, Inc., 2003), 5. 81. “The time is come, / Old World! before you perish / Stop; For the last time—the bright feast of brotherhood / You are called by the barbaric lyre.” Lourié’s compilation from Blok’s Scythians, in Lourié, “Feasts of Plato and Pushkin,” 28. 82. Ibid., 28–29. 83. Ibid., 29. 84. Tsvetayeva, “Art in the Light of Conscience,” 61. 85. Lourie, “Feasts of Plato and Pushkin,” 25. 86. Long scenario, in Maritain Coll. 87. Detailed memo, in Maritain Coll.

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88. Felix Meyer, “Brückenschlag zur Vergangenheit: Zu Arthur Lourié’s Concerto da camera,” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 23 (April 2010): 32n11. Lourié reused another movement from the Suite in the Feast, the “March funèbre,” which he renamed in the opera “Le char de la mort.” 89. Draft of detailed memo, in Maritain Coll. 90. See Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence 1, 371–78. 91. In his Russian translation of Petrarch’s text Lourié labels Joy’s words “first antiphon,” Reason’s “second antiphon.” Lourié Coll. 92. French version of the short scenario, Lourié Coll. 93. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Pushkin and Pugachev” (1937), in Marina Tsvetaeva, A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose, ed. and trans. J. Marin King (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980), 384. 94. Tsvetayeva, “Art in the Light of Conscience,” 60–61. 95. Deux prières du soir for three tenors, oboe, and two double basses, 1929, “Te lucis” (Hymne), dated August 1929, and “Nunc dimitties” (Cantique de Siméon), dated September 1929. Orig. version at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. 96. Tsvetayeva, “Art in the Light of Conscience,” 62. 97. See “Wilson’s Poetical Works” in The Poetical Works of Milman, Bowles, Wilson and Barry Cornwall, 38. 98. Davydov, “ ‘Strange and Savage Joy,’ ” 102. 99. Tsvetayeva, “Art in the Light of Conscience,” 60. 100. Davydov, “ ‘Strange and Savage Joy,’ ” 103. 101. French and Russian scenario, Maritain Coll. 102. Jacques Maritain, “The Freedom of Song,” in his Art and Poetry, trans. E. de P. Matthews (New York: Philosophical Library, 1943), 103. 103. Ibid., 98. 104. Long scenario, in Maritain Coll. 105. Maritain, “Freedom of Song,” 99. 106. Ibid., 102. 107. Leonid Sabaneyev, “Pushkin i muzïka,” Sovremennïye zapiski 63 (1937), reprinted in Pushkin v emigratsii 1937 (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiya, 1999), 549. 108. Quoted in Stephanie Sandler, Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 10, 315n23. EPILOGUE

1. Nicolas Nabokov, “The Gracious Master,” Nicolas Nabokov Papers, Yale, Beinecke Special Coll., Box 4, Folder 68 (GEN MSS 1154), 169. 2. Vernon Duke, “The Deification of Stravinsky,” Listen 4 (May-June 1964): 2. 3. Nabokov, “Gracious Master,” 121, 169. 4. Duke, “Deification of Stravinsky,” 2. 5. Vernon Duke, Passport to Paris (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955), 217–49. 6. Nicolas Nabokov, “Bagázh,” 34, typescript, quoted in Vincent Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 108. 7. Nicolas Nabokov, draft on Stravinsky, quoted in ibid, 108–9.

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8. Ibid., 106. 9. Ian Wellens, Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov’s Struggle Against Communism and Middlebrow Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002). 10. Nabokov, “Gracious Master,” 116. Stravinsky’s wife Vera explained to Nabokov that Stravinsky “had broken relations once and for all with Lourié” for, Nabokov added in parentheses, “perfectly valid reasons” (which he leaves unspecified in the manuscript). Craft claimed that the reason was Vera, about whom Lourié repeated gossip to Stravinsky’s son Theodore. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Retrospectives and Conclusions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 136–37. 11. Nicolas Nabokov, “La vie et l’oeuvre de Serge Diaghilew,” La musique 3, no. 2 (November 15, 1929): 64. Stravinsky’s response, published in La musique 3, no. 3 (December 15, 1929), is quoted in Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov, 90. 12. Ibid., 128–29. 13. Nicolas Nabokov, “Stravinsky Now,” Partisan Review 11, no. 3 (Summer 1944): 324– 34. 14. Stravinsky to René Auberjonois, June 17, 1939, quoted in Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America 1934–1971 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 89. 15. Nabokov, “Stravinsky Now,” 324–25, 327. 16. Nabokov, “Gracious Master,” 159, 164, 165–69, and 188–89. 17. Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959); Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960); and idem, Expositions and Developments (Garden City: Doubleday, 1962). Three other co-authored volumes came out in the mid-to-late 1960s: Dialogues and a Diary (Garden City: Doubleday, 1963), Themes and Episodes (New York: Knopf, 1966), and Retrospectives and Conclusions (New York: Knopf, 1969). 18. Nabokov, “Gracious Master,” 174. 19. Duke, “Deification of Stravinsky,” 5. Duke quotes Stravinsky saying that he was unwilling to “spit” on Rachmaninoff for writing conservative music. Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, 42. Duke borrows the rare word “horripilating” (i.e., hair-raising) from the Stravinsky/Craft vocabulary. 20. Vernon Duke, Listen Here! A Critical Essay on Music Depreciation (New York: I. Obolensky, 1963). On Duke’s years in the 1960 see Natalie Zelensky, Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019), esp. chapter 4. 21. Duke, “Deification of Stravinsky,” 2. 22. Stravinsky and Craft, Memories and Commentaries, 41 and 54–55. 23. Ibid., 67. 24. Duke, “Deification of Stravinsky,” 4–5. 25. Ibid., 1–3. 26. Under the title the editor added in parentheses: “The Title is Mr. Stravinsky’s own.” [Igor Stravinsky], “Stravinsky Proposes: A Cure for V. D.,” Listen 5 (September–October 1964): 1. 27. Ibid., 2. 28. Ibid. Ironically, in January 16, 1961, Duke had received a letter from Mrs. Robert D. Graft, co-chair of the exhibition “Stravinsky and the Dance” at the New York Public Library,

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asking Duke, “as an old friend of Stravinsky’s,” to contribute items relating to the exhibition. Mrs. Robert D. Graft to Duke, January 16, 1961, Duke Coll., LC. Duke underlined “as an old friend of Stravinsky’s” and added two exclamation marks on the margin. 29. Vernon Duke, “The Deification of Stravinsky,” Part II, Listen 5 (September-October 1964): 3. 30. Duke to Leonard Altman, September 23, 1964, in Duke Coll. 31. According to Scott Holden, Altman was willing to publish Duke’s response but could not secure further funding for the journal. See Holden, “The ‘Adventures and Battles’ of Vladimir Dukelsky (a.k.a. Vernon Duke),” American Music 28, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 305. In a review of Listen, Robert Dumm praised the journal for its independent voice. See Dumm’s review in American Music Teacher 14, no. 2 (November–December 1964): 36. But some, among them Victor Babin, the director of the Cleveland Institute of Music, cancelled their subscriptions in protest against Duke’s article. Even Klaus G. Roy from the Cleveland Orchestra, who welcomed the controversial tone of Listen, found Duke’s piece too venomous. See “Letters to the Editors,” Listen 5 (September–October 1964): 11. 32. Arthur Lourié, “An Inquiry Into Melody,” Modern Music 7, no. 1 (December–January, 1929–30): 3–11. 33. Lourié to Schloezer, 18 August, 1940, Schloezer Coll. 34. Lourié to Raïssa Maritain, December 10, 1940, Maritain Coll., translated in Olesya Bobrik, “Arthur Lourié: A Biographical Sketch,” in Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Lourié, ed. Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 55–56. 35. American Consular Service, Marseille, France, typed letter to applicant, Schloezer Coll. 36. Koussevitzky’s cable to the American Consul in Marseille, January 19, 1941, Maritain Coll. 37. Lourié to Ella, May 19, 1941, Schloezer Coll. 38. The article must have been Arthur Lourié’s “Musing on Music,” Musical Quarterly 27 (April 1941): 235–42. 39. Raïssa Maritain’s notes on two conversations with Lourié, 11 and 14 August, 1942, Maritain Coll. 40. Lourié to Raïssa, August 22, 1943, Maritain Coll. 41. Lourié to Schloezer, August 12, 1948, Schloezer Coll. 42. See Klára Móricz, “Decadent Truncation: Liberated Eros in Arthur Vincent Lourié’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great,” Cambridge Opera Journal 20, no. 2 (2008): 181–213; and idem, “Retrieving What Time Destroys: The Palimpsest of Lourié’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great,” in Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Lourié, 150–95. 43. Lourié to Schloezer, 13 October 1934, Schloezer Coll. 44. The quoted phrase is from Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), 19. As is well known, most of Poetics of Music was written by Alexis Roland-Manuel and Pyotr Suvchinsky. The ideas expressed in the book were approved by Stravinsky at the time. 45. Arthur Lourié, “Notes on the ‘New Order,’ ” Modern Music 19, no. 1 (November– December 1941): 3. 46. Lourié to Schloezer, July 21, 1946, Schloezer Coll.

Notes

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47. Pierre Souvtchinsky, “Introduction: Domaine de la musique russe,” in his Musique russe: Études réunies, 2 vols. (Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 1953), 1:21. 48. Ibid., 1:9. 49. Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1936), 53–54. 50. Gilbert Brangues, “Deux dimensions de la musique,” La vie intellectuelle 44, no. 4 (September 25, 1936): 601, offprint in Maritain Coll. 51. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, quoted in ibid., 602. For the quoted passage in the English translation see Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John. E. Woods (New York and London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 134–35. 52. Brangues, “Deux dimensions de la musique,” 603. 53. “An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness.” James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Huebsch, 1916), 249, quoted in French in Brangues, “Deux dimensions de la musique,” 603–4. 54. Pierre Souvtchinsky, “La Notion du Temps et la Musique (Réflections sur la typologie de la création musicale),” La Revue musicale 191 (1939): 70–81. 55. Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, 31. 56. Suvchinsky’s term is quoted in Gisèle Brelet, Le temps musical: Essai d’une esthétique nouvelle de la musique, vol. 2, La forme musicale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), 540. 57. Souvtchinsky, “La Notion du Temps et la Musique,” 74–75. 58. Brelet, Le temps musical, vols. 1–2. 59. Quoted in Jann Pasler, ed., Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 354. 60. Ernst Krenek, “Musical Time,” Newsletter of the Ernst Krenek Archive 3, nos. 2–3 (Winter–Spring 1993): 11. 61. Brelet, Le temps musical, 2:685; further quotations from 2:579 and 689. 62. Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 2:1486–93. 63. Nabokov, “Stravinsky Now,” 333–34. 64. Arthur Lourié, “Musings on Music,” Musical Quarterly 27, no. 2 (April 1941): 242. 65. Arthur Lourié, “Encore quelques mots sur le temps,” in his Profanation et Sanctification du Temps: Journal musical, Saint-Pétersbourg—Paris—New York (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966), 101. 66. On the word “atopia” see Helmut Willke, Atopia: Studien zur atopischen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001); and Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). 67. Pierre Souvtchinsky, “Qui est Strawinsky? Cahiers musicaux: Revue mensuelle des jeunesses musicales de Bruxelles, 3, no. 16 (1958): 7–14, 7. Suvchinsky borrows from Gisèle Brelet, who defined time as “no more than a single present that is renewed.” Quoted in

266

Notes

Suvtchinsky, “Glinka, Moussorgsky, Tchaïkowsky, Strawinsky,” in idem, Un siècle de musique russe (1830–1930): Glinka, Moussorgsky, Tchaïkowsky, Strawinsky et autre écrits, Strawinsky, Berg, Messiaen, et Boulez, ed. Frank Langlois (Arles: Actes Sud/Association Pierre Souvtchinsky, 2004), 203. The part about Stravinsky is a longer version of the article “Qui est Strawinsky?” 68. Souvtchinsky, “Qui est Strawinsky?” 11. Further quotations from 12–14. For Suvchinsky’s psychological explanation of the void, see his “Glinka, Moussorgsky, Tchaïkovsky, Strawinsky,” 206. 69. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, Souvenirs sur Igor Strawinsky (Lausanne/Paris: Librarie Gallimard/Éditions Mermod, 1929), quoted in Souvtchinsky, “Glinka, Moussorgsky, Tchaïkovsky, Strawinsky,” 205.

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. “Igor Stravinsky: Le libertin [The Rake’s Progress]” [Classicism et néoclassicisme]. Nouvelle NRF 1, no. 9 (September 1, 1953): 536–38. . “Alexander Scriabine.” In Musique russe, edited by Pierre Souvtchinsky, 2:229–48. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1953. . Scriabin: Artist and Mystic. Translated by Nicolas Slonimsky. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. . Comprendre la musique: Contributions à La Nouvelle revue française et à La Revue musicale (1921–1956). Edited by Timothée Picard. Rennes Cedex: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011. Schlögel, Karl. Moscow, 1937. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Scholl, Tim. From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernization of Ballet. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Schouvaloff, Alexander. The Art of Ballets Russes: The Serge Lifar Collection of Theater Designs, Costumes, and Painting at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. Shanks, Edward. “The Bolshevist Heresy.” Review of The Mind and Face of Bolshevism by René Fülöp Miller (Putnam). The Saturday Review, July 16, 1927. Shcherbachev, V. V. Stat’i, Materialï, Pis’ma (Articles, Materials, Letters). Edited by R. Slonimskaya. Leningrad: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1985. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Oshibki i izobreteniya”. Novïy Lef, nos. 11/12 (November–December 1927): 29–33. Shlifstein, Semyon, ed. S. S. Prokofyev: Materialï, dokumentï, vospominaniya. 2 vols. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye muzïkal’noye izdatel’stvo, 1956. Shostakovich, D. D. Pis’ma I. I. Sollertinskomu. St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo “Kompozitor,” 2006. Smolyarova, T. I. Parizh 1928: Oda vozvrashchayetsya v teatr. Moscow: Rossiyskiy gosudarstvennïy gumanitarnïy universitet, 1999. Souvtchinsky, Pierre. “La Notion du Temps et la Musique (Réflections sur la typologie de la création musicale).” La Revue musicale 191 (1939): 70–81. . “Introduction: Domaine de la musique russe.” In Musique russe: Études réunie, 1:1– 26. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1953. . ed. Musique russe: Études réunies. 2 vols. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1953. . “Qui est Strawinsky? Cahiers musicaux: Revue mensuelle des jeunesses musicales de Bruxelles 3, no. 16 (1958): 7–14. . Un siècle de musique russe (1830–1930): Glinka, Moussorgsky, Tchaïkowsky, Strawinsky et autre écrits, Strawinsky, Berg, Messiaen et Boulez. Edited by Frank Langlois. Arles: Actes Sud / Association Pierre Souvtchinsky, 2004. Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970. Spotts, Frederic. The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Stravinsky, Igor. “Some Ideas about my Octuor.” The Arts 6, no. 1 (January 1924): 4–6. Reprinted in Music in the Western World: A History in Document, edited by Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, 458–59. New York: Schirmer Books, 1984.

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In dex

Adamovich, Georgy, 32; “Two Poems,” 1936, 1 Adolescent, The (Dostoevsky), 30 aesthetics: and craftsmanship, 250n57; of Pushkin, 168–69; reactionary, of the extra muros composers, 16; of Stravinsky, 136, 149–50, 207–8, 213–14, 217–19, 223–24 Akhmatova, Anna: Anno Domini MCMXXI, 33–36; “Poem Without a Hero,” 31 Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein), 22 allegory, 99, 103–4, 113–14, 119–20, 133–34, 192–93 American ragtime/jazz, 64, 78, 79ex, 129 Annensky, Innokenty: “Moya toska,” 187–88; “Petersburg,” 33–35; “Yellow Fog,” 34–35, 37 Anno Domini MCMXXI (Akhmatova), 33–36 anti-Bolshevism in London, 84–85 anti-individualism, 71–72, 87–88, 92, 216 Antonie, André, 60 Antsiferov, Nikolai: The Soul of Petersburg, 45 Apollo (journal), 142 Apollo (Stravinsky): aesthetics of, 136, 149–50; “Apothéose,” 129, 143–50, 144–48ex; choreography of, 142; neoclassicism in, 18, 123–24, 128–29, 132–34, 138–40; “purity” of, 122, 141; reviews of, 125, 130–32, 138–42; as ritual purification, 123–24; Washington premiere and Paris production of, 124–25; “white” music of, 126–32 Apollon Apparaissant aux Bergers (Bauchant), 127

Apollonian principle, 141 “Apothéose” (Apollo), 129, 143–50, 144–48ex apotheosis, 69, 70–72, 125, 149 Arapov, Pyotr, 65–66 aristocracy, Russian: in celebrations of Pushkin’s anniversary, 161; Nabokov as, 101–3, 209; and neoclassicism, 99–100, 101, 103–4; in Pas d’acier, 81; in Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg, 44; Pushkin as, 152–53, 164, 169–72 Art and Scholasticism (Maritain), 135, 171 artistic sterility of exiles, myth of, 1–2 arts, Soviet contemporary, 60–63, 86–87 assimilation, 19 Astrov, Mikhail, 50–51, 55 Atovmyan, Levon, 62 audiences: for Apollo, 124; emigrant, for Russian music, 10; Parisian, 73, 87–88, 154; Soviet and Stal’noy skok, 89–90 Augsbourg, Géa: La Vie en images de Serge Lifar, 157, 158 Auric, Georges, 64, 65, 120–21 Aurora’s Wedding (Chaikovsky), 133–34 Ausonius (fl. 310–395), 183, 189–90 Autobiography (Stravinsky), 125, 141, 151–52, 216 autocracy, 44, 45–46, 98, 99–100, 104 Autumn Lake (Kuzmin), 33–34 “Baba Yaga’s Fight with the Crocodile,” 80, 81 Bach, Johannes Sebastian, 217–18

281

282

Index

Bakst, Léon: “The Paths of Classicism in Art,” 142 Balanchine, George, 123, 134, 140, 142 ballet: ballet blanc, 126–28; Bolshoi, 90, 91–92; Diaghilev in preserving, 132–33; as Dionysian, 141–42, 143. See also under name of specific ballet Ballets Russes, 10, 99–100, 101, 120–21. See also Diaghilev, Sergey Balmont, Konstantin, 62 Barskova, Polina, 31 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), 61 Bauchant, André, 127–28, 132; Apollon Apparaissant aux Bergers, 127 Bely, Andrei, 21, 25; Petersburg, 31 Benois, Alexandre: aristocratic taste of, 99–100; illustration for “The Bronze Horseman,” 49, 50; illustrations for the Petersburg Text, 47; “In Expectation of a Hymn to Apollo,” 142 Benois, Elena, 32 Berberova, Nina, 12, 62 Berg, Alban: Wozzeck, 40 Bibliothèque Nationale, 157, 159 Blackamoor of Peter the Great, The (Lourié), 215 Blok, Aleksandr: Dances of Death, 36–37, 39; and Lourié, 173–74, 175–76; Scythians, 187–88; “The Poet’s Calling,” 167 Bohm, Adolf, 125 Boileau, Nicolas: L’art poétique, 139 Bolshevism: in 1920s Paris, 59; anti-individualism in, 71–72, 216; in conflict with nostalgia, 6; in London, 84–85; and Pas d’acier, 17–18, 65–68, 73–79, 83, 84–88, 91–92, 95–96; temptation of, 17–18, 59–65, 123–24. See also Communism/Communist Party Bolshoi, 90, 91–92 borders, 5–6, 18, 57, 95–96, 138 Boris Godunov (Musorgsky), 37, 38ex, 39, 169 Borman, Arkadiy, 33 Boym, Svetlana, 6 Brangues, Gilbert, 217–18 Brelet, Gisèle, 4; Le Temps Musicale, 218–19 Brillant, Maurice (critic), 115, 119–22, 139–40 Bronze Horseman (statue), 48 “Bronze Horseman, The” (Pushkin), 29 Brunel, Raoul, 73–74 Bryusova, Nadezhda, 62 Buckler, Julie, 25 Bundikov, Aleksandr, 83, 132–33

Bunin, Ivan, 3, 25, 62, 153–54 Burk, John N., 174–75 Caby, Robert, 119, 125, 140–41 Captain’s Daughter, The (Pushkin), 162–63 Carpenter, John Alden: Skyscrapers, 86 Casella, Alfredo, 92 Chaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich: Aurora’s Wedding, 133–34; and classicism, 138; Eugene Onegin, 169; as inspiration for Apollo, 130–31; Queen of Spades, 39–40; Sleeping Beauty, 141 chairman, character in A Feast in Time of Plague, 200, 202–5 chaos: in The End of St. Petersburg, 21–22; in A Feast in Time of Plague, 183, 184–85, 188–89, 189ex, 192, 193; form as answer to, 171; neoclassicism as Stravinsky’s answer to, 141–42; in Pushkin’s works, 173–74; of St. Petersburg, 30–31 Charbonnier, Pierre, 114, 118 Chavez, Carlos: “H.P.,” 65 choreography: in Apollo, 142; in Les Noces, 142; neoclassical, 133–34; in Ode, 118–20; in Pas d’acier, 59, 79–83, 87, 90, 92, 95; in The Rite of Spring, 87–88, 142. See also scenarios, ballet Chotzinoff, Samuel, 22–23 Chout (Prokofiev), 63 Christianity in A Feast in Time of Plague, 197–205, 206 City of Plague, The (Wilson), 182–83, 185–86, 203 classicism: in Apollo, 136–38, 141–43; of de Schloezer, 134–36; in A Feast in Time of Plague, 188; of Pushkin, 169–72; retrospective, in Diaghilev’s productions, 99–100, 133–34; time in defining, 219–20, 223. See also neoclassicism Cochran, C.B., 27 Cocteau, Jean, 58–59, 83, 159, 160 collectivity, 4, 87, 137 comedy/comedic effects in Pas d’acier, 67–68, 83 Communism/Communist Party, 18, 59, 62, 94, 96, 152, 162–66, 167. See also Bolshevism; ideology Concerto spirituale (Lourié), 178, 179–80 concerts: in celebrations of Pushkin, 154–56; in the musical life of Russian Paris, 7–8 Coolidge, Elizabeth Sprague, 124–25 Cotton, A. V., 114 Craft, Robert, 210–12

Index culture: pre-Revolutionary Russian, 2, 3–4, 5–6, 18, 123–24, 150. See also “Russia Abroad” Dances of Death (Blok), 36–37, 39 Danilova, Alexandra, 82, 128 Daveson, Henri, 179 “Day of Russian Culture,” 11, 152–54 Decembrist uprising, Pushkin in, 162–63 Delbos, Zay and Yvon, 156 Delius, Frederick: Mass for Life, 55–56 Derzhanovsky, Vladimir, 89 Derzhavin, Gavrila: “The Procession Along the Volkhov River of the Russian Amphitrite,” 33–34 de Sincay Ross, Elaine, 56, 235n118 Desnitsky, Vasily: “Pushkin and Us,” 165–66 Désormière, Roger, 51 Diaghilev, Sergey: on Apollo, 126, 143; archives of, 253n21; “At the Hour of Reckoning,” 100–101; Ballets Russes, 10, 99–100, 101, 120–21; and the Bolshevik temptation, 59–60, 61–65; death of, 56–57, 208–9; description of Nabokov’s Ode by, 113; and Dukelsky, 26, 27, 212; emigration of, 3; and first tier “extra muros“ composers, 15; influence of, 8, 10, 12; neoclassicism of, 99–103, 132–34; on nostalgia, 104–6; and Pas d’acier, 58–59, 66–67, 79–80, 84–85, 88–89; in realization of Ode, 118–19 diaspora, Russian: celebration of Pushkin by, 152–56; diaspora anxiety, 123–24; relics of, in Lifar’s Pushkin exhibition, 159, 161; in the United States, 208–16 Dionysian elements: and Apollo, 141–43; in Pushkin’s work, 173–74, 183–84, 205, 206. See also chaos displacement, geographical and cultural, 25–26, 123–24 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 25, 34–35, 50, 167–68; The Adolescent, 30 Downes, Olin, 21–22, 94, 95, 124 Dubrovska, Felia, 128 Dukelsky, Vladimir/Duke, Vernon: and the Bolshevik temptation, 64–65; on Concerto spirituale, 179–80; in conflict with Cocteau over Pas d’acier, 58–59; in conflict with Stravinsky, 211–13; on the death of Diaghilev, 56–57; departure of, for the U.S., 208–9; double life of, 26–29; emigration of, from Russia, 3; High-Low Concerts, 28–29; on renaming of St. Petersburg, 32; on Skyscrapers, 86; on

283

Stravinsky’s rebirth, 207–8; “The Deification of Stravinsky,” 211–12; Zéphyr et Flore, 26–27, 52, 56 —The End of St. Petersburg: double narratives in, 25–26, 31; Mayakovskian ending of, 53–54, 55–56; nostalgia in, 17, 19–20, 25, 33–43, 35ex, 38–39ex, 41–42ex; Petersburg myth in, 25–26, 29–31; Petersburg syndrome in, 31–33; Soviet triumphalism in, 17, 21–25, 23–24ex Édition russe de musique (Rossiskoye muzïkal’noye izdatel’stvo), 9–10, 26–27, 177, 181 Efron, Sergey, 62 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 60–61, 66, 67, 84 Eisenstein, Sergei, 233n72; Alexander Nevsky, 22; Battleship Potemkin, 61; October, 43–44 Elizabeth Petrovna, Empress, 113 emigration, 1–3, 152, 171–72, 206, 208–10 “émigré,” use of, 226n7 emotional detachment, 135–36, 218, 223 End of St. Petersburg, The (Dukelsky). See Dukelsky, Vladimir—The End of St. Petersburg End of St. Petersburg, The (Pudovkin), 25, 43–50 equestrian statues in The End of St. Petersburg, 45–48, 47, 48–49 eroticism: in A Feast in Time of Plague, 183, 184, 189–90; in Pas d’acier, 82 Erotopaegnia (Love Games), 183 Eudoxia, tsarina, 30–31 Eugene Onegin (Chaikovsky), 169 Eurasionists, 65–66, 88, 177 exile: narrative of, 5–6; shared experience of, 17 “extra muros” Russian music, 14–16 factories: in The End of St. Petersburg, 44–45, 45; in Pas d’acier, 67–68, 76, 83, 84, 86 Fascism, 92, 163–64, 215–16 Feast in Time of Plague, A (Lourié): Boston premiere of, 174–75; chaos in, 183, 184–85, 188–89, 192, 193; the cross evoked in, 197–205; as emigrant Pushkiniana, 19, 172; enhancements to Pushkin in, 182–84; “Hymn to the Plague,” 184, 185–87, 193, 195, 197, 198–99ex, 200, 203; “In pueram formosum,” 190; “Joy,” 192, 194ex, 200, 202; as “My Pushkin” genre, 205–6; recreation of Pushkin in, 188–93; “Tempo di Marcia,” 190, 192 Feast in Time of Plague, A (Pushkin), 18–19, 173, 182–88, 193–97, 203 Fedotov, Georgy Petrovich, 29–30

284

Index

financing/finances: of Dukelsky/Duke, 27–28; for The End of St. Petersburg, 55–56, 234n86; of Pas d’acier in London, 84–85; for Russian musicians, 10; in success/failure of Russian composers, 12 Firebird, The (Stravinsky), 63, 141 Flaubert, Gustave, 170 Fokine, Michel: Les Sylphides, 126 folk music and tales, 69–70, 80, 81, 84, 86. See also mythology form/formalism: as answer to chaos, 171; of Pushkin, 151, 153, 171; of Stravinsky, 139–40, 223 Fülöp-Miller, René: The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, 86–87, 88 Futurists/Futurism, 2, 61, 163, 175–76, 177 Fyodorov, Mikhail, 153

Stravinsky, 215–16; of Lourié, 177–78; in Pas d’acier, 91–92; pro-Soviet, of émigrés and intellectuals, 62; in Russian Paris, 7, 15–16; Soviet, Pushkin used in, 152, 162–66 immobility of time, in music, 217–19 individualism, 88, 137, 139, 153, 167, 195, 197, 216 innovation, 1–2, 5, 16–17, 72–73, 96, 132–33 intellectuals: French, 5, 59, 62, 96, 153, 156; Russian, 2–4, 19, 151, 152–53, 166–68, 176–78 International Exposition Dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life, Paris, 52–53, 54, 55, 60–61 “intra muros” Russian music, 14 Intrasigeant, L’ (Paris), 156 Iofan, Boris, 52–53

Gachev, Dmitry, 90–92 Garafola, Lynn, 99–100, 134 Gaubert, Philippe, 50–51, 52 George, André, 120–21 Gheusi, Pierre-Barthélemy, 139, 142–43 Gide, André, 159 Giroflé-Girofla (Lecocq), 60 Glinka, Mikhail, 105–6, 121, 137–38; Ruslan and Lyudmila, 168–69 Gogol, Nicolai, 30 Golbert, Luba, 98 Goldbeck, Frederick, 180 Golovnia, Anatoli, 45–46 Goncharova, Natalia, 157 Gusman, Boris, 89–92 gymnastics, 68, 71–72, 83, 86, 237–38n61

Kamernïy Theater, 60, 66 Keldïsh, Yuriy, 90, 91–92 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 7–8, 153, 167, 170 King, William, 23–24 Kirpotin, Valery Yakovlevich: “Pushkin’s Legacy and Communism,” 167 Kochno, Boris, 79–80, 113–15, 118–20 Koussevitzky, Sergey, 8–10, 26–27, 50–51, 62, 174–75, 209, 214 Krasin, Boris, 60, 66–67 Krasnaya nov’ (Red Virgin Soil, 1921–1941), 2 Krenek, Ernst, 219 Kuzmin, Mikhail: Autumn Lake, 33–34

hammers/hammering in Pas d’acier, 67, 68, 72, 83, 94 Hart, Alfred, 28 Haydn, Joseph, 97, 98 High-Low Concerts (Dukelsky), 28–29 Hofman, Modest G., 157, 161–62, 167–68, 171–72 homosexuality in A Feast in Time of Plague, 189–90 hymns, Christian, in A Feast in Time of Plague, 183–84, 185–87, 190, 192, 193, 195, 197, 198–99ex, 199–200, 202, 203 identity, national and cultural, 33, 137–38, 151–52, 205 ideology: Communism, 18, 59, 62, 94, 96, 152, 162–66, 167; in conflict between Lourié and

Jansenism, 140

Landinsky, Antonin, 32 Lang, Fritz: Metropolis, 86 Langer, Valerian, 161 Larionov, Mikhail, 60, 63 League of Composers, New York, 93 Lecocq, Charles: Giroflé-Girofla, 60 Levinson, André, 82, 104, 119–20, 140, 142 Levitz, Tamara, 134 Library of Congress in production of Apollo, 124–25 libretti: for A Feast in Time of Plague, 183–84; for Ode, 119–20 Lifar, Serge: acquisition of Diaghilev’s assets by, 253n21; as Apollo, 125, 128, 140, 142; as choreographer of A Feast in Time of Plague, 181–82; drawing of, with Pushkin, 158; and The End of St. Petersburg, 52; in Ode, 117–18, 119; “Our Pushkin,” 167–68; in Pas d’acier, 82; Pushkin celebrations organized by, 151,

Index 153–54, 155, 155–56, 157–62; in Zéphyr et Flore, 52 light, in stage design for Ode, 114–15, 118 Livak, Leonid, 2, 4, 5, 226n7 Lomonosov, Mikhail: Ode: Meditation Upon the Greatness of God, 99, 103–4, 113; “Ode to the Arrival of Her Majesty,” 33–34 London, 59, 63, 83, 84–85, 247n94 Lotman, Yuri, 30 Lourié, Arthur: on Apollo, 140; and Blok, 173–74, 175–76; emigration of, from Russia, 3; escape from Paris to the U.S. by, 214–16; ideological analysis of Russian Paris, 7; influences on, 174; as Petersburg “snob,” 174–78; reputation of, 178–80; on Russian music in Paris, 3–4, 5, 11; and Stravinsky, 14–17, 176–77, 213–14, 215–16, 220; views on Pushkin, 173–74, 184, 186–88 —works of: The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, 215; Concerto spirituale, 178, 179–80; A Feast in Time of Plague (See Feast in Time of Plague, A, by Lourié); Nash marsh, 175–76; Sonata liturgique, 179 —writings of: “The Feasts of Plato and Pushkin,” 184, 186–88; “The Voice of the Poet,” 173; “We and the West,” 175 Love of Three Oranges, The (Prokofiev), 63 Lukash, Ivan, 32 Lukomsky, Georgy, 142 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 1–2, 60, 88–89, 96, 163 Lyublinsky, Pyotr, 55 machine dance in Pas d’acier, 83, 87, 91, 92, 95 Maklakov, Vasily, 153–54 Makovsky, Sergei, 142 Malherbe, Henry, 119, 120–21, 131, 139, 140 Malko, Nikolai, 62 Mandelshtam, Osip, 31 Mandelshtam, Yuri: “Pushkin: Poetry and Music,” 151–52 Maritain, Jacques, 62, 135, 204, 214, 250n57; Art and Scholasticism, 135, 171 Maritain, Raïssa, 187, 214–15 markets, cultural: as challenge for Russian composers, 17; The End of St. Petersburg in, 50–56; Pas d’acier in, 88–96; political neutrality in, 17–18; porous borders in, 95–96; in success of Stravinsky, 12–13; timelessness in, 223 Markevich, Igor, 5 Martin, John, 93

285

Mary’s song (in A Feast in Time of Plague), 185–86, 193, 195, 196ex Mass for Life (Delius), 55–56 Massine, Leonid, 9, 26–27, 59, 80–84, 87, 90, 113, 118–20 Mathilda, character in A Feast in Time of Plague, 185, 202, 203 Matich, Olga, 25 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 21–22, 61, 166 Mazon, André, 156 Medtner, Nikolai, 169 Mel’nikov, Konstantin, 60 memory, rejected, 218–19 Mérimé, Prosper, 170 Metropolis (Lang), 86 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 79–80, 89–92 Mikhailovskoye estate of Pushkin, 164 Milhaud, Darius, 64, 65 Milyukov, Pavel: Posledniye novosti, 154–55 Mind and Face of Bolshevism, The (FülöpMiller), 86–87, 88 Mir iskusstva (World of Art) movement, 98, 99–101 Mirsky, D. S., 169–71; A History of Russian Literature, 169–71 Mnukhin, Lev: Russkoye zarubezh’ye, 7, 8 modernism: Soviet, 60–61, 122; Western, 1–2, 5–6, 12–13, 15–17, 73, 134 Modern Russian Composers (Sabaneyev), 13–14 Monument to the Third International (Tatlin), 61 morality: in anti-expressive aesthetics, 218; in Apollo, 136; music in, 218 Mouton, Jean, 180 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 97 Mukhin, Vera: Worker and Collective Farm Women, 52–53, 234–35n103 Muses in Apollo, 125 musicians, Russian, interactions of, in Paris, 7–10 Musorgsky, Modest Petrovich: Boris Godunov, 37, 38ex, 39, 169; Pictures at an Exhibition, 106, 107ex Myers, Rollo H., 139 “My Pushkin” genre, 166–68 mythology: in Apollo, 125, 126; of artistic sterility in exile, 1–2; in A Feast in Time of Plague, 188–90; of St. Petersburg, 29–31, 40, 42–43 Nabokov, Nicolas: aristocratic roots of, 101–4, 209; in conflict with Stravinsky, 210–11; critical praise for music of, 120–21; in Diaghilev’s circle, 103–4; emigration from Russia of, 3;

286

Index

Nabokov, Nicolas (continued) on Lourié, 176, 177; nostalgia in music of, 18, 99, 104–13; nostalgia of, for St. Petersburg, 32–33; on Stravinsky, 126, 207, 220, 223–24; “The Gracious Master,” 210–11; in the U.S., 209 —Ode: allegory in, 99, 113–14, 119–20; costumes for, 115, 117, 117–18, 120; Diaghilev’s interest in, 103–4; geometry in stage designs for, 116, 118; neoclassical embellishments in, 109ex; as neoclassicism, 99–103, 109ex, 112ex; nostalgia in, 18, 99, 104–13, 106ex, 112ex; realization of, 118–19; reviews of, 119–21, 247n94; surrealism in scenario of, 113–18, 119–20 Narcissus, character in A Feast in Time of Plague, 190 Nash marsh (Lourié), 175–76 nationalism, Russian, 4, 15–17, 123–24. See also patriotism nature/Nature: in The End of St. Petersburg, 40, 42; in Lomonsov’s Ode, 104; in Nabokov’s Ode, 113–14, 115, 117, 118; in the Saint Petersburg myth, 30 Nazi Germany/Nazism, 52–53, 55, 152 neoclassicism: as answer to chaos, 141–42; of Diaghilev, 99–103, 132–34; emigrants’ attraction to, 5–6; in A Feast in Time of Plague, 206; imperial Russia in, 121; Lourié as critic of, 178; odes in, 103–4; in Pas d’acier, 75–76; of Pulcinella, 98; and Pushkin, 152, 171–72; and Russian aristocracy, 99–100, 101, 103–4; as solution to nostalgia and Russian progressivism, 18; of St. Petersburg, 29–30; of Stravinsky, 64, 138–41, 150, 210, 223; as triumph over modernism, 141; of “white” ballet, 126. See also Apollo; classicism; Nabokov, Nicolas—Ode neoprimitivism, 127–28, 132. See also Rite of Spring, The neo-Thomists/neo-Thomism, 135, 177–78, 217–18 Nestyev, Israel V., 73 neutrality, political: of Dukelsky, 23–25; and Parisian markets, 17–18; in Pas d’acier, 65–68, 84–85, 86, 89–92, 94, 95–96. See also politics New Economic Policy (Soviet), 67 newspapers, Russian, 7–8 New York, 21–22, 29, 56, 93–95, 208–10, 214–15 New York Philharmonic, 21–22, 55–56 Nicolas I, statue of, 48 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 87–88, 142 Nisnevich, Anna, 101

Noces, Les (Stravinsky), 73, 142 nostalgia: for absolutism in the Mir iskusstva movement, 101; Apollo as cure for, 123–24; in conflict with Soviet triumphalism, 17; in emigrant narratives on St. Petersburg, 25–26; for emigrants, 6–7; in The End of St. Petersburg, 19–20, 50; neoclassicism as cure for, 18; in Ode, 18, 99, 104–13; in Petersburg syndrome, 31–33; Pushkin in, 205–6; retrospective, 6, 18; and time, 220 Nouvel, Walter, 26, 79 novelty: in criticism of modernism, 12, 19–20; in Lourié’s orchestration, 179; in Nabokov’s music, 112–13, 119; in Pas d’acier, 58–59, 86, 90; in Stravinsky’s music, 13, 15–16, 19–20 “Nunc dimittis” (Canticle of Simeon), 199–200 Ode (Nabokov). See Nabokov, Nicolas—Ode Ode: Meditation Upon the Greatness of God (Lomonosov), 99, 103–4, 113 odes, eighteenth century, 98 Odoevsky, Vladimir, 159 Oeberg, Ernest, 176–77 Oedipus Rex (Stravinsky), 131–32 ontological time, 218 “Orator, The,” in Pas d’acier, 78–79, 79ex originality. See novelty Oxford History of Western Music (Taruskin), 73–74 Paichadze, Gavriil, 96 Paris: celebrations of Pushkin in, 152–62, 164; Communism in, 96, 152; cultural landscape of, in marketing The End of St. Petersburg, 51–53; news of Soviet celebrations of Pushkin in, 164–66; nostalgia for, 19–20; Soviet trends in, 5 Paris, Russian, musical life in, 7–10 Pas d’acier (Prokofiev): aborted Soviet staging of, 88–92; American incomprehension of, 93–95; Apollo compared to, 142–43; Bolshevism portrayed in, 17–18, 58–59, 65–68, 83, 84–88, 95–96; choreography of, 59, 79–83, 87, 90, 92, 95; London premier of, 84–85; originality of, 58–59, 86, 90; poaching from and parody of Stravinsky in, 73–79, 75–77ex, 79ex, 88; politics and political neutrality in, 17–18, 59, 65–68, 84–85, 86, 89–92, 93–96; reviews of, 73, 82, 83–85, 86–88, 93, 94–95; scenario of, 66–68, 70–73, 80–83, 93–95; as Skal’noy skok, 88–92; trains in, 67, 76, 80–81

Index “Pas d’action” (Apollo), 129 patriotism, 31–32, 45–46, 102–3. See also nationalism, Russian Pentadius (fl. 354–361), 183, 189–90 People’s Commissars, Council of (SOVNARKOM), 162–63 Perel’muter, Vadim, 163 personalist movement, 179 Petersburg syndrome, 31–33 “Petersburg Text,” 25–26, 30–31, 32–50 Peter the Great, 29–30, 47 Petrarch: “Joy,” 192, 194ex, 200, 202; Remedi utriusque fortunae, 183, 192, 194–95ex Petrushka (Stravinsky), 73, 141 Pictures at an Exhibition (Musorgsky), 106, 107ex Plato’s Symposium, 186–87, 189–90 Poetics of Music (Stravinsky), 210, 218 poetry in The End of St. Petersburg, 33–43, 56 politics: in conflict between Lourié and Stravinsky, 215–16; in The End of St. Petersburg, 22–24; in neoclassical choreography, 134; in Pas d’acier, 17–18, 59, 65–68, 84–85, 86, 89–92, 93–96. See also neutrality, political Posledniye novosti (Paris), 7–8, 164–65, 166 Potyomkin, Vladimir, 156, 157, 159 Poulenc, Francis, 26, 64, 65 Pouterman, J. -E., 165–66 Pravda (Moscow), 163–64 present time, in theories of time, 217–18, 219–20 priest, character in A Feast in Time of Plague, 200, 202–5 primitivism: in Pas d’acier, 69–70, 70–71ex, 75–76, 91–92; in The Rite of Spring, 86, 87–88, 141 Prokofiev, Sergey: on Apollo, 130–31, 143; “Autobiography,” 73; and the Bolshevik temptation, 59–60, 62–63; as Christian Scientist, 96; on derivation in Nabokov’s music, 113; diaries of, 7, 8–9; and Dukelsky, 26–28, 29, 211–12; on The End of St. Petersburg, 50–52, 53–54; intention to practice Western modernism, 1–2; on leaving for America, 225n2; on Lourié, 176, 177; and Mayakovsky, 61; in the musical life of Russian Paris, 8–9; on “new simplicity,” 72–73; pro-Soviet stance of, 51–52; return to the Soviet Union by, 56–57; and Russian émigré circles, 11–12; and Stravinsky, 9, 63–65 —works of: Chout, 63; “Classical” Symphony, 97–98; The Love of Three Oranges, 63; Pas d’acier (See Pas d’acier); symphonies by, 243–44n2

287

Proletarskiy muzïkant (RAPM), 90 propaganda: in The End of St. Petersburg, 46; in Mayakovsky’s “Moi Mai,” 22–24; Soviet, on Pushkin, 153, 162–66, 172 Pudovkin, Vsevolod: The End of St. Petersburg, 25, 43–50 Pulcinella (Stravinsky), 98 purification/purity, 126–29, 136, 139–40, 200, 204 Pushkin, Alexander: as Apollo, 18, 150, 159, 173, 205; chaos and enlightenment in works of, 173–74; as classical, 169–72; cultural traits of, 205–6; drawing of, with Lifar, 158; Lourié’s recreation of, 188–93, 205–6; “My Pushkin” genre, 166–68, 205; Paris celebrations for, 152–56, 155, 157–62, 160, 164; in revolutionary movements, 162–63; as Russian classicism, 138; Russian music inspired by, 168–69; Soviet rebranding of, 18, 153, 162–66, 166, 172; on St. Petersburg, 29–30; symbolism of, 6 —writings of: The Captain’s Daughter, 162–63; collected, 154, 155–56; A Feast in Time of Plague, 18–19, 173, 182–88, 193–97, 203; “The Bronze Horseman,” 29, 33–35, 46–48, 49 Pushkin, Nicolai (grandson of Alexander), 161 Queen of Spades (Chaikovsky), 39–40 Rabinovich, Isaak, 66 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 12, 135–36 Racine, Jean: Phèdre, 139 radicalism: of Lourié, 175–76; Soviet artistic, in Pas d’acier, 17; of Stravinsky, 210 RAPM (Representatives of the Association of Proletarian Musicians), 90–91 Rayevsky, Georgy, 25 reality: in classicism, 134–35; in the present time, 217–18 “Reason” in A Feast in Time of Plague, 192–93, 195ex, 200–201, 202 Reis, Claire, 93–95 religion: in Apollo, 136, 140; in classicism, 137; in A Feast in Time of Plague, 183–84, 197–205, 206; immobility in, 217–18; in Ode, 103–4; Stravinsky’s music and aesthetics as, 218–19 Remedi utriusque fortunae (Petrarch), 183, 192, 194–95ex reviews, critical: of Apollo, 125, 130–32, 138–42; of contemporary Russian art, 60; on Dionysian elements of Russian ballets, 141–42; of The End of St. Petersburgh, 21–22, 24–25; on Lourié, 178–80; of Ode, 104, 119–20, 122; of

288

Index

reviews, critical (continued) Pas d’acier, 73, 82, 83–85, 86–88, 93, 94–95; of Pushkin, 169–70; in “Russia Abroad,” 8–9; of Stravinsky’s Russian ballets, 141–42; on Stravinsky’s timelessness, 219–20; of Zéphyr et Flore, 26–27 Rimbaud, Arthur: Une saison en enfer, 187 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 168–69, 212 Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky), 12, 14, 73–76, 74–75ex, 86, 87–88, 141, 142 rivalry: French-Russian, 59; ProkofievStravinsky, 63–65, 78–79, 95, 96 Rivières, Jacques, 87–88, 141 RMOZ (Russian Musical Society Abroad), 10, 11 Rodchenko, Alexander, 60 Roland-Manuel, Alexis, 141 Rolland, Romain, 62 romance in Pas d’acier, 68, 70–72, 82 romance sentimentale, 105, 106, 112 Romanticism: in Apollo, 126–28, 129–30, 131–32, 144; in de Schloezer’s classicism, 134–36; and A Feast in Time of Plague, 187–88, 204–6; neo-Romanticism, in Ode, 114 Ross, Hugh, 21–22, 55–56 Rossiskoye muzïkal’noye izdatel’stvo (Édition russe de musique), 9–10, 26–27, 177, 181 Rouché, Jacques, 181–82 Rubins, Maria, 2 Rubinstein, Ida, 133 Ruslan and Lyudmila (Glinka), 168–69 Russia, eighteenth-century: in Apollo, 133–34, 136, 137–38, 139, 140; in the Mir iskusstva movement, 100–1; in Petersburg syndrome, 32–33. See also Nabokov, Nicolas—Ode; neoclassicism; Russia, prerevolutionary Russia, imperial: aristocratic lure of, 103–4; classical ballet in, 141; in Lifar’s Pushkin exhibition, 159, 161–62; monuments to, 44–49, 44–50; Nabokov’s position in, 102–3; in neoclassicism, 121; in Ode, 115–16; the ode in, 98–99; resonances of, in Apollo, 18. See also Dukelsky, Vladimir—The End of St. Petersburg; St. Petersburg Russia, nineteenth-century: in Apollo, 130–32; in A Feast in Time of Plague, 193, 205; as Golden Age, 138; in the Mir iskusstva movement, 99–100; in Ode, 99, 105–7, 112–13; in the Petersburg Text, 30–32; in Pushkin anniversary celebrations, 161–62 Russia, prerevolutionary: classicism in, 150; culture of, in exile, 2–4, 5–6; “Petersburg Text,”

25–26, 30–34, 40–44, 47–49, 219; prestige of Lourié in, 175–76; resonances of, in Apollo, 18. See also Dukelsky, Vladimir—The End of St. Petersburg Russia, Soviet: Diaghilev’s interest in art from, 60–61; modernism in, 5–6; neoclassical revival in, 142; Pas d’acier’s depiction of, 17–18, 65–68, 73–79, 85–88, 95–96; “Petersburg Text” in, 43–50; porous borders of, 5–6, 18, 57, 96; Prokofiev’s return to, 57; Pushkin in, 152, 156, 162–66, 171, 205; reception of Stal’noy skok in, 88–92 “Russia Abroad” (emigrant culture): Bolshevik temptation in, 59–63; celebration of Pushkin by, 152–56; defined, 2; at the International Exposition, 53; in Paris culture, 3; Petersburg Syndrome in, 31–33; porousness of cultural border with Paris, 5; uniformity of, 3–5, 16–17 Russkoye zarubezh’ye (Mnukhin), 8 Sabaneyev, Leonid: on Apollo, 131–32; emigration of, 3; on Lourié, 176; Modern Russian Composers, 13–14, 175; “Pushkin and Music,” 168–69; on return or assimilation, 19; on Russian composers in Paris, 10–14, 229n64; on Russian music in Paris, 3; on Russian Paris, 7; on Symbolists and Pushkin, 205 St. Isaac’s Cathedral, 44, 44, 45, 45 St. Petersburg: depiction of in the Petersburg Text, 43–50; double narratives on, 25–26, 30–33; in the Mir iskusstva movement, 99–100; myth of, 29–31; nostalgia for, 19–20, 25–26, 31–33, 50; resonances of, in Apollo, 18; symbolism of, 6. See also Dukelsky, Vladimir—The End of St. Petersburg; imperial Russia Satie, Erik, 112–13 satire in Pas d’acier, 85, 86 Savich, Vladimir, 89–90 scenarios, ballet: for Apollo, 139; for A Feast in Time of Plague, 181, 183–84, 188–89, 190, 193, 200, 204–5, 260n52; for Ode, 113–18, 119–20; for Pas d’acier, 66–68, 70–73, 80–83, 85–88, 93–95. See also choreography Schaeffner, André, 119, 120–21 Schloezer, Boris de, 3, 123–24, 134–38, 179–80 Scriabin, Alexander, 137 Scythians (Blok), 187–88 Second Symphony (Prokofiev), 72–73 Serenade (Stravinsky), 64 serial music, 210–11, 212–13. See also twelve-tone music

Index Shervashidze, Alexander, 127–28 Simonson, Lee, 93–95 “Sinfonia finale” in A Feast in Time of Plague, 203–4, 204ex Skal’noy skok, 88–92. See also Pas d’acier Skyscrapers (Carpenter), 86 Sleeping Beauty (Chaikovsky), 141 society, musical, of Russians in Paris, 7–10 Sonata liturgique (Lourié), 179 Sorbonne celebration of Pushkin, 154–56 Soul of Petersburg, The (Antsiferov), 45 Soviet Embassy, Paris, 61, 153, 156, 157, 159 Soviet Pavilion at the International Exposition, 52–53, 54, 55, 60–61 stage design: for Ode, 114–18, 120; for Pas d’acier, 60 Stalin, Joseph, 163–64, 165 Stravinsky, Igor: as center of Russian émigré circles, 11–13; in conflict with musical diaspora in the U.S., 209–14, 215–16; de Schloezer’s classicism applied to, 134–36; Dionysian elements in ballets by, 141–42; embrace of Fascism by, 216; emigration from Russia by, 3; European passport for, 136–38; as example of art in political-cultural environments, 216–17; influence of, 107, 112, 179; and Lourié, 14–17, 174, 176–77, 179, 213–14, 215–16, 220; and Nabokov, 107, 112, 121; neoclassicism of, 122, 150, 210; on Ode, 103–4, 105; and Prokofiev, 78–79, 95, 96; on Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, 97; rebirth of, 207–8; on Russianness, 4; Russianness of, 136–38; self-promotion by, 212–13; on structure in Pushkin’s poetry, 151; theories of time, 217–24; on Zéphyr et Flore, 26 —works of: Apollo, 18, 122, 123–25, 126–34, 136, 138–42, 143–50, 144–48ex; “Dialogue of Two Fortunes” setting by, 192–93; Firebird, 63, 141; Flood, 213; Mavra, 168; Les Noces, 73, 142; Oedipus Rex, 95, 107; Pulcinella, 98; The Rite of Spring, 12, 14, 73–76, 74–75ex, 86, 87–88, 141, 142; Serenade, 64; Symphony in C, 220, 221–22ex; Symphony of Psalms, 178 —writings of: “A Cure for V.D.,” 213; Autobiography, 125, 141, 151–52, 216; Poetics of Music, 210, 218; “Pushkin: Poetry and Music,” 168; “Warning,” 139–40 Stravinsky-Craft dialogues, 211–12 structures. See form/formalism subjectivity and objectivity, in classicism, 137 surrealism in design of Ode, 113–18, 119–20

289

Suvchinsky, Pyotr, 11, 26, 56, 62, 65–66, 216–17, 218, 223 Sylphides, Les (Fokine), 126 Symbolists/Symbolism: in The End of St. Petersburg, 36–37, 39–40, 50; in A Feast in Time of Plague, 172, 173–74, 184, 186–88, 192, 205–6, 215 Symphony in C (Stravinsky), 220, 221–22ex Tairov, Alexander, 60–61, 79–80 Tannier, Allan, 115 Taruskin, Richard, 6–7, 17, 73–74, 220; “Is there a ‘Russia Abroad’ in Music,” 4; Oxford History of Western Music, 73–74 Tatlin, Vladimir: Monument to the Third International, 61 Taylor, H. P., 124 Tchelitchew, Pavel, 26, 113, 114–18, 116, 117, 118–20 Tchernicheva, Lubov, 82, 128 “Te lucis ante terminum” (To Thee before the close of day), A Feast in Time of Plague, 199–200, 201ex Temps Musicale, Le (Brelet), 218–19 temptation, Bolshevik, 17–18, 59–65, 123–24 Terpsichore (Muse), 125 time: as context in Pushkin exhibition, 157–62; detachment from, in de Schloezer’s classicism, 135; musical, 6–7, 218–19; passage of, in Apollo, 149–50; theories of, 217–24 Timenchik, Roman, 40 Topol’sky, Aleksandr, 25 Toporov, Vladimir, 25 Toye, Francis, 247n94 triumphalism, Soviet, 17, 21–22 Tsvetayeva, Marina, 61, 152, 174, 193, 195, 197, 199, 203; “Art in the Light of Conscience,” 186; “My Pushkin,” 167 twelve-tone music, 19–20, 207–8, 210–11. See also serial music Tyutchev, Fyodor, 33–34 United States, Russian musical diaspora in, 208–16 universality, 165–66, 204–5 Ursignol (Prokofiev), 65. See also Prokofiev, Sergey—Pas d’acier utopia in classicism, 135–36 Valéry, Paul, 156 Vie en images de Serge Lifar, La (Augsbourg), 157, 158

290

Index

Vinteul, Roger, 180 visual effects in Pas d’acier, 68 Volynsky, Akim, 141, 142 Vozrozhdeniye (Paris), 7–8, 96

working class in The End of St. Petersburg, 44, 45, 46, 47–48 World War I in anti-German bias of neoclassicism, 6–7

Walsingham, character in A Feast in Time of Plague, 185–87, 188, 195–96, 197, 198–99ex, 199, 203–4 “white ballet,” Apollo as, 126–28 “white” music, 68–73, 74–75, 76, 78, 126–32 Wilson, John: The City of Plague, 182–83, 185–86, 203 Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, 44–45, 46 Worker and Collective Farm Women (Mukhin), 52–53, 234–35n103

“Yablochko,” 69–70, 71ex Yakulov, Georgy, 60, 61, 65, 66–68, 71–72, 79–83, 87, 88–90 yurodivïy (Holy Fool), 37–39, 38x, 41, 43 Zabolotsky, Nikolai: “Pushkin and Us,” 165 Zaitsev, K.: “Battle for Pushkin,” 153 Zay, Jean, 157, 159 Zéphyr et Flore (Dukelsky), 26–27, 52, 56 Zeyeler, Vladimir, 153

CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN 20TH-CENTURY MUSIC Richard Taruskin, General Editor 1. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, by W. Anthony Sheppard 2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison 3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch 4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, by Amy Beal 5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider 6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis 7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier 8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music, by Klára Móricz 9. Brecht at the Opera, by Joy H. Calico 10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, by Michael Long 11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, by Benjamin Piekut 12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981, by Eric Drott 13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, by Leta E. Miller 14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth E. Levy 15. In Search of a Concrete Music, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack 16. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, by Leslie A. Sprout 17. Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe, by Joy H. Calico 18. Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier 19. Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968, by Lisa Jakelski 20. Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack 21. Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono’s Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi 22. The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930–1951, edited by E. Randol Schoenberg, with an introduction by Adrian Daub 23. Stravinsky in the Americas: Transatlantic Tours and Domestic Excursions from Wartime Los Angeles (1925–1945), by H. Colin Slim, with a foreword by Richard Taruskin

24. Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide, by Christopher Chowrimootoo 25. A Wayfaring Stranger: Ernst von Dohnányi’s American Years, 1949–1960, by Veronika Kusz, translated by Viktória Kusz and Brian McLean 26. In Stravinsky’s Orbit: Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris, by Klára Móricz

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