Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin's Russia 9780300265682

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PLAYING WITH FIRE ‘Presents an absorbing picture of a tragic period of Russian history. At its centre is the towering figure of Maria Yudina, a remarkable pianist and one of the most influential personalities of Soviet cultural life. A riveting read.’ Boris Berman, Head of Piano, Yale University School of Music ‘The daughter of the British ambassador to the USSR and herself an ambassador for Russian music and musical culture, Elizabeth Wilson incorporates in her writing her own experience of living in Soviet Russia, studying at the Moscow Conservatory and encountering several generations of Russian musicians. It is surprising that such a book had not been written earlier; it is not surprising that it was eventually written by Wilson.’ Olga Manulkina, Saint Petersburg State University

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PLAYING WITH FIRE The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin’s Russia ELIZABETH WILSON

YALE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON iii

Copyright © 2022 Elizabeth Wilson All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. All reasonable efforts have been made to provide accurate sources for all images that appear in this book. Any discrepancies or omissions will be rectified in future editions. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected]  yalebooks.com Europe Office: [email protected]  yalebooks.co.uk Set in Minion Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd Printed in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow, Cornwall Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948939 e-ISBN 978-0-300-26568-2 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To Daniel and to Radu, whose superlative music-making has enriched my life for over half a century

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CONTENTS



List of Plates Acronyms Transliteration



Introduction

  1   2

  9 10

Childhood and Youth: Nevel’, Petrograd 1919–1927: Baptism, University Studies, Philosophical Circles 1921–1927: Graduation and Start of a Musical Career 1928–1933: Leningrad–Moscow via Tbilisi 1933–1936: Moscow 1936–1941: The Moscow Conservatoire and Musical Projects 1941–1945: War and its Aftermath 1945–1953: The Anti-Formalist and Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaigns 1953–1960: The Thaw Years 1960–1970: The Final Decade



Endnotes Appendix Bibliography Selected Discography Acknowledgements Index

  3   4   5   6   7   8

viii x xiv 1 6 29 56 85 113 140 166 191 218 250 283 300 306 315 320 324

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PLATES

  1. Maria Yudina as newly appointed professor of Petrograd Conservatoire, 1922. Collection of Yakov Nazarov.  2. Maria’s father, Veniamin Gavrilovich Yudin. Collection of Yakov Nazarov.   3. Maria’s mother, Raisa Yakovlevna Yudina. Collection of Yakov Nazarov.   4. Anna Yesipova. Collection of Yakov Nazarov.   5. Bakhtin’s circle recreated in Leningrad, c.1924–6. Collection of Yakov Nazarov.   6. Yudina at piano, late 1920s/early 1930s. Collection of Yakov Nazarov.   7. Detail from The House Cut Open by Alisa Poret and Tatiana Glebova. Collection of Yaroslav Arts Museum.  8. Yudina in besieged Leningrad, summer 1943. Collection of Yakov Nazarov.  9. Concert in wartime Moscow with conductor Nikolai Anosov at the Grand Hall of the Conservatoire, 8 June 1943. Collection of Yakov Nazarov. 10. Poster for Yudina’s recital at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia in besieged Leningrad, 3 October 1943. From collection of Musical Library of St Petersburg Academic Shostakovich Philharmonia. 11. Pencil drawing of Maria Yudina by Vladimir Favorsky, January 1949. 12. Yudina with Igor Stravinsky at the opening of an exhibition in his honour at the Leningrad House of Composers, 6 October 1962. Collection of Yakov Nazarov. 13. Stravinsky receiving applause at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, September 1962. Photo taken by Khrennikov’s wife, Klara Vaks. In archival collection of RNMM (Glinka Museum) Moscow.

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PLATES

Federal State Budgetary Institution of Culture Russian National Museum of Music (без запятой). 14. Tikhon Khrennikov and Maria Yudina, autumn 1962. Photo taken by Khrennikov’s wife, Klara Vaks. In archival collection of RNMM (Glinka Museum) Moscow. Federal State Budgetary Institution of Culture Russian National Museum of Music (без запятой). 15. Yudina’s desk-cum-dining table at her flat on Rostovskaya Embankment, 1967. Photo taken by Yakov Nazarov. Collection of Yakov Nazarov. 16. Yudina reading from the Gospel at Pasternak’s grave on the 10th anniversary of his death, 30 May 1970. Collection of Yakov Nazarov.

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ACRONYMS

ASM

(Assotsiatsiya Sovremennoi Muzyki) Association of Contemporary Music, 1923–9. Officially closed 1932. BSO (Bolshoi simfonicheski orkestr) Large Symphony Orchestra. The acronym for the All-Union Radio orchestra, previously known as Orkestr VRK (Orkestr Vsesoyuznyogo Radio komiteta), Orchestra of the All-Union Radio committee. Cheka (ChK) (Chrezvychainaya Komissiya po Bor’be s Kontrrevolyutsiei i Sabotazhem) The Extraordinary Commission to fight Counterrevolution and Sabotage. Established in December 1917, it was effectively the first Soviet secret police organisation. DZZ (Dom Zvukozapisei) The House of Sound Recordings. Between 1936 and 1958 it served both as a concert hall and a recording studio, where the first shellac records were made as well as most radio broadcasts. Taken over by Gosteleradio in 1958. Glavrepertkom (Glavniy Reportuarniy Komitet) Main Repertoire Committee. A censorship organisation (part of GlavLit) responsible for authorising theatre and concert performance repertoire. ISCM International Society for Contemporary Music. Founded in 1922 and still active today. KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti) Committee of State Security. Founded in 1954, it acted as successor to previous secret police organisation (Cheka, GPU; NKVD etc). x

ACRONYMS

Komsomol

(Komunisticheski Soyuz Molodezhi) Communist Youth Union. Full name VLKSM, standing for All-Union Leninist Communist Youth League. Founded in 1918. LASM (Leningradskaya Assositsiatsiya Sovremennoi Muzyki) Leningrad Association of Contemporary Music. Active between 1925 and 1928. MORS (Mezhdunarodnyaya Organizatsiya Pomoshchi Bortsam Revolyutsii) International Organisation for Aid to Fighters for the Revolution. Yudina refers to MOPS, either a misprint or a subsidiary of MORS, usually known in English as International Red Aid, founded in 1922 with the aim to support both materially and morally political prisoners of all regimes and victims of class war. Mossoviet (Moskovskoi gorodskoi soviet) Moscow Town Council founded in 1917. Muzfond SSSR (Musykalny fond SSSR) The Music Fund of the USSR was created in 1939 as part of the Union of Composers, as a means to help finance composers’ and musicologists’ needs, from folklore expeditions, vacations in ‘creative rest homes’ to professional expenses such as copying scores and providing commissions and material aid. Muzgiz (Gosudartvennoye Muzykal’noye Izdatel’stvo) State Music Publishers, founded in 1930, taking over from the musical sector of the State publishers. Narkomfin (Harodni Kommisariat Finansov) People’s Commissariat for Finance. Dom Narkomfina refers to a constructivist building in Moscow erected between 1928 and 1930, designed for ‘communal living’. NEP (Novaya Ekonomicheskaya Politika) New Economic Policy, 1921–8. A partially free market economy allowing private enterprise so that the country could get back on the rails economically after the civil war. NKVD (Narodniy Kommisariat Vnutrennikh Del) People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, established in 1917, amongst whose responsibilities was overseeing prisons xi

ACRONYMS

Oberiu

Oberiut/i OGPU (also GPU)

POMPOLIT

RAPM (also VAPM and APM) SEKSOT

TASS TseKUBU

VKhuTEMAS

and labour camps. In 1934 it took over the secret police role from the GPU, while in 1946 it became the Ministry for Internal Affairs. (Ob’edineniye Real’nogo Iskusstva) Unification of Real Art. A Leningrad ‘absurdist’ group created in 1926 by writers Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky and Nikolai Zabolotsky. Its first public meeting took place in January 1928. The group stopped functioning in the early 1930s. Member/s of the Oberiu group. ( Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskpye Upravleniye) State Political Directorate. Organisation responsible for internal security between 1923 and 1934, replacing the Cheka. (Pomoshch Politicheskim Zaklyuchyonnym) Help to Political Prisoners. An offshoot of the Political Red Cross founded in 1922 by Yekaterina Peshkova and Mikhail Vinaver. Closed in 1937. ( Rossiskaya Assotsiyatsiya Proletarskikh Muzykantov) Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians. Founded in 1923, active in late 1920s and disbanded in 1932. (Sekretni sotrudnik) Secret collaborator. An informer. A term invented by the Soviet security organs, that was used more widely only in the derogatory sense. (Telegrafnoye Agentstvo Sovetskogo Soyuza) Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. (Tsentralnaya Kommissiya po Ulucheniyu Byta Uchyonykh) Central Commission for the Betterment of Scientists’ Life. An organisation which existed between 1922 and 1937. (Vyshchiye Khudozhestvenniye Tekhnicheskiye Masterskiye) Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops. Founded immediately after the Revolution for free study of the Arts, open to all initially without need to take an entry examination. xii

ACRONYMS

VOKS

VRK VTO

(Vsesoyuznoye Obshchestvo Kulturnoi Svyazi s Zagranitsei) All-Union Society for Links with Abroad. Created in 1925 to promote cultural exchange with other countries. (Vsesoyuznyj Radio Orkestr) All-Union Radio orchestra, 1930–52. It then became known as BSO (see above). (Vserossisjoye Teatralnoye Obshchestvo) All Russian Theatrical Society initially founded in 1877. In Soviet times it existed between 1932 and 1992 as the Union of Theatre Workers. The VTO Soviet Opera Ensemble was founded by Ivan Kozlovsky in 1938.

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TRANSLITERATION

Transliteration from Cyrillic and the Romanization of Russian into the various European languages is a minefield. The possibilities are numerous in English alone, not to speak of the different systems used in such languages as French, German and Italian. I have chosen to use a composite system, which attempts to make things look and read as simply as possible for the general reader. Therefore I do not adhere to any one particular system such as Grove or Library of Congress, which are most commonly used in scholarly publications. • I leave the already familiar, if incorrect, spellings of composers’ names. Hence Tchaikovsky (instead of Chaikovsky), Taneyev (instead of Taneev), Scriabin (instead of Skryabin), Prokofiev (instead of Prokof ’ev or Prokof ’yev), Asafiev (instead of Asaf ’ev or Asaf ’yev). Also for the philosopher Losev (instead of Losyev), and the politician Khrushchev instead of Khrushchyov. • For the common endings of male given names in ий (i and short i or ï) I simply use the letter ‘i’. Hence Dmitri, Yuri, Georgi, Vasili and so on. • Conversely for the same endings for surnames I use the accepted spelling of ‘y’. Hence Gorky, Florensky, Lossky, Ossovsky and so on. • The Russians differentiate between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ E/e. For names beginning with the soft ‘e’ I use ‘Ye’. Hence Yevgeni, Yelena, Yekaterina, Yevtushenko, Yefimov, Yershov and so forth. • I also use the ‘ye’ in the middle of the patronymic. Hence Dmitriyevich, Sergeyevich. • The Russian names Aleksandr and Aleksei are written with an ‘x’ to conform with Western spellings: Alexander and Alexei.

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TRANSLITERATION

• Zh is like the G in the French name Georges. A difficult name like ‘Skrzhinskaya’ hence has four (not five) consecutive consonants, so it can be pronounced without too much difficulty. • The Russian ‘x’ is usually transliterated as ‘kh’, with the same sound as ‘ch’ in Scottish ‘loch’. Hence Khlebnikov, Khrushchev. • The Russian hard ‘i’ (ы), pronounced at the back of the throat, is represented by a ‘y’, rather than the more scholarly and correct ‘ï’. A normal ‘i’ is used for the soft and open Russian ‘i’ sound (more like an English ‘ee’ in ‘meek’ or ‘leek’).

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INTRODUCTION

[Art] continues that which God initiated, with the aim to increase not those things made by Man’s hands, but God’s eternal creations. Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act1 Playing with fire – con fuoco – these words characterize the life and interpretative style of the great Russian pianist Maria Veniaminovna Yudina. Risktaking was inherent to her, not for its own sake, but as a result of her unshakeable artistic and moral convictions in the face of external circumstances of extreme difficulty. Her actions reflected her belief that human creativity stems from the divine, as epitomized in the words of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev quoted above. Coming from an educated, agnostic Jewish family living in a small town in the Pale of Settlement, Yudina’s move to St Petersburg/Petrograd in her early teens saw her pursuing her studies within the heady artistic milieu of Russia’s most culturally advanced city. It was against the background of Revolution and social change that she took her place amongst the country’s foremost musicians and humanist thinkers. Yudina was much more than an outstandingly gifted musician and concert pianist. Mikhail Bakhtin, one of Russia’s foremost philosophers, whose circle she joined aged eighteen, recognized her abilities as a philosopher, and Boris Pasternak appreciated Yudina as one of his most discerning readers. Father Pavel Florensky, Russia’s great spiritual leader and polymath, befriended her and pointed her towards submission of her rebellious spirit. Already at the age of seventeen she declared that she would dedicate her life to Music: ‘Art is my Vocation as a way to God.’

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PLAYING WITH FIRE

A convert to Orthodox Christianity at the age of nineteen, she saw her life as a service to others. Achieving Good was an imperative, and she fearlessly interceded for those friends and colleagues who were arrested and persecuted in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Orthodox Church was under assault and the intelligentsia under threat of extermination. She travelled to the ‘Gulag’ camps, took messages to and from incarcerated priests, sent parcels and money to ‘the unfortunate’, to use Dostoevsky’s term. Thrown out of three teaching institutions for her religious beliefs, Yudina was also periodically banned from the concert stage, not least for propagating contemporary music. During the Second World War, she was at the height of her fame, broadcasting and playing concerts for the military and the ordinary citizen, at the front, in hospitals, and in besieged Leningrad. She lived impecuniously, never owned a piano, let alone any furniture, and lived all her life in debt. She died in 1970, shortly after her seventy-first birthday. Her very survival through the metaphorical trials of fire and water had been a continuous drama, if not a miracle. As a musician Yudina earned her place in performance history as a friend and trusted interpreter of the great composers of her time, from Hindemith and Prokofiev to Shostakovich and Stravinsky. She was the person who more than anyone else persuaded Stravinsky to return to Russia to celebrate his eightieth birthday. In the last years of her life she preferred to play contemporary music exclusively, to be in touch with the future. Yudina’s rare communicative power was put at the service of modern music. Her idiosyncratic interpretations were often based on a form of narrative illuminated by concrete imagery, and by the spirit, if not the letter, of the score. Yudina’s large discography includes many recordings from live concerts, where the technical quality of recording is often sub-standard. Nevertheless it was through her recordings that she started gaining recognition in the West in the early 1980s, reinforced by legendary stories, filtering through from Soviet Russia. The most famous of these told of her recording Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 in one night at Stalin’s specific request. This story has stuck firmly in the popular imagination, although there has been no confirmation of its veracity. For instance, recently it was used at the beginning of Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin (2017), and in both Italy and France books with titles naming Yudina as ‘the pianist beloved of Stalin’ have appeared. I have examined the story more closely, and deal with it in a 2

INTRODUCTION

separate Appendix, preferring not to include it in the body of a biography based on verified facts. I for one have always been sceptical. In Russia this legend has acquired more fantastical aspects, with the claims of a certain Johann the Blessed that Yudina was his spiritual spouse and a secret nun named Seraphima, and that she was awarded the Stalin Prize, claims which can be safely ignored.2 I myself first heard of Yudina in Moscow when I was a student in Rostropovich’s class at the Moscow Conservatoire in the second half of the 1960s. To musicians she was renowned for her distinctive performances and profound readings of Bach, Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition, Stravinsky’s piano works, and Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, the ‘Hammerklavier’ and Op. 111 in particular. I heard various legendary stories about her eccentricities: she slept in her coffin (untrue), she slept in her bath (partially true, in her first Moscow apartment she slept on top of boards placed over the bathtub), she was a nun (untrue), she was Stalin’s favourite pianist (as already mentioned, probably a legend). Unfortunately, I never heard her play, although I came to Moscow six years before she died. However, Yudina was then undergoing a period of disgrace, and public performances were few and far between. I bought her recordings, and was duly impressed. I bitterly regret not having attended the lectures she gave at the Conservatoire on Romanticism in 1966, although I might not have understood her wide-ranging philosophical references or her quotations from Russian poetry and much else. If I had met her, I would probably have been intimidated by her formidable prophet-like figure, even if, as friends insisted, she had the kindest of hearts. My wish to write about Maria Yudina goes back to the mid-1980s, when the graphic designer and photographer David King approached me. David, known for his remarkable collection of historical journals, graphic cartoons and photos relating to the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union (the collection is now in Tate Modern), had developed an enormous enthusiasm for Yudina and her recordings. ‘Listen, we have to do a book on her,’ he said. I was trained as a cellist and had a good knowledge of Russian, but I had never written anything in my life. Obviously David had in mind one of his marvellously designed books where images spoke louder than words. We set off on a couple of research trips to Moscow and Leningrad, where we met the guardians of Yudina’s heritage, her biographer Anatoli Kuznetsov, one of her favourite students and disciple, Marina Drozdova, and her first 3

PLAYING WITH FIRE

cousin’s son, Yasha Nazarov. They were wonderfully helpful and friendly, and arranged for us to meet others connected to Yudina, including her cousin, the conductor Gavriil Yudin. The more I learned about Yudina, the less ready I felt to write about her, not least because I was determined to show her life against the background of her times. I could have coped with the musical side, but I felt inadequate describing the context to the extraordinary events of her life, the intellectual and religious movements of the 1920s, her meetings with towering personalities from many walks of life, as well as the underground life of ordinary people during Stalinism, with its overlapping horrors – arrests, repressions, prisons and camps. Nevertheless I started the research process, and contacted people such as Robert Craft, Boris Filippov, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, interviewed others like Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Nikolai Karetnikov and Edison Denisov, and got to know Pierre Suvchinsky’s widow in Paris. I commissioned an article on Yudina’s pianism from Susan Bradshaw, and in 1988 made a radio programme for Radio 4, and the following year actively participated in a series of programmes for Radio France, devised by Nadine Dubourvieux and Marc Floriot. In 1990 I moved to Italy and started writing about music and musicians. Yudina was laid aside, and some twenty-five years passed before I felt ready to return to the project. I contacted David King in December 2015, just as he was packing up his collection to go to the Tate Modern. He still had the Yudina photos. We agreed to find a way to do the book together. Sadly it was not to be – he died some five months later. In the intervening years an incredible amount of material about Yudina had been published in Russia, volumes of her own writings and reminiscences, the memoirs of others, and seven large volumes of correspondence between her and her many friends. I started writing this book about six years ago. During September and October 2019, with the support of the Oleg Prokofiev Trust, I spent some five weeks in the archives in St Petersburg and Moscow. While in Moscow I learnt that my colleagues Marina Drozdova and the pianist Alexei Lubimov were compiling a new anthology of Yudina materials for publication in Russia. They had also tracked down and issued many more of her recordings. The largest part of their discoveries were unpublished letters, written by Yudina to various correspondents; I am glad to say 4

INTRODUCTION

that some material I found in the archives were added to this anthology. In addition, our French colleague living in Germany, Jean-Pierre Collot, had discovered in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale a cache of unpublished letters written by Yudina to Pierre Suvchinsky. This resulted in his impressive publication in 2020 of the complete correspondence between Yudina and Suvchinsky and other connected figures.3 To my good fortune we were able to unite many of our research efforts, sharing new material and indulging in much discussion. Our aims have in fact been different, since notwithstanding the immense amount of published volumes on Yudina, a conventional chronological biography is lacking, leaving a glaring gap which I hope here to have filled. To share knowledge with such eminent colleagues made the process of writing the biography an unusual pleasure, taking away the solitary aspect of writing – which, due to the Covid pandemic, was even more solitary than usual. Elizabeth Wilson, Cumiana, Italy, 27 May 2021

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1 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH NEVEL’, PETROGRAD

I only know one way to God: through Art. Maria Yudina For what I have experienced and understood in Art, I must answer with my life, in order that such experience and understanding should not be rendered ineffective. Mikhail Bakhtin1 Maria Veniaminovna Yudina was born on 10 September 1899 (30 August in the old-style calendar), the fourth of five brothers and sisters in Nevel’, a small town in the Pale of Settlement, in the Vitebsk district.* Her family came from the educated intelligentsia; as Jews they adhered to the social ideals rather than the religious traditions of their forebears. Indeed, Nevel’s population was predominantly Jewish, while a quarter of its inhabitants were registered as Russian Orthodox. A few remaining Catholics testified to former times, when the town had been under PolishLithuanian control. The town boasted at least eight synagogues, but at the time of Yudina’s birth the main town square was distinguished by an architectural ensemble of churches, the Uspensky Orthodox Cathedral, various churches of the Spasopreobrazhensky Monastery and a Catholic chapel, built by the Radziwill family. Little remains of the Nevel’ of these times; it suffered massive destruction during the German occupation of 1941–4, when its Jewish population was * Today Vitebsk lies in Belarus, while Nevel’ belongs to the Pskov region of the Russian Federation.

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virtually exterminated. A few churches survived the ravages of the Second World War, while the remnants of the town’s religious buildings were torn down during the early 1960s, in a last surge of ideological zeal. In Yudina’s words, ‘Nevel’ was a place where Sholom-Aleikem, Chekhov, Platonov, and Mikhoels could find their heroes.’2 And so, for that matter, could Marc Chagall, who started his career as a painter in nearby Vitebsk. Maria’s mother, Raisa Yakovlevna Yudina, endeared herself to all and sundry as an unusually kind and gentle person. She was described by Maria’s much younger half-sister Vera, as ‘well-educated for those times and adored by her children’. In addition, there was a much-loved governess, Schvede, ‘an enormously stout woman, with an inexhaustible supply of games, shadow theatre, charades’.3 Veniamin Gavrilovich Yudin, Maria’s father, was a hard-working, upright man, totally dedicated to his work as senior doctor at the Nevel’ hospital. Like so many of the zemski doctors* of Chekhov’s stories or Bulgakov’s A Country Doctor’s Notebook, he was an agnostic who took his social duties seriously. Vera, his daughter by his second marriage, left the following description of him: Born into a large and very poor Jewish family, Father had to become independent at a very early age. He attended the gymnasium in Vitebsk and from the 4th class onwards he gave lessons to earn his keep and support the family. Despite his desperate poverty he managed to get to Moscow to study medicine with the most famous figures of his day. He returned to Nevel’ to discover a grim picture – the small and dirty hospital for the poor and homeless. Epidemics of typhoid fever constantly broke out in the town. And Father started from nothing, and for 50 years selflessly and untiringly carried out the routine work of the hospital. Much has been written of the good work of the Zemski doctors – not only did Father treat town dwellers and peasants from surrounding areas, but constantly (and successfully) petitioned for extensions and improvements to the hospital, for an outpatients’ department, the digging of artesian wells, the opening of schools [. . .] His energy was extraordinary. Family legend has it that Father shouted at the Governor and threw some visiting dignitary down the stairs. That was in his style.4 * A zemski doctor, appointed by local administrations or zemstvos, typically came from the intelligentsia and fostered a high moral work ethos.

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The Yudin family lived in a two-storey wooden house on Monastyrskaya Street, by the banks of the river Emenka, near its outflow into the large Lake Nevel’. It boasted a large garden and vegetable patch, a summerhouse and bathing hut. Contemporaries recall Dr Yudin walking down the garden path in his fox fur coat to his bathing hut – he swam even in the cold winter months.5 From her father Maria inherited a decisive character, courage and impulsiveness, and an incredible capacity for hard work. Her musical gifts came from her mother’s side of the family: her cousin, the distinguished pianist and conductor Ilya Slatin, founded the Kharkov branch of the Russian Musical Society, as well as the Kharkov Symphony Orchestra and Musical School. Maria, or Marusya or Marila as she was known in the family, started studying the piano aged seven and was soon accepted by Frieda TeitelbaumLevinson, a one-time pupil of Anton Rubinstein and winner of the gold medal at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. Having abandoned her performing career when she married, Teitelbaum-Levinson became a teacher of note in Vitebsk. Gavriil Yudin, Maria’s cousin, remembered how ‘her mother brought Marila to Vitebsk 2 or 3 times a month. The 100-km journey took some 3 and ½ hours by the fast train. After her piano lesson, they returned to Nevel’ the following day.’ Gavriil recalled Maria’s striking appearance: . . . with her enormous forehead and eyes expressing great depth of thought and a concentration most unusual for a ten-year-old. Even then, her playing showed striking individuality, with those inimitable characteristics of her maturity: grandeur of scale, profundity, tautness of pulse and rhythm, and above all a great aesthetic quality – a sort of Beethovenian ‘Es Muss Sein’. Of the pieces she played then, I can never forget her performance of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, in B minor (Op. 30 no. 4) and in particular that in C minor (Op. 38 no. 2). No pianist I have heard since could convey such commitment and inner strength as this young girl, with her thick braid of hair down to her waist, stubbornly nodding her head at the piano, as if in agreement with her own playing.6

In the close family circle, Maria could be vivacious, and was the leader of the close-knit group of cousins in theatrical games, ‘inventing ingenious tricks and devising new subjects’.7 8

CHILDHOOD and Youth

Yudina herself recalled her childhood as idyllic – the ‘paradise of the parental home’ with the subtle charm of the surrounding lush, waterstudded countryside: As a child I would sit on the spreading branches of the willow tree by the river in my parents’ garden and tried to write verse. I composed bad poems in German – in the manner of a traveller in the Steppes of Central Asia – eulogizing God’s world and the surrounding beauties. I described sunsets, stars, the splashing of waves, and the magic twilight hours. Later I realized that my poems were no good. I started reading real poetry, and dreamt of being able to study verse writing.8

Maria’s progress at the piano was so remarkable that at the age of thirteen she was taken to St Petersburg to play for the famous Anna Yesipova. An ‘international star’ of her day, Yesipova had been a favourite pupil (and one-time wife) of the great Polish pianist Theodor Leschetizky (Leszetycki).* Initially Yudina started her studies with Yesipova’s assistant, Olga Kalantarova, in the junior department of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, but she was soon promoted to Yesipova’s own class. The Conservatoire director, the composer Alexander Glazunov, sat on the examination commission and assessed the young Maria as follows: ‘Excellent dexterity. A gifted virtuoso, but with a tendency to rush. Technical exam and concert programme – passed with excellence.’9 Her fellow classmate, Adriana Birmak, recalled Yudina as ‘large, somewhat heavy, and seemingly older than her thirteen years. Her face itself was not particularly remarkable, but her serious attentive grey eyes seemed to read the thoughts of those she talked to, lending her an austere expression way beyond her years. She dressed simply in a sailor suit [. . .] and had difficulty in making contact with the other girls. Her spare time was spent reading – she did not join in our fun and games.’10 As Birmak noted, Yesipova required her students to sit in on each other’s lessons. ‘Anna Nikolayevna never let pass any misreading or discrepancy in the dynamic markings, thereby instilling discipline and a sense of responsibility in her students. She never shouted or banged the music, in the manner of some teachers. But * Leschetizky (1830–1915) counted amongst his students Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Artur Schnabel, Mieczysław Horszowski and Ignaz Friedman.

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should Anna Nikolayevna, pronounce quietly, “My dear, that simply won’t do”, the pupil realized that a thunderstorm was imminent and tried to slip away unnoticed.’ Yesipova valued Maria for her calm thoughtfulness and her immediate reactions. ‘As Marusya played, Yesipova would smile and nod her head approvingly. Normally she was never generous with praise.’ Birmak noted Yudina’s large excellent pianistic hands, with their wide palms. Already at the age of thirteen she could stretch a tenth and had no problems with chord or octave technique. ‘Her sound was deep and powerful; lightness of touch and transparency didn’t come so easily to her.’11 During the ten months Yesipova taught Yudina, she worked on sound, style, pedalling, adding brilliance to the touchée and generally refining her playing. Like her fellow students, Maria received free tickets for concerts, and heard in person the foremost artists of the day – the pianist-composer Ferruccio Busoni, the violinists Jacques Thibaud and the young Jascha Heifetz. She also attended Yesipova’s duo performances with the renowned violinist Leopold Auer. Yudina was also an avid reader and exchanged books and visited museums with Birmak. The range of her reading went far beyond the requirements of the Conservatoire curriculum; she devoured Plato, the Romantic writers, and the great nineteenth-century Russian authors. In August 1914, when Yesipova died unexpectedly, Glazunov transferred Yudina to the class of a young professor, Vladimir Nikolayevich Drozdov, a favourite pupil of Yesipova’s and himself a fine composer and musicologist. Yudina, now the youngest student in Drozdov’s class, observed that ‘All his female students were madly in love with him, he was young and handsome, and a wonderful pianist.’ Yudina, either too young or too engrossed in music, kept aloof. ‘At one class concert, I played Liszt’s transcription of Bach’s Organ Fantasy and Fugue in G minor very brilliantly, and Vladimir Nikolayevich quipped “Such success with Bach! That’s worth more than a pound of raisins.”’12 Drozdov extended Yudina’s repertoire, polished her piano technique and refined her sound, insisting that a powerful forte should never obscure the softness of touch. Around 1916, Yudina started taking lessons from the renowned Polish pianist Felix Blumenfeld, while continuing her official studies with Drozdov – probably without the latter’s knowledge. An all-round musician, Blumenfeld had studied piano, conducting and composition at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. A pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, Blumenfeld did not share his 10

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vision, or adhere to the aspirations of ‘The Mighty Handful’.* His piano compositions were harmonically reminiscent of Scriabin and stylistically of Karol Szymanowski, to whom he was incidentally related, as he was to the pianist Heinrich Neuhaus. Blumenfeld was not only renowned for his pianistic interpretations of Chopin, Schumann and Liszt, but for his performances of contemporary music, not least his own. The general opinion was that had he focused exclusively on the piano instead of branching out into conducting, he would have been the most brilliant pianist of his generation. However, Blumenfeld’s scope was much broader. He started to direct opera at the Mariinsky Theatre, and as a convinced Wagnerian he conducted the Russian premiere of Tristan and Isolde in 1909 in a provocative production by Vsevolod Meyerhold. In the 1910s Blumenfeld’s health started to deteriorate and by 1917 he was partially paralysed (reputedly due to syphilis). Although he no longer performed, he continued teaching at his alma mater, the Petrograd Conservatoire. In 1918 he transferred his teaching to the Kiev Conservatoire where he counted Vladimir Horowitz amongst his students. From 1922 until his death in 1931 Blumenfeld continued his distinguished pedagogical career at the Moscow Conservatoire. Blumenfeld did much to widen Yudina’s musical horizons. Like him, she did not want to be limited by the piano, and in 1915 she enrolled at the Petrograd Conservatoire’s composition and conducting faculties. She was particularly inspired by Nikolai Cherepnin’s conducting and percussion classes, and enjoyed playing timpani and tam-tam in the student orchestra. Yudina called his lessons ‘real Symphonies’ – they covered the orchestral repertoire from Haydn to Debussy, from Schubert to Richard Strauss. Cherepnin became her musical idol, admired as much for his immaculate musical taste as for the strictness and elegance of his bearing. Yudina summed him up in Goethe’s words: ‘In der Beschränkung kennt sich erst der Meister’ (It is through restraint that one recognizes the Master).13 Yudina was struck by the enormous erudition behind the restraint, and yet no less by his genuine modesty: ‘I cannot remember a single occasion when Cherepnin might have shown us one of his own scores, even for study * The name given by Vladimir Stasov in 1867 to a group of national composers. Five composers adhered to the group: Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin.

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purposes. I was in those days somewhat critical of his compositions, finding them impressionistic and effete.’14 Her professors of composition, Vasili Kalafati and Maximilian Steinberg, were amongst the best teachers in St Petersburg. Kalafati taught counterpoint to many generations of composers, Stravinsky and Prokofiev amongst them. Steinberg was no less esteemed, continuing the traditions of his father-in-law, Rimsky-Korsakov. His most famous pupil was to be Dmitri Shostakovich. Prompted by her love of polyphony and Bach’s music, Yudina also took organ lessons for a time with Professors Jacques Gandshin and Nikolajs Vanadziņš. Another formative influence on her Bach interpretations was Isai Braudo, who became the Soviet Union’s most renowned organist and Yudina’s close friend. During the summers Maria returned to Nevel’. Her cousin, Gavriil, recalled how ‘in those years Marila was caught up with going to the people. This nearly ended in tragedy. She had set off to help the peasants harvest rye. An hour or two later Marila came home with her right hand bandaged in a handkerchief, blood pouring everywhere. Mother carefully unwound the handkerchief to reveal a terrible sight: the thumb was nearly severed from the hand – it was only attached by a tendon – the cut was that deep. Marila had been wielding a scythe, with next to no skill. [. . .] By some miracle the wound healed and her pianism did not suffer.’15 It was during her mid-teens that Yudina started to develop the enormous spiritual and intellectual resources which would determine the direction of her life. A diary – a gift from her parents for her seventeenth birthday – acted as a stimulus to record her thoughts. The first entry reads: ‘30 VIII 1916. Arrived in Petrograd to start living my life for ART.’ These words were followed by a no less lofty declaration: ‘I only know one way to God: through Art [. . .] All that is divine, that is spiritual, first came to me through Art, through one of its branches – Music. This is my Vocation.’16 Indeed, the so-called ‘Nevel’ Diary’, written in Petrograd and in her home town, testified to her intellectual and spiritual quests during this formative period. As Maria entered her eighteenth year, she found herself caught up in the whirlwind of revolution and political change. Given her family background and the aspirations of the Russian intelligentsia in these last stifling years of Tsarism, it is hardly surprising that Yudina greeted the February Revolution of 1917 and the abdication of the Tsar with enthusiasm. She had recently 12

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enrolled in Petrograd’s Lesgaft Courses,* which offered women free teachertraining courses. Because of their democratic social principles, the courses were associated with political ferment. Now, Yudina was swept up in the revolutionary fervour that overtook Petrograd as Russia gained its first short-lived taste of democracy. The militia had taken over the Lesgaft Course building, and the courses were closed. Maria joined the streams of people thronging the streets: In no time I reached the quarter of town where the Conservatoire and the Lesgaft Courses were situated [. . .] Everything was in commotion, some people were being given food, others were being bandaged or handed rifles [. . .] Arms were being given out to the prisoners who had just been released from the Litovsky fortress, and I gave rifles to whomsoever I was told. I obeyed orders unquestioningly, in a totally natural way – we had after all been commanded in ‘The name of the People’, and that surely meant ‘for the general good’ [. . .] I too was given a loaded rifle and was taught how to use it. But the wretched thing went off by itself! The bullet went through the ceilings of four storeys, and I was very lucky that I didn’t wound anybody on the fifth! I wasn’t punished or dismissed, but I was teased for the rest of the day – ‘What a warrior!’ And once again I was shown the basic rules of handling a gun.17

After this adventure Yudina called by her friend Yevgeniya Otten’ (her future godmother) and her sister Vera. They recalled Maria’s bemusement, as she recounted how ‘we have been giving out weapons to murderers and thieves.’18 Yudina then hurried home to Pushkin Street where she shared an apartment with her two elder sisters, Flora and Anna. Flora was studying at the Bekhterev Institute for Psycho-Neurology, while Anna was a student of natural sciences at the Lokhvitskaya-Skalon Courses. After reassuring them that she was still alive, Maria rushed back to her revolutionary work. This now involved the militia making a census of the population. ‘We all pinned red ribbons on our coats and went to people’s houses in groups of 2 or 3, to

* Named after Pyotr Lesgaft (1837–1908), founder of modern physical education. In 1896 Lesgaft founded free courses for women to train as teachers of physical education.

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record the “makeup” of the population. We wore armbands, boarded the trams at the front saying “svoi” (“one of us”) with great pride.’ One day amidst this commotion Yudina happened to bump into her idol, Professor Cherepnin: He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at me. ‘We’ve been worried stiff about you – we looked for you everywhere!’ he exclaimed. ‘And what’s this?’ He touched my militia armband. I was overcome by confusion. Suddenly Weber’s overtures, Schubert and Mozart’s symphonies, swept through my mind. I thought of my timpani playing in the student orchestra. I found nothing to say, mumbling words about ‘my duty to the people’ [. . .] At that moment the spontaneous revolutionary in me gave way to ‘symphonism’. I resumed my Conservatoire studies.19

Yudina had by now been appointed secretary to the Kolomenskaya branch of the People’s Militia in Petrograd. She would appear in class with files and registers swollen from the immense amount of paperwork after the overthrow of the Tsarist regime, and would plonk them down on the table together with her orchestral and piano scores. As her cousin Gavriil recalled, ‘Cherepnin would cry out in mock horror: “Maria Veniaminovna, where do you think you are? Is this a conductor’s classroom or a militia point?”’20 By the summer of 1917 Yudina had relinquished her position with the militia, and she completed the academic year at the Conservatoire, as well as her training as pre-school teacher at the Lesgaft Courses. In mid-June she returned to her parents’ home, just a few months short of her eighteenth birthday. Her decision to move back to Nevel’ was due to the uncertain political situation in Petrograd, but her mother’s illness required her presence at home as well. Maria had also strained her hands, in what transpired to be a first attack of rheumatic fever, something which plagued her throughout her life and would periodically stop her from playing the piano. Now was the ideal time for her to put her Lesgaft training into practice. Yudina combined forces with some of the town’s young teachers to open the first summer play-school in Nevel’. They were given permission to use the grounds of the town park. As Yudina later recalled: ‘It was ideal, full of shade, with its straight lines of outlandish trees, a wide sand pit useful for our games, and several ponds.’21 The forty children who attended were 14

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divided into two Russian-language groups and a larger Jewish group. ‘Our acknowledged leader was a Jewish woman, a professional instructor and wonderful teacher, thoughtful, affectionate, and responsible, with a kind heart, and a great love of children. Despite being petite and fragile she knew how to keep the group under rein. We all learnt from her.’22 A commission created by the town council oversaw the group, providing encouragement and money as necessary. Yudina’s father served on it as an active member. Maria was thrilled by the children’s accomplishments over the summer months: ‘In the autumn, when the trees in the park shimmered with gold, we handed over our work to the commission. Everybody was happy – the children proud of their success and delighted at being the centre of attention. They all received small prizes and medals, and we teachers wept with joy.’23 Not all the work was plain sailing, as Yudina discovered: In my Russian-language group there was a small orphaned boy called Akinfa. He was about eight years old and lived with unloving and unloved relations. He tortured and teased everybody, mocked the Jewish children, imitating their accent, their gesticulations and whining voices, and got into fights. We all tried to correct him through word and example, and as I was responsible for him, I tried particularly hard. But one day Akinfa overstepped the limits of the permissible – he beat up a boy, was rude to a staff member, and stole something. It was voted that he should be expelled. And when the time came for the sentence to be imposed, at the hour of parting, I suddenly burst into tears. And my weeping was responsible for Akinfa’s ‘second birth’ – he too burst into tears and asked to be pardoned, and returned the stolen goods. Thereafter he followed me around like a devoted dog. He announced that ‘never in my long life’ had he ever witnessed a teacher cry over a pupil.24

Her cousin Gavriil recalled that after her work, ‘Marila came back so exhausted that she would instantly fall asleep over lunch, unable even to wait for a bowl of soup to be put in front of her by her elder sister.’25 Sometimes Maria and her siblings would swim in the river at the bottom of the garden, and on occasion they took a whole day’s boating expedition with their parents, rowing down the Emenka into nearby Lake Nevel’ and out of 15

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it down the gently winding river Plissa, whose grassy banks were strewn with white lilies, and which emerged into Lake Plisskoye, a spot of unparalleled beauty. Yudina was intent on expanding her horizons, and mostly spent her spare time reading, studying philosophy, and learning orchestral and operatic repertoire. As she recovered the use of her hands, she would play through the great stage works of Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov for relatives and friends. She herself loved Parsifal best, but for cousin Gavriil, who much preferred Rimsky-Korsakov to Wagner, she often played through The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh. By sheer coincidence some of the country’s best philosophical minds, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Matvei Kagan, Valentin Voloshinov and Boris Zubakin, found themselves in this small town in the Pale of Settlement around the time of the Revolution. The leading spirit amongst this circle of thinkers around Bakhtin was the literary critic, Lev Vasilyevich Pumpyansky. Born as Leib Meerovich Pumpyan into a Jewish family in Vilnius in 1891, he befriended Mikhail Bakhtin and his brother Nikolai while attending the First Vilenskaya gymnasium. In 1912 Pumpyansky enrolled at the GermanRomance faculty of St Petersburg/Petrograd University, which he attended intermittently until 1919. His studies were interrupted in 1915 by military service. By chance Pumpyansky was stationed outside Nevel’, where his linguistic skills made him useful in military counter-espionage, and as an interpreter during the interrogations of German prisoners of war. When not on military duty, he taught at Nevel’s United Soviet School of Labour, and gave private coaching in Latin and modern languages. In her diary entry on 24 June 1917 we find Yudina’s exalted declaration ‘to have exclusively meaningful thoughts leading to Light. Fichte, Schelling. Hegel – I want, I want, I want to study philosophy!’ In the same entry, Yudina mentions Pumpyansky for the first time, identifying him as one of the friends ‘helping me find the way to Light’.26 The others included the literary critic and musician, Yevgeniya Oskarovna Tilicheyeva (née Otten’), and the extraordinary Boris Zubakin, poet, historian and Grand Master of the Rosicrucian Order. A brilliant philologist, and polymath, Pumpyansky did much to stimulate Yudina’s literary and spiritual interests. He had converted to Orthodoxy in 1911 at a time when many Jewish intellectuals relinquished 16

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their ancestors’ religion, converted to Christianity, or renounced formal religion altogether. Or else, as in the case of the poet Osip Mandelstam, they adopted a world view shaped by Hellenism. Not to be forgotten were the socially conscious revolutionaries of Jewish origin, many of them fervent Bolsheviks, who rose to power during the Revolution, not least amongst them Leon Trotsky. Although brought up in an agnostic family, Yudina related to her Judaic roots and knew the Yiddish traditions that were widely practised in Nevel’. Later in life she recalled a proud beggar, ‘an old Jew with dark grey curls, who would walk into our house each Friday morning, bang his stick threateningly, crying out, “Achtzehn Kopkes auf ’n Tisch” (eighteen kopecks on the table) – he refused to take money from a woman’s hand, either mother’s or ours. He always demanded this sacramental sum. We children were frightened of him.’27 Even after her conversion to Russian Orthodoxy, Yudina remained proud of her Jewish origins. As a repository of her thoughts, feelings and evolving beliefs, her diary provides a detailed record of Yudina’s development between June 1917 and February 1918. Here she made careful note of her reading – the Gospels, the Church fathers, the German poets and philosophers – and scatters it with quotations from the great writers, her own verses and those of Pumpyansky. During the summer of 1917 she translated a large chunk of St Augustine’s Confessions from German into Russian, before asking herself why – there already existed a good translation into Russian from the original Latin. Behind Yudina’s serious investigation into Christianity, one is constantly aware of Pumpyansky’s guiding influence. As she confessed in her diary, the affinity between mentor and student gradually developed into a mutually declared love. Yet her doubts as to the true nature of her feelings were still unresolved when the diary breaks off in February 1918. This first experience of love aroused tempestuous and bewildering sensations, undermined by a tortured inner debate on spiritual versus passionate love. Never for a moment did she doubt that their friendly union was divinely consecrated. On 1 August 1917 she writes: ‘Dear friend, today you shared your most precious thoughts with me [. . .] I was right in saying that His Light shines upon us, this is a God-given friendship.’28 In the same entry we learn that Pumpyansky was leaving Nevel’ for a short trip to Petrograd: ‘Dear friend, your train is speeding its way to that beloved but cold city, and as you look 17

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up at the starry orbs, pure and serene thoughts permeate your spirit. Some of your thoughts are for me – and from me, for my yearning, turbulent spirit is surely dear to you!’ Translating these sentiments into musical terms, Yudina declared that ‘The lofty spirit of Beethoven soars above me – you too will be able to hear it.’29 Perhaps inspired by Pumpyansky’s military duties, Yudina seriously considered leaving home to work as an auxiliary nurse. However, she abandoned this romantic vision of herself tending wounded soldiers at the front when she realized what suffering it would cause her parents. Interestingly enough, on the outbreak of the Second World War, Yudina’s instincts were exactly the same, although in 1941 she actually completed a first-aid course to acquire basic nursing skills. As Yudina’s love for Pumpyansky grew, she felt she was no longer in control of the situation. ‘What have you done to me?’ she confided to her diary. ‘Where is my pride, my solitude? I had such faith in him, and I am dying without him. I never thought that my spirit was so filled by him, to see both the light and strife in this person.’ A fortnight later, love was replaced by the need for complete independence; perhaps Yudina realized that justifying love through its God-given aspect was self-deluding. ‘Yesterday it came to pass. A new stage in my spiritual development. I have turned away from him to whom I owe so infinitely much, who has shown me the way. A terrible fateful dilemma, but I am convinced I have made the right decision.’30 Yet her doubts did not disappear: ‘I don’t know what he sees in me. When he is here, everything is easy and wonderful [. . .] And when he is not here then I am simply consumed by the flames of love. What is to become of me?’ Such uncertainties could lead to petty disagreements. ‘Why did I say those evil words to him! Forgive me! Understand I am searching for the light that illuminates the darkness.’ Within a week, peace was restored: ‘It was so extraordinary, wonderful, all barriers were overcome, all misunderstanding and hostility, once again his profound words spoke of spiritual closeness [. . .] And the golden autumn with the stealthy rustling of the forests, and at our feet the flow of splashing water, nature itself blessed our Union.’31 In mid-September Maria decided to return to Petrograd, to sound out the situation at the Conservatoire. The inflammation of her hands still hampered her piano playing, and with the uncertain political situation 18

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everything was up in the air. In the meantime Pumpyansky was being sent to the Eastern Front. The idea of parting produced a flurry of despair in Maria, not untouched by melodrama. ‘Suddenly everything seems dreadful and terrifying [. . .] Shells will be flying over his head – over him, and not over me, he will be facing fire and blood. I hadn’t understood this straight away, I hadn’t taken in that he might not come back – Oh Lord, please preserve him in storm and battle. He must not die now [. . .] It would be totally my fault.’ Accordingly she put off her own departure until his longedfor return. When Pumpyansky came back unharmed, Yudina wondered how he could be so cheerful, ‘as if he had never experienced the crossfire of battle and death. It’s very strange. This attachment to life and its good things does not accord with his fundamental depth of spirit. In reality he knows how to live life simultaneously at different levels; at the most basic level he forgets the existence of the other, much deeper level.’32 Her arrival in Petrograd towards the end of September did little to appease her feelings. The city provoked a feeling of unease: ‘How it seethes with people, these soulless crowds, where each person is alienated one from the other [. . .] What a cold unpleasant town.’ In compensation there was the joy of attending Church: ‘Yesterday I went to divine service for the first time. It seems that I will definitely embrace Christianity!’33 The decision to convert to Russian Orthodoxy was made gradually, and it was influenced by two friends in particular, Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva and Pumpyansky, who would become her godparents. Maria knew her conversion would go against her father’s wishes, for Veniamin Yudin was an outspoken atheist, although guided by a strong moral conscience. In contrast, at the age of eighteen Maria was an idealist, striving for a synthesis of Hellenistic culture, Russian symbolism and German-based philosophy, and still unsure as to whether to join the Church. In Petrograd, Yudina found solace in devotional reading, and specifically in Solovyov’s The Spiritual Foundations of Life: ‘The chapter on prayer is a sacred book!’ She battled with St Augustine, ‘so difficult to read, mostly because of the language. But I want to and I can do it. I will persist and achieve illumination of the spirit! Achieve it? Oh, what pride on my part to think I can do so!’34 Back in Nevel’ by mid-October, Yudina started studying aesthetics, the Greeks, Homer and Hesiod. She learned to distinguish Xenophon’s historic Socrates from the Platonic. Almost simultaneously she 19

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discovered the extraordinary figure of Father Pavel Florensky.* A linguist, philosopher, religious thinker, art historian, physicist and mathematician, he had turned his back on a brilliant academic career to study theology and enter the priesthood. Yudina became acquainted with Florensky through reading his seminal work The Pillar and Ground of Truth, published in 1914. A treatise and speculative investigation into the theme of Christian love, it is written in the form of twelve letters to a brother – a symbolic friend in Christ. Yudina soon laid the book aside. For she had neither the time nor energy to comprehend its complexities. But she took note of Florensky’s fundamental belief that only in Orthodoxy can True Life be found. If other religions required testified proof of the nature of Divine Truth, then in Orthodoxy the manifestation of Truth is self-evident and self-perpetuating, a being in existence, and as such divine in character. Florensky summed it up best: ‘Truth is discursive intuition.’ Discussion with Pumpyansky on such themes provided stimulation, even as their relationship continued to be undermined by uncertainty. Yudina was tormented by conflict, her inability to confess her love, her longing to fulfil her passion, and her desperate feeling of being unworthy. Here she was already setting a pattern for the future, when she would write passionate letters to the current – and usually unattainable – object of her love, letters which often were never sent. Things were no longer as simple as they had seemed to start with: ‘The more I love him, the more I understand how large the distance is between us.’35 In early December a mutual confession of love took place. ‘Who said it first?’ Yudina asked. ‘We both did [. . .] All night I couldn’t sleep and wept quietly. Oh, Lord, I am lost in such unknown, enormous happiness.’36 But this happiness was in conflict with the desire for chastity – although like St Augustine she didn’t quite want it now. ‘Well, what of it. I will be stronger, but not now, when he is here, and I am dying from love [. . .] I’ll immerse myself in my Art and perhaps “at my sad sunset” faith and prayer will shine with a smile of farewell.’ Maria found solace in paraphrasing Pushkin; reading poetry calmed her, whereas music only made her ‘burn in an ecstasy of devotion’ and diminished her creativity.

* See Avril Pyman’s biography of Florensky for more detailed information.

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In early January 1918, Yudina travelled with Pumpyansky to ‘Piter’ (Petrograd), where they decided not to see each other: ‘I need solitude, repose and peace. Only then can I be creative,’ she mused. She was now focused on conducting and her studies with her ‘idol’, Nikolai Cherepnin. ‘I have one aim in front of me. Conducting! This will cure me, and help me find my way back to reality. In the meantime I go around with a deep, festering wound. I must live through it and overcome.’ She confessed to her diary that ‘Today (24 January) my teacher [Cherepnin] was dissatisfied – that is hardly surprising. How can one work in this condition. No, enough of weeping and groaning!’37 Cherepnin’s concerts devoted to Bach provided a welcome distraction: ‘Today’s was the best, a real celebration, which is what counts most in Art! Nikolai Nikolayevich was on top form in his volitional force and drive, although his gestures lack beauty.’38 Creativity – or lack of it – was a frequently voiced theme in Yudina’s diary. She had already adopted Berdyaev’s idea of the artist being a co-creator with God, and shared his belief in the religious nature of creative genius, ‘for it involves resistance to the world by man’s whole spirit; it implies a universal assumption of another world and a universal impulse towards it’.39 Berdyaev’s words, ‘the creative way of genius demands sacrifice – no less than the sacrifice demanded by sainthood’,40 resonated with Yudina. If she had the potential for this form of ‘genius’, she would willingly embrace any sacrifices it might entail. Yudina’s diary came to an abrupt halt in early February 1918. Learning of the rapid deterioration in her mother’s health, she rushed home. Raisa Yakovlevna Yudina was still relatively young when she died from apparent heart failure on 24 March. According to Maria’s childhood friend, Raisa Shapiro, Raisa Yudina had recently put on so much weight and grown so stout that she needed two chairs to sit down on. Many people – Shapiro amongst them – felt bereft after her death. Raisa Yudina was exceptionally good-natured, and loved not only her own children but all children. ‘Soon after, Marusya gave a concert at the local club of the Noblemen’s Assembly in Nevel’, where she dressed all in black, wearing her mother’s dress. I was overwhelmed by her playing.’41 Maria had already adopted an almost monastic simplicity of attire, which she never abandoned. It was all the more noticeable at a time when young women were beginning to wear short skirts and crop their hair. As Elga 21

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Linetskaya, another childhood friend, recalled, ‘(Maria) wore her hems down to the ground. She herself had extraordinarily upright posture, and looked straight ahead of her, never glancing to the side.’42 Yudina decided to stay on in Nevel’ to help the family. She was particularly concerned about her younger brother Boris, a talented violinist with an unstable character, whose upbringing was being neglected in a house dominated by young women. She resolved to undertake responsibility for him, not just now but for the rest of his life. It was a thankless task, for Boris’s mental health was shaky, with intermittent periods of manic behaviour, making it difficult for him to stick to any one line of study or work. In the early spring Yudina found distraction from her grief in the arrival of the young philosopher and theoretician of European culture and semantics, the twenty-three-year-old Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. A man of magnetism and natural authority, Bakhtin would dedicate his life to literary theory, and become best known for his studies of Dostoevsky and Rabelais. He had studied history and philosophy at the Novorossiisky University in Odessa from 1913, before enrolling at Petrograd University early in 1918. When in the wake of revolution educational institutions came to a near standstill, Bakhtin’s close friend Pumpyansky happened to come to Petrograd. As Bakhtin recalled, ‘there was nothing to eat in Petrograd, so Pumpyansky convinced me to join him in Nevel’ – There I could earn money, and in addition there was plenty of food.’43 At the time of his arrival in Nevel’, Bakhtin had yet to publish any of his writings. The two years he spent there were fundamental as the time when he worked out his philosophical precepts orally, through lectures and in discussion, using a small circle of like-minded people as a sounding board to formulate his ideas. Initially, his interests focused on ethics and aesthetics, but from the mid-1920s and particularly after his encounter with the Russian Formalists, he developed his literary theories of dialogism and polyphonism, formulating diverse models of language within specific literary contexts. While in Nevel’, Bakhtin, like Pumpyansky and the town’s neo-Kantian philosopher Matvei Kagan, taught at the ‘united School of Labour’, a brick building still extant on Ulyanov Street. Soon after his arrival in the spring of 1918, Bakhtin gave an introductory course of lectures for the local intelligentsia, organized by philosophical theme, rather than chronologically. ‘I paid most attention in my lectures to Kant and Kantian philosophy, which 22

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were to my mind of central importance. And neo-Kantian philosophy, and foremost of course Hermann Cohen, Rickert, Natorp and Cassirer.’44 Amongst his most ardent listeners was Maria Yudina. Many years later Bakhtin recalled, ‘I noticed her straight away, a young girl, quite large, and dressed completely in black. She had the aspect of a nun [. . .] I was struck by the figure she made – there was this almost absurd contrast between her young, ruddy-cheeked face (she was robustly built), and her all-black clothing. I then got to know her better, and soon, you might say, became accepted as one of the family in her home.’45 As Bakhtin observed, ‘Maria Veniaminovna was under [Pumpyansky’s] philosophical and literary influence [. . .] He was wonderfully erudite as far as literature was concerned, particularly in regard to foreign (non-Russian) literature. He knew many languages and was an extremely quick reader. He was capable of reading a large monographic work in one evening and could then sum it up very fully and accurately. In this sense he had quite exceptional ability.’46 It would appear that by mid-1918, Yudina and Pumpyansky had reversed roles – she was now the rejecting and no longer the rejected party. As Bakhtin recalled, Pumpyansky had proposed marriage to Yudina sometime in the early summer of 1918, but she refused him. Yudina’s father and sisters were dead set against such a marriage, but assumed that they were living as a betrothed couple. They felt that Pumpyansky’s unworldliness made him totally unsuited to the role of husband. Bakhtin concurred; indeed, he was ‘far less of this world’ than Yudina herself. Pumpyansky suffered Yudina’s rejection very deeply during the summer of 1918, and furthermore felt so hostile to Maria’s father that he wanted to physically assault him, to give him the proverbial slap in the face. Bakhtin recalled, ‘I attempted to quieten him down. Afterwards they restored their friendship and all ended well.’47 Other sources had it that Veniamin Yudin threw Pumpyansky down the stairs when Pumpyansky asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Certainly, Veniamin Yudin was intolerant of all religious people, but a Jew converted to Orthodoxy was a double affront. The Bakhtin Circle* came into being gradually over the summer of 1918. Later it was officially established as The Nevel’ Academic Association on * For more detailed information on the Bakhtin Circle, see Clark and Holquist’s exemplary biography of Mikhail Bakhtin.

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30 July 1919. Despite the small size of the town, from the early 1900s Nevel’ had enjoyed a rich intellectual and musical life, even having its own orchestra. As Bakhtin noted, its inhabitants were equipped to enter into discussion with the incoming philosophers. Fundamental to the creation of the Circle was the local philosopher Matvei Kagan, who had recently returned from Leipzig, Berlin and Marburg, where he had been studying with the leading Neo-Kantian philosopher, Hermann Cohen. A striking and eccentric addition to the group was Boris Zubakin, who like Pumpyansky was in military service, currently stationed at Nevel’. A man of letters, talented poet, historian and archaeologist, the musically gifted Zubakin was a leading member of the secret Rosicrucian Order, and became Grand Master of the Petrograd Lodge shortly before 1917. Bakhtin classed him as a ‘mason’ in his reminiscences, and there are indeed signs that the whole Bakhtin Circle was given over to Masonic practice during its stay in Nevel’. Zubakin in turn persuaded his ‘star’ friend, and Rosicrucian brother, Valentin Voloshinov, to move from Petrograd to Nevel’ to escape the hard conditions of the capital. A talented poet, Voloshinov was a pianist manqué, forced to give up playing because tuberculosis had deformed his hands. He became particularly close to Bakhtin after they both moved to Vitebsk in 1920, where they shared an apartment. While Kagan is credited with initiating the Circle on his return from Germany, Bakhtin was regarded as its central figure, and became Chairman of the Nevel’ Academic Association. His exceptional clarity as a thinker certainly earned him the mantle of its intellectual leader, while Pumpyansky remained the guiding spirit of the group. When the latter moved to Vitebsk in 1919, he encouraged the other members to follow. For a while the activities of the Association were shared between Nevel’ and Vitebsk, but by 1920 all participants had left Nevel’, and Vitebsk became the centre of ‘the Bakhtin Circle’. The Circle’s inner sanctum consisted of twelve active participants who met almost daily during 1918–19. Yudina was amongst them, and she joined in the night-long discussions, where members were sustained by strong tea until the early hours of morning. When their words were exhausted, Yudina would turn to the piano and perform for the philosophers. At this time she had given herself over to the study of Bach and polyphony, learning both volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which she presented in its entirety during her graduation exam at the Petrograd Conservatoire. 24

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One wonders whether Bakhtin and Yudina discussed the application of musical polyphony and its rules to other disciplines. Bakhtin’s pivotal polyphonic theory was developed in his work on Dostoevsky, which he started writing in Vitebsk and eventually published in 1929. Bakhtin’s understanding of polyphony was based on Dostoevsky’s unique ability to present a gallery of personages, each independent, and self-reliant in thought, speech and actions, free to enact their roles and interact with others, ultimately constructing a unified, spiritual truth. The author’s objective descriptions, opinions or judgement could be dispensed with. In a diary entry from 1899, Lev Tolstoy, not known for being musically progressive, noted his thoughts on polyphony: ‘A voice ought to say something, but in this case, there are many voices and each one says nothing.’ Such a definition of polyphony would have seemed utterly absurd to Yudina and Bakhtin. It was a period when borrowings from musical terminology were in current usage in the visual arts; the titles of Kandinsky’s paintings referred to ‘Symphonies’ and ‘improvisations’, and later Filonov ‘painted’ Shostakovich’s First Symphony. Conversely the writer Andrei Bely created four poetic prose works entitled ‘Symphonies’, written between 1902 and 1908. Originally the declared aim of the first Bakhtin Circle was to explore Neo-Kantianism, and ethical and moral problems reflecting the preoccupations of the Marburg School. Soon their themes extended to religion and problems of literary scholarship. The Circle took its social duties seriously, teaching those of ‘proletarian’ origin at the Nevel’ School of Labour, and travelling to nearby villages to hold workshops. Yudina for her part was actively involved in setting up the town’s first School of Music early in 1919, an achievement that she justly felt proud of.48 Polemic debate was the order of the day, and at public meetings at the Karl Marx People’s Club in Nevel’, members of the Circle took on their principal opponents, the Marxists. Participants were differentiated between ‘Comrades’ and ‘Citizens’.49 These disputes were advertised and reported in the local newspaper Molot (Hammer), whose chief editor Jan Gutman was a friend of the Circle, even if he rarely shared their points of view. On 3 December 1918 Molot reported the recent discussion where ‘Citizen’ Bakhtin spoke on the subject of ‘God and Socialism’, and like ‘Citizen’ Pumpyansky, came out in favour of religion, criticizing the immorality of socialism’s attitude towards the dead. His Bolshevik opponent, Comrade Jan Gutman, reputedly 25

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responded, ‘Since the dead will not come back to life, there is no need to care for them.’50 Other meetings took place at the People’s Club on such themes as ‘Lev Tolstoy and his Work’ and ‘Culture and Revolution’. These debates were well attended, with up to 600 people in the audience, who actively participated in discussion and got involved in ferocious arguments. When Bakhtin gave a lecture on ‘The Meaning of Life’, discussion went on well past midnight, and had to be continued the next day. The artist Gurvich, a convinced Bolshevik, enjoyed polemic discussions with members of the Circle, although apparently he usually lost the argument. It is edifying to think that while the young Soviet Union was engaged in civil war, overcoming hardships, and fighting for survival, the citizens of Nevel’ were engaged in philosophical discussion. While Bakhtin was the most revered thinker of the group, Pumpyansky and Kagan were no less in demand as speakers and lecturers. Kagan’s lectures on philosophy at Nevel’s Jewish Courses were particularly well attended, while Zubakin entertained his audiences with his dramatic talents and his ability to improvise poems on the spot. He must have made a strange impression on the Nevel’ population with his occult philosophical ideas, even if his concepts of united brotherly love and freedom were not so far away from the ideals of communism. Not that the Bolsheviks saw it like this – they dubbed him ‘an unprincipled poet’, while others criticized ‘his stagey tricks’.51 On the Day of the Working Red Army Man (12 October 1919) it was reported that ‘Comrade Zubakin recited the Marseillaise with great élan to the accompaniment of the local orchestra.’52 It was an enormous tribute to Yudina’s intellect that she was included in Bakhtin’s Circle. We have no evidence of her actual participation in public debates, but in the more intimate meetings of the group she evidently participated in the discussions. Bakhtin himself had a great respect for Yudina’s mind, remarking that ‘it transpired she had a rather rare ability for philosophical thought. As you know [. . .] there are many who can philosophize in this world, but few who can become philosophers – Yudina was amongst that number. She could have become a philosopher, something which is even rarer in women.’53 Bakhtin noted that her father was equally interested in philosophy. ‘Dr Yudin was an intelligent man with wide interests, despite his somewhat cynical world outlook, typical of the old Medical intelligentsia, a remnant of the 1860s and nihilism.’54 26

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On the other hand, Maria’s fascination with German Romanticism was largely due to Pumpyansky’s influence. She could read the literature in the original language; indeed, most families of the local Jewish intelligentsia knew and used German. Maria’s early love for the Jena Romantics remained a lifelong passion, and she counted amongst her favourite authors Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Schlegel, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Brentano and Fichte. In philosophic terms, Bakhtin dubbed Yudina ‘a follower of Schelling, and up to a point of Hegel. She was simply not interested in the theoretical, cognitive side of philosophy, neither was she interested in dialectics.’55 In the summer and autumn months Yudina, Bakhtin and Pumpyansky took long walks together. As Bakhtin recalled, ‘Nevel’ and its surroundings are exceptionally beautiful, and the town itself is wonderful. It’s situated beside a whole area of lakes, which are absolutely marvellous – we had long discussions on these walks. I remember that I exposed the initial ideas of my moral philosophy, sitting on the banks of a lake some ten kilometres from Nevel’. We called it the “Lake of Moral Reality” – before that it bore no name.’56 After moving back to Petrograd in 1919, Yudina would return to Nevel’ during the holidays. She also visited Vitebsk, where the Circle’s participants had transferred residence. The city was blossoming into a cultural centre of importance, dominated by the activities of the painter Marc Chagall, a native of the town. Chagall had initially seen the Revolution as an opportunity to achieve equality and to abolish the hated Pale of Settlement with all its injustices. In 1918 Anatoli Lunacharsky, newly designated head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, appointed him Commissar for Arts in Vitebsk. In founding a local People’s Arts School, Chagall not only fulfilled his educational aims, but created innovative projects, which attracted some of Russia’s best painters, including the relatively conservative Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, the avant-garde artist El Lissitzky, the suprematist Kazimir Malevich and his student, Yudina’s younger cousin Lev Yudin. While Chagall was the catalyst for the School’s activity, Malevich was responsible for the creation in 1920 of Unovis, the highly influential modern art department, where he formulated his theories of abstractionism as ‘Non-objectivity’. In Malevich’s visionary understanding, abstract painting should be illuminated by mystic spiritual qualities. Yudina knew Malevich and years later recalled seeing his iconic painting of 1915, The Black Square, while in Vitebsk. 27

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A similar renaissance occurred in the theatrical and musical life of Vitebsk. In 1918 Lunacharsky sanctioned the opening of a People’s Conservatoire in Vitebsk, where Pumpyansky and Bakhtin were invited to lecture on aesthetics. Here Pumpyansky gained an exceptionally brilliant pupil in the seventeen-year-old Ivan Sollertinsky, an expert in Romance languages, and in theatre and art history, who eventually chose musicology as his path in life, ending his career as artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The brilliant young polymath got to know Yudina, when he came to Nevel’ to hear Bakhtin and Pumpyansky speak, even before they moved to Vitebsk. Sollertinsky enrolled at Petrograd University in the autumn of 1921, and six years later became Dmitri Shostakovich’s inseparable friend, confidant and equal in sardonic wit. He had a lasting influence on the composer through introducing him to Mahler. At the same time Vitebsk acquired a symphony orchestra, put together by the conductor Nikolai Malko on his arrival from Petrograd in the spring of 1918. Over the next two and a half seasons he conducted some 250 concerts in and around Vitebsk before the orchestra was dissolved. In 1922 Malko returned to Petrograd to teach at the Conservatoire, where Yudina took the odd conducting lesson from him. As chief conductor of the Petrograd/Leningrad Philharmonic from 1924, he became influential in his support of new music, and was the first to perform Shostakovich’s early symphonic works. Two years after Yudina returned to Petrograd, Pumpyansky relocated there from Vitebsk, followed in 1924 by Bakhtin, with his new wife Yelena (Alyona). As the Circle resumed its activity, Yudina was not merely a participant, but a host to many of its meetings. Petrograd was the town where she embraced Christianity, became active in Church matters, attended university courses, completed her Conservatoire studies and started her professional career. Nevel’ remained for her the town of ‘childhood paradise’, where her musical talents were fostered and her intellectual formation was initiated.

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2 1919–1927

BAPTISM, UNIVERSITY STUDIES, PHILOSOPHICAL CIRCLES

How often we weep, me and you Over life’s pitiful malaise – My friends, if only you knew, The darkness and gloom of coming days. Alexander Blok1 We were all in a way Flying Dutchmen – We the Russian intelligentsia [. . .] united in seeking the Truth. Maria Yudina2 Yudina’s return to Petrograd in mid-1919 initiated an intensely rich and formative phase in her life, lasting for the next eleven years. Soon she found herself leading three disconnected parallel lives. From September she was studying conducting and composition at the Conservatoire – her piano studies being suspended due to the inflammation of her hands. Additionally, she frequented courses of philology and philosophy at Petrograd University, following the interests cultivated within the Bakhtin Circle in Nevel’. And thirdly, as a member of the Orthodox Church, she became part of a closeknit community fighting for survival. Even before embarking on her studies in the capital city, Yudina formalized her conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith. On 2 May 1919 she was baptized at the Petrograd missionary Church of the Protecting Veil of the Holy Virgin on Borovaya Street, at a service officiated by Father Nikolai Chepurin. It was a highly personal affair attended only by a few close friends. Lev Pumpyansky, her appointed godfather, was not present, but the evening 29

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beforehand he reputedly prepared Yudina for the event by reading aloud extracts from Pavel Florensky’s writings. Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva, Yudina’s friend from Nevel’, stood as godmother, and left a telling description: ‘Underneath the temple’s great cupola stood a large font [. . .] and over the font were two or three smallish windows. The day was overcast, but when the rite of holy baptism began the clouds parted, and the sunlight poured through the windows. I vividly recall Maria Veniaminovna at that moment, her head surrounded by a golden aura of light.’3 Vera, Maria’s half-sister, recorded that their father was much angered by his daughter’s conversion, holding Tilicheyeva and Pumpyansky responsible. Vera was born in 1926, so the events she spoke of happened well before her birth, and had become part of family legend. ‘One couldn’t mention [Tilicheyeva’s] name in front of Father [. . .] Papa was an atheist and couldn’t stand any kind of religious sentiment, whether Orthodox or Jewish. He drove off Marusya’s fiancés very quickly. As for Pumpyansky, he threw him down the stairs.’4 Yet Vera sensed that ‘Father loved and valued Marusya, although he was offended by her “ties with priests”. He called her “my pearl”, and attended her concerts when he came to Leningrad. Yet they avoided any closeness in their relationship, even when she returned to the family home in Nevel’.’5 Yudina’s friend, Yelena Skrzhinskaya, had similar observations: Dr Yudin was a severe, unbending man. He simply couldn’t bear Marusya’s milieu, and Tilicheyeva in particular, whom, as her godmother, Maria Veniaminovna revered until death [. . .] In her room, Marusya had a small religious corner, some pictures in oils of holy images, probably painted by Tilicheyeva, and leaning against them little icons, hung with small chains, rosaries and crosses. On seeing this, her father took the inkwell and hurled it with all his might at these objects. The ink stains remained on the wall, although Marusya did her best to rub them out. When she saw what her father had done, she didn’t start arguing with him, she was very meek. I witnessed their occasional quarrel, but Marusya never did anything to inflame the situation.6

While Veniamin Yudin never accepted her religious beliefs, she wisely learnt to avoid this provocative theme with him. Church-going became a way of 30

1919–1927

life for Yudina during the 1920s, but this was no anomaly amongst her contemporaries. The spirit of religious revival that was prevalent amongst the intelligentsia in the decade before the Revolution was compatible both with personal beliefs and the conviction that social and political reform were urgently needed. For Yudina the quest for Christian faith was a way to enrich her inner world and transform her performances into a spiritual act. Years later she recalled how ‘our youth was elevated by selflessness, poverty and the distant rumble of civil war. At the centre of everything was the need to discover the Truth. We could each in our own way claim as our own Alexander Blok’s wonderful words, “I hear the noise of the pages of history being turned.” ’7 Yet this sudden change from relative economic well-being before the Revolution to the uncertainty and poverty that followed was difficult to accept. Yudina’s friend Lyubov Shaporina, the first wife of the composer Yuri Shaporin, recorded in her diary: ‘Famine started here in Petrograd. Having lived through the siege of Leningrad I realize it wasn’t that authentic hunger from which two and half million people perished. But the transition from complete abundance and plenty to the disappearance of bread, meat, milk and many other products was a misery and torment.’8 In Nevel’, Yudina had been protected from the food and fuel shortages. Not that this alarmed her when she returned to Petrograd: We weren’t looking for material comfort, security or possessions. We were quite content eating pancakes made from potato peelings, wearing clothes concocted out of string and tattered rags. We lived our lives through poetry and music from sunrise to sundown. We despised the upstarts of NEP.* In 1921 there remained one horse-drawn carriage in Petrograd. A young lady of extraordinary beauty rode in it, and we all openly laughed at her.9

Certainly the haggard faces and shattered nerves of much of the population told a different tale. Nevertheless it transpired that material hardship was * The New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin in 1921, allowing free-market enterprise so as to give temporary respite to the population from hunger and the hardships of War Communism.

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less of an evil than Bolshevik Terror. As Shaporina recalled, ‘Firewood was nowhere to be found for love nor money. Everybody sawed up cupboards and tables to burn, and we huddled together in one room. Getting hold of firewood was seventh heaven! The city was almost without electricity – it came on at best for one or two hours a day. But if the lights came on all evening and night, then our hearts froze in deathly terror – the authorities were carrying out searches and arrests.’10 The Cheka,* the dreaded Secret Police, created in December 1918 within weeks of the Bolshevik takeover, was the first of a series of Soviet repressive security organs founded to combat ‘counter-revolutionary’ activity. From the start the Cheka was given extra-juridical power to make arbitrary arrests and shoot people on the scantiest of evidence, and consequently did not have to answer for its actions. Already from 1918 the country was subjected to a first taste of Terror, which escalated dramatically, completely engulfing the country under Stalin’s rule. Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, the state structured its administration through a series of Commissariats (Narkomat), headed by a Council of People’s Commissars. The Commissariat for Enlightenment (Narkompros), under the supervision of Anatoli Lunacharsky, was responsible for cultural and educational matters, and promoted progressive policies to educate the proletariat and introduce social reforms. The prestigious old universities of Moscow and Petrograd did not conceal their hostility to the new regime. Narkompros wished to keep them functioning initially, despite the general conditions of cold and hunger.11 During 1920–1 Petrograd University nearly ceased to function, being emptied of teachers and students alike. Olga Freidenberg, a student of classics, wrote to her cousin Boris Pasternak on 25 May 1921: ‘Petersburg is beautiful in its abandonment with its empty streets, with grass and wild flowers springing up in the cracks in the sidewalks. Prolonged misery has made an optimist of me. How odd that desolation should bring freedom, allowing flowers to grow wild in city streets.’12 The poet Anna Akhmatova painted a similar picture: ‘All the old Petersburg signboards were still in place, but behind them was nothing but * Acronym for the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.

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dusk, darkness and yawning emptiness. Typhus, hunger, executions, damp firewood, people so swollen as to be unrecognizable. In Gostiny Dvor* one could pick a large bunch of wild flowers [. . .] The city had not simply changed, it had turned into its opposite. But people loved poetry (mainly the young) almost as much as they do now.’13 Such devotion to the arts in the face of desolation was a phenomenon of the times. People lived through their passionate beliefs, whether for poetry, music, building a new social order, or defending religious convictions. The fact that the Petrograd Conservatoire remained active during the cold, hungry years of civil war was largely due to the determination and dedication of its director, Alexander Glazunov. Formerly solid and stout, Glazunov had lost so much weight that his clothes hung off his body like a scarecrow. Many professors left Petrograd to cities such as Kiev, Tiflis (Tbilisi), Koktebel in the Crimea, and Vitebsk, where food and fuel were more plentiful. By the end of 1918 Yudina’s favourite teacher, Nikolai Cherepnin, had departed to assume the position of director of the Tbilisi Conservatoire, remaining there until the arrival of the Bolsheviks in 1921, when he left Georgia to take up permanent residence in Paris. Emil Cooper (Couper or Kuper) replaced Cherepnin as professor of conducting. Having made his name as an opera conductor, he was renowned for his ‘definitive’ interpretations of Wagner’s Ring cycle at the Mariinsky Theatre, while his performances of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh were equally acclaimed. In 1918 Lunacharsky appointed Cooper chief conductor and director of the Ex-Imperial Theatre, as the Mariinsky was temporarily called. In 1921 it acquired a new name, the ugly acronym GATOB (State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet). For Yudina, Cooper was a legendary figure. As a student she attended his rehearsals and performances of Wagner and of Kitezh, in which Russia’s most famous tenor, Ivan Vasilyevich Yershov, performed. ‘Dear God, what an amazing Grishka Kuterma,** what an amazing Siegmund,’ Yudina wrote of Yershov. ‘He was the very embodiment of Art [. . .] the High Priest of the Dionysian, and no less of Apollonian reasoning.’14

* The enormous department store on Nevsky Prospekt. ** The treacherous drunkard in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh.

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In 1921 Cooper was additionally appointed artistic director of the Institution of the Petrograd (later Leningrad) Philharmonic, which included duties as chief conductor of the Petrograd Philharmonic Orchestra, which had been reassembled from the Philharmonic Society’s pre-revolutionary orchestra. A father figure to his musicians, Cooper gave them generous material help during this troubled period. Nevertheless, despite his commitment to the new Soviet musical institutions, he emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1924, ending up in New York as staff conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. For his part, Cooper was so impressed by the young Yudina that he chose her as his soloist in Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto at the opening of the Petrograd Philharmonia on 10 August 1921, just weeks after her graduation in July. The concert took place in the former Hall of the Noblemen’s Assembly, with its beautiful white columns and eight large glittering chandeliers. For Yudina it was memorable for other reasons: ‘I performed Beethoven’s Fifth at that concert, but it would have been better not to play at all – it was the day Alexander Blok died.* Emil Albertovich informed us of the news, when I was already sitting at the open grand piano, the orchestra was tuning up. We all rose to our feet, many of us in tears. Then the rehearsal started. We should have postponed the concert, but alas, we lacked understanding of the event’s historical significance and of our irreparable loss.’15 The great poet had won early recognition in the 1900s, when he was primarily associated with the Symbolist movement. While initially accepting the Bolshevik takeover of October 1917, Blok soon lost all illusions about the Revolution’s benefits. His pessimism was reinforced through his feeling that he could no longer write poetry: ‘All sounds have stopped. Can’t you hear that there are no longer any sounds?’ he demanded of the writer, Kornei Chukovsky. After the Revolution, Blok’s health deteriorated drastically, and he died a natural death ‘of exhaustion’ at the age of forty. The reaction of all educated people on learning of Blok’s death was well captured by the twenty-year-old writer, Nina Berberova: ‘I was seized by a feeling, which I never again experienced, that I was suddenly orphaned.’16 The funeral, held on 10 August, was attended by over 500 people. The writers * The poet Alexander Blok died on 7 August. His funeral was held on 10 August, the day of Yudina’s concert. Evidently she was referring to a rehearsal three days before.

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Andrei Bely, Vladimir Pyast, Yevgeni Zamyatin bore Blok’s coffin high over the heads of the mourners. As Berberova commented, ‘Probably there was not a man in this crowd who did not think – if only for a moment – that not only Blok had died, but this city was dying with him, its special power over people was coming to an end, a historical period was closing, a cycle of Russian destinies was being completed.’17 While Blok’s death was a terrible blow for the Russian intelligentsia, worse was to come. The thirty-five-year-old poet and co-founder of the Acmeist movement, Nikolai Gumilyov, had been arrested by the Cheka on 3 August for counter-revolutionary activity. Gumilyov – incidentally Anna Akhmatova’s first husband – was charged with participating in a monarchist conspiracy, the so-called Tagantsev plot. On 26 August 1921 he was summarily shot along with sixty others, just before Maxim Gorky had time to deliver the pardon he had allegedly elicited from Lenin. As early as 1922, it was admitted that Gumilyov and his ‘fellow plotters’ had been executed on trumped-up charges. What followed afterwards – mass deportations, the exile of the intelligentsia and the start of planned repressions – was a logical consequence of those August events. Many of the country’s intellectual and religious figures with whom Yudina was mixing now faced a stark choice between emigration – leaving behind inherited culture, language, family and friends – and remaining in Soviet Russia, thereby risking imprisonment, execution, the labour camps, or enforced exile in the wastes of Siberia. Yudina, too, was invited to leave Russia by the violinist and composer, Iosif Achron, a pupil of Leopold Auer. She had first heard him perform with orchestra under Cherepnin’s direction at a Bach cycle organized by the Petrograd Conservatoire in 1917. Yudina was impressed by Achron’s violin playing, and admired even more his ‘most unusual, [characteristically innovative compositions], closely linked in style to Mahler’s cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn.’18 Achron’s interpretation of Bach’s violin concertos had inspired Yudina to write him a complimentary letter. He replied asking her to emigrate with him. ‘I was incensed! I had no intention of leaving Russia, all the more so with a young man, who had “not asked for my hand in marriage”. Our morals were strict in those days.’19 In general Yudina disapproved of the idea of leaving her country. In this she shared Anna Akhmatova’s feelings as expressed in the lines: ‘But to me 35

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the exile is forever pitiful,/Like a prisoner, like someone ill,/Dark is your road, wanderer,/Like wormwood smells the bread of strangers.’20 Yudina, no less than Akhmatova, had no wish for the taste of foreign bread, even when there were considerable shortages of the native product at home. Whosoever experienced the chaotic years of civil war and Soviet repression became accustomed to hardships. In compensation, Yudina was able to profit from Bolshevik progressive policies on women’s education. Women were now given equal access to universities, as well as the right to free civil union, divorce on demand, leglized abortion, and so-called socialization of housework. In the decades preceding the Revolution higher education for women had only been available privately – in Petersburg/Petrograd at the Bekhterev and Lesgaft Courses, and the prestigious, intellectually elitist Bestuzhev Institute, where, exceptionally, women could gain a university degree. Thus in the 1919/20 academic year Yudina was of the first generation of women to attend Petrograd University. As an external student she frequented lectures at the faculty of classical philology (headed by the distinguished Professor Faddei Frantsevich Zelinsky), as well as Nikolai Lossky’s courses on Fichte’s philosophy and Zelinsky’s lectures on Hellenism. The poet Blok had praised Zelinsky as the university’s best professor, while Mikhail Bakhtin acknowledged him as the closest thing to a teacher he had ever had. Zelinsky’s influence on Bakhtin is evident in his views on popular culture as an invigorating and subversive force, and on dialogue as a philosophical means of expression. Yudina vividly recalled how her Petrograd University professors were subjected to ideological stress. ‘Our maitre Zelinsky towered above us all. He had no intention of leaving Russia, although the University was emptying of teachers [. . .] He taught until the very last minute. The alternative was to wait for his subject to be abolished from the curriculum or be dismissed. Forcibly separated from the University, our professors had to look for other work to engage their wonderful minds. They also needed to earn their bread (however stale) to feed themselves and their families.’21 Despite Zelinsky’s enormous international reputation, his conflict with the authorities forced him to leave Petrograd in 1920 for his native Poland. His departure was symptomatic of the increasing suspicion with which the prestigious universities of Petrograd and Moscow were treated. In the face 36

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of mutual hostility, the Bolsheviks undermined their authority, while prioritizing the creation of new proletarian and provincial universities. The founding of Workers’ Faculties (Rabfacs) in 1922 coincided with a virulent purging (‘chistka’) of the ‘old class’ of professors and students. Those teachers who resisted the ‘proletarization’ of the student body on the grounds that this debased academic standards were branded disloyal to Soviet power. The following academic year (1920/21) Yudina abandoned philosophy and philology to enrol in the history faculty of Petrograd University, renowned for the excellence of its Medieval Studies. It was headed by Ivan Grevs, the teacher of a whole generation of brilliant minds, including the historian Olga Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaya, and the philosopher and historian Lev Karsavin – all of whom Yudina knew and revered. Her teacher of Hellenistic religion, Ivan Ivanovich Tolstoy, ‘represented the cognitive sciences in a riot of learning, despite his inherent qualities of restraint and aestheticism [. . .] Just a few of us attended his lessons – amongst them the brilliant Olga Freidenberg, who sat and stared fixedly at Ivan Ivanovich with her enormous smoky grey, crystal-clear eyes. She herself was a myth, a sibyl, and to boot, she was Boris Pasternak’s cousin.’22 At the time of writing, some fifteen years after Freidenberg’s death, Yudina lamented that ‘she remains misunderstood and unrecognized – this great philosopher and classical philologist’.23 Perhaps the most illustrious amongst the Petrograd history professors was Lev Karsavin, who combined interests in history, spiritual philosophy and metaphysics. Indeed, Karsavin started by studying philosophy, but switched to medieval history at the behest of Professor Grevs, concentrating on the transitional period between the late Romans and Middle Ages. Karsavin’s quiet magnetic personality exerted a special fascination on his students. Perhaps it was unsurprising that in 1916 he became passionately involved with a twenty-year-old student at the Bectuzhev Courses, Yelena Cheslavna Skrzhinskaya (known to friends simply by her patronymic, Cheslavna). The way he experienced and transformed the love affair into a literary phenomenon had a significant effect on his philosophical thinking and spiritual life. As Karsavin’s biographer Dominic Ruben wrote, ‘Cheslavna Skrzhinskaya was a pretty and gentle girl from an aristocratic family [. . .] A rising star in the history department – later she became one of Soviet Russia’s leading medievalists.’24 Gossip soon spread. Even before the affair 37

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had fully blossomed, Karsavin was seen ‘racing down the wide university corridor on a lady’s bike which, rumour had it, belonged to a certain female admirer and muse’.25 Indeed, Karsavin did not bother to hide the affair, even from his family. Skrzhinskaya was to become Yudina’s closest Leningrad confidante and lifelong friend. They were drawn together as much through their love of music as their passion for history. Cheslavna had studied piano since childhood, and in 1925 Yudina accepted her as a piano student. Skrzhinskaya recalled first meeting Yudina in 1921 at one of Lev Karsavin’s seminars: ‘Maria Veniaminovna sat at the edge of the table by the wall, and listened with great attention, but did not participate in the discussion. Her wavy hair gave away her Jewish origins. I would see her at seminars and lectures, and once, while passing by Palace Embankment I greeted her – it felt as if we were already acquainted. I decided to pay an impromptu visit to her house – I nervously rang the doorbell, but she received me very well.’26 This view of Yudina as an ‘amateur’ too shy to open her mouth in classes or seminars was confirmed by other students, including Skrzhinskaya’s sister, Irina: ‘Marusya didn’t attend many of Lev Karsavin’s seminars. She was a new student, very timid [. . .] Karsavin was to play a tragic role in my sister’s life. They loved each other, but he was not ready to sacrifice his family, although they knew of his love affair.’27 Karsavin described his romance with a certain degree of self-irony in his book Noctes Petropolitanes, published in 1922, the year he was expelled from Russia. As Irina remarked, ‘Everything happened as described in the introduction, we were participants in the story. Here he parodies himself and everything that came in the following chapters.’28 The charismatic Karsavin left a deep impression on Yudina: ‘Whoever attended Karsavin’s lectures, participated in his seminars or talked with him is forever linked to him. The spirit of doubt was great in him, the spirit of sarcasm, the spirit of “inter­ locutor” of our age. But what, one wonders, lay behind this complex, angular, almost hermetic figure?’29 Even though Yudina only studied with Karsavin for a short time, through a series of coincidences she was to maintain ties with him and his family throughout her life. Yudina returned to her Conservatoire piano studies in the autumn of 1920, with the intention of graduating the following summer. For the moment she continued with her university courses, although obviously her 38

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music studies took precedence. By the winter she found this double load untenable, as she acknowledged to Viktor Zhirmunsky, her Professor of Philology: ‘It is with great regret and shame that I inform you that because of extraordinary circumstances I can no longer attend your seminar [. . .] You will already have understood that as an amateur, my work can have no scientific interest [. . .] I simply did not calculate my strength; to work in two different fields with the same energy is evidently impossible.’30 At her graduation ceremony (see Chapter 3) it was announced that Yudina had been appointed to the teaching staff of the Petrograd Conservatoire, and immediately afterwards she embarked on a brilliant concert career. Nevertheless she found time to continue attending university courses, if only sporadically, sing in Church choirs and generally devote much time to Church matters. At the Conservatoire she made it a rule never to speak of religion with students, unless she discovered that they were already practising Orthodox Christians. While not broadcasting her faith, Yudina did not hide her views, as when she compiled an obligatory questionnaire for the Leningrad Conservatoire in 1925. In answer as to whether she belonged to a political party she wrote: ‘The Party is too serious a matter to only have sympathy for it, one needs to be active. In many aspects I agree with the Russian Communist Party, but I cannot join it because of my idealistic and religious views.’31 Yudina also admitted with regret: I never became an academic, for music claimed so much of my attention at the time. But I am happy that the roots of an intellectual and ethical way of life were deeply embedded in me at that time [. . .] I received the ‘key’ to humanist knowledge, an immense field of thought, of which I can avail myself until my dying day. The teachers and students were such amazing people – the very ‘cream of humanity’! Selfless, hard-working, responsible, actively good. Nobody thought of ‘careers’, everything was genuine, fashioned from ‘pure metal’.32

Later in life, Yudina would express nostalgia for the old St Petersburg ethos, which did not outlive the 1920s: We often stood near the Palace Bridge after some lesson or seminar, or by the Sphinxes on the University Embankment, waiting while the

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drawn-up bridges closed again. Our discussions would continue, while we watched the blazing Petersburg sunsets. Everything was enfolded in quiet, rustling autumn mist, as the half-empty ships silently glided by. We were all in a way ‘Flying Dutchmen’! We – meaning [. . .] the Russian intelligentsia, with its many differences in character, aspirations and destiny, united in seeking the Truth.33

Yudina indeed found lifelong friends within the circles of the literary and humanistic intelligentsia. Many, like her, were members of the religiousphilosophical circles Volfila and Voskreseniye* while also belonging to the Orthodox Church. The Church paradoxically underwent a form of renaissance after the Revolution, having at last escaped from two centuries of secular control imposed by Peter the Great with the abolishment of the Patriarchate. Only in the last decades of the nineteenth century did ecclesiastical independence from the state become a pressing issue. With Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication after the February Revolution and the Bolshevik takeover of October 1917, the Church gained autonomy, however shortlived. In November 1917, Metropolitan Tikhon Belavin of Moscow was elected Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church – the first for some 200 years. On 23 January 1918 Lenin issued a decree enforcing the separation of Church from State, and School from Church, while simultaneously enforcing a policy of ‘militant atheism’, which threatened all forms of organized religion and deprived the Church of its institutional rights. From 1920 a period of persecution and martyrdom began; thousands of church buildings were pulled down, most monasteries were closed, while in 1923 the first forced labour camp was established at the great fortified Solovetsky monastery – also referred to as Solovki. Conflict was inevitable when Patriarch Tikhon condemned the atrocities committed by the Soviet regime against members of the Church, and the massacre of the Tsar and his family on 17 July 1918. Yet conversely the Bolsheviks’ policy of oppression served to stimulate a revival of interest in the Orthodox Church itself. As the scholar and expert on Russian medieval history, Dmitri Likhachov, recalled: ‘The persecution * Volfila: Acronym of the Free Philosophical Association. The Philosophical Circle Voskreseniye (meaning both ‘Sunday’ and ‘Resurrection’) was created in 1917 and closed in 1928.

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of the Church was so unbearable to any Russian, that many non-believers started frequenting Church services, as a means of distancing themselves from its oppressors.’34 In all this, what rang true for Yudina was Mikhail Bakhtin’s assessment of the human need for religion as a higher goal: ‘Without God, without faith in the absolute otherness, self-awareness and self-expression are impossible, and this is not, of course, because they have no meaning in practice, but because trust in God is the immanent constructive factor.’35 She believed that synonymous with baptism was the responsibility to defend the principles of the Orthodox Church. Such commitment was compatible with the intelligentsia’s search for a system of universal belief, combining religious, philosophical and social ideals. Already from the beginning of the century, circles of discussion, created around a central figure, had brought like-minded people together. As Likhachov observed, ‘The Russian culture of the Silver Age was born in conversations and discussion that were absolutely frank and free [. . .] New discoveries were made during these conversations, in which – according to some unspoken spiritual law – no fewer than three people ever participated [. . .] It was symptomatic that Stalin’s assumption of power in 1928 and imposition of dictatorship on the minds and souls of people coincided with the persecution of these “circles” of the intelligentsia, their meetings and discussions.’36 Spiritual-philosophical circles continued to emerge after 1917, even if they only enjoyed short existences. Exceptionally the circle Voskreseniye kept going until 1928. Its roots lay in the famous Petersburg Religious Philosophical Society, founded in 1907 by the spiritual thinkers Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Lossky. Later the Symbolists Dmitri Merezhkovsky and his wife, Zinaida Gippius, became the most prominent members, together with the philosopher, Alexander Meier. A Marxist, active in radical politics from the early 1900s, who underwent multiple arrests, Meier evolved his views on philosophy, becoming increasingly interested in religion in its wider, non-clerical sense. Because of the diverging interests of Merezhkovsky and Meier, the Religious Philosophical Society did not survive the Revolution. Other circles arose in its place, including ‘The Brotherhood of Saint Sophia of Divine Wisdom’, whose declared aim was discussion of the Gospels. Its members included the philosopher Nikolai Lossky, Mikhail Bakhtin and his followers, 41

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and the historians Grevs and Karsavin. Another such circle was ‘The Brotherhood of Saint Seraphim Sarovsky’ (named after the most recently canonized Russian saint), with which Bakhtin was also briefly associated. Yudina was highly sceptical of this particular circle. No sooner did the Bolsheviks close one circle, than others sprang up in its place. When the Orthodox Theological Academy was shut down, it was effectively replaced by the Institute of Theology, initially headed by the Metropolitan, Veniamin Kazansky. After Kazansky’s execution in 1922, Lev Karsavin became its leader, although within months he himself had been arrested and deported. Yudina attended the Institute’s Higher Theological Courses for several years and conducted its choir until its closure in 1928. These circles were not exclusive of each other, and members moved from one to another, attending lectures and participating in discussions. The authorities regarded any independent initiative with great suspicion. It required a lot of ingenuity to establish a circle and keep it going, although as Likhachov recalled, all that was actually needed was a space to hold lectures or discussions: ‘A room in a flat, the hall of the Tenishev school, a teacher’s schoolroom. The time and place of meetings were communicated by handwritten announcements or by word of mouth.’37 Yudina and other members of Bakhtin’s Circle sustained the circles Volfila and Voskreseniye. The former was founded early in 1919 at the initiative of the Social-Revolutionary Ivanov-Razumnik and the writer Andrei Bely. Volfila’s aim was to discuss philosophical questions of cultural activity and heritage; religious belief was not a requisite for joining. Its meetings were attended by a wide range of illustrious men: the poet Blok, the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the philosophers Lossky and Meier, the historian Karsavin and the artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Non-members, including the writers Mikhail Zoshchenko and Yevgeni Zamyatin, were invited to lecture. Yudina actively participated in the unconstrained discourse encouraged at these meetings. Smaller ‘circles’ were created from Volfila’s subdivisions for specific discussion. By the time Volfila was closed in 1923, its members had almost all joined Voskreseniye, founded in 1917 at the initiative of Meier and his common-law wife, the artist and architect Kseniya Polovtseva – both to become lifelong friends of Yudina’s. Voskreseniye (with its double significance of ‘Sunday’ and ‘Resurrection’) was specifically defined as a religious philosophical society. 42

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Likhachov recalled that although its members originally met on Tuesdays, the meetings were then transferred to Sundays – giving sense to the dual meaning of its title. The circle fostered a synthesis of Christianity and Socialism, where the concept of ‘resurrection’ as intellectual rebirth was appropriate. Meier and Polovtseva proclaimed the need to link communism and Christ, reflecting Blok’s vision in his poem The Twelve (1918). For other members Voskreseniye provided a less extreme forum for the discussion of Christian ideas. Many members expressed sympathy with the aims, if not methods, of the Bolsheviks. As the philosopher Georgi Fedotov declared in the group’s initial charter, ‘We acknowledge the truth and justice of socialism, but seek some spiritual basis for it.’ Yudina was introduced to Voskreseniye in 1918 by her godmother, Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva. Other members of the circle became Yudina’s loyal friends: the historian and expert on St Petersburg, Nikolai Antsiferov, the Orientalist Nina Pigulevskaya (originally from Nevel’), as well as the students of medieval history Vsevolod Bakhtin (no relation of Mikhail Bakhtin) and his wife Yevgeniya. Yudina’s teachers Grevs and Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaya were also active members of the circle. Yudina was already an admirer of the charismatic Meier, and vastly impressed by his erudition. After Likhachov’s arrest, he got to know Meier in the spring of 1929: ‘Meier appeared in the Solovki camp together with his wife Polovtseva. He had initially been sentenced to execution by firing squad, but was granted “grace” and condemned to a 10-year sentence – the longest term of punishment in those years. He was a very unusual man, he never tired of thinking, whatever the conditions, and he tried to make sense of everything philosophically.’38 Likhachov identified him as a new mentor: ‘The conversations I had with Meier and the Solovetskaya intelligentsia were for me a second university – and first in terms of significance.’39 Voskreseniye’s meetings were initially held in the premises of Volfila, and were widely attended, with up to 150 people present. But soon the circle was only able to operate privately in domestic premises, usually the flats of individual members. From 1924 it was decided for caution’s sake not to meet as one unit, but to divide up into smaller groups. Thus Voskreseniye became an umbrella for a variety of circles, divided by theme and meeting on different days of the week. Yudina and Pumpyansky attended the ‘Tuesday Circle’ led by Georgi Fedotov as a study group for the ‘Reappraisal of Values’. If the 43

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existence of a circle of free-thinking people was still possible in the mid-1920s, it was merely a question of time before Voskreseniye would be forcibly closed. It so happened that because of a minor disagreement Yudina ceased her membership of the circle at the end of 1928, just a few weeks before it was disbanded, and within days of the first arrests of its members. More surprising was how long Voskreseniye managed to keep going, given its open association with religious matters at a time when religion was increasingly under assault. With Bakhtin’s return to Leningrad in 1924, his circle was reconstituted. Its meetings were usually held at Yudina’s apartment on 10th January Embankment – always known by its former name, Palace Embankment (Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya). The first-floor apartment was ideal as it boasted an enormous room and balcony. From Yudina’s surviving invitation notes to friends, it is evident the talks and lectures were of an impromptu, last-minute nature and the guests were hand-picked, a necessary precaution. Here is a typical letter dating from July 1924, to the musicologist Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov, son of the famous Nikolai, and husband of Yudina’s friend Yulia Veysberg: ‘Highly respected Andrei Nikolayevich, If you are free and if it is of interest to you, at 8 o’clock this evening at my home Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya 30, flat 79, the PHILOSOPHER BAKHTIN, recently arrived in Petrograd, will give a lecture on the theme “Problems of Content, Material and Form in Artistic Creation”, as a philosophical reflection on Formalist methods.’40 Bakhtin’s next lecture at her flat would instead be for ‘a very intimate circle of people’. These events were well attended, and they aimed to raise funds for charitable purposes. Pumpyansky recalled the theme of Bakhtin’s first cycle of Petrograd lectures as ‘The Hero and the Author in Artistic Creation’. Here Bakhtin would refute Formalist methods from a philosophical standpoint. He was in general very disdainful of the superficiality of Formalist philosophical thinking, but wanted to explore its theories in linguistics and the autonomous function of literary devices. Over the next two years, Yudina issued similar invitations to lectures by Bakhtin and Pumpyansky on a variety of philosophical and literary themes. Evenings were also devoted to a particular writer. Here for instance she writes to her friend, the philologist Yevlaliya Kazanovich, apologizing for a last-minute invitation to honour the memory of the poet Valery Bryusov: ‘I myself only discovered about it yesterday, since the meeting was transferred 44

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from a different venue to my place. Bakhtin and Pumpyansky will make speeches, and perhaps others too.’41 Another literary figure thus honoured was Vyacheslav Ivanov, about whom Bakhtin’s brilliant lecture covered ‘the whole of culture’, as one admiring member of the audience put it.42 In November and December 1926 respectively Yudina hosted two evenings dedicated to living poets, the first to Konstantin Vaginov, and the second to the ‘village’ or ‘archaic’ poet, Nikolai Klyuev. The aim of the second meeting was to collect money for the impoverished writer, who had no means of earning an income. Yudina’s short missives indicate the themes that Bakhtin was working on at the time – Dostoevsky, discourse and dialogue, the polyphony of ideas, as well as his ambiguous relationship with the Formalists. Most of these subjects were connected to his principal work of those years, The Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, published in 1929. Bakhtin’s Circle also acquired new members, including the biologist Ivan Kanayev and the petro-geologist Boris Zalesky, both of whom would become lifelong friends of Yudina and Bakhtin. The circle never had a fixed programme, and it functioned as a hermetic group of friends, dominated by Bakhtin’s quiet, charismatic personality. It reopened with eight lectures on Kant’s Critique of Judgement given by Bakhtin himself – once again his brilliance and erudition overwhelmed his listeners. The circle also addressed contemporary concerns, including the study of psychoanalysis – Freud and Otto Rank in particular – promoted by the philologist Valentin Voloshinov, a founding member of the group, who specialized in the social aspects of Marxist theory. In the later part of the 1920s, Voloshinov published Freudianism – A Marxist Critique, possibly co-authored or even written in its entirety by Bakhtin. In 1926, Pumpyansky wrote to the Nevel’ philosopher Matvei Kagan, now living in Moscow: You are much missed here throughout these years, but particularly this year – when we are doggedly studying theology. The circle of our present friends remains the same: MV Yudina, Mikh Mikh Bakhtin, Mikh. Izr Tubyansky and myself – Believe me, we have more than once exclaimed, ‘What a pity that Matvei Isayevich is not here, he would help us unravel the matter!’ [.  .  .] After night-time discussions, we relive our

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reminiscences of those wonderful Nevel’ times – ‘Dear Ladies, Dear Gentlemen. Dear Mikhail Mikhailovich’ – a phrase which Maria Veniaminovna loves to recall.43

Despite Pumpyansky’s warm references to Yudina, they had recently quarrelled bitterly. She expressed her indignation in a letter to her friend Kazanovich: ‘I ask you never to mention his name again in my presence. I despise this subject to the extreme!’44 Pumpyansky had never been popular with her friends; Skrzhinskaya in particular had taken against him already in the early 1920s and nicknamed him ‘Pumpa’. Towards the end of the 1920s, like Voloshinov, Pumpyansky took up with Marxism. This probably ensured his survival and allowed him to teach at the Leningrad Conservatoire in the early 1930s, but it will hardly have endeared him to Yudina or others of the Bakhtin Circle. His brilliant pupil from Vitebsk, Ivan Sollertinsky, likewise learned how to use – or manipulate – Marxist ideology in his writings and discourses, and thereby flourished in his various careers in Leningrad. Pumpyansky was indeed an improbable and colourful figure. Bakhtin’s biographers, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, describe ‘his, cast-off, ill-fitting uniform coat which gave him the appearance of an early-blooming Sergeant Pepper.’45 He was the model for Teptelkin, the main character of the 1927 novel The Satyr’s Song* by Konstantin Vaginov, a member of the Leningrad absurdist group, OBERIU.** Here Vaginov satirizes a group of St Petersburg pre-revolutionary intellectuals unable to adapt to the new Soviet society. Living in their ideological ivory tower, they become ineffectual and isolated. Teptelkin is described as a mysterious creature surrounded by satyrs and nymphs, often observed carrying a kettle of boiling water from the communal dining room. Back in his room, ‘he absorbs himself in the most senseless occupation, needed by nobody – writing a thesis about an unknown poet to be read to a Circle of yawning ladies and exalted youths’.46 The novel also paints gentle, ironic vignettes of Bakhtin, Yudina and other

* Kozlinaya Pesnya, sometimes translated as The Goat’s Song. ** Acronym for Ob’edinenie real’nogo isskustva (The Union or Association for Real Art). Founded in 1927 by the Leningrad writers Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky and Nikolai Zabolotsky.

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group members; yet its underlying message emphasizes that such lively, enquiring minds were doomed within the new Soviet system. The process of stamping out independent thought had started as far back as 1922, when the Bolshevik state turned its attention from civil strife to eliminating opposition. Lenin believed that the free-thinking intelligentsia constituted a threat as potential opponents, and he personally drew up a list of 220 ‘undesirable elements’ for expulsion from the country. Prior to this, the first show trials had been directed at the clergy and the Social Revolutionaries – Lenin’s former allies, whom he now ruthlessly quashed. In the autumn of 1922 some fifty of Russia’s most prominent thinkers were arrested and deported with their families on the so-called ‘Philosophy Steamer’ (actually there were two boatloads of deportees). Prominent philosophers and academics of the calibre of Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, Nikolai Lossky and Lev Karsavin were amongst those banished from Petrograd to enforced exile. In 1917 in a flash of premonition, Franck talked of being destined to live in a vacuum ‘[. . .] there is no longer a Motherland. The West does not need us – nor does Russia, because she no longer exists.’47 The situation of the Orthodox Church was even more dramatic. In April 1922 Patriarch Tikhon was placed under house arrest at Moscow’s Donskoi Monastery. The Party authorities recommended a show trial or expedient execution, but they feared an international outcry. As the first Orthodox bishop to work in North America during the early 1900s, Tikhon actually held honorary American citizenship. Although the authorities released him in June 1923, he lived nominally under house arrest. Tikhon was deprived of Patriarchal powers in favour of a Soviet-controlled organization known as the ‘Living Church’, originally founded by the Renovationist movement. It was now appropriated as a slogan for a bogus institution at the service of the Bolsheviks; its carefully orchestrated infiltration by the Cheka was cynically designed to undermine the Renovationists’ genuine wish for reform. While Tikhon’s arrest was largely symbolic, the notorious Petrogradsky Trial of the summer of 1922 saw an unparalleled travesty of justice. The Metropolitan of Petrograd, Veniamin Kazansky, had been arrested on 1 June and tried – along with eighty-five other defendants – for ostensibly resisting confiscation of church valuables in the state campaign to alleviate famine. In contrast to Patriarch Tikhon, Veniamin had permitted the donation of church artefacts to this cause. Now he stood accused by the Prosecutor, 47

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Pyotr Krasnikov, of conducting ‘counter-revolutionary politics’ under cover of the Church. The ensuing trial by a quirk of fate took place in the Hall of the Petrograd Philharmonic where only ten months earlier Yudina had given the opening concert. Along with many churchgoers, she followed the trial over its six weeks’ duration, and was duly impressed by the Metropolitan’s quiet dignity. On 5 July, together with nine other defendants, he was declared guilty and sentenced to death. Yudina expressed her shock in a letter to her friend, the composer Yuri Shaporin: ‘I started to come to only yesterday, when the sentence was pronounced. Then all the tension of expectation was transformed to despair. And one of the worst things was the complete indifference of society – it’s deeply deplorable.’48 The prosecutor secured commutation of six of the ten death sentences. Metropolitan Veniamin and three others were executed by firing squad. Amongst them was the Dean of Kazan Cathedral, Archpriest Nikolai Chukov, a figure well known to Yudina as a chorister in the cathedral choir. After these events, from the autumn of 1922, she transferred attendance and her choral activity to the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, soon to be associated with the schismatic ‘Josephite’ branch of the Church. In the same letter to Shaporin, Yudina responded to his request to help him receive rations – he had recently returned to Petrograd from Petrozavodsk and had no work or money: I spoke with Professor Adrianov, the husband of the singer Zoya Lody – he thinks it will be difficult to slip you onto the list for rations – there are new commission members who do not know you. I myself know nobody, except the chief of the Petrograd Philharmonic administration, who is a fan of my performances. But how can I, at this particular moment, have any conversation with the authorities? [. . .] In general I love to help others and I am happy to do what I can. But I cannot approach Adrianov again, for my sharp tongue is a match for yours. On leaving the Tribunal I came across his wife, Zoya Petrovna, and incensed by her indifference, I let slip some barbed criticisms, which she did not deserve, even if historically and morally I am right.49

At the end of the letter Yudina asked Shaporin to lend her a book by the jurist Lev Petrozhitsky, The Theory of Law and Morality – she needed to 48

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consult it on procedures of registering protest against the sentences in the Petrogradsky Trial. As an afterthought she mentioned that it would be safest to remove herself from the scene. ‘Father is waiting for me in Nevel’; he is afraid that I might cross somebody because of my work, and find myself liable for trial. Destroy this counter-revolutionary epistle immediately.’50 Yudina was careful not to tell even her closest friends when she left on a mission to visit imprisoned clergy members or join protests against the treatment of Church leaders. In a letter to Yevlaliya Kazanovich dated 12 September 1923 she signed off as ‘Your truly devoted Moscow madwoman’, allowing her friend to understand she had gone to the capital to protest against Patriarch Tikhon’s house arrest. A situation of extreme delicacy was being played out, whereby Tikhon attempted to maintain the allegiance of believers, walking a tightrope of political neutrality. He appealed for loyalty to the Soviet regime, stating that civic duty was to the state, while spiritual duty was to God. Such honourable compromise was necessitated as a means of self-preservation, although in the future it proved unsustainable. Upon Tikhon’s death on 7 April 1925, the process of finding a successor was initiated – not without the interference of the OGPU, as the Cheka had been renamed in 1923. The election was complicated by the fact that of the thirteen appointed ‘locum tenens’, twelve were now in prison. Amongst them was the Moscow Metropolitan, Sergei Starogorodsky, who negotiated agreement with the security organs in order to save the situation – the whole hierarchy of the Patriarchal Church was in peril of extinction. On his release on 27 March 1927, Starogorodsky became effective head of the Russian Orthodox Church, as the single ‘Locum Tenens’. Yet when he declared absolute loyalty to the Soviet state in July, he provoked enormous controversy. A large proportion of bishops and congregational believers refused to accept his declaration, with its words ‘Your joys are our joys, your cares are our cares!’ smacking of sycophancy. The controversy proved irreconcilable, and it resulted in schism. This in turn provided the Bolsheviks with an excuse to initiate a wholesale campaign against religion, while maintaining control of the Patriarchy. Of the various separatist movements that sprung into being, by far the most important was the ‘Josephite movement’ (Iosiflyanskoe dvizhenie), named after the Leningrad Metropolitan Iosif Petrovykh, who had declared himself absolutely against compromise with the authorities. Petrovykh was arrested and not allowed to return to Leningrad, but he 49

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continued to direct the movement through his messengers. It was then that Leningrad’s Church of the Resurrection of Christ – more commonly known as the Church on Spilled Blood – took on the status of a cathedral church of the eparchy, and became the centre for Josephite supporters. For Yudina, the Church on Spilled Blood was a second home; she had been singing in its wonderful choir since 1922. There she got to know the priest, Father Fyodor Andreyev, whose lectures on divinity and Christian Apologetics she had attended at Petrograd’s Theological Institute. Andreyev served briefly at the Kazan Cathedral, until it was taken over by false Renovationists in 1923. He then served as a junior priest at Petrograd’s Sergiev Cathedral until its closure. At that stage Father Fyodor started holding services at the Church on Spilled Blood, and became the effective leader of the Josephite movement after Metropolitan Iosif ’s arrest. From early 1927 he became Yudina’s confessor, and had an enormous influence on her. She deeply admired Andreyev as a wonderful preacher and considered him ‘a man not of this world’ for his rigour in Christian practice.51 He in turn nurtured the greatest respect for Yudina, although, as he told his family, ‘she wasn’t sufficiently baptized’52 – referring to her difficulty in relinquishing her independent views. Naturally she became a confirmed Josephite. On 14 July 1927, Andreyev was arrested, accused of ‘counterrevolutionary agitation’. He was released six weeks later on account of his ill health. His twin daughters, Maria and Anna, were only four at the time, but retained a clear memory of the dramatic events of their early childhood. ‘Father was still in prison when Metropolitan Sergius made his famous declaration, stirring up real antagonism [. . .] The Church was the highest of everything for him, and he played an active part in the movement against the ecclesiastic policies of Metropolitan Sergius.’53 From prison Father Fyodor wrote letters on behalf of the clergy to the Metropolitan in an attempt to dissuade him from his divisive policies. As Anna Andreyeva recalled, the security organs believed that their apartment was the Josephites’ headquarters. She emphasized that ‘the Josephites’ efforts were directed at the preservation of the purity of spiritual life and not at struggling with the Soviet authorities, as was subsequently claimed at the trials of clergy’.54 Just before his arrest, Father Fyodor introduced Yudina to his friend, Father Pavel Florensky, who was to assume an enormous spiritual influence over her. Florensky was that rare breed of polymath whose knowledge 50

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ranged from mathematics, applied and theoretical physics to art history and theology, all of which, however, were subordinated to his religious faith and spiritual interests. Florensky had remained on the periphery of the current troubles of the Church, detached from politics and ecclesiastical intrigue. While he regarded the 1917 Revolutions as the beginning of inevitable persecution, he also believed that freedom of the spirit outside religion was a mirage, unattainable even under democracy. His submission to the Bolsheviks was effectively a pose. ‘For authorities issuing forth from the belly of Leviathan, I have no recognition other than the toes of my boot!’ he had declared in 1917.55 Submission inevitably meant cooperating with the regime, for it was precisely his brilliance as a scientist that made Florensky indispensable to the Soviet state. Ironically, from 1921, he found himself a full-time researcher on Lenin’s pet project – the State Plan for electrification of the whole Soviet Union – working for the Experimental Electro-Technical Institute and the Carbolite Commission in the sphere of mechanics and chemistry, and in the investigation of high-voltage techniques. Father Pavel started his work as an electro-technician still wearing his priest’s cassock, a remarkable sight in such times! In the following years his inventions led to no fewer than ten patents deposited on behalf of the Soviet state. Despite great differences in character, Florensky and Yudina developed a strong friendship, reinforced by Father Pavel’s intimate knowledge of music. Yudina would play for him for hours on end at her apartment on Palace Embankment. She recalled the joy of accompanying him to the antiquities department of the Hermitage, visiting the Botanical Gardens, hearing his thoughts on Dutch painting, on Mozart and Bach, on the poet Karolina Pavlova. ‘He explained his own works, his views on Khlebnikov, on plants in general. His synthetic all-embracing universality, a silence, transparent as dew in a crystal goblet, enveloped his whole personality.’56 It was this luminous ‘silence’ that impressed Yudina most. Sergei Trubachyov, Florensky’s son-in-law, identified the defining differences between these two towering personalities: ‘In Yudina, emotion was dominant, in Florensky – reason. Yudina’s stormy temperament and unruly nature were pacified by Florensky’s presence. That which aroused protest in Yudina, provoked submission in Florensky. In life, Yudina was restless and rebellious – Florensky was stable and pure-minded. The contrast in their personalities was 51

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evident at a much deeper level. In her questing, Yudina moved from the past towards the contemporary; Florensky from the present day back to the past.’ Father Pavel understood that ‘her meteoric character has to be accepted as a fact of life; one must take each appearance of hers as it comes.’57 Florensky was on the closest terms with Father Fyodor Andreyev and supported his position as head of the Josephites. By coincidence, shortly after Andreyev’s release, Florensky was arrested in May 1928. The accusations levied at him concerned alleged association with monarchists and former aristocrats, who like him lived in the city of Sergiev Posad north of Moscow. On 14 July, Father Pavel was sentenced to exile in Nizhny Novgorod. He was released after two months, largely due to the intervention of the philanthropist and human rights activist, Yekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova. Peshkova enjoyed a unique position, winning the trust of both prisoners and the security organs. Aged twenty she had married the writer Maxim Gorky. They separated five years later; nevertheless they maintained friendly relations throughout their lives. A fearless woman, Peshkova dedicated her life to alleviating the lot of political prisoners, under whatever regime they were held. In 1918 she joined the Red Cross, and in 1922 became chairwoman of the organization ‘Help to Political Prisoners’ known by the acronym ‘PomPolit’, the only organization of its kind in the Soviet Union. PomPolit survived until 1937 – probably due to Peshkova’s personal friendship with Lenin. Through its services, sentences could be reduced or commuted, and prisoners were allowed to receive food parcels and letters. Shortly after Florensky was freed, Father Fyodor Andreyev was arrested for a second time. He was held in solitary confinement for two months, where the awful conditions exacerbated his terminal illness – tuberculosis of the throat. He was released in December 1928 on compassionate grounds through the intervention of family, friends (Yudina included) and the tireless Peshkova. Father Fyodor was an immensely popular figure, and his death on 23 May 1929 at the relatively young age of forty-two elicited immense sorrow. At his funeral, crowds turned out in an unprecedented demonstration of support, carrying his coffin from the Church on Spilled Blood along Nevsky Prospekt to the Nikolsky cemetery. When the police tried to block the path of the mourners, the procession simply turned down smaller side streets. Not since Dostoevsky’s funeral had such crowds turned out to pay their respects. 52

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Yudina’s close circle of friends was largely drawn from the Josephites, who like her also frequented the Voskreseniye circle. Amongst them was Boris Filippov, who had come to Petrograd in 1923 as ‘a young man full of confused ideas’ – a convinced Marxist, a follower of Kant, and a dedicated reader of Dostoevsky. When his uncle took him to a service at the Church on Spilled Blood he became aware of Russia’s tragic past, abandoned his position as an atheist, and joined the Brotherhood of Seraphim Sarovsky. It was in this church that Filippov first caught sight of Yudina prostrating herself, as she bowed low to the ground beside the canopy marking the place of Alexander II’s murder. He noted ‘her darned shoes with holes in the soles, an unusual sight in the years of NEP, which had brought relative wellbeing’.58 Within a couple of years he got to know Yudina personally through common acquaintances, including Ivan Mikhailovich Andreyevsky, the founder of the Seraphim Sarovsky religious circle. Andreyevsky’s wife, Yelena Sosnovskaya would become a close friend of Yudina’s. Filippov recalled the heady discussions and arguments revolving around the meaning of faith. ‘No, Boris,’ Andreyevsky muttered in his nervous, rapid patter, energetically gesticulating with his thin hands, ‘Good deeds turn to ashes. They will not save a Christian, for he is rewarded in this world [. . .] The only thing to save us is Faith in God, only and exclusively Faith! You will not be asked at the Last Judgement how you lived and sinned, but how you believed, and how strong was your belief!’ Andreyevsky had just been released from the Solovetsky and Svirsky camps, and from 1927 lived in exile, while secretly visiting ‘Piter’.* ‘No, Ivan Mikhailovich,’ Yudina retorted, ‘it has been said that Faith is measured by deeds.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ interpolated Andreyevsky, ‘but those deeds connected to Faith. Morals and charitable acts have nothing to do with Faith. Only Protestants use a codex of morals, and nothing more.’ Shura Makarova, an old-believer and self-immolator in the past, and now a fervid Josephite, entered the discussion. ‘Ivan, in the official old Orthodoxy the only thing that was demanded was the Act of Faith.’59 For Yudina, living by her faith nevertheless presupposed the obligation to help others. Filippov recalled how:

* St Petersburg or Leningrad.

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. . . she somehow managed to travel to the camps and places of exile of the disgraced Josephite bishops, bringing messages and instructions from them to their priests and congregations. In all this Maria Veniaminovna was troubled, almost embarrassed: ‘Whom do they take me for? Almost all my acquaintances and friends have been arrested at least once, many of them are in the camps [. . .] I haven’t even been called up by the GPU!’ ‘That’s nothing to be sad about, Mashenka,’ we laughed. My mother really loved Yudina and added, ‘Be glad of your good fortune.’60

As Filippov observed, it was hard to believe that a person in those times could be so completely and openly devoted to God’s laws and heedless of the material things of life: When Maria Veniaminovna came out of the Church on Spilled Blood – and as a rule she never missed a service – she was hemmed in by a crowd of beggars. And without even glancing around her, she gave to left and right the whole contents of her pockets. I remember a lanky beggar, a typical vagrant imposter of old times, who come winter or summer went barefoot, dressed in a very dirty gown of lurid brown colour, with a Cossack belt bedecked with metal discs tied round his waist. On his breast he wore a large, carved wooden cross, in his large hands a knarred staff the height of a man. His knotted hair, red edged by grey, fell loose nearly to his waist, his fiery red beard was streaked with grey, and his small cunning animal eyes peered out from under bushy eyebrows. He did not so much ask as demand in his low trombone voice, ‘Oh God’s servant Maria, give to a pilgrim from the Athos and Kiev shrines.’ He was completely unperturbed that the New Athos had been turned into a Soviet Institution. And Maria Veniaminovna, without counting her change, gave him whatever remained in her purse. ‘That’s not much, oh God’s servant,’ the vagrant muttered.61

Even though Yudina earned a relatively good amount of money through concerts and teaching, she rarely had enough for her basic needs. Filippov noted:

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Usually she was as hungry as a wolf. She would come over to us and announce [to Mother] straight away, ‘Lidia Andreyevna, mmm . . . something smells so good in your kitchen. Is that Borsch cooking on your primus?’ Six families lived in our communal flat, and six primus stoves bubbled and spluttered away on the large, unheated range in the former nobleman’s kitchen. Yudina not only had good ears and eyes, but her olfactory sense was very refined, and she could sniff out any smell. ‘Come, Mashenka,’ Mother invited, ‘we’ll have lunch together.’62

As anti-religious propaganda intensified and atheism became the official dogma, the term ‘Catacomb-church’ came into common usage to denote those practising Christians who rejected the ‘official’ Sergeyite Orthodox Church. The Party authorities had most to fear from a united Church with strong popular appeal. In practice all religious movements were abhorrent to the Communist regime, which indiscriminately repressed Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Shamanists. By the end of the 1920s most churches had stopped functioning and the priesthood was decimated. At the same time there were committed believers who decided to secretly take monastic vows, known as strizhka, the shaving of the head. These included Yudina’s historian friends Vsevolod Bakhtin and his wife, and the philosopher Alexei Losev and his wife. Even in recent years rumours abounded that Yudina had taken monastic vows, but there is no evidence to show for it. Certainly she never accepted Sergei Starogorodsky’s compromised Orthodoxy, and after the repression of the Josephite movement she stopped confessing or attending church services for nearly thirty years.

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GRADUATION AND START OF A MUSICAL CAREER

While there are no rules [in composition], there are of course laws. How else can a creation, based on thoughts expressed through material, be conceived without the laws by which it finds life? Vladimir Favorsky1 Bach climbs majestically to the heights like a pious aspirant, whereas Mozart is always at home there. Father Pavel Florensky2 Maria Yudina returned to her official piano studies in the autumn of 1920 with the intention of graduating from the Petrograd Conservatoire the next summer. By now many of her former professors had left Petrograd. Vladimir Drozdov emigrated from Russia, eventually to settle in the USA, while Felix Blumenfeld had taken up a position at the Kiev Conservatoire in 1918. Yudina now enrolled in Leonid Nikolayev’s piano class. As the acknowledged doyen of the Petrograd Conservatoire’s piano teachers, Nikolayev boasted a strong class, including such eminent pianists as Vladimir Sofronitsky, Alexander Kamensky and Natan Perelman. The thirteen-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich had enrolled in his class in 1919, and was yet to decide whether to become a pianist or a composer. Additionally, there were Yudina’s closest friends Hermann Biek and his wife Vera Vinogradova, fellow students of Yudina and Shostakovich in Steinberg’s composition class. Lessons with Nikolayev would be a mere formality in Yudina’s mind, for she was confident of having already learnt all she needed to know about 56

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piano playing. She had used her three years away from the Conservatoire studying new repertoire, consolidating the old, and extending her cultural horizons. Thus, Yudina and Nikolayev entered into discussion as near equals. While he recognized her outstanding gifts, she held him in enormous esteem as a serious composer and performer of immaculate taste. As Yudina’s friend the composer Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky observed,‘Nikolayev educated his students not so much as pianists, but primarily as thinking musicians. He never created a specific school of playing.’3 When, at the age of seventeen, a dissatisfied Shostakovich thought of transferring from the Petrograd to the Moscow Conservatoire, it was his devotion to Nikolayev that held him back. He might have preferred Moscow’s Nikolai Myaskovsky to Petrograd’s Maximilian Steinberg as a composition teacher, but in his opinion Moscow’s most illustrious piano professor, Konstantin Igumnov, ‘had a long way to go to reach Nikolayev’s level’.4 In addition, Dmitri attended Nikolayev’s classes on analysis and form, claiming he was by far the best teacher of this subject in the Conservatoire. He also respected Nikolayev the composer, and performed his ‘Variations for Four-hand Piano’, from which he would quote themes in his own Second Piano Sonata of 1943. Nikolayev encouraged his students to develop their own musical personality, so that no two pianists in his class were alike. He demanded of all his pupils attentive listening and complete control of the musical phrase through use of finely nuanced dynamics and rubato. He taught that piano sound must be ‘constructed’ as a large mass, while preserving transparency and an infinite spectrum of nuanced colour. Later in life Shostakovich recalled his years in Nikolayev’s class. Yudina and Sofronitsky were set as examples for him: ‘Just listen to how Marusya plays this piece’ – he called Yudina ‘Marusya’ and Sofronitsky ‘Vova’ or ‘Vovochka’. Or ‘listen to how she plays four-part fugues, each voice has its own timbre’. And I would listen and indeed each voice has its own timbre, although it seemed theoretically impossible. Yudina played Bach quite wonderfully.5

Nikolayev was often very late for his morning classes; if other students loped off impatiently, Yudina and Shostakovich stubbornly stayed on. ‘We would 57

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go to the library and take out some four-hand music to sight-read while waiting,’ Shostakovich wrote. ‘I remember on one occasion sight-reading Taneyev’s Prelude and Fugue in G sharp minor,* a very complex work which posed no problems for Yudina. I would show her my own works, and she was very encouraging. And she in turn acquainted me with works by Hindemith, Bartók and Krenek. I much enjoyed her performance of Krenek’s F sharp minor concerto, and on a couple of occasions played second piano for her.’6 It was during this last Conservatoire year that Yudina developed an interest in contemporary music. She often performed new pieces by composition students. The boldness and conviction of her interpretations often raised a new work beyond its level of achievement, helping young composers to understand their own potential. The musicologist Yuri Tyulin was entranced by the young Yudina: ‘In all her being, her facial expression, her eyes shining in exaltation, one sensed the imminent arrival of a special and great event; all the more so as she was offering a student’s new sonata for judgement to our most illustrious examiners. The sonata may have been mediocre, but how she played it!’7 Throughout her pianistic career Yudina’s choice of repertoire was defined by her serious tastes; her idols were Bach and Beethoven, while she definitely preferred Brahms and Mussorgsky to Chopin and Rachmaninov. As a student, she was greatly enamoured of Liszt, in particular Années de Pèlerinage en Italie and ‘Après une lecture de Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata’ in the second volume. Shostakovich found that: Yudina’s interpretations of Liszt were quite marvellous – most particularly of those works where the composer was most sparing with the notes, as in ‘Les Cloches de Genève’ – one of his best piano works in my opinion. Yudina also had a deep understanding of Beethoven, and her interpretation of Op. 111 was especially remarkable. She held your attention completely in the second movement, which is so hard to grasp; the music’s inner tension never wavered for a second. It was Yudina who advised me to learn the famous ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata. ‘Why do

* Originally for solo piano, Taneyev later arranged it for two pianos.

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you keep playing the ‘Moonlight’ and the ‘Appassionata’?’ she reproached me. ‘Why don’t you tackle the ‘Hammerklavier’?’ Nikolayev gave his approval, and I played for Yudina a few times before taking it to my lesson with him.8

For her graduation programme, Yudina chose pieces she had already studied with Drozdov and doubtlessly also with Blumenfeld. Nikolayev did not interfere with her interpretation, wishing rather to ‘polish it’ and make her focus on the precise transmission of her musical ideas. During that year she increasingly valued his advice, acknowledging him as a true master. The graduation exams commenced in spring 1921. Yudina passed her first exam in score-reading with the top mark (5+). A few days later, on 11 May, the first part of her solo piano exam took place as a public concert at the beautiful Small Hall of the Conservatoire. She performed a selection from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (she presented both volumes in their entirety to the commission), Beethoven’s Sonata no. 21 (Waldstein), Glazunov’s D minor Prelude and Fugue, and Liszt’s Sonata in B minor. The head of the examination commission, Alexander Glazunov, assessed her performance as ‘brilliant, large-scale and virtuoso. Yudina displays much temperament in her transmission of music, and her interpretation of the lyrical moments showed great depth and variety of colour. Massive, opulent sound, but her fortes are sometimes exaggerated.’9 He too awarded her a 5+, as he did for the second part of the performance exam a month later, where Yudina performed Hermann Biek’s new one-movement piano concerto, entitled Northern Legend. Yudina had a high opinion of Biek as an original composer, and described the concerto as written in the Dorian mode, while showing the influence of Brahms and Mahler – something a little hard to imagine! The composer provided the orchestral accompaniment on second piano. Biek was an excellent pianist in his own right (he won the Rubinstein Prize in 1918), as indeed was his wife, Vera Vinogradova. Yudina enjoyed their warm friendship, but later looked back on Hermann’s life as one of squandered talent. Her verdict was that ‘it was ruined by pianism’10 – a remark to be understood in context. In 1921 Biek and his then pregnant wife left Russia, first for Estonia and later for Berlin, where Biek under the assumed name of Ben Berlin performed as a jazz musician with his own dance orchestra, founded in 1928. Forced to 59

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flee the Nazis in 1933, Biek and his family made a final move to London three years later. In Yudina’s opinion, living in Western ‘bourgeois conditions’ destroyed the best of talents. At the time Glazunov left a sole comment on Biek’s concerto and Yudina’s interpretation: ‘I find it difficult to judge.’ Paradoxically, Glazunov was renowned for his lack of sympathy with young composers’ music. On 3 July 1921 the actual graduation ceremony took place, this time as an open concert at the Grand Hall of the Petrograd Conservatoire. Yudina and Sofronitsky played one after the other, making an indelible impression on the many young listeners. Amongst them was Shostakovich: ‘The hall was full to bursting, one could sense the special atmosphere [. . .] of festivity, elated excitement, yet without any hysteria. The two graduates enjoyed a remarkable triumph. They both performed the Liszt Sonata, incidentally Sofronitsky played first, as Nikolayev insisted on strict alphabetical order.’11 The programme Yudina chose made little concession to public appeal, but exhibited her propensity for polyphony: Buxtehude-Nikolayev – Prelude and Fugue in F sharp minor; Bach-Busoni – Prelude and Fugue in E minor; Glazunov’s Prelude and Fugue in D minor. And the final work, Liszt’s Sonata in B minor with its compact through-composed structure and use of thematic transformation, is equally renowned for the fugato in the final section, a masterly exercise in contrapuntal skill. A music critic, Strelnikov, defined Yudina the interpreter as ‘an unexpected and idiosyncratic anachronism: the severe Eisenach of the seventeenth century, the wise madness of counterpoint, the head splitting Art of Fugue and extreme rationality of Bach’. He concluded that Yudina’s talent was ‘exceptionally organic [. . .] elated and enthusiastic and noble in artistic truthfulness’.12 Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva regarded Yudina’s performances as ‘events born of a deeply personal inner experience’ and pointed to the extraordinary contrast between these two pianists’ readings of Liszt’s Sonata: Maria Veniaminovna created a terrifying and passionate discourse of a person suffering great pain, who insistently stands up for the truth in the face of powerful temptation. According to Yudina, her Mother had been frightened by her interpretation and disliked it. (She doubtless had difficulty accepting her daughter’s adolescent turmoil and religious passions.) I remember when Marusya once played the Sonata at home, at a certain

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point she pronounced the words ‘It’s coming . . . here it is . . . and now it’s all over . . . signed and sealed.’ Yet in the finale the power of evil evaporates as the music becomes infused with light. In contrast, Sofronitsky’s interpretation was marked by its multi-faceted expressivity – he commanded the most magical palette of sounds. There was, however, not even a shadow of struggle in his reading.13

Yudina interpreted Liszt’s Sonata as a rendering of the Faust legend, a battle between divine and diabolical, akin to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Yudina and Sofronitsky’s triumph was made tangible through the joint award of the coveted Rubinstein Prize,* presented to the year’s best graduate from the piano faculty. Apart from the enormous prestige attached to the prize – the winners’ names were engraved on a gold board in the Conservatoire – each recipient was to receive a concert grand piano. Material benefits, however, were not forthcoming during this period of ‘War Communism’. The Rubinstein Prize itself was discontinued the following year, and in the meantime neither Yudina nor Sofronitsky received a piano. Indeed Yudina never owned her own instrument to her dying day. In 1928 she addressed the Leningrad Conservatoire (unsuccessfully), demanding assistance in acquiring the Bechstein piano she was hiring. Yudina’s preference for Bechsteins was hardly a choice – they were the standard instruments in Soviet concert halls until circa 1957. In compensation, it was announced at the graduation ceremony that Yudina was appointed to the staff of the Petrograd Conservatoire, an unprecedented honour and recognition of her artistic maturity. Two years later, on 25 June 1923, she was promoted to the position of full professor with her own class. Despite initial doubts about teaching, Yudina took her duties very seriously, and gave much thought to creating a system, which helped students to maximize their learning skills and achieve independence. Soon she won the respect and approval of her colleagues, as is evident from Conservatoire reports, where her students were singled out for their intellectual maturity, beauty of sound and musical awareness. As a young and eager teacher, Yudina sought to increase contact between students and teachers. She recommended that students attend each other’s classes so as to * The Prize was named after the pianist and founder of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, Anton Rubinstein.

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learn from each other and benefit from other professors’ approaches. She herself craved more discussion about methodology with her colleagues, and in the examination reports of 1925 expressed disappointment that there was little willingness for open exchange: ‘Why is this? We could help each other broaden these difficult issues. Does one single person possess the whole key to this mystery? [. . .] Why remain silent, when we should be striving to create a science of the artistic process? I don’t speak only of technique, for much is being done in this field. But science is the voice of our age!’14 In the spirit of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s proclamation that ‘the Squares are our Palettes’, Yudina urged ‘Throw open the classroom doors!’ Her godmother Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva was much impressed by Yudina’s pedagogical development in the 1920s: ‘Her students literally grew under our eyes. It seemed to me that her demands exceeded their possibilities, for she exacted the same requirements from them as she did from herself.’15 This was precisely what attracted the students, who felt privileged to be judged by such high standards and stretched to their limits. Naturally many students emulated their teacher, imitating her musical interpretations in every particular. As the young Shostakovich admitted, such an approach was doomed to failure. ‘In the years I studied with Nikolayev, Yudina was one of my idols. Sometimes I attempted to copy her in every detail of a performance: if she did a ritenuto somewhere, then I too would do it in that place. Much later I understood that I was treading the wrong path. What one could learn from her related not so much to particular mannerisms or colours, but to the overall shape and grandeur of her concepts. Yet such youthful errors had their use, in that I was imitating a mature artist, as Yudina was in her Conservatoire years.’16 When it came to technique, Yudina adhered to Nikolayev’s maxim that ‘a pianist’s hand must be trained in the same way as singers’ voices’.17 Adhering to universal physiological laws, Yudina would closely observe a student’s movements and hand position, checking that there was no sign of muscular tension. She used the analogy of a hosepipe carrying water through the arm’s whole length, explaining that weight and energy should be free to flow without impediment, so as to connect the fingertips to the shoulder and back. She likened the position of the fingers to the supporting pillars of an arched bridge, rounded, strong, yet sensitive, and able to carry the burden of weight. The tips of the fingers were of utmost importance, for 62

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their touch on the keyboard was the focal point on which the arm’s weight was concentrated.18 Yudina instructed her students to ‘develop a mind’ in the fingers, a metaphor also used by the great Jewish actor and theatre director, Solomon Mikhoels. In 1945 Yudina wrote to him, ‘Your theory is so apparent – and so close to mine – of seeing life in the very fingertips, one can observe this focused, creative heartbeat in the hands of your actors, bearing all life’s diversity, refinement, virtuosity and content.’19 The piano is, in effect, an instrument of illusions, where the creation of singing legato defies its basic percussive character. Sensitivity of touch was of fundamental importance in achieving a free sound, which Yudina believed had to have depth, with no trace of hardness, and be capable of great strength, while remaining precisely focused. Until a student could produce a beautiful and noble sound on the piano, he or she was not allowed to play up to speed. In developing virtuosity, a light but strong finger articulation was needed, allowing clarity of passagework. The natural weight of the arm was essential in producing a freely projecting sound – what she termed ‘maximum cantabile’.20 Yudina selected her students’ study repertoire according to progressive difficulty, using examples of different musical forms, first and foremost polyphony. Some believed that she did not possess the lightness and flexibility suitable for Chopin, although she could avail herself of these qualities when needed. Certainly she recommended that her students study certain passages ‘with maximum lightness, airiness, transparency’. Other favourite maxims were ‘to combine flexibility and breathing with sharpness and tenacity’. More than anything Yudina detested ‘mechanical’ repetition, and insisted that students ‘play with the head and not the hands’. After all, artistic aims dictated performance methods. Only an exacting listening process guaranteed results; what the hands played should coincide with what the head heard. Yudina herself was known to repeat a passage for hours and hours to achieve perfection. All in all, the mobility of the pianist’s hand and arm apparatus had to become second nature, ‘like the function of breathing in musical speech’.21 Yudina liked to paraphrase the artist Vladimir Favorsky in saying there were no rules in music, only laws, by which she actually meant the embodiment of philosophical values. As her one-time student Marina Drozdova 63

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(and niece of Yudina’s teacher Vladimir Drozdov) put it, ‘laws as a philosophical category express the very essence of all phenomena and their inner connections’.22 In this Yudina shared Favorsky’s understanding of creativity: ‘Why is it that an artistic creation, based on ideas translated into matter, should not adhere to the laws by which it was born and by which it lives?’ Yudina responded: ‘Once you have an aim and the conditions to realize it, then laws exist implicitly. But you cannot turn these laws into rules. Laws are alive, whereas rules are static.’23 Naturally students were expected to start with a minute study of the text and the composer’s indications. Yudina exhorted, ‘Look with attention, as if through a magnifying glass, so you don’t miss anything.’ One had to have a clear understanding of the form and structure of a piece of music, its style, harmonic language and rhythmic design. Here lay the key to interpretation, which could be aided by pictorial imagery or intuitions of inherent spiritual expression. In music, the projection of sound is in itself an art. Sustaining sound and shaping the phrasing is achieved through minute control, whereby the decay of each single note is precisely calculated. Yudina also demanded that in passagework the melodic element must be highlighted even in the fastest figurations. Occasionally students found themselves in conflict with Yudina’s views when they felt unable to identify with her interpretation or were pressurized to refute their own ideas. Endowed with the essential quality of empathy, Yudina knew when it was useless to force a pupil to go against their firm convictions. In the early stages of her teaching career, many of Yudina’s students were her contemporaries in age – a few were actually older. Several, like Alla Maslakovets and Anna Artobolevskaya, became lifelong friends. Maslakovets enjoyed a distinguished career as a performer, whereas Artobolevskaya was to become a famous teacher in her own right at Moscow’s Central Music School and Conservatoire.* Initially Yudina recognized the gifts of one particular student, Yuli Kremlyov, and stimulated his interest in contemporary music, setting him works by Hindemith, Poulenc, Berg and Stravinsky. When he stopped performing because of illness, he became a music critic. * Her students included such illustrious pianists as Alexei Nasedkin, Alexei Lubimov and Yevgeni Korolyov.

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Yudina believed that his attitudes to life and people hardened, and worse still, he became overly eager to oblige the Soviet authorities. In 1928 Yudina met the art historian Alexei Bykov, a good amateur pianist who had sought an audition with her. She greeted him with the words: ‘Consider it a happiness not to become a professional pianist!’ Before Bykov had even played a note, Yudina put him through his paces in a small colloquium on philosophy. A panic-stricken Bykov had forgotten all he knew about Kant and Hegel, and couldn’t answer Yudina’s questions on the Critique of Pure Reason. She nevertheless agreed to teach him privately, setting him a programme worthy of any professional – Chopin’s First Ballade, and Bach’s F sharp minor Prelude and Fugue from volume one of The Well-Tempered Clavier. At their first lesson she worked on just one line of the Chopin Ballade! When Bykov asked Yudina to name her fee she exclaimed angrily, ‘It has absolutely no importance. Of course, everybody needs money from time to time, myself included. Bring however much you want, what you can afford.’ Money was never to be mentioned again, she added.24 Soon Bykov took on secretarial duties for Yudina, and often accompanied her to her concerts at the Leningrad Philharmonic by taxi. Silence had to be observed so as not to interfere with her concentration. ‘I have to just see black and white before the concert,’ she would say. When she walked out on stage, she would bow without looking at the audience, and sit down completely focused on the keyboard. On one occasion she played as an encore Liszt’s arrangement of Bach’s A minor Prelude and Fugue. Bykov recalled: . . . the stream of people, musicians, composers and music lovers going to the green room, headed by Nikolayev. He kissed her hand and paid some compliments; Yudina, however, took her head in her hands, and exclaimed, ‘Good God, Leonid Vladimirovich, how ashamed I am – I messed up the encore.’ Nikolayev calmed her down: ‘I expect nobody noticed, other than me! Even if you didn’t play exactly what Bach wrote in that bar, you retained the correct voice-leading!’25

Bykov was astonished to see Yudina receive her fee, a pack of notes, which she threw onto the piano. He tried to hide them in her briefcase, but Yudina took out a bunch and started giving them away, stuffing them into people’s 65

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pockets. Her brother Boris, who had moved to Petrograd and stayed with her, always waited for this moment. Soon her fee had evaporated. ‘Money is to be used, to be spent,’ she would say. And indeed she spent without a thought for tomorrow.26 Although officially Yudina gave lessons at the Conservatoire, she preferred teaching at home on the Palace Embankment with its balcony facing the Peter and Paul Fortress. The piano stood in the middle of the largest room, which was modestly furnished, with two pictures and various scraps of paper pinned to the wall, usually quotes from her favourite poetry. As the artist and close friend of Leningrad absurdist Oberiuti writers, Alisa Poret, recalled, ‘the students’ lessons lasted as long as she thought necessary, sometimes for several hours. This could lead to conflict.’27 Yudina never mentioned religion when teaching her students, given the taboo at all Soviet institutions. However, as her former student Valentina Friedman recalled, she often spoke of the philosophical and spiritual nature of music: ‘Yudina might remark when teaching Beethoven’s 29th sonata, Op. 106 (the ‘Hammerklavier’): “Can you hear how much Goodness there is here?” ’28 In Friedman’s view, everything about Yudina was different, and as a performer she differed sharply not only from other Russian musicians, but from the famous pianists who came on tour to Leningrad in the 1920s. An ardent admirer of Yudina’s artistry, the philologist and her close friend Yevlaliya Kazanovich found that Yudina the performer was: . . . touching in her humility and shyness, in her intensity and seriousness, her winning qualities of youth and femininity. Her smoothly drawn back hair, tied in a knot at the nape of her neck, her black, almost monastically plain dress, her pure, high forehead over dark eyes and modestly blushing cheeks, her awkward, almost masculine manner of bowing to the audience – a deeper bow when acknowledging the orchestra than for the audience, her unsmiling face and always downcast eyes – such an unusual image for an artist signalled a person both simple and modest, and equally, profound and grand.29

Some Leningrad musicians accused Yudina of developing ‘the pose of a Catholic nun’. The critic and composer, Boris Asafiev, in summing up Petrograd’s musical life in a letter dated 15 December 1924 to his Moscow 66

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colleague, Nikolai Myaskovsky, described Yudina as ‘an enigmatic personality – an intelligent Holy Fool. She seems to augur things profound. Yet she is mushy, limp, with no dynamics, and then suddenly she will play something so incredibly – some Glazunov fugue – that you rub your eyes, wondering “What was that?” She plays the Old German masters best of all.’30 Asafiev felt the Conservatoire overestimated her, promoting her as a Master – this was not the kind of encouragement needed. ‘She is simply a young chick of female sex, who needs to experience life. I fear she lacks musical culture, and because of her schoolgirl passions for Medtner, the Middle Ages, or Church music she won’t fly far from the roost.’31 Bogdanov-Berezovsky’s description, on the contrary, depicted the young Yudina as possessing great cultural and spiritual qualities: Seated in complete concentration at the piano she wipes her hands and the piano keys with a handkerchief, and after a short silence collects herself [. . .] as if in preparation for a significant event, something which will exceed all aesthetic criteria, placing ethical pathos to the fore. This is how listeners of the most varied aspirations perceive her rhetorical outpourings, her exhortations through sound. They await a purifying catharsis, and their expectations are fully justified.32

The unusual severity of her dress in everyday life did much to reinforce such impressions. Poret often attended Yudina’s concerts with the writer Daniil Kharms, an ardent music-lover. They were much amused by her concert attire: It was established once and for all that her dress would be long, rigorously black, in the form of a pyramid or a sack, with a lightly scooped top, and free sleeves – known as priest’s sleeves. A belt of sorts was permitted, often just a bit of string, knotted at each end. In private houses she would wear a large cross on a chain. Yudina was utterly uninterested in footwear. At home she loved wearing her comfy, fur slippers, and once appeared in them at a concert, having left her black patent moccasins at home. The conductor Fritz Stiedry’s eyes stood out on stalks! He stared long and hard, first at the pianist’s face and then at her feet, mumbling, ‘Aber Frau Judin!’ She replied drily that it was too late to fetch her concert

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shoes, although I proposed dashing back home to get them. Then I had a brilliant idea – to borrow the shoes from the lady-cashier, since she hardly needed them – after all only her head was visible at the box-office window. ‘Danke schön, Fräulein,’ a delighted Stiedry repeated. I brought the shoes to Yudina. She tottered on stage with very fast, uneven steps, but as soon as her hands struck the keyboard everything else was forgotten. After a while Kharms nudged me under the elbow, and I noticed with alarm some commotion under her long skirt. Evidently, uncomfortable using the pedals with high-heeled shoes, Maria Veniaminovna, with a simplicity characteristic of great people, had unceremoniously kicked them off, leaving them lying on their side. When she finished playing, she bowed and swept offstage, without affording the shoes as much as a glance.33

Others, like Valentina Friedman, believed that Yudina chose this form of dress to cover up her heavy build. In this she created a fashion, for her students also adopted this simple mode of black dress with white collar, which differentiated them from other Conservatoire students. This gave rise to their nickname ‘Yudintsy’ (Yudina followers).34 Yudina particularly enjoyed performing privately in her own home or in trusted friends’ homes. Her listeners could include distinguished visitors such as the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Oberiut* writer Kharms, the poet Samuil Marshak, the artists and illustrators Tatiana Glebova and Poret (both students of Pavel Filonov), and not least the spiritual leader and great scientist, Father Pavel Florensky. Yudina had been introduced to Marshak by Glebova and Poret. He oversaw a group of artists and writers at Detgiz, the State publisher of children’s books, and he employed talented people who otherwise would have been out of work. This company wrote and illustrated humorous verse, and got up to all kind of pranks. Playing for Marshak’s closest circle was one of Yudina’s great pleasures: ‘I did so without giving a thought for the time. Like Ondine, who gradually wept her knight to death with her tears, I lulled my listeners to a dazed condition in an intimate domestic setting, uninhibited by the official atmosphere and time limits of a public concert, where by the * Acronym for Ob’edineniye Real’nogo Iskusstva (The Union of Real Art), literary movement founded in 1927.

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end people’s thoughts have turned to cloakrooms, lights, transport, and fatigue. I would play Bach, Beethoven, innumerable sonatas, variations, preludes and fugues, lots of Romantic music.’35 Glebova recommended herself in particular as a former violinist and fan of the organ, and for some time a lover of Yudina’s great friend, the organist Isai Braudo. Together Poret and Glebova painted a large canvas entitled The House Cut Open (Dom v razreze), using Filonov’s method of analytical realism, building up the whole image through myriad detail, informed by the spirit of its subject. The lower right-hand corner of the canvas depicts Yudina’s home, where she is seen in four humorous cameos, at the piano, at her desk, resting on a sofa, and urgently rushing out in her immutable black dress with white collar, a long cloak billowing out behind her. Poret drew numerous humorous sketches of friends, including one of Yudina dressed as usual in her pyramid-shaped dress with a cross around her neck. As Poret narrates, the pianist brought a young girl from Siberia to her home, asking whether she could be looked after for six days until her family collected her. Yudina promptly disappeared. The girl, an avid reader, was given a camp bed in the dining room. At night she kept the lights on, devouring six or seven books simultaneously. She stayed not for six days but six years with the family! On occasion Yudina would invite Poret and Glebova to listen to her practise at home: When preparing for her concerts, Maria Veniaminovna spared herself not one jot, playing for hours on end in the large unheated room [. . .] We sat on the little sofa with my large dog, Hokusai, and listened, not daring to breathe. She lived then in a former mansion on the embankment, her grand piano stood in the middle of an enormous room, with its curtain-less windows thrown wide open overlooking the Neva. Gradually it started to grow dark, and Yudina asked us to turn on a lamp, then covered it with a piece of dark cloth, so that we could only see her illuminated profile and hands. Suddenly she stopped, and asked for a towel. When I approached the piano, I saw that the keys were spattered with blood – her fingertips were completely cracked from cold and had no time to heal, for she worked six or seven hours a day, and often at night as well.36

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From the start of her career the conductor Emil Cooper actively promoted Yudina as a musician of the future. She performed frequently as his soloist during his three remaining years as head of the Petrograd Philharmonic, in repertoire ranging from Bach to Medtner, from Beethoven to Scriabin. In January 1922 she played Mozart’s Concerto K.365 for Two Pianos with her teacher, Leonid Nikolayev, under Cooper’s direction, and a year later Bach’s Concerto for Two Pianos in C (BWV 1061) with the well-known Petrograd pianist Irina Miklashevskaya. At her last concert with Cooper on 6 April 1924, Yudina took on the solo piano part in Scriabin’s Prometheus, repertoire with which she was not associated. By now the orchestra was known as the Leningrad Philharmonic – two months after Lenin’s death in January, the city had changed its name for the second time in just over a decade. Yudina also made her mark in her solo recitals, extending her repertoire well beyond popular favourites. On 20 May 1922 she had given her first thematic recital entitled ‘Preludes and Fugues’ at Petrograd’s Small Hall of the Philharmonia, performing much of her graduation programme, with additional fugues by Pachelbel, Handel, Taneyev, and César Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue. A few days later, at a second ‘polyphonic’ recital, this time at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia, she performed twelve Preludes and Fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and Busoni’s arrangements of the D minor Chaconne and two Chorale Preludes (‘Ich Ruf zu Dir’ and ‘Herr Jesu Wachet auf ’) before the interval. The second half of the programme featured Max Reger’s Prelude and Fugue in B minor and Schumann’s C major Fantasie. In the summer of 1922 Yudina travelled to Vitebsk, where she caught up with her Nevel’ philosopher friends now living there – Bakhtin, Voloshinov, Kagan, and the younger Ivan Sollertinsky. As she reported to Leonid Nikolayev: ‘In Vitebsk I gave three Klavierabend in a week (all of Liszt’s fugues, Schumann’s Fantasie, the Chaconne and other small pieces by Bach). In all conscience I can say that it wasn’t bad! Many pieces have settled with time, and things that were uncomfortable have become natural and easy. I played with great feeling and temperament, which was transmitted to the audience. At one point it was even like the way I played at my graduation exam, and that made me happy.’ She asked Nikolayev if it was true that Busoni was coming to Leningrad. ‘I can hardly believe such good fortune. It almost frightens me to think how he must play! Perhaps it will make one 70

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regard one’s own efforts as vain and pitiful.’37 Yudina informed her former teacher: I have been thinking of leaving the Conservatoire, not only because teaching seems be a non-productive activity, which emasculates my strength, but because I want to work in the Capella in any capacity, to be involved in its choir in some way. I have immersed myself in Rachmaninov’s Vespers, and want to be initiated in the mysteries of choral music. But today other thoughts come to mind – I have made a definite decision to go abroad for a long period, to devote myself entirely to perfecting my pianism. I therefore bow before you, dear Leonid Vladimirovich, and ask you to take your prodigal daughter into your fold and give me guidance.38

One might speculate that Yudina’s talk of going abroad was more connected to the current wave of expulsions of Church figures, university teachers and philosophers, than to studying under a renowned master in the West. In the event she probably didn’t even apply to go abroad. Instead, Yudina maintained her teaching position in Leningrad until she was forcibly expelled from the Conservatoire in 1930. By the mid-1920s, with Soviet power well established and with the New Economic Policy providing a semblance of normality, Petrograd/Leningrad could again invite conductors and soloists from abroad. Already by 1924 the city could boast an unusually rich and varied musical life. Yudina asserted that her musical education was completed through attending rehearsals and concerts by such great conductors as Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Erich Kleiber. Naturally her students were also encouraged to attend. Neither was there any shortage of native talent. In March 1925 Yudina heard the ‘delightful’ Vladimir Horowitz (well before his emigration to America), and wrote of ‘Vova Sofronitsky’s charming playing’ of Chopin – the ‘diversity, inventiveness and SWEET FRAGRANCE of his performances’.39 Amongst the visiting artists none made a stronger impact than Otto Klemperer, who first visited the USSR in 1924 and regularly conducted the Leningrad Philharmonic until 1936. He was largely responsible for introducing Richard Strauss’s music to Soviet audiences – his Till Eulenspiegel in particular had an electrifying effect. Yudina believed he was no less 71

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impressive in classical repertoire than in Strauss and Mahler. Klemperer became the idol of Leningrad audiences, in her opinion a ‘Rex Tremendae Majestatis’.40 His high sense of moral duty in art and in life was something to which she also aspired. Although they formed a close friendship, they never performed together – she claimed this was for ‘subjective’ reasons, whatever they may have been. But Klemperer did hear her play and was duly impressed. He tried to set up a large concert tour of Germany for Yudina in the early 1930s, but it came to nothing. He was incredulous that ‘such a treasure’ was not displayed abroad. ‘She is pure gold,’ he exclaimed.41 Another performer greatly admired by Yudina was the Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel, with whom she developed a close friendship. In a letter to Nadezhda and Maximilian Steinberg she mentioned her discovery: ‘I was so amazed at the accidental JOY of Schnabel that I forgot to invite you to come this Monday evening.’42 Schnabel played two recitals, on 27 and 30 January 1925, in the small Hall of the Leningrad Conservatoire. The second programme was made up of three major works: Schubert’s B flat major Sonata D.960, Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 110 and Schumann’s Fantasie in C Op. 17. The two pianists had shared the common experience of studying in their youth with Anna Esipova. As a student of Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna from the age of nine, Schnabel received a rigorous technical training from Esipova, Leschetizky’s current wife and assistant. Schnabel by nature was ‘a musician and not a pianist’. To Leschetizky’s credit, rather than pushing him towards virtuoso repertoire, he directed Schnabel towards Schubert’s piano sonatas at a time when they were largely unknown. Not only was Schnabel the first to bring Schubert’s piano music to the attention of the public, he also was the first to perform the whole cycle of Beethoven’s thirtytwo sonatas. Yudina insisted that her students attend Schnabel’s concerts and rehearsals. She arranged free passes, announcing to the lady ticket controllers, ‘These are my young stars, soon they too will be playing concerts here!’ All the staff at the Conservatoire and the Philharmonia, from the cloakroom attendants to the ticket controllers, adored Yudina; exceptionally, they would even stay on to listen to her concerts. She invited Schnabel to her class to advise her students. Artobolevskaya recalled his chief exhortation was to be natural: ‘Place the hands on the keyboard, just as you lay them on your knees.’43 72

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Yudina and Schnabel shared a similar approach to interpretation, where intellectual rigour was combined with emotional impulsiveness. Schnabel, who introduced Russian audiences to Schubert, made an enormous impression with his performance of the great B flat Sonata, and inspired Yudina to learn it. At this time she was often called ‘Schnabel in a skirt,’ while her student Yuli Kremlyov was dubbed with the faintly ridiculous diminutive Schnabelyonok, because of his adoration of the great pianist – he even copied his grimaces. Yudina would say, ‘Yulik, imitate Schnabel in everything EXCEPT his making faces!’44 Like Schnabel, Yudina believed in being faithful to the spirit, and not the letter, of the score. She sometimes went one step further, turning fortissimos into pianissimos, Andantes into Prestos. Her unorthodox interpretations were born of her questing nature, where a personal sense of narrative and spiritual striving dominated her vision. As her cousin Gavriil Yudin recalled, the sheer force of her conviction was equal to a ‘Categorical Imperative!’ In this he compared her to ‘the prophet Isaiah, the most militant of the prophets’. According to Gavriil, this was particularly evident when she played Medtner, at a time ‘when we were used to the playing of his Moscow pupils, which tended towards intimate, chamber dimensions. But Maria Veniaminovna was exalted and strong, one could say even Beethovenian in her approach.’45 An overview of Yudina’s recital repertoire over the next decade points to her focus on polyphonic music on the one hand and new music on the other. Not that she ignored classical or nineteenth-century repertoire; indeed she usually included in her programmes one of the grandest pieces by Beethoven, Schumann or Liszt. In this period Yudina nurtured particular reverence for Taneyev, Russia’s great master of polyphony. His detailed study of the Flemish polyphonists, Jean de Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez and Orlando di Lasso, meant that Taneyev approached Bach as the apex of strict polyphony. Bach’s music in turn cast long shadows on the great classical fugue-writers from Mozart to Brahms. One of Yudina’s great achievements was her interpretation of Taneyev’s Prelude and Fugue in G sharp minor Op. 29. The Prelude was conceived as a homage to Chopin, although harmonically indebted to Scriabin, Taneyev’s one-time student. The Fugue, with its chromatic theme worthy of Bach, is a virtuoso tour de force with its intricately interwoven three-voice counterpoint compressed into less than four minutes. 73

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Side by side with her pianistic career, Yudina developed an interest in vocal music. She loved to accompany singers and was passionate about choral singing. In December 1923, within a three-concert cycle dedicated to Bach at the Petrograd Philharmonia, she performed Bach’s Concerto for Two Pianos in C major BWV 1061, and various solo keyboard works, and initiated a duo with the renowned soprano Kseniya Dorliak, accompanying her in cantata arias. Of noble German ancestry, Dorliak had studied singing at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, and made her debut in various Wagnerian roles at the Paris Grand Opera during the 1911/12 season. Her operatic career was cut short on the death of her husband in 1914. Dorliak stayed at home to look after her children, but started giving recitals, proving herself a chamber musician of extreme refinement. Yudina recognized her as a truly great artist, ‘a woman with an amazingly strong, heroic personality. At the same time her soft, tender visage could melt your heart.’46 Rehearsals took place at Dorliak’s house, where Yudina made friends with the soprano’s children (Nina was to become a wonderful chamber singer and wife of the pianist Sviatoslav Richter) and Caro, an enormous friendly St Bernard dog, who would place his paws on her shoulders and lick her face.47 Dorliak and Yudina built up a large repertoire ranging from Bach and Beethoven to contemporary music. Dorliak had a particular affinity with the Leningrad composer, Vladimir Shcherbachov, whom Yudina admired as ‘a wonderful person, tragic and fraught, with a prickly character and elevated outlook, but completely irresistible’.48 From 1923 Yudina started championing Shcherbachov’s Piano Sonata, and six years later performed his Piano Concerto. Shcherbachov’s identification with Blok’s poetry resulted in various settings, including the Romances dedicated to Dorliak. Yudina recalled that ‘whether you wanted to or not, it was impossible to hold back tears when Dorliak sang the Blok Romances [. . .] Shcherbachov’s music gave wings to the poetic text.’49 Yudina herself had a nice singing voice, and in 1920 she joined the Kazan Cathedral choir, known for its excellence under its director Vasili Fateyev. After its closure she sang with the renowned choir of the Church on Spilled Blood from 1922 to 1925. Through its choirmaster, the much-respected Alexander Rozhdestvensky, Yudina became acquainted with ancient Russian liturgical chant. ‘We sang Kastalsky, and polyphonic arrangements of Znamenny Chant, both in the Kiev and other versions,’ she recalled.50 74

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Through the combined influence of Klimov and Rozhdestvensky, Yudina made a close study of ‘znamenny chant’, learning the ‘Stolp’ form of notation with its hook symbols (kryuki). Yudina believed that knowledge of the sources of ecclesiastical music gave deeper insights into more recent Russian music, not least the piano pieces of Borodin and Mussorgsky that were particularly dear to her. She condemned the Conservatoires for depriving students of the possibility of studying these important roots of national music. It was with Rozhdestvensky’s choir that Yudina studied and sang Bach’s great masterpiece, the St Matthew Passion. She already knew the work from Mikhail Klimov’s annual performances with the Capella, as well as his performances of Bach’s B minor Mass, which had its first complete performance in Russia in 1910. Yudina’s new idol, Klimov, became director of the Leningrad Academic Capella in 1917. It became for her a second musical ‘home’ and an example to be followed. In 1921 she created a ‘singing circle’ at her home, where she directed a small choir, ‘to study the old masters of choral singing, as well as the ancient Russian choral art, and its palaeography under Alexander Preobrazhensky (Klimov’s consultant on ecclesiastical music)’.51 Two years later, at Yudina’s initiative, a ‘Bach Circle’ headed by Boris Asafiev was created in Petrograd with the aim of studying the Cantatas, as the largest body of Bach’s religious work. In the meantime, when her other ‘idol’, Cooper, left the Soviet Union, Yudina lost an important supporter. On 2 and 3 March 1924 she appeared with the Leningrad Philharmonic under the German conductor Oskar Fried as soloist in Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, the first concert of a complete Beethoven cycle. Fried, the first Western conductor to visit Soviet Russia, was – according to legend – met at the station by Lenin himself in 1922. Fried’s chequered career from dog-trainer to the first conductor to record Mahler was colourful by any standards. As a convinced communist and refugee from the Nazis, Fried had fled from Germany to the Soviet Union in 1934. He died in Moscow on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Otto Klemperer dubbed him ‘a brilliant conductor, an extremely gifted composer, and a most original personality’.52 In the Fourth Piano Concerto, Yudina substituted Beethoven’s original cadenza with another, unidentified one. Fried treated her condescendingly at the rehearsal – evidently he strongly disapproved of her choice of cadenza. During the concert performance he made deprecating grimaces, and as she 75

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started the cadenza he threw the score loudly on the floor in a gesture of disgust. Yudina was indignant and refused to play the repeat concert. A group of respected musicians, including Nikolayev and Steinberg, wrote an open letter to ‘Citizen Fried’,53 complaining of his attitude. ‘We see in your behaviour a lack of respect to those working in musical art and consider it our duty to respond to your “open” actions through an open expression of disapproval.’ Whatever their artistic differences, Yudina and Fried certainly did not see eye to eye ideologically. Cooper’s successor as principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra was Nikolai Malko, whom Yudina knew from her years in Nikolai Cherepnin’s conducting classes. After making his debut at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1909, Malko was active conducting in Kharkov and Moscow, and more recently in Vitebsk. He joined the teaching staff of the Petrograd Conservatoire in 1923, two years before becoming director of the Philharmonia. Shostakovich declared at the time to his mentor Boleslav Yavorsky, ‘Malko is the best Russian conductor I know [. . .] However, Emil Cooper was a better conductor than Malko, but he’s buzzed off abroad, and is now conducting in Spain. Malko is terribly dry, but his dryness is preferable to the temperament of a conductor like Saradzhayev.’54 Yudina’s first appearance with Malko and the Leningrad Philharmonic took place on 16 October 1926, when she performed Krenek’s Piano Concerto. Malko noted in his diary with barely hidden sarcasm that Yudina was a difficult soloist: ‘She is the very impersonation of self-sacrifice [. . .] it gets on my nerves. She is ready to get down on her knees and wash the floor, in order to receive another hour of rehearsal tomorrow. I said it’s not necessary. She has an adverse effect on me, as I cannot perceive the boundaries between where she is right and where she doesn’t understand orchestral sound, since she is used to the accompaniment of piano. Mitya Shostakovich told me that sometimes she drowns the orchestra.’55 Shostakovich had accompanied her on second piano in preparation for the orchestral rehearsals. Malko’s strenuous programme also included Stravinsky’s Le Chant du Rossignol, Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and Honegger’s Pastorale d’été, so probably his rehearsal time was limited, to Yudina’s distress. Notwithstanding his cryptic remarks about her, Malko was sufficiently impressed to invite her to perform with him in Vienna, an invitation she refused because of family 76

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difficulties. At the time she had assumed there would be other such opportunities. In the next decade Yudina added to her repertoire with orchestra Bach’s D minor concerto, three of Mozart’s concertos (K.466, K.488 and K.491), Schumann’s concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Concerto no. 1 and Prokofiev’s Concerto no. 2. Additionally, she played single performances of concertos by Scherbachov, John Ireland and Alfredo Casella. In 1938 she performed Rachmaninov’s Concerto no. 2 – with considerable reluctance – and during the war Rimsky-Korsakov’s concerto. Essentially Yudina only played representative masterpieces from the classical repertoire; she disdained Beethoven’s first two concertos and Grieg’s famous warhorse of a concerto. In the early 1960s she learnt and performed two other great works for piano and orchestra – Brahms’ first concerto and Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds. Yudina’s devotion to Stravinsky began in the 1920s, when his music was still actively performed in the Soviet Union, particularly in Leningrad. At GATOB, his ballets Firebird, Petrushka and Pulcinella were staged, and works such as Mavra, Renard, Le Chant du Rossignol, Les Noces and The Rite of Spring were given in concert performances. The pianist Mikhail Druskin did much to propagate Stravinsky’s music in his recitals, giving the Soviet premiere of the Serenade shortly after it was written.56 Klimov was no less active in promoting Stravinsky’s works than Bach’s. Yudina had always been Klimov’s fervent admirer: she particularly appreciated his annual performances of Bach’s St Matthew Passion and the B minor Mass in the years after the Revolution.57 He became a reference point for Yudina in his courageously eclectic repertoire, ranging from ancient Russian ecclesiastical chant to Kastalsky, from Taneyev to contemporary works like Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Honegger’s Antigone. It was Klimov who invited Yudina to participate in performances of Stravinsky’s Les Noces (Svadebka) for choir, soloists, four pianos and percussion, asking her to choose the other three piano soloists. Yudina played the first piano part and invited Isai Renzin, a former Nikolayev student, and her own student Alla Maslakovets as partners. As she recalled, ‘Mitya Shostakovich played the third piano part at our first performance. He was very young, a novice composer, and he played the piano superbly. His star was in the ascendant – like Lord Byron he became famous very early on.’58 When Shostakovich 77

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left for Warsaw to participate in the Chopin Competition in January 1927, he was replaced in Les Noces by another talented composer and Nikolayev’s piano student, Gavriil Popov, known for his veneration of Stravinsky. The first Russian performance of Les Noces under Klimov’s direction was given at the Leningrad Capella on 12 December 1926, only three and a half years after the world premiere in France, while the final Russian performance took place in Moscow in 1935 – one of the last times Stravinsky’s music was heard in Soviet Russia until the late 1950s. The ousting of religious music and music of ‘decadent bourgeois’ character from the repertoire at this time was connected with stricter Party control of the arts and the imposition of Socialist Realism. However, a special case was made for Bach, whose music had been seen as a contemporary phenomenon of relevance in the years following the Revolution, when his religious works were still performed. In the early 1930s, when anti-religious campaigns reached new heights, ideological justification was sought for Bach’s music. Its historical significance was interpreted through the lens of Marxism, which saw Protestantism in northern Germany as a social movement, taking Germany forward from feudalism and breaking the power of the Catholic Church and the aristocracy. Marxist critics could twist the ideological arguments to demonstrate that religion was actually not very important to Bach and his contemporaries Handel and Telemann. Sollertinsky even claimed that Bach’s music belonged to the proletariat. This was in marked contrast with Soviet attitudes to Russian religious music, which was considered dangerously close to the Orthodox liturgy. Whereas Bach and Handel were celebrated through performances of their oratorios and passions in 1935 – the 250th anniversary of their births – as noted by the musicologist Pauline Fairclough during a sort of ‘Bach revival’,59 music such as Taneyev’s At the Reading of the Psalm, Tchaikovsky’s liturgical music and Rachmaninov’s Vespers were effectively subject to a ban. After all, in 1932 the Soviet Union had declared itself an atheist state. Bach’s music, however, faded from the repertoire after the anniversary celebrations, although a smattering of religious cantata arias were performed in 1950, for the bicentenary of the composer’s death. This ban on religious and modern Western music was gradually lifted from the 1960s, meaning that for nearly three decades all the great oratorio and religious cantata literature was woefully missing from Soviet musical life. I can testify that even when I was studying at the Moscow Conservatoire 78

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in the mid-1960s, Bach was studied as a composer of secular vocal works, like the Hunting and Coffee cantatas (BWV 208 and BWV 211), while works like the two Passions and B minor Mass started to be performed only at the end of the decade. Exceptionally, in the 1950s Yudina set her singing students at Moscow’s Gnesins’ Institute Bach’s religious cantatas for performances. She fervently believed that knowledge of Bach’s choral music was fundamental to an understanding of his keyboard music. While Yudina became renowned for her Bach interpretations, she was not alone, and her achievement in learning both volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier from memory was matched by the fine Bach interpreter, pianist and composer, Samuil Feinberg, who first played the whole cycle in 1911. Earlier still, Yelena Bekman-Scherbina, a pupil of Safonov’s, performed both volumes in 1899, and it is reputed that Dmitri Shostakovich learnt both volumes of the Preludes and Fugues as a twelve-year-old boy. Certainly his deep knowledge of Bach shone through his own cycle of Preludes and Fugues Op. 87, composed in 1950–1. When Yudina started playing Bach, Busoni’s interpretations still held sway, with their roots in the Romantic tradition of Liszt. The two editions of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier available at the time in Russia were Czerny’s and Busoni’s; the former (described as ‘elegantly sentimental’ by Mikhail Druskin) was more commonly used, whereas the latter only existed as volume I. Yudina frequently programmed both Liszt’s and Busoni’s transcriptions of Bach’s music – the organ preludes in particular. Her Bach interpretations were indeed influenced by her study of the organ and specifically by her friend Isai Braudo, the country’s foremost organist and Bach scholar. Later Yudina deepened her theoretical knowledge of Bach through her friendship with Boleslav Yavorsky, the great music theorist, composition student of Taneyev and expert on Scriabin. Yavorsky’s theory of Ladovoy Ritm, approximately translated as ‘Modal Rhythm’, won him renown at home in the early 1900s. Its fundamental premise related to ‘gravitational attractions’, whereby modes, scales or other systems function according to specific time and spatial factors subject to harmonic (‘modal’) pull, creating a dichotomy between the ‘unstable’ and the ‘stable’. If in diatonic systems the unstable usually resolves into the stable, the reverse is true in late Romantic music, particularly in Scriabin. Here heightened chromaticism or quasi-dissonance undermines the whole harmonic structure. In the margin 79

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notes to his own music, Yavorsky leaves a key to the ‘gravitational attraction’, showing the fundamental tritones with their various possibilities of harmonic resolution. To use other terminology, the issue of tension and relaxation affects specific aspects of music like tempo and structure, and likewise influences the performer’s use of dynamics, colour and rubato. This relationship between the unstable and stable operates not just in short phrases and periods, but on much larger scales, as Shostakovich, another of Yavorsky’s admirers, proved with great mastery in his symphonic developments. Yavorsky believed that the theory could equally be applied to Bach and Mozart – both used chromaticism for heightened expression or to convey harmonic ambiguity. Yavorsky’s ideas about the semiology of The WellTempered Clavier were close to Yudina’s heart, since they were rooted in the Gospel narrative. His principles of musical rhetoric in Bach also influenced Yudina’s interpretations of the Preludes and Fugues, and also of works like the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. Here recitative was conceived in terms of public oratory, although equally it could be transformed into private meditative prayer. Yudina saw Bach’s music as a spiritual metaphor for striving towards the intangible, a very Russian concept dating to the Silver Age (1890–1917) and Vladimir Solovyov’s mystical philosophy. Her belief that music had symbolic meaning gained substance from the knowledge that Bach himself favoured the idea of symbol-motifs. Yudina shared Klimov’s view that language and style in Bach’s vocal oeuvre were embedded in its poetic and spiritual metaphors. Years later, Yudina recalled her discussions with Yavorsky: He quite rightly demanded from musicians not a reproduction but the spiritualization of musical elements and symbols [. . .] Music, after all, does not copy emotions, does not ‘duplicate’ them, but through its symbolic action, it helps point towards them. There is no sense at all in serving up a replica of second-hand ‘real’ emotions (and in ordinary life they are usually quite superficial). A truly inspired artist does not imitate emotion, but creates its symbol, whose emotional calibre is essentially a means of symbolic expression. Therefore ‘truthfulness, honesty’ and other such qualities are superfluous and do not apply to musical performance.60

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Many of these theories originated with Albert Schweitzer, ‘the truly great aesthete and scholar’ as Yudina called him.61 Schweitzer’s monumental twovolume work on Bach, first published in 1908, only appeared in Russian in Mikhail and Yakov Druskin’s translation in 1964. Yudina probably read Schweitzer’s book in German, and would certainly have discussed his ideas on pictorial and symbolic representation in Bach’s music with Braudo and Yavorsky. Her interpretation of the Chorale Preludes had a similar theological colouring, where the musical imagery reflected the words of the Lutheran hymns on which they were based. Likewise she associated Bach’s music with imagery derived from great paintings and literature. In his Bach seminars Yavorsky extended Schweitzer’s premise that the chorale lies at the heart of all Bach’s instrumental output. In The WellTempered Clavier, Yavorsky systematically developed a table of images and biblical associations to illustrate the cycle’s relationship to the Christian calendar. His propositions are each backed with literally hundreds of detailed musical examples from all of Bach’s musical output, with theoretical and musicological commentary backing his arguments. Thus each Prelude and Fugue in Yavorsky’s overview is associated with a specific Gospel text. Undoubtedly Yudina will have talked about these issues with Yavorsky. In addition, she frequently illustrated his ideas at the piano at his Bach seminars. Yavorsky was still working on The Well-Tempered Clavier during his last Bach seminars in Saratov in the early years of the war, shortly before his death in 1942, evidently preparing his thesis as a book. It is hardly credible that he could have envisaged publication at a time when all forms of religious discourse were forbidden. Such paradoxes were part of life in Stalin’s Russia, when associating Bach’s instrumental music with the Gospel was a daring, if not a seditious act. We now have access to Yavorsky’s ideas on the cycle in the Russian scholar Roman Berchenko’s book reconstituted from his notes.62 Although the two volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier were created at different periods in Bach’s life, Yavorsky saw them both as a continuous narrative of Christ’s life, although without a systemized chronology. The opening C major Prelude and Fugue is associated with the Annunciation.63 The bright key of D major in volume II was seen as a symbol of faith (the Credo), and the E flat major in both volumes is linked to the Trinity, where 81

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the three flats of the key signature already constitute a symbol. The great minor Preludes and Fugues refer to the drama and deep sorrow of the Crucifixion. The B minor Fugue from volume I is a typical example, with its sighing chromatic theme, made up of an open, descending triad followed by coupled semitones, which through their criss-cross melodic pattern represent a symbol of the Cross. To give some less obvious examples, in Yavorsky’s view the Prelude and Fugue in B flat major from volume I relates to the Adoration of the Shepherds, as narrated in St Luke’s Gospel 2:8–20, where the angel appears to them with news of Jesus’ birth.64 Yavorsky related the Prelude to Bach’s chorale prelude with its fugal theme ‘Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland’, BWV 62. He also linked pictorial images to the subject, pointing to nativity paintings by Giotto, Botticelli, Grünewald, Lucas Cranach, Tintoretto and El Greco. In his interpretation the Prelude opens with flights of angels and playful games anticipating the angel’s Annunciation to the Shepherds. In key and mood the Prelude can be associated with the New Year Cantata BWV 143, ‘Lobe den Herren, meine Seele’. The dotted broken chords that interrupt the flow towards the middle, three times in quick succession, represent texts: ‘Gloria’ (bar 11), ‘In Excelsis Deo’ (bar 13), ‘Et in terra pax’ (bar 15) – these latter words are spelled out in the cadential bar 17, which is preceded by a passage of demisemiquavers, ending with a descending series of decussating semitones, an accepted symbol of the Cross and Crucifixion. Yavorsky interpreted the Fugue, with its allemande-like character, as the shepherds’ greetings. The theme opens with a gesture of the hands in the first four notes, followed by bowing in homage to Jesus in the descent of the 5th and 6th notes. The imitation of shepherds’ pipes is taken, in Yavorsky’s opinion, from a series of chorale preludes in the Orgelbüchlein, which include ‘Herr Christ, der ein’ge Gottes Sohn’, BWV 601, and ‘In Dulci Jubilo’, BWV 608. His indication to play the Prelude’s figuration smoothly is executed to perfection in Yudina’s existing recording. Nevertheless Yudina’s own system of imagery in The Well-Tempered Clavier did not always coincide with Yavorsky’s. She structured volume I through more generalized themes, starting with the opening C major Prelude and Fugue as the Annunciation or the creation of Man, while the second (C minor) represents Evil. Naturally the famous fourth pair in C sharp minor (with the famous Kreuz Fugue) represents the Crucifixus. 82

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Passing through a series of evangelical subjects, she defines the concluding B minor Prelude and Fugue as the Pietà. In the early 1960s Olga Nikitina, Florensky’s granddaughter and a student of Anna Artobolevskaya, came to play for Yudina, presenting Bach’s F sharp major Prelude and Fugue from volume I. ‘Ah, the New Year Prelude,’ Yudina exclaimed. This accorded with Yavorsky’s association with the holiday of ‘the Lord’s Circumcision’, the first day of the Christian New Year. The rocking, lullaby motifs derive from Bach’s chorale preludes in the Orgelbüchlein representing the Christmas period.* Additionally the composer refers to the soprano aria,‘Süsser Trost’, from the Christmas Cantata BWV 151, expressing wonder at the miracle of new life. The Fugue’s main theme is borrowed from the Lutheran Creed ‘Wir glauben all an einen Gott’, its second theme from the Cantata aria, ‘Jesu, der du meine Seele’ (BWV 78).65 Olga recalled how Yudina played these particular works herself, ‘rather simply in a dry manner with no pedal’. She then asked Olga what other Preludes and Fugues she played: I answered the G minor from volume II. Yudina’s reaction was instantaneous: ‘That is the flagellation of Christ.’ When I asked why, she explained the association with the St Matthew Passion. She then started playing the Prelude very slowly, emphasizing the pointed dotted rhythm. Initially, her sound seemed so massive that it was difficult to follow the connection between the notes. It produced the impression of an enormous object, which cannot be grasped at once, where one glimpses only the details and not the whole. Gradually as one adapts to this tempo, one can make out a procession moving tortuously, firmly treading a predestined path, its movement impossible to halt or tear oneself away from. Her reading gave the strongest impression of inevitable tragedy.66

Bach was fundamental to Yudina’s teaching at the Petrograd/Leningrad Conservatoire. One of the first things she asked of her students was to study the Preludes and Fugues, thereby introducing them to polyphonic techniques, while stimulating the quest for spiritual imagery. One of her former

* ‘Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich’ BWV 605, ‘Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich’ BWV 609.

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students, the pianist and composer Boris Bitov, recalled, ‘Just as every composition student of Maximilian Steinberg had a lifelong fidelity to the purity of voice leading, so every student of Yudina carried a heartfelt devotion to Bach’s polyphony.’67 Her attitude to Bach was uniquely embedded in the belief that pianists should only study Bach’s keyboard music after having sung his choral works.

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4 1928–1933

LENINGRAD–MOSCOW VIA TBILISI

Have we gone out of our minds? How do we still believe in the nonsense and phantom of revolution? How could we forget ourselves to such an extent? Maria Yudina1 The year 1929 was the one in which – against all the odds – Yudina was not arrested. As many of her closest friends were put on trial, imprisoned and exiled, her own position became ever more precarious. Over the last two years the harsh repressive measures against the excommunicated Josephites were extended to other religious and philosophical groups, notably Alexander Meier’s circle, Voskreseniye, of which Yudina was a member. Now firmly at the helm of the Party, Stalin was transmitting a clear message – independent thought would not be tolerated. The wholesale purge of Voskreseniye took place between December 1928 and June 1929. Some seventy of its 110 members were accused of counterrevolutionary activity, starting with the arrest of the group’s founders, Meier and Kseniya Polovtseva, on 11 December. Amongst others of the Voskreseniye circle to be arrested were Yudina’s university professors, the historians Ivan Grevs and Olga Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaya, and both of Yudina’s godparents, Lev Pumpyansky and Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva. They were all released within a short period, while other members of the group languished in prison for months, at the end of which they were sentenced to an average of three to five years in a concentration camp. They included Yudina’s friends, Mikhail Bakhtin, the historian Nikolai Antsiferov, and the medievalist Vsevolod Bakhtin and his wife, Yevgeniya.

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Yudina’s arrest was expected imminently, but the authorities, fearing an outcry, desisted. Her friend Valentina Yasnopolskaya recalled that while being held prisoner, she was told by her investigator: ‘Yudina wants us to arrest her so that she will be regarded as a martyr in Western Europe. But we won’t fall for that!’2 While Yudina was ready for such martyrdom, the Soviet state was not. Antsiferov recalled meeting Pumpyansky shortly after his release in December 1928: ‘Pumpyansky recoiled from me, as if I was contagious. But a month later he approached me, saying quietly: “You know I was arrested – some time has elapsed, so I can speak now without causing anxiety. The investigator dealing with the Meier case asked me to tell you and Yudina not to be worried by Meier’s arrest, you will not be involved in this case.” Seeing my astonishment, Pumpyansky added, “I kept silent for a month, and neither you nor Yudina have been touched.” ’3 Albert Stromin, the investigator handling the proceedings, warned that the ‘Meier Case’ arrests were the start of a large-scale repression of the intelligentsia. Although there was a chaotic or irrational aspect to the arrests taking place, a lucky few escaped the grip of the secret police altogether, while others were accused under separate indictments, leading to multiple or overlapping arrests. Antsiferov was originally arrested under the ‘Meier Case’ in April 1929, kept in horrendous conditions in Leningrad’s Kresti Prison, before being sentenced to a three-year term in Solovetsky labour camp, a sentence that Antsiferov considered ‘mere child’s play’. He was returned to Leningrad in the summer of 1930 – as was Meier – to face new charges under the Academicians’ Case as an alleged participant in the ‘historians’ plot, supposedly headed by Yevgeni Tarlé and Sergei Platonov. This time Antsiferov was sentenced to the notorious camp at Medvezhaya Gora in Karelia to work in the White Sea/Baltic Canal construction. Tarlé got off more lightly and was exiled. Antsiferov found himself travelling to Medvezhaya Gora together with Meier, who declared, ‘Life is finished, now existence begins.’4 Whereas Pumpyansky was detained for only four days, Mikhail Bakhtin was arrested on 24 December 1928 on charges of belonging to an alleged anti-revolutionary organization, ‘The Brotherhood of Saint Seraphim’, and to a circle founded by Russian expatriates in Paris. More insidiously, Bakhtin was accused of ‘corrupting’ Soviet youth through his lectures on philosophy. 86

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Nevertheless the investigator, Albert Stromin, considered him a minor figure in the case. Bakhtin was held in ‘preliminary detention’ for over six months, during which time his health deteriorated – he already suffered from multiple osteomyelitis, which was further complicated by kidney disease. In mid-July, while in care at the Uritsky Hospital in Leningrad, his book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art was published, receiving a very favourable review from Anatoli Lunacharsky, shortly to be released from his position as Commissar of Enlightenment. His positive opinion did not prevent Bakhtin from being sentenced in late July to five years at the Solovetsky labour camp, an equivalent to the death penalty for a man suffering such fragile health. Together with Sofia, the wife of Matvei Kagan, the Nevel’ philosopher, Yudina embarked on a mission to intercede for Bakhtin. She addressed Yekaterina Peshkova, the former wife of Maxim Gorky, and head of an extraordinary organization called PomPolit, an acronym for ‘Help to Political Prisoners’. A woman of indomitable courage, Peshkova dedicated her life to alleviating the lot of political prisoners, under whatever regime they were held, something she began doing before the First World War, while living abroad. Her involvement with the Red Cross started before her return to the new Soviet Union, where she created PomPolit in 1922. Yudina’s admiration for Peshkova knew no bounds: Whoever did not have the privilege to see her in her Moscow office on Kuznetsky Most, amongst the hundreds and thousands of visitors and petitioners to PomPolit, does not know the true face of Russia during the mid-1920s and early 30s of our era [. . .] How was it that there, just round the corner at the Lubyanka, people were arrested and tortured, and here at Kuznetsky, their sentences were reduced, missing people discovered, permission was gained to send parcels, even to arrange meetings [. . .] Then the ‘counter-weights’ of MOPS* abroad also alleviated the situation. ‘We’ll cover things up over here, while they’ll uncover them over there.’ In those hard years, Yekaterina Pavlovna, with her majestic beauty and elegance arrived at her ‘office’ on an old, sputtering motorcycle. And he,

* MOPS or MORS: acronym for International Organisation for Aid to Fighters for the Revolution. Usually known as International Red Aid.

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Gorky, stood behind her, no longer a husband but a friend, a patron, a pillar of support, a proletarian writer, loved and respected by the Party.5

Peshkova had no hesitation in involving Gorky in her missions. For her part Yudina addressed the writer Alexei Tolstoy. Both he and Gorky sent telegrams to the authorities urging clemency, while Bakhtin asked the Health Commissariat to review his case. Given his poor state of health, his sentence was commuted to five years’ exile in Kustanai (today’s Kostanai) in Kazakhstan. Similarly, when Meier was condemned to death in 1928, his ‘official wife’ Praskoviya Meier and Peshkova intervened successfully, commuting his sentence to ten years’ hard labour in Solovki – a sentence shared by Polovtseva. The repression of the intelligentsia was followed by purges connected to industry and production. The infamous Shakhty Trials of 1928 saw mass arrests of engineers and technicians accused of ‘wrecking and sabotage’. Next came a series of arrests in scientific institutions. The Academy of Sciences was particularly vulnerable to ideological control and suffered interior power struggles; in 1930 over 100 of its members were charged with counter-revolutionary activity. The Historians’ case was an offshoot of the Academicians’ case. In 1930–1 it was the turn of bacteriologists, food specialists, agronomists and geneticists. The damage wrought in the sciences, particularly in the fine modern school of Russian genetics, was irreparable and resulted in the ascendancy of charlatans like Trofim Lysenko, who instigated disastrous policies in Soviet genetics and agriculture. Likewise, from the end of the 1920s, Soviet musical life was torn by conflict and split between two main factions – the proletarian groups and the professional associations. RAPM6 (Russian Association of Proletarian Music), founded in 1923, was the most active and powerful of the proletarian groups. It promoted ideological conformity and was accused of oversimplification in the name of accessibility. The Association of Contemporary Music (ASM), on the other hand, supported contemporary composers and endorsed professional standards. Yudina belonged to the Leningrad branch (LASM), where she championed Leningrad composers, participating in its last concert in November 1927. LASM’s closure the following year paved the way for the aggressive dominance of the proletarian factions. Composers were now forced to compromise and justify their aims in ideological terms. 88

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In 1932 the Party disbanded all independent groups in every branch of the arts. The initial feeling of general relief was soon overtaken by an understanding that the Party would impose stricter controls and more compromise as the new doctrine of Socialist Realism was imposed. While performers were less affected than composers by such ideological strictures, the teaching profession was a prime target, as Yudina was soon to discover to her cost. The sweeping arrests and persecution of friends put an end to Yudina’s desire to perform. Apart from her participation in two concerts devoted to Mikhail Gnesin’s music in spring, her first concert in 1928 only took place in November. The next year started on a similarly bleak note, until in July 1929 Yuri Shaporin delivered the score of his long-awaited second piano sonata, dedicated to Yudina. She wrote to the composer at once saying she was too busy with Conservatoire exams and commissions to learn it, as she was teaching ten hours a day: ‘You cannot work in an Institution and remain indifferent to the efforts of colleagues. You will say, this is a waste of time. No more so than your fulfilling commissions for theatre-music!’7 Like many other composers, Shaporin was currently having to compose music on ideologically topical themes for theatre productions, as a shield from assault by the proletarian organizations. In reply, Shaporin lamented that his serious compositions were not being published. Yudina sympathized; only recently she had viewed vocal romances by Moscow composers selected by the State Publishing Commission; they were ‘terrible rubbish’, and the texts no less disgraceful. Shaporin should rise above it, remain true to his gift, and finish his Symphonic Cantata On the Field of Kulikovo, set to words by Blok, which he had started when Blok was still alive. ‘You have a good intellect and critical perception [. . .] so why are you aping current trends?’ she demanded. ‘Shame on you! Your business is to stand for Mussorgsky and for real Russian music – not for Scriabinism.’8 The Second Piano Sonata in F sharp minor, composed over two years, was one of Shaporin’s major achievements. Its opening Allegro Agitato alla Toccata immediately points to the influence of his great forebear, Mussorgsky. The music’s passionate expressionism and dense textures in the opening are pitted against contrasting themes of lightness and clarity, linked by skilful transition sections. The work contains some explicit references to Pictures from an Exhibition, an acknowledgement of Yudina’s belief in Shaporin as a ‘second Mussorgsky’. 89

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Within five days of finishing with Conservatoire exams, Yudina learnt the sonata. As she wrote to ‘Dear Shaporik’, this helped her recover her spirits. ‘This evening for the first time in six months, I remember that I am a musician and forget the traumas of life. It’s possible to ignore one’s own troubles, but can one ignore other people’s?’9 Yudina played the sonata through to a young artist, who was profoundly touched by the music’s sorrow, ‘as if pierced to the core by some terrible misfortune’. Yudina identified with Shaporin’s musical depiction of ‘oppressive events beyond the soul itself. I cannot [. . .] comprehend the force of impact of such great sorrow. Yet for me could it be otherwise? Is there a smile lurking somewhere – not just for a day or for an hour, but for longer? You definitely have made no mistake in your dedication – this is MY sonata. Now please write a concerto, and soon, as I may die. If I could play it but once! I want it so badly!’10 A Shaporin piano concerto was announced for the Leningrad Philharmonic season of 1930 with Yudina as soloist, but the work was never written. Certainly the dismal situation in the country was exacerbating Yudina’s despondency: ‘Where is life precipitating in this depleted, barbaric, wounded Russia?’ she asked Shaporin. ‘How can we still live and bear it, when all we hold sacred is so violated, so besmirched? Have we gone out of our minds? How do we still believe in the nonsense and phantom of revolution? How could we forget ourselves to such an extent? And did not Blok pray to save his own soul or save Russia? He knew that without prayer there is no life, only the void!’11 Yudina also had personal reasons for despair. She started to realize that a love affair with Mikhail Gnesin, whom she had got to know in 1921, existed more in her mind than in his. She now accepted it as a lost cause and upbraided herself as much as blaming him: If I could only learn to hate you! And to hate my accommodating slavery, to smash the death-ridden chains of ‘duty’, ‘submission’, ‘chastisement’ and ‘detachment’ – all such slavish trash! Life without your love covers me with eternal shame. Why so much lying? What use is culture, when all is hypocrisy? To not have understood the only assignation, to be illuminated by love at our first meeting, when you came to St Petersburg on your way to Palestine in 1921, to not be able to become the mother of

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your child in all the following meetings, to not be free from prejudice when you were well inclined towards me, and not to kill myself when you finally left me [. . .] How could you, in that sacred time of our first coming together, when I had no chastity, no femininity, no maturity, no truth. Love and creation are the only important things in a woman’s life. Anything else is sheer delirium!12

Yudina saw the hypocrisy of her life – going to Church, philosophizing: ‘Oh, be damned, all those books, which only serve to stifle the life force!’ She understood that Gnesin now loved another woman, shortly to become his second wife. She begged a response from him as to whether they should continue to meet. He probably accepted her suggestion ‘just to go on in an ordinary, everyday manner, with no highfaluting words’.13 Certainly Gnesin could hardly afford to lose the greatest champion of his work, and Yudina performed his pieces regularly – his Piano Quintet Requiem, his violin sonata and vocal romances. On 29 November 1928 she had performed Gnesin’s monumental Symphonic Moment with the pianist Mikhail Bichter in the latter’s brilliant transcription for two pianos. In a private Confession (dated 1929) Yudina viewed her failure to love as a lack of faith as a practising Christian. She admonished herself, not for being unable to forget her unrequited love, but more for not wanting to forget ‘the sweetness of sin’. Yet through Yudina’s genuine depression one feels the buoyancy of her character: ‘My heart is like a stone [. . .] I cannot now work or [play] music. But I don’t want to stop loving, that would not be ME – I would become a ruin, a corpse – and surely I should be a living person with fiery passions to be of use to God?’14 A year later Yudina wanted to send Gnesin her photograph, but thought better of it. Her accompanying note read, ‘I wish, my sunshine, to leave you this photograph of myself when I was young and sin-free, together with the words of Lev [Pumpyansky], written at a time he thought he loved me. [. . .] Everything that happened before you is pre-history, the void.’15 Yudina referred to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s recent suicide,* saying she had to be stronger than the poet in order to continue to serve Gnesin.

* On 14 April 1930.

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Yudina had better fortune with friends than with lovers. In the late 1920s she formed two friendships of fundamental importance. ‘I got to know Boleslav Leopoldovich Yavorsky, when I was a young professor at the Leningrad Conservatoire. Halfway through the 1929 academic year, Yavorsky gave a brilliant lecture there at the packed-out Small Hall [. . .] I was particularly impressed by his method of synthesis – his ability to approach music in a manner similar to the visual arts. His impassioned manner of speech, his subtly varied speech inflections, the charm of the timbre of his voice, his sparkling erudition flashing like meteorites lighting up the autumn sky – everything was unique and individual, irresistibly appealing and instructive [. . .] Oh Yavorsky, Yavorsky! You seduced with your intellectual genius, so typically Polish and elegant!’16 In December 1928 the poet Boris Pasternak visited Leningrad, and Yudina sought a meeting with him. She was engrossed with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Only recently, with the soprano Vera Pavlovskaya-Borovik she had performed Hindemith’s grandiose song-cycle, Das Marienleben, based on Rilke’s poem, for which she had commissioned a translation of the text from Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky. Pasternak wrote about this encounter to his sister Josephine in Oxford: A month ago, having first made an appointment by telephone, a young female visitor appeared, in type and build a bit like [our sister] Lidochka [. . .] Between sniffles and intense embarrassment, she informed me of her wish – was it possible to ask for a translation from a private individual of a favourite German poet, was such a commission admissible? It was a question of translating several poems from Rilke’s Stundenbuch. I refused her [. . .] and muttered something about perhaps a publisher being interested. Here she interrupted me and asked wouldn’t it be all the same to me, if she offered me the same conditions as the publisher; and I smiled, not only because such private patronage here is materially completely unthinkable now, but because it was extraordinarily touching when one glanced at her darned and mended shoes and her more than humble jersey.17

Yudina’s name meant nothing to Pasternak, although he was a music-lover and in his youth had aspired to become a concert pianist and composer. 92

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Shortly afterwards, Pasternak attended a concert in Moscow given by the renowned pianist Heinrich Neuhaus: Brushing aside my compliments, Neuhaus advised me most insistently that I should go and hear the concert of a lady pianist from Leningrad, for in comparison to her he was absolutely nothing. She is a remarkable musician – with some strange quirks – mystically inclined, wears shackles under her dress and behaves accordingly, but interestingly enough she is Jewish by origin and so on and so on. Then he named the visitor I described! She played Bach, [Schumann’s] Kreisleriana, several pieces by Hindemith, and more Bach, mostly his choral-preludes for organ. In the interval I transmitted to her the only volume of Rilke I could part with [. . .] his youthful collection of comparatively weak stories, ‘Am Leben hin’, with a suitable inscription: ‘Forgive me, I did not know it was you. Write to me from Leningrad and I will translate everything you want.18

He even thought of sending Yudina his youthful musical manuscripts but ended up giving them to Neuhaus. The concert Pasternak mentioned was in fact Yudina’s recital debut in Moscow, which took place on 5 January 1930 at the Small Hall of the Conservatoire. She had previously performed in Moscow in shared concerts or accompanying singers. Now her reputation as a great pianist had preceded her and the hall was full to bursting. Apart from the pieces Pasternak described, Yudina played works by the Leningrad composers Shcherbachov, Mikhail Yudin (no relation of hers) and Pyotr Ryazanov. The concert was a personal triumph, and she noted with pride that amongst her listeners were the Meyerholds, the Pasternaks and the Neuhauses. Now at the zenith of her fame, Yudina performed some twenty-two concerts between January 1929 and March 1930 in Moscow and Leningrad alone – concertos, solo recitals, chamber concerts and performances with singers. She also made her debut in Kiev in three consecutive recitals, received with great acclaim. Her repertoire laid emphasis on contemporary music, placed next to great classical masterpieces, such as Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ and ‘Hammerklavier’ sonatas, Chopin’s B flat minor Sonata and Schumann’s Kreisleriana. At a time when performances of Western modern composers were barely tolerated by the Proletarian Associations, she introduced to 93

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Russian audiences Hindemith’s Music for Piano Op. 37, and Schoenberg’s aphoristic Sechs Kleine Klavier Stücke Op. 19, and also performed Prokofiev’s fourth and fifth sonatas, and Medtner’s Sonata – Reminiscence. She gave the first performance of Shaporin’s Second Piano Sonata in Leningrad’s Small Philharmonic Hall on 27 January 1929, and was scheduled to premiere Shcherbachov’s concerto with the Leningrad Philharmonic. However, for reasons unknown this never happened. Yudina continued championing Gnesin’s music, working with the singers Sofia Akimova, Irma Yunzem (a contralto well-known for performing popular songs), Anna Kerner (a superficial artist in Yudina’s opinion), and of course Dorliak. Yudina particularly enjoyed working with Akimova, who was married to her hero, the famous heldentenor Ivan Yershov. Like Dorliak, Akimova had started as a Wagnerian soprano at the Mariinsky Theatre; recently, she had sung the role of Marie in the 1927 Leningrad production of Berg’s Wozzeck, attended by the composer. Yudina’s Leningrad recital of Russian romances with Dorliak was greatly acclaimed, and a repeat performance in Moscow on 11 January 1930 went even better. Although the singer’s voice was not always reliable, her artistry remained unimpaired. Yudina reported to Gnesin on the success of his song ‘Gaetan’: ‘It’s unthinkable to play anything else after it. The audience was shouting, banging their chairs from genuine delight, they were touched to the very core.’19 No doubt Yudina’s career would have gone from strength to strength had she not been arbitrarily dismissed from the Leningrad Conservatoire in April 1930 for defending her religious beliefs – many of her friends had been arrested for less. As vigilance in educational institutions increased, the Conservatoire authorities started objecting to Yudina’s concert trips to other towns. Things took a more sinister turn when she received a letter from the acting director* of the Leningrad Conservatoire, Alexei Mashirov, questioning her about her religious activities. Her answer of 11 March showed courage and honesty: she confirmed that she frequented the Theological Pastoral courses – ‘my studies ceased only because the courses were closed’ – neither did she hide her religious convictions, while denying being involved in active propaganda of the Orthodox Church. Challenged about * Officially Glazunov was still director of the Conservatoire, although he left Leningrad in 1928 for Paris and never returned.

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participating in church concerts, she reminded Mashirov that ‘Orthodox Church Music is exclusively vocal, so I could participate in concerts only as a normal chorister.’ Declaring that ‘Ecclesiastical Chant is one of the greatest treasures of Russian musical Culture’, nevertheless she could not propagate it in her role of piano professor. Yudina concluded by saying she saw no reason why religious beliefs could not be combined with academic life. ‘I have no intention of changing my beliefs in any way, while I leave my students complete freedom to hold any philosophical views they choose.’20 Only two days before writing this letter, Yudina had given a triumphant recital at the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The long queue for concert tickets stretched from the Philharmonia to Nevsky Prospekt. According to Yudina’s biographer, Anatoli Kuznetsov, the programme had enormous symbolic significance – Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ sonata and Brahms’ Intermezzo Op. 116 no. 2 (‘song of the abandoned girl’), which referred to her crushed hopes of personal love. Chopin’s Sonata in B flat minor with its famous Funeral March represented the Soviet Union’s tragic destiny, while Prokofiev’s Fourth Sonata, From Old Notebooks,* with its dark first movement, Allegro molto sostenuto, and brooding second movement, Andante assai, reflected dramatic protest and numbed acceptance. Whereas the exuberant finale, Allegro con brio, described by Boris Asafiev as ‘an outburst of pent-up emotion’, symbolized Good triumphing over Evil. Her final offering, Mussorgsky’s grandiose Pictures from an Exhibition, spoke of the sufferings and glories of the Russian people.21 Contemporary Leningraders saw in her performance a spark of hope lighting up a devastated, dark landscape. Others spoke of the euphoric atmosphere in the packed-out hall, redolent with premonitions of danger. The premonitions proved accurate, for on 24 March a vicious article entitled ‘Nun’s habit in the Faculty’ appeared in the Krasnaya Gazeta (Red Newspaper). Couched in the rabid ideological jargon of the day, the article, signed by a certain Bonko, accused Yudina of religious fascism. ‘Only three days ago, when half a million workers hammered home their response to the priestly-fascist gang, one could meet amongst the worker-demonstrators a * Written in 1917, the Fourth Sonata Op. 29, like the Second Piano Concerto, was dedicated to the memory of Prokofiev’s late friend, Maximilian Schmidthof, who had committed suicide in 1913.

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column from the Leningrad Conservatoire. The proletarian student body of this Artistic Institute of Higher Education, together with white-headed professors, famous musicians and artists, were protesting against the attempts by cross and censer to mobilize the forces of capitalism to destroy the workers’ Republic. Against the background of vigorous protests and the mighty hypocrisy of the world, Jesuitism here pales to a petty, regional scale. Measure it as you like and draw your own conclusions! For all social classes should be given some idea of who Maria Yudina is – a professor of the same Institution, and educator of youth.’22 Yudina’s answers to Mashirov’s questionnaire were shamelessly used against her. ‘Well comrades, what can one say? [. . .] Try and probe this hypocritical pacifist wisdom and blatant insolence. Or maybe you should ask the governing body of the Conservatoire how long they have known about their Professor’s activities?’ Bonko advised, ‘What Comrade Yudina needs is a nun’s habit! Dress her then in a nun’s habit, so that she may be liberated the sooner from her teaching duties. She will find her place in the priestlyfascist gang.’ In his view, Soviet higher educational institutions should be actively ‘demonstrating with the working class against bishops, priests, pastors and mullahs’.23 Mashirov was careful in his report to the Commissariat of Enlightenment to justify Yudina’s expulsion from the Conservatoire for administrative reasons. He accused her and her students of social indifference – the latter had failed to appear at Komsomol meetings, and worse, Yudina forgot to request a leave of absence for concerts in Moscow in mid-April. Mashirov did not want to appear to be purging the Conservatoire of religious elements – he was known personally to defend his staff from extreme ideological attacks. On 15 April a Protocol report was drawn up, deeming that Yudina’s behaviour ‘was deeply reprehensible, incompatible with working in Soviet Higher Education and with the construction of Soviet Musical Culture’.24 Yudina was officially expelled from the Leningrad Conservatoire on 24 April, but did not learn of this herself for several days. Aware of having ignored correct procedure, Yudina wrote to apologize and explain ulterior reasons for her absence – in Moscow a close relative was dying of cancer. Mashirov privately believed the concert in Moscow on 16 April was a cover for celebrating Easter! Worse still, after a few days back in Leningrad, Yudina set off to Kiev at the end of April, again without applying for a leave of 96

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absence. (Now Mashirov jokingly suggested she was celebrating May Day!) On 28 April Yudina wrote with an apology – she would be back by early May. Naturally she did not mention that in Kiev she was acting as a messenger for the Josephite clergy. On 7 May, the day after returning to Leningrad, Yudina lodged an appeal against her dismissal. The Conservatoire local committee met on 19 May to discuss her case. In the final account, the verdict of dismissal was confirmed, even while other Conservatoire Professors (her teachers included) tried to support her. Nikolayev abstained – he believed that without Yudina the Conservatoire would be much poorer. Shcherbachov, while agreeing that she had ‘broken the rules of discipline and labour’, deplored the overruling of a wider discussion of her case. Steinberg suggested that the proposal to ‘re-educate Yudina’ should be imposed. Ossovsky and Savshinsky defended Yudina while Comrades Chrenov and Medvedeva believed ‘there was no sense in reconsidering the decision’.25 Boris Filippov recalled that at one of Yudina’s first concerts in Leningrad after the publication of the abusive article, the audience demonstratively showed their sympathy, walking up to the stage between pieces to present her with a single flower or bouquet. Some even handed her wreaths, adorned with ribbons with a clearly visible written message, ‘The darker the night, the brighter the stars!’, or citing the title of the revolutionary song ‘You fell victim to Grievous Bondage’. Others pressed notes or small icons into her hands.26 Dismissed ‘in a blaze of scandal’ as Yudina later described it, she now had many practical problems to face, not least being deprived of her salary. All forthcoming concerts in Leningrad were cancelled in view of her disgrace. Worse still, Yudina’s right to ration cards was withdrawn,* for she no longer belonged to the category either of ‘worker’ or intellectual ‘labourer’. Effectively, the unemployed, priests and vagrants were all treated as pariahs, and had to buy food in open markets where it was sold at exorbitant prices. Yudina found herself living off the charity of others, aided by the occasional food parcel from her family in Nevel’. Her principal supporter, Yelena (Lyosha) Skrzhinskaya, welcomed Yudina to the family home on Krestovsky Island, helped her with practical matters, and allowed her to eat, sleep and practise piano to her heart’s content. * Rationing was introduced to Leningrad in 1929 by the city’s Party Boss and Politburo member, Sergei Kirov. It lasted until his death in 1934.

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Yudina’s disgrace was primarily connected with Leningrad, for she was still welcomed in other cities. On 22 November she played an important recital at the Small Hall of Moscow’s Conservatoire, made up of sonatas by Beethoven and Medtner, a series of Schubert and Schumann songs in Liszt’s transcriptions, and lieder by Brahms and Wolf in her own arrangements, concluding with Chopin’s Second Sonata. She informed Skrzhinskaya, ‘The concert went off fairly well, although my [sore] finger and the piano’s heavy action bothered me. I have lost the habit of playing on a real keyboard. But the Chopin and the songs weren’t bad at all. The concert was sold out and I received many greetings and congratulations!’27 At her next concert at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire on 30 November, Yudina performed Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 and Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. A few days beforehand she had written to ‘Cheslavna’ telling her that she was searching for cadenzas to both works – there were oceans of them! Her next epistle to Skrzhinskaya was almost euphoric in mood: The concert on the 30th was received with ovations, the hall was crammed full. I played not without inspiration and elegance, but in both finales (Mozart and Beethoven) I had two small memory slips; friends said they were hardly noticeable, but it upset me all the same. I didn’t play encores, even if the audience clamoured for them. In the end, I played the Brahms cadenza to Beethoven’s 4th [. . .] Of all the new ones sent to me, Casella’s was the best. Everybody criticized the red dress, and I didn’t wear it, chiefly because it was tight and made playing difficult. I have seen a lot of Pasternak and his lovely wife, Zhenya. Tomorrow I am going to the Meyerholds (they all came on the 30th), and I have also seen Anatoli Dolivo* and the Neuhauses. [In Moscow] people are glad to see me, and show me respect and admiration! It would be good to inform Pumpa [Pumpyansky] and see what he makes of this!28

Soon it was Yudina’s turn to comfort Skrzhinskaya: she had been dismissed from her position at the Academy of the History of Material Culture, accused

* Professor of Vocal Chamber Music at the Moscow Conservatoire.

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of being a ‘church-goer’, and having association with the exiled Karsavin. Skrzhinskaya, a brilliant academic in her own right, remained without work for the next ten years. Yudina encouraged her to get a visa to travel abroad and look up Karsavin; neither of them was surprised when permission was refused. Through doing occasional translations and odd jobs, Skrzhinskaya survived. Ultimately she was saved from arrest, for generally only institutions were subject to full-scale purges – individuals had the chance of remaining unnoticed and untouched. Yudina somehow got through 1930, a year dominated by a feeling of general catastrophe. At the beginning of the year she had written a despairing letter to Gnesin: Can anyone live even 24 hours without struggle and the effort to surmount it? In the profound night, as one sleeps, one hears the silence shattered by moans and sighs, the heavy, threatening scrape of wheels, the ungreased axles, the smashed stones [. . .] discordant shrieks, raucous noise. Then the daily spectacle of the overloaded dray horse stumbling forward – hardly a poetic image, although precise in my vision – the suffering heroism, the tortured anguish, difficulties surmounted [. . .] What will remain of this mad, frenzied sweep of history is uncertain, but to me it is abundantly clear that each individual must forge his inner resistance to destruction [. . .] If one shakes off the shackles of slavery, shows love amidst hatred, recalls God in times of atheism, that implies the triumph of freedom, love and faith, which cut through the barriers encircling this ‘crisis in ideology’ and allows one to expose one’s true self [. . .] This of course is the burden of the select!29

Yudina credited her survival to Alexei Ukhtomsky’s teachings. A practising Old-Believer, Ukhtomsky was trained in theology, but specialized in the field of physiology, where he developed his important ‘Theory of Dominance’. Through researching the dominant and inhibiting factors in animal behaviour, he explained fundamental aspects of man’s psychological processes, where the ‘higher’ dominant becomes the focal point of stimulus in a person’s central nervous system. The theory was equally applicable to philosophy, psychology and literary criticism, and for Yudina it illuminated the path leading to Truth. ‘I had several meetings with [Ukhtomsky] in the 99

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winter of 1930. His own complex personality was highly instructive to others [. . .] He urged one to look inside a person, uncover his personality, his way of thinking, to reveal the organic processes of human everyday behaviour, arising as a necessity in his consciousness.’30 Ukhtomsky’s principles could be applied to life in general, as Yudina discovered. Writing to Shaporin she explained: ‘You need to live simultaneously in different spheres of life, and preserve a dominant idea as the highest gift, and be guardian of this idea until one’s last breath.’31 She reprimanded him for his slack work. ‘I myself am ripped apart by never-ending difficulties; overcoming them saps one’s strength, little is left over for real work. And one day without work kills all joy in life [. . .] If God protects me from this, then surely he would save you, for you have better grounds to believe in the intransient significance of your vocation.’32 Yudina also felt it a moral duty to set Shaporin back on the rails, for his marriage to Lyubov Shaporina was falling apart. In her view, marriage was a sacred bond. Indeed when they divorced, Yudina’s relationship with Shaporin cooled off, while she remained on close terms with his wife. As the year 1931 started, Yudina’s concert diary looked empty, apart from three concerts in Leningrad between February and April – a recital at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia on 17 February, a repeat performance of Stravinsky’s Les Noces with Klimov on 10 March, and a performance of Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 on 8 April with the Leningrad Philharmonic under Alexander Gauk. Without her teaching salary Yudina faced a bleak financial situation. On receiving an invitation to perform that spring in Tiflis (as Tbilisi was known before 1936), she accepted it with alacrity, seeing it as a demonstration of support. ‘I was given a triumphant reception by the Georgians, and from then on I performed regularly in their country.’33 Getting to Tiflis was an adventure in itself. She wrote to Skrzhinskaya: I have a trunk full of stories for you! [. . .] In Moscow I couldn’t get a sleeper on the train [. . .] there was only one international wagon-lit, which the ‘cleaner members’ of the populace were all scrambling to board [. . .] Then I discovered this air connection and mobilized all my financial resources – the ticket costs 197 roubles plus 35 for a suitcase [. . .] The flying machine, ‘Wings of the Soviet’, was wonderful, one of three such airplanes in Russia, with 12 seats, 3 motors – inside everything was

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beautiful and comfortable. It was making its second flight, for they don’t fly in the winter. We left the morning of 3 May and should have arrived the next day at midday. On landing at Kharkov they explained there was a misunderstanding, the plane would land in Tiflis next evening. Then we experienced delays due to trouble with the motors and bad weather in Piatigorsk. We spent the night in Armavir in a squalid hotel, then the next night in Piatigorsk in a delightful rest house for pilots. From there we flew on to Baku, where I dumped myself on some relatives. At last on 6 May we arrived late afternoon.34

By then Yudina had already missed her first concert on 5 May. At the airport those meeting her had spent several expectant days waiting for news. ‘They desperately enquired of the pilots if I hadn’t fallen out of the plane!’35 Yudina had been particularly impressed by that ‘severe, friendly caste’ of pilots – ‘all quite young, with military manners – one could easily fall in love with them! The mechanics accompanying them travel in pairs and are nearly all Germans, Latvians or Estonians. One had eyes of extraordinary beauty, but kept silent. I asked why – the pilots explained he had just come back from “over there”, where so many friends languish.’36 Between 7 May and 1 June Yudina played eight concerts, with three different recital programmes in Tiflis, two of which she repeated in Yerevan, in neighbouring Armenia. On her day off, she was driven to Lake Sevan and was enraptured by its beauty. Both as a person and as an artist, Yudina made an enormous impression on the Georgians. She also initiated an invitation to Vladimir Sofronitsky, suggesting a two-piano programme in Tiflis. They performed two concerts with works by Mozart and Busoni, and finished with Debussy’s En Blanc et Noir. Yudina and Sofronitsky had been considered rivals since their student days, but the pianists themselves discounted any idea of ‘two camps’; certainly Tiflis audiences greeted them both enthusiastically. Yudina nurtured a soft spot for ‘Vovochka’, and particularly admired his Chopin performances for their ‘strength, brilliance, truth, heartfelt, elegiac feelings and great eloquence’.37 Not long before Sofronitsky had brought the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, to visit her in Leningrad. Yudina recalled that on entering her apartment Vovochka broke the door handle of her large unheated room. ‘I had nothing to offer with tea (those 101

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were hard times for me), but all four of us were immeasurably glad to see each other, each recounted his work, hopes and catastrophes. Behind the windows, the ice on the Neva shone, and the enormous winter constellations looked down on us with empathy. We talked happily through the night. They were at the height of their fame, and I was in disgrace. Who could have foreseen how things would change?’38 Sofronitsky’s naïve impulsiveness was evident at the banquet organized in celebration of their Tiflis recital, which took place in a splendid hall, boasting a fountain and a pool teeming with live fish. ‘Evidently, Sofronitsky was bored with all these elderly, highly respected and old-fashioned professors (myself excepted!)’ Yudina recalled. ‘Suddenly he strode into the fountain, still dressed in his concert tails! Everyone was horrified, but he was soon forgiven!’39 The Georgian interlude temporarily restored Yudina’s good spirits. On returning to Leningrad in June, she found the city traumatized by continuing arrests. Her immediate concern was for Father Fyodor Andreyev’s widow, Natalia Nikolayevna Andreyeva, who had been arrested in September 1930 in the fabricated case of ‘The Living Orthodox Church’. Now Yudina had to discover where Andreyeva was being held. The poet Anna Akhmatova hauntingly described her search for her arrested son, Lev Gumilyov, and husband Nikolai Punin. Standing in line with other distraught, benumbed women outside Leningrad’s Kresti Prison, prompted her to write her elegiac poem Requiem. Like Akhmatova, Yudina stood in line at Kresti Prison. She knew that the arrested were moved from prison to prison and from town to town while awaiting sentence. ‘I found Natalia Nikolayevna in [Moscow’s] Butyrky Prison, for she had disappeared from Leningrad. One could hold out hope in those days. One went to various prisons where one handed over parcels; the usual barked-out response was “There’s nobody here of that name!” Then, suddenly the packet is taken – that means you have found your person. When at the Butyrky they accepted my parcel containing a cake, I burst out sobbing from joy; those in the waiting crowd either rejoiced with me, or remained sullen with envy.’40 Now that she knew where Andreyeva was being held, Yudina petitioned Peshkova at PomPolit. She also decided to address the GPU’s Procurator General, Nikolai Krylenko, although getting to see him without an appointment was a desperate enterprise. She recalled her recklessness: 102

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I ran up 5 flights of stairs, with armed guards standing on the landing of each flight, and – God knows how – shot past them all without being stopped! I had with me a letter for him from some personal acquaintance [. . .] The secretary seated at her desk wouldn’t let me in. ‘Here – I have a letter, can’t you see it’s marked “Personal”?’ I cried out brazenly [. . .] Suddenly the door was flung open and out walked ‘himself ’, a shortish man wearing a pea-coat jacket. His penetrating eyes seemed open to communication and comprehension; here was a military man, making it clear that flattery and boot-licking would get you nowhere. ‘You see, dear Comrade, I came from Leningrad specially and have brought this personal letter.’ The letter (from a female friend of his youth) produced the desired effect. He stated in almost friendly fashion, ‘I will sort it out.’41

Krylenko himself later came into conflict with the notorious Procurator Andrei Vyshinsky, was arrested and shot in 1938. Yudina also involved her friends Yuri Shaporin and Alexei Tolstoy in her mission. They both lived outside Leningrad in Detskoye Selo (Children’s Village), a settlement once favoured by the aristocracy for their summer residences, and where tsars built their palaces, giving it the name Tsarskoye Selo. After the Revolution it continued to be popular with the intelligentsia – Yudina dubbed it ‘our Russian Weimar’. In the early 1930s Shaporin and Alexei Tolstoy were collaborating on the opera The Decembrists. They kept open houses, entertaining the cream of Leningrad’s intelligentsia – from the poet Anna Akhmatova, the theatre director Sergei Radlov, to the painter Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Yudina would play for the assembled company. Now Shaporin and Alexei Tolstoy decided to introduce her to Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, better known by his pseudonym Maxim Gorky. Yudina’s visit to Gorky took place on 18 October 1931 at his Moscow town house on Malaya Nikitskaya Street, where amidst tables laden with food and drink the ‘Maitre’ held court amongst Moscow’s literati. A Bechstein grand piano was placed in the corner of the dining room. When Gorky sat down in a nearby armchair, it signalled the start of Yudina’s massive programme, ranging from a selection of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ sonata, to Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition and Schumann’s C major Fantasie. ‘While concentrating on the music,’ Yudina recalled: 103

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I sensed the presence of this extraordinary personality nearby. Images flashed ‘upon my inward eye’, sad or triumphant; the nameless fates of persons well-known or now forgotten, snowy mountain ranges, and the star-studded sky, matching the third movement of Schumann’s Fantasie originally entitled ‘the Wreath of Stars’ [. . .] After my performance there was applause, hand shaking, greetings, words of gratitude, kissing of hands and sincere invitations to come again after Alexei Maximovich’s return from Italy [. . .] Shaporin and Tolstoy persuaded Gorky that I should be ‘exhibited abroad’.42

After her visit, Yudina went to ‘report’ to Pavel Florensky at his home in Sergiyev Pasad outside Moscow. ‘ “So how did it go, did Gorky cry?” asked Father Pavel. “Yes, he cried.” “Then all is well!” ’43 Yudina’s own pleas, combined with Peshkova’s and Gorky’s petitions, achieved their result: Andreyeva’s sentence was reduced from three years in the camps to exile in Alma-Ata. Later Natalia asked Yudina how she did it. ‘Shaporin took me under one arm, Alexei Tolstoy under the other, and off we went to play for Gorky,’44 she joked. Andreyeva’s family was anxious how she would survive the rigours of the train journey and the dire conditions in Alma-Ata as a lone widow, torn away from her small twin daughters. After consulting with Father Pavel, Yudina decided to accompany her. Natalia was released in late October and immediately set out on her journey – Yudina followed two weeks later. Her preparations, as Yelena Skrzhinskaya recalled, consisted of ‘stuffing an empty potato sack with as much as possible. Yudina claimed it was the most comfortable piece of luggage, slung over your back like a rucksack.’45 Just before she left, the epidemiologist, Pyotr Maslakovets, father of her favourite student Alla, was arrested under the ‘Bacteriologists’ Case’. Little did they think they would next meet in Alma-Ata! Yudina left Skrzhinskaya in charge of her Leningrad affairs. Her excitement about the long journey was tangible in her letters to her: ‘I can’t wait to see the Caspian, the Aral Sea, the deserts and mountains.’ Soon she was ‘fed up with the Russian steppe – no trees have been visible for some time now. The Volga was beautiful, but as it was misty I only saw a little of it.’ The Aral Sea, ‘glimpsed shining in the distance’, was a disappointment, less blue than Lake Sevan. The ‘Oriental Charms’ of an obnoxious – if harmless – drunk provided a diversion. She reckoned that his 104

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amorous approaches hid a practical aim – ‘to find somebody to darn his socks’. Yudina used her time to learn Pushkin by heart and observe her travelling companions. ‘The drunken lad has loped off ashamed, the mechanical engineer is reading a novel by Zola [. . .] the couple from Murmansk never stop embracing and kissing, and there is a delightful one-and-a-half-year-old little girl, from a military family who dances to the accordion.’46 By the end of the journey she was in despair at the never-ending steppe and the overwhelming amount of dirt inside the train. Three decades later Yudina recalled her arrival in Alma-Ata: It was not the sumptuous capital it is today, with its cinema studios, universities, and other attributes of civilization. The train stations were swarming with people. Collectivization ‘de-kulakized’ whole families; they were going somewhere, without knowing where, deprived of their roofs, their cattle, their land – of everything. They travelled standing up in cattle wagons or hanging on to the locomotive buffers. People were lying in the streets, dysentery was rife, there was hardly any food to be had, and in the half-empty markets all one could buy – at an exorbitant price – were lepyoshki [round flat bread] the size of a five-rouble coin, and sausage made from camel meat. These proud kings of the desert shriek and spit at the level of a human head, usually hitting their target in the middle of the face!47

During the winter days the weather oscillated between cold and hot. ‘One went out wearing soft felt boots (Valenki), throwing over one’s shoulder a pair of shoes on a string – should one possess them. Those who didn’t either froze or waded through slushy snow in their felt boots.’48 By the time Yudina arrived, Andreyeva had already found work and rough lodgings, sleeping on the floor. While hunting for better accommodation for Natalia, Yudina was bitten by a dog in a courtyard. The bite went deep – the dog was rabid; within a few days her whole leg was inflamed, and sepsis had set in. Hallucinating and feverish, Yudina was taken in by some good people, who kept her until the wound had healed. She hazily recalled doctors’ visits – the local medics and those from the exiled community were divided in their opinions about treatment.‘These medical quarrels continued; then one day I suddenly saw through the window my former student, Alla 105

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Maslakovets, walking through the streets with her father and some others. We both wept.’49 Yudina was mortified that instead of helping her friends, she herself required help. As she informed Skrzhinskaya, her hosts, a mother and daughter, ‘were likeable, but quarrelsome. The old woman tells me that she had 20 children, but only 4 survived.’ The nights were tedious, as lights were turned off at 8 o’clock. ‘During the day many kind people came to visit, I played a lot of chess – mostly with Pyotr Maslakovets, an excellent opponent, and I read some good books. To begin with my leg was terribly painful and I had to lie recumbent, until the risk of blood poisoning passed.’50 Soon another exiled academic arrived from Leningrad – Yudina’s upstairs neighbour Yevgeni Tarlé, a victim of the historians’ purge. Tarlé used to enjoy sitting on Yudina’s balcony overlooking the Neva, ‘seeking inspiration’ for his monumental biography of Napoleon. For his dinner parties, he would often ‘borrow’ her bouquets of flowers that she had received at concerts. Feeling confident now that Natalia had these new exiles as engaging company, Yudina embarked on her lengthy return journey to Leningrad. Departing towards the end of December, the train got snowed in and was diverted via Dushanbe in Tadjikistan. She arrived back in Leningrad on New Year’s Day 1932 and went straight to Skrzhinskaya’s house from the station. Lyosha recalled, ‘When Marusya came to us, I promptly put her in the bathtub, she was swarming with lice – they dropped off her in heaps – and I scrubbed away layers of dirt. We then had to catch the lice as they hopped out of the bathroom, ensuring they didn’t get into our lodgers’ rooms.’51 As incomers escaping collectivization crowded the cities, accommodation shortages grew acute. Living space was taken over from those, who according to the new norms had an excess of it. The Skrzhinskays were affected and so was Yudina. The Hermitage authorities, owners of the apartment on Palace Embankment, partitioned her large room into several small ones, divided by flimsy walls. Yudina was distraught, and complained to Skrzhinskaya, ‘The Philharmonia should defend me, after all a pianist cannot live in 9 square metres – a grand piano alone occupies more space than that. Additionally it’s unlawful to do this without written notice.’52 Things had been easier to cope with in Alma-Ata, she declared! Although officially she continued to reside in the much-diminished room in Palace Embankment, 106

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she now spent most of her time in Skrzhinskaya’s family apartment on Krestovsky Island. As 1932 started, Yudina continued to be persona non grata at the Leningrad Conservatoire; however, as a concert pianist she found herself back in favour. During that year she performed five times at the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonia in large and demanding recital programmes; additionally she played two concerts at the Leningrad Capella. Her repertoire ranged from Bach, popular Beethoven sonatas, Haydn’s F minor Variations and Schumann’s Kreisleriana to Shaporin and Medtner. On 4 March she performed Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 with the Leningrad Philharmonic under the renowned Czech conductor Václav Talich. The composer and pianist Gavriil Popov recalled that Yudina was so dissatisfied with her performance that she burst into tears in front of him: ‘She was so charming – her tears shone like pearls on her wide, stern, illuminated face.’53 However, by the summer of 1932, life in Leningrad became untenable. Yudina returned to Nevel’ in late July, staying with her family more or less continuously until late November. Her father had remarried and although Yudina considered his new wife Tsetsiliya Yakovlevna ‘an angel’, she found it difficult to slot back into family life, and was troubled by minor health problems – fatigue, dizziness and headaches – signs of stress. Her great joy was her six-year-old stepsister Vera, to whom she read Kipling’s Jungle Book, and herself earned the nickname ‘Bagheera’ (after the panther). She was reconciled with her brother Boris, who had now been diagnosed with cyclothymia or bipolar disorder. He had refused to see her over the last four years. Yudina wanted to help him, and started playing violin sonatas with him to encourage his renewed interest in music. Her only performance in Nevel’ was an impromptu concert in the town park. In early September Yudina consulted Shalvo (Shaliko) Aslanishvili – one-time student of Shcherbachov’s in Leningrad, now head of the Music Theory faculty at Tiflis Conservatoire – about a possible move to Georgia. It occurred to her that Boris might find work there in his newly chosen profession of cinema director. Yudina suggested she might work for the radio, and play the occasional concert in Tiflis. ‘The most important thing is to have some official employment,’ she explained.54 Yet privately Yudina was apprehensive about the move and she was worried about her brother’s inability to stick to any one project – there was still a ‘precipice’ between them. As she confessed to her friend from the 107

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Bakhtin Circle, Boris (Boba) Zalesky, she disliked the noise and chaos of the south. She implored him to help her settle in; after all he was planning petro-geological expeditions in nearby Batumi. ‘It would be easier for me to begin this new life, if I had a close friend – a European – at hand. I find Tiflis more Asiatic and alien than Alma-Ata. My amusing stories of last year were mere traveller’s tales, which within a month were hateful to remember.’55 As a preliminary step, Yudina travelled to Tiflis for five concerts in December 1932. She had already sent in her official application to the Conservatoire, seconded by the composers Vladimir Shcherbachov and Khristofor Kushnaryov, who had likewise been dismissed from the Leningrad Conservatoire in 1930, and had recently been welcomed onto the staff of the Tiflis Conservatoire. Only recently Yudina had attended the premiere of Shcherbachov’s Third Symphony in Leningrad, which took place despite RAPM’s virulent attacks on the composer. Just as her application in Tiflis was accepted, she received through Isai Braudo a counterproposal to return to the Leningrad Conservatoire. She rejected it: ‘I consider my years of teaching there was a biographical mistake, which I don’t want to repeat in the foreseeable future.’56 At the end of December she wrote to Skrzhinskaya about her success in Tiflis: I am practising until I drop with fatigue, and my fingers are cracked and bloodied. Two concerts were excellent, two good, and the fifth somewhat mediocre. I played lots of new things: Beethoven’s Waldstein (Sonata no. 21), the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, new Schubert song transcriptions and Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives (Op. 22) and some other small pieces, as well as ‘bunches’ of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues [. . .] I have found wonderful new friends, like Sandro Akhmeteli, head of the National Theatre. People here are thrilled not just by my artistry, but also by my exterior! I find it rather amusing and completely unexpected. The weather is slushy and foggy, almost like Leningrad. The houses are cold; Georgian nonchalance cannot cope with winter, and everybody here has become poor.57

In early January 1933 Yudina returned to Nevel’ via Donbas, where her sister Flora worked as a doctor in the mining communities. Changing trains at Kharkov, Yudina’s handbag containing her train ticket, passport and money 108

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was stolen. Back in Leningrad she applied for new documents. A law had just been introduced in December 1932 requiring all internal passports to be reissued, a system that implied a tighter control in general, particularly of the rural population. Many peasants and collective farm workers were fleeing the land to escape collectivization and the dreadful famine that ensued. A simple but cruel expedient was simply not to issue them with passports. Now residence permits (propiska), mandatory for citizens living in the big cities, were stamped in the passport itself. Without a valid passport and propiska, Yudina ran the real risk of losing her room at the Palace Embankment. At last, her documents were in order, and Yudina and her brother took the train south, travelling through Dagestan and Azerbaijan before arriving in Tiflis on 30 January 1933. A quiet room in town had been found in a house with a beautiful terrace and the ‘promise of a garden in spring’. However, the room was so small it could only house an upright piano. In compensation the city offered a wonderful cultural life. Yudina befriended the keepers of the National Gallery and was thrilled by Sandro Akhmeteli’s wonderful production of Schiller’s Die Räuber. Equally she was struck by the Georgian people’s appearance, their slender bone structure and Roman noses making them appear both beautiful and fragile, ‘seemingly so light that they might be blown away by the wind!’58 Within days of her arrival, Yudina performed her first concert at the Tiflis Opera House with Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto under the direction of the remarkable young Georgian conductor, Yevgeni Mikeladze. He had studied in Leningrad with Malko and Gauk, and was now director of the only symphony orchestra in Tiflis (disparaged by Yudina as ‘complete rubbish’). The Austrian conductor Fritz Stiedri described Mikeladze as the Soviet Union’s most talented conductor. Yudina, too, believed in his worldclass potential.59 However, Mikeladze did not live to realize it. Like Akhmeteli he provoked the hostility of the future chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, and was arrested, tortured and shot in 1937. At her first recital in Tiflis’ Philharmonic Hall, Yudina tried out new repertoire: Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze Op. 6 and Chopin’s Fantasie Op. 49, and the Second, ‘Funeral-March’ Sonata, Op. 35. At the last moment, she agreed to add Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue – ‘that old war-horse’. She described her Conservatoire routine to Skrzhinskaya: ‘I teach twice a 109

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week from early morning until two o’clock. The students, with one exception, play very badly, but try their best [. . .] I haven’t enough money to liquidate my debts, the Conservatoire pays late and deducts money from the salary. Then I had 350 roubles stolen – a theft effected with virtuosity.’ Life in Tiflis was expensive, and there were blackouts most evenings. ‘When we have electricity it’s a treat! Kerosene is terribly difficult to get hold of and costs a fortune. I managed to get 17 pounds of it for a rouble and was happy as a birthday girl. The shops close early and there is no ink or paper to be had.’60 No less than Moscow and Leningrad, Tiflis was undergoing repression. Yudina heard distressing rumours about arrests and purges in Leningrad – names were never mentioned in letters for fear of the vigilant eye of the GPU. Somehow she learnt of the arrest of her spiritual mentor Father Pavel Florensky on the night of 25/26 February 1933 at his town flat in Moscow. Only recently Yudina had met him during a work trip to Leningrad. When she had accompanied him to the station on his return to Moscow: . . . it seemed that his singular spirit had some form of premonition, for he maintained a concentrated, melancholy silence, and I too became quiet. Nobody was ever to accompany Father Pavel again. While we were immersed in our inner thoughts, I saw Alexander Gauk and Ivan Sollertinsky, standing beside the neighbouring carriage, observing the mysterious passenger. Although Florensky was wearing civilian clothes, his whole image was so unusual [. . .] that Gauk and Sollertinsky fell silent. At last, unable to contain himself any longer, Sollertinsky approached Florensky and bowed low to the ground. The extraordinary significance of this modest passenger had pierced through his characteristic irony.61

For the moment she knew nothing of Florensky’s fate, but she feared the worst. She was equally anxious about her former students Alla Maslakovets and Anna Artobolevskaya. Alla remained in Alma-Ata with her exiled father until his death in July 1933. Anna’s husband, the zoologist Georgi Artobolevsky, had been arrested in 1931 as part of the ‘Biologists’ Case’ and sentenced to five years’ hard labour at the White Sea–Baltic canal construction. Artobolevsky was released early, in late 1932, but then the GPU came 110

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for him again. By chance he was warned of their unwelcome visit; instead of going home, he simply ‘disappeared’ to the provinces, avoiding arrest by moving from one town to another. Artobolevsky was to build up a second career as an actor reciting at concerts. In the meantime Anna travelled to secret meetings with him, which as Yudina understood involved dreadful risks. Welcome distraction came with a trip to Armenia between 11 and 25 April, to discuss an invitation to teach at the Yerevan Conservatoire. Returning to Tiflis, Yudina fell as she got out of the train and fractured her left shoulder. ‘The pain was unbearable the first days. Now I lie motionless in bed with a hard starched bandage weighing about 20 pounds, which has put my left hand out of action.’62 While recovering, Yudina met Sergei Prokofiev on his concert tour of the Caucasus. She had first come across the composer in Leningrad on his first return trip to the Soviet Union in early 1927. She almost certainly heard him play his Second Piano Concerto Op. 16 in Leningrad on 19 February. Shostakovich attended the concert and found Prokofiev’s interpretation ‘superb’ and the work ‘exceptionally wonderful!’63 One imagines Yudina falling in love with this concerto on that very occasion. The following evening (20 February) Prokofiev was invited to Vladimir Shcherbachov’s flat to listen to young Leningrad composers. The first to play was Joseph Schillinger, followed by Shostakovich, who made a favourable impression with his first piano sonata. After listening to half a dozen more composers, Prokofiev was dropping with fatigue, but agreed to listen to Yudina, who had just arrived to perform with the composer Kushnaryov a four-hand transcription of his Passacaglia and Fugue for organ. By this stage Prokofiev had developed a terrible migraine, and at the end of Kushnaryov’s piece hastily made his excuses and left.64 Probably Yudina did not get the chance to talk to Prokofiev during this Leningrad visit, but now in Tiflis she established friendly relations with him. She will have undoubtedly attended his performance on 17 May of his own Third Concerto with Mikladze, whom he recognized as ‘a very gifted conductor’. The next day Yudina accompanied the composer to the Tiflis Conservatoire where he performed his music, and listened to works by young Georgian composers – in his opinion, all ‘beginners or retrograde’.65 Prokofiev told her of his intention to play one of his concertos each season 111

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in the Soviet Union. When Yudina expressed her ardent wish to perform his Second Concerto, he conceded her the right to play it during the 1933/34 season, and furthermore promised to provide the orchestral material. By mid-June, Yudina’s shoulder had recovered sufficiently to allow her to return to performing. At her last concert in Tiflis on 22 June she played Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto under Mikeladze’s baton. In mid-July she travelled to Baku, where she played a full recital on 14 July, and two muchapplauded performances of Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth concertos under Leo Ginsburg. While in Baku she fell seriously ill with dysentery and returned to Tiflis much debilitated. Nevertheless, Yudina was able to attend a celebration in honour of the conductor Alexander Gauk’s fortieth birthday. ‘Gauk was welcomed in Tiflis with great pomp. I didn’t talk to him about my affairs, as I didn’t wish to appear to be currying favour; however, we established a good relationship.’66 This indeed proved useful when she moved to Moscow later that summer. At the beginning of August, Yudina left Tiflis for Moscow. During the rail journey her condition worsened, and she was taken off the train haemorrhaging blood. On 8 August she was admitted to Moscow’s Baumanskaya Hospital, where typhoid fever was diagnosed. This then was Yudina’s entry – more whimpering than triumphant – to the city where she was to spend the rest of her life.

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Then only the dead smiled Glad to be at rest. And over its prisons, Leningrad, Like a useless pendant swayed bereft. Anna Akhmatova1 Yudina’s dramatic arrival in Moscow resulted in a prolonged stay at Baumanskaya Hospital. The typhoid fever came on top of a series of debilitating health problems, which had weakened her heart. The doctors barely managed to save her life. Six weeks after admission, Yudina confessed to Lyosha Skrzhinskaya: ‘I crawl along the corridors, clinging to chairs, tables and the walls. My legs give way, and when I lie down again my heart is thumping. My wounded finger is getting better, but that gives new cause for chatter, because I am now the object of the senior surgeon’s attentions: he [. . .] visits me twice a day. The whole hospital smiles ironically when my finger is bandaged by him – a task which could be performed by any nurse, if not the patient herself.’2 She told Skrzhinskaya she hoped to be discharged in a week’s time and sent to a sanatorium to convalesce. Certainly Yudina’s resistance to physical pain was remarkable. As Mikhail Bakhtin later recalled, ‘she would have gone to the stake and not have felt the fire burning around her. Indeed she dreamed – at least metaphorically – of such a destiny, to be burnt alive like the Old Believer and martyr Avvakum.’3 Just now, however, Yudina needed consolation and support rather than martyrdom. Her friends’ hospital visits were tiring; even Skrzhinskaya, who arrived in Moscow to see her radiologist sister Irina, seemed unaware of just how vulnerable Yudina was. 113

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Before being discharged Yudina wrote to Boba Zalesky pleading for him to come from Leningrad. Zalesky was not just a source of moral support, but of generous financial loans – he earned good money as a petro-geologist. Yudina did not disguise her fragile state: ‘Like a drowning man clutching at straws, I need to cling to all those who are well disposed to me, because my strength has completely evaporated. I am aware of my bad habit of being demanding, of my need to be spoilt [. . .] Could you not come to Moscow for a few days, perhaps a field expedition will bring you this way? [. . .] There is nobody I can turn to here, except Mikhail Gnesin, who himself is depressed – his wife is ill, and his son brings him little joy. The other person dear to me is far away and won’t be back for a long time.’4 This was an oblique reference to Florensky, who was beginning a ten-year sentence in Siberia. From 10 October 1933, Yudina spent a fortnight convalescing at the sanatorium of Uzkoye, which occupied the old manor house and estate of the Princes Trubetskoy south-west of Moscow. Yudina will have been aware that the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, whom she so greatly admired, had died there in 1900. Writing to Skrzhinskaya, Yudina described Uzkoye’s charms: ‘It’s very beautiful here, the trees still retain their golden foliage. It’s quiet and one somehow doesn’t notice the other inmates, whose faces lack “brilliance”. [. . .] It delays the return to the burdens of life – being able to forget them does me good.’5 Yudina was able to start practising and to consider how to relaunch her professional career. Moscow provided better opportunities than Leningrad, although her artistic connections were deeply rooted in Leningrad. While still in hospital Yudina wrote to Alexander Ossovsky, the new director of the Leningrad Philharmonia, proposing four programmes for the forthcoming season: the second piano concertos of Prokofiev and Brahms, recitals with both volumes of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and new repertoire. She asked Ossovsky whether the Philharmonia would advance her 600 roubles, and informed him she would be ready to start giving concerts from late October.6 Yudina also contacted Alexander Gauk, who was currently chief conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic (1930–4) and worked regularly with the Radio Orchestra* in Moscow. He was shortly to be appointed * The Large Symphony Orchestra of the All-Union Radio Orchestra was created in 1930.

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director of the newly founded USSR State Orchestra in Moscow. Yudina had played Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 with him in Leningrad in February 1931, and they had met recently in Tiflis. She now relied on his considerable influence to find work for her at the Moscow Radio. The Radio Orchestra was the first newly created orchestra in the USSR, whose primary aim was to make studio recordings. Alexander Orlov was appointed chief conductor, but the conductors Georges Sébastian and Gauk also directed it frequently. Yudina was assumed as a ‘soloist’ of the Radio, a position that facilitated her official transfer to Moscow. By the end of October, Yudina felt strong enough to return to concert life. Her head had been completely shaved because of typhoid fever, so she now wore a wig. Before her first concert, scheduled on 25 October in Kiev with Jascha Horenstein, Yudina contacted Boleslav Yavorsky: Our lively musical meetings started very dramatically in the autumn of 1933, when I was first to perform Prokofiev’s 2nd concerto [. . .] I asked Boleslav Leopoldovich to listen to me, according to the principle ‘Live and Learn’ – He was glad to do so – after all Maria Veniaminovna had come on her own initiative, humbly ‘bowing’ before him. I played as best I could – I was well prepared. But, oh God, how he scolded me, telling me with such irony – not like this, not like that! He himself didn’t illustrate any of this marvellous work, but words streamed forth, corroborating his eloquence. I said farewell to the Maitre in the dark entrance hall, probably in tears. Nevertheless [. . .] my rational side inexplicably protected me from giving in to depression. Boleslav Leopoldovich suggested I come back in a few days. [. . .] I imagine that I played almost as I had the previous visit. But this time I was showered with compliments and given full approval. ‘How is this?’ I asked. ‘I was just testing you,’ he replied with a sly smile. ‘It proves you are a convinced artist.’ I was delighted!7

Dating from 1913, Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto was substantially reworked in 1923, when the composer was reconstructing the score after the original manuscript had been destroyed. As Yudina declared, ‘the concerto’s enormous complexities and monumental concept makes it one of the most difficult works even for the best-equipped pianist’. She was the first pianist to perform the work in Soviet Russia after Prokofiev himself. Even in the West 115

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the only other pianist to play it was the Latvian Sergei Tager, who was to lose his life in the Riga Ghetto in 1941. We have no record of how Yudina got on with Horenstein – she was amused at the use of the diminutive ‘Jascha’ (instead of the full name Jakov), which seemed more appropriate to a wunderkind violinist than a respected conductor and assistant to Wilhelm Furtwängler. As Nazi Germany was closing its doors to Jews, Horenstein was forced to relinquish his position as music director of the Düsseldorf Opera; in compensation, he took advantage of opportunities on offer in the Soviet Union until 1937. Just a few days after her Kiev concert, on 30 October, Yudina made her first appearance with the All-Union Radio Orchestra playing Mozart’s concerto K.488 under Georges Sébastian at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. Her main concern beforehand had been to find a suitable cadenza, as she found Mozart’s ‘very plain’. She had implored Skrzhinskaya to track down in Leningrad’s ‘Publichka’ (National Library) a ‘possible worthy cadenza, by Busoni, D’Albert, Von Bülow, or Schnabel’.8 We do not know which one she chose in the end. She enjoyed working with Sébastian, a French conductor of Hungarian origin, who had started his international career as Bruno Walter’s assistant. Now director of the Städtische Oper in Berlin, Sébastian’s collabo­ ration with the Radio Orchestra between 1931 and 1937 included highly acclaimed performances of Mozart’s operas and Beethoven’s Fidelio. Few written descriptions of Yudina’s playing have survived. All the more precious, then, is this published review by the musicologist Grigori Kogan of her Mozart performance with Sébastian: The force and significance of expression to be found in Yudina’s pianism has hardly any equals on the contemporary concert platform. It is difficult to think of another performer whose art leaves such a powerful, lasting impression on the listener as Yudina does in the second movement of Mozart’s A major concerto. In Yudina’s fingers the mythical calm of Mozart’s music acquires the outlines of tragic sculpture. Particular features of her performance are comparable to trends in the contemporary scenic arts: her ‘multi-faceted’ thought processes, and her extreme tempi (the slow tempi are slower – the fast – faster!), which extend far beyond an arbitrary romantic approach. Yudina’s playing achieves an almost antique perfection in its expressive flexibility.9

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Yudina wrote to Skrzhinskaya saying that the Mozart concerto had gone ‘ideally’. She proceeded to list her performances over the last month: On 6 November I played some trifles on the Radio; on the 14th Shaporin’s sonata and some Myaskovsky pieces at the Moscow TseKUBU;* on the 21st I performed Ravel at the Radio (the Sonatina, the Pavane, and Ziloti’s arrangement of Kaddish – this last very well). On the 22nd [at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire] I played Borodin’s quintet and some of his piano pieces (ideally!). Yesterday, 1 December, my Klavierabend at the Grand Hall took place – it was sold out. Some things went marvellously, others less so, a mixed bag! All of this while living as a vagrant in completely unsettled circumstances. But gradually I am beginning to sort out my life, and now see money coming in and my debts starting to vanish. Soon I will get round to paying back both you and Boba [Zalesky].’10

Yudina set great store by this ‘Klavierabend’ as a manifestation not merely of her musicianship, but of her status as a virtuoso. The programme vaunted three pieces that were new to her – Mozart’s A major sonata K.331, Brahms’ F minor Sonata no. 3, and that warhorse of Romantic virtuosity, Balakirev’s Islamey, an Oriental Fantasy. While studio or concert recordings of most of her repertoire exist, this is not true of Islamey. It appears that she never played it again. In general Yudina chose her music carefully, putting ‘the highest’ masterpieces of the classics as centrepieces in her programmes, while usually including contemporary composers. ‘At last – in Leningrad!’ Yudina now exclaimed to Skrzhinskaya; her next concerts would take her back there in December. She needed to find Brahms’ cadenza to Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto,** which she had programmed at the end of the month. ‘It’s almost better than the concerto itself! Last time I played the cadenza, it created a furore,’ she told Skrzhinskaya. Yudina was tired but optimistic, declaring, ‘Life has great meaning – it is brilliant, sad and full of responsibilities! [. . .] The strong frosts here are torturing me. The legend about * Central Commission for the Betterment of Scientists’ Life. ** Yudina plays Brahms’ cadenza in the 1950 recording of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with Kurt Sanderling and the Leningrad Philharmonic.

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my getting married is complete nonsense of course. Many people appear backstage and then accompany me home, this no doubt is where the rumours originate.’11 There were certainly several contenders for the rumoured ‘fiancé’, from the philosopher Alexei Losev to the architect Vyacheslav Vladimirov, both of whom would become important in her life. Yudina’s long-awaited return to Leningrad ended up being the briefest of visits. After performing in an exclusive concert of Gnesin’s work at the Philharmonia’s Small Hall on 4 December, she took the night train back to Moscow. Here she was to perform Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (presumably with the Brahms cadenza) at the Grand Hall of the Conservatoire on 11 and 13 December, with a repeat performance at the Leningrad Philharmonia on 20 December. The concerts were to be directed by the German conductor, Hermann Scherchen, whom Yudina admired for his dedication to contemporary music and for his anti-Nazi stance – only recently he had escaped to Switzerland from Germany. For the next weeks Yudina shuttled back and forth between Leningrad and Moscow. On New Year’s Day 1934 she participated in a concert in Moscow dedicated to Soviet composers, travelling the next day to Leningrad, for her big ‘comeback’ recital on 3 January at the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonia, originally planned for early December, immediately following her triumphant Moscow concert. She repeated the programme, but as was her wont, she added a new element – performances of two novelties, Karol Szymanowski’s ‘Tantris the Fool’ from Masques Op. 34 no. 2 and ‘Nausikaa’ from Mètopes Op. 29 no. 3. Now at last Yudina had time for her old Leningrad friends. Lyubov Shaporina organized a reunion with Alexei Tolstoy, the Shaporin and the Starchakov families, recorded thus in her diary: ‘On 4 January Yudina visited us – I got our Detskoye Selo residents to come and hear her play. Starchakov’s mot – to me today: “I like Yudina much more now than the times I met her earlier. She seems simple and kind, whereas before she seemed very affected – a crazy salon type, just like Pasternak.” ’ Shaporina was indignant: ‘PASTERNAK – a crazy salon type?’12 She described Yudina as ‘very young in spirit, younger than her 33 years, pure, naïve and inexperienced. But her playing has changed. She evidently has made colossal progress in her technique, and appears elated by her unlimited technical resources. I asked her to play Schubert, but she didn’t want to. Whereas earlier her preference lay with the German Romantics.’13 118

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Back in Moscow by mid-January 1934, Yudina performed a curiosity for Russian audiences – John Ireland’s piano concerto of 1930 with the Radio Orchestra under the baton of Edward Clark. Clark had probably chosen the concerto as a condition following his invitation to conduct in Moscow – it had only recently created a furore at its Albert Hall premiere in London. The proposal came from VOKS,* which was responsible for contacts with foreign musicians. Known for her remarkable speed in learning new music, Yudina was the ideal pianist for the job. Clark was not only a champion of his countrymen’s music, but as Schoenberg’s only English composition student he actively promoted the New Viennese School to British audiences and acted as president of the ISCM** during the 1930s and 1940s. Yudina described the Ireland concerto as ‘charming, jolly, fresh, elegant, lyrical, energetic and faultless as a composition’.14 Later in life she toned down her praise, calling the work ‘pleasant, if old-fashioned’.15 Now she wrote to Ossovsky suggesting a performance of the Ireland concerto in Leningrad – the score and orchestral material could be borrowed from Moscow Radio. Gauk could easily conduct the concerto, given that ‘even Mr Clark managed to do so. Oh Lord, what kind of a conductor is this Clark? One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.’16 Yudina’s next project was a large recital programme devoted to ‘The Dance in Piano Literature from the 16th century to our days’. She wrote to Ossovsky saying, ‘I am immersed in the galliards and pavanes of “Merry Old England” and the incomparably beautiful music of “Padre” Martini, Nicola Porpora and Salamone Rossi. I forget about time and deadlines and that the concert is round the corner. I am playing 16 hours a day – choosing new works and repeating old ones.’17 The concert ‘round the corner’ was too close for comfort, and with the excuse of extreme fatigue Yudina implored Ossovsky to postpone the ‘Dance’ programme from 9 February to a date in April. When the organizers at the Leningrad Philharmonia resisted such a postponement, Yudina protested: ‘When I broke my shoulder and lay at death’s door with typhus, nothing frightened me – except the colossal precariousness of my present situation. When I was discharged from hospital, the doctor gave me a stern “farewell” warning: “If you don’t get * All-Union Society for Links with Abroad ** International Society for Contemporary Music.

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sufficient rest, you will become an invalid for life.” The concerts I played so far this season reassured me that I have regained my working ability [. . .] But I have bitten off more than I can chew! Just now I cannot play at all, and can only return to work after some days of complete rest, otherwise my head simply won’t function.’18 Ossovsky was basically sympathetic to her situation – his colleagues obviously less so. Yudina was adamant: ‘the inner concept of a concert, the idea behind it and its content is more important to me than money. I am ready for anything if you postpone this concert, but on 9 February I am unable to play.’19 She offered to pay the cancellation penalties. By the end of the month Yudina had recovered enough to play Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto at Moscow’s ‘House of Scientists’ conducted by ‘Sébastianchik’.20 In April she performed her esoteric programme of some forty dance pieces, ‘each of them a masterpiece’,21 first at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire on 2 April, and ten days later at the Leningrad Philharmonia. The composers ranged from Gibbons to Couperin, from Rameau to Ravel, while the second half of the concert was devoted predominantly to Russian composers. Yudina’s interest in baroque music led her to devise another programme, entitled ‘Toccatas and Passacaglias’, although she never performed it. Another landmark concert for Yudina was her performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto on 13 May, at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire with the Greek conductor, Dimitri Mitropoulos. She was particularly in awe of him as a former student of Busoni’s and treasured the photo he had inscribed to her with the words: ‘An Freundin Maria Yudina, l’excellente artiste en souvenir de notre collaboration à Moscou.’* She would always speak with pride of her performances with Mitropoulos. The ups and downs of Yudina’s concert career ran parallel to her swings in and out of official favour. From late May 1934, her concerts in the country’s two musical capitals dried up. Her relationship with the Leningrad Philharmonia soured because of her frequent ‘postponements’ – it was assumed she was capricious and difficult. Apart from her genuine health problems, Yudina lacked stability in her life, and lived from pillar to post with friends and relatives. She was deeply affected by the unrelenting * To my friend the excellent artist Maria Yudina, in memory of our collaboration in Moscow.

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repression of friends by the Soviet authorities. Currently she was worrying about Florensky, now awaiting sentence in prison. She was equally concerned about Andreyeva, who after training as a soil specialist in Alma-Ata found work in the construction sector that emerged during Stalin’s intensive drive for industrialization. Regulations forbade ex-prisoners from residing in a large city; after her return from exile, Andreyeva found refuge outside Leningrad so as to be near her twin daughters. Yudina’s accommodation problems were even more acute in Moscow. As an ‘unregistered’ guest, she was a liability to the people she stayed with – for this reason her aunt Polina asked that her post no longer be sent to her address. Yudina arranged for letters to be delivered care of her friend, Anatoli Dolivo at the Conservatoire. For a while she and her brother Boris rented a room vacated by a parachutist’s widow in a large flat with another family of Yudins (no relations!). A philosopher by training, Pavel Fyodorovich Yudin was of humble origins, but rose to high diplomatic office, later becoming Soviet ambassador to China. He and his wife were warm and hospitable, holding parties and singing Russian songs to accordion accompaniment. Pavel would say, ‘Maria Veniaminovna, you would be carried high – if only you didn’t believe in God.’ Yudina retorted, ‘You won’t be able to carry me high, Pavel Fyodorovich, since I won’t refute my faith in God – you’ll be coming to us instead.’22 Yudin’s home was open to officially approved persons from the academic and theatre world. At a New Year party Yudina met the geneticist Trofim Lysenko and his colleague Isaac Prezent. They arrived in the small hours of morning in their cups. ‘Although it was obvious he was completely drunk, Lysenko did not pronounce a word, fearing to lose his dignity, but surveyed the company with his haughty eagle’s stare.’23 Yudina dubbed Lysenko ‘an anti-person’ – indeed his pseudo-scientific approach caused untold harm to Soviet genetics. She didn’t think much better of Prezent. He called her ‘his green-eyed beauty’ and tried to seduce her.24 When the parachutist’s widow returned to Moscow, Yudina and her brother once again had to camp out with relatives. While battling with accommodation problems in Moscow, Yudina tried to retain her Leningrad room, now partitioned up and occupied by various Nevel’ friends. Amongst them was Emelyan (Milya) Zalessky, who had studied physical education at the Lesgaft Institute in Leningrad and was a passionate bibliophile. Zalessky was arrested in December 1933 and his 121

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library risked confiscation by the GPU. Yudina agreed to help save Milya’s books, asking friends to transfer them to the remaining section of her room. In the spring of 1934 Yudina’s brother Boris, helped by her friend Nina Zbruyeva, rented two small intercommunicating rooms in a communal apartment in a wooden house in the courtyard of the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum.* This became Yudina’s home for the next five years. It was widely quipped in Moscow, ‘Maria Veniaminovna lives with her brother, but sleeps in the bath.’ Yulian Selyu, a young veterinary doctor and lifelong friend of Yudina, came to treat her cat for eczema and discovered what this meant. He saw that Yudina indeed slept in the bathroom, with a board and mattress laid on top of the bathtub!25 Although Selyu called the apartment ‘modest and light’, in reality it was dark and damp, some nine metres square and divided by hardboard from the rest of the living space. The damp provoked painful attacks of rheumatic fever. The apartment was eminently unsuitable for piano practice. In any case Yudina didn’t have a piano and was dependent on using the instruments of kind friends. Most of her concert preparation took place at the Yefimov family apartment on Novogireyevsky Street, where she had access to a lovely Bechstein piano belonging to Yefimov’s niece, Yelena Derviz. Ivan Yefimov was a well-known sculptor and graphic artist; his wife, Nina Simonovich-Yefimova, was a talented painter and puppeteer, co-founder of the ‘Petrushka’ marionette theatre in Moscow. Yudina had met them in the late 1920s and developed a close relationship, reinforced by shared friendships with Florensky and Favorsky. The Yefimovs valued Florensky not just as a spiritual mentor, but also for his expert knowledge of art and icon-painting. During the 1920s Yefimov, Favorsky and Florensky all worked at VKhuTEMAS,** the institute associated with modernist constructivism and utopian experiment. Here Yefimov taught sculpture and Florensky art theory, while Favorsky acted as director of the school between 1923 and 1926. During the years he taught there, Florensky was occupied with research into space and perspective, which resulted in his brilliant, provocative essay ‘Reverse Perspective’, published only in 1967. Florensky and Favorsky were involved in heated polemics with the radical constructivist artists, who * Luzhnikovskaya Street 29, flat 108 (later renamed Bakhrushin Street). ** Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops.

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dominated VKhuTEMAS – Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin and Lyubov Popova amongst them. Rodchenko expressed his hostility in gross anti-religious caricatures of Florensky and Favorsky. Bizarrely, Florensky’s synthetic view of art, shared by Favorsky, was not so far from the avantgardists’ – the difference being that Florensky’s was rooted in art’s eternal religious meaning, while theirs was based on an anarchic rejection of artistic conventions. Both Florensky and Favorsky were passionate music-lovers – Florensky was a good amateur pianist (and occasional four-hand partner to Yudina); Favorsky played the clarinet and piano. Yudina recalled how ‘Favorsky “saw” music in images; he “heard” and could coherently explain the music of Rublyev’s Trinity.’ Altogether, Favorsky’s striving towards beauty had aesthetic integrity: ‘He offered the viewer an amalgamated – rather than merely a visual – impression of the objects he depicted, he captured their essence. In consciously rejecting illusory “truthful” reproduction, Favorsky discovered inner laws in his paintings connected to many differing phenomena.’26 For Yudina, Favorsky equalled Florensky and Yavorsky in his significance as a teacher. She found she could apply his principles to music interpretation. Happily, Yudina’s new rooms were a mere nine-minute walk from Boleslav Yavorsky’s apartment in Strochenovsky Pereulok, where he lived with the composer and choirmaster Sergei Protopopov, his partner since 1918. She was sure of a warm welcome from them both: ‘Boleslav Leopoldovich (BL) and Sergei Vladimirovich were extremely modest in their needs – riches and luxury simply did not suit them. Sometimes BL and I competed as to whose coat was the more threadbare! [. . .] We usually ate cutlets, which we fried ourselves – or else ham, cutting off and discarding the fat. BL would throw a tea towel over his shoulder and go to the kitchen, still elaborating some artistic concept [. . .] In these real “feasts of friendship” we talked – theoretically – about love. BL declared that at the basis of all real human relationships lies trust. “It exists between us, MV! And we will never, never be enemies.” Thus it was!’27 Moscow not only provided artistic stimulus, but the opportunity to have a social life. Maximilian Steinberg recalled being amazed at Yudina’s appearance when he met her that winter. After typhoid fever, she had grown slim and was glamorously dressed; seemingly her religious interests had slipped into the background.28 Now Yudina gradually acquired her own circle of 123

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friends. Some were Leningraders, like Skrzhinskaya’s sister Irina, and Nikolai Antsiferov, her historian friend, who had recently been released from the Solovki and BelBaltLag* camps and had now moved to Moscow. Probably the closest of her new friends was Nina Zbruyeva, a music teacher by profession and daughter of a well-known singer, with contacts in the literary world. Zbruyeva was totally devoted to Yudina and offered practical assistance of all kinds. Old friends from other towns would contact Yudina when passing through Moscow. Yudina had a joyful reunion with ‘Mikh Mikh’ (as she called Bakhtin) in August 1934, when he was returning from Leningrad to Kustanai, his place of exile. In the autumn of 1933 an important new friendship was initiated with the philosopher, philologist and cultural critic Alexei Losev. Yudina had originally met him in Moscow some days before his arrest on 18 April 1930, when he had attended her performance of Taneyev’s quintet with the Beethoven Quartet. Yudina was fascinated by Losev as a philosopher dedicated to music and religion. He had received both a philosophical and musical education (he studied violin). As an active member of the Solovyov Religious Philosophical Society, he came into contact with the country’s most renowned religious thinkers – Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank and Sergei Bulgakov. Between 1922 and 1929 he taught aesthetics at the Moscow Conservatoire and at the State Academy of Arts and Sciences. Under the powerful influence of Florensky, Losev became interested in onomatodoxy (imyaslaviye), the heretical dogma regarding the Name of Jesus, laconically defined in Florensky’s words: ‘God is in the name, but the name is not God.’ The Name-Worshippers had provoked great controversy when in 1913 the Athonite ‘heretics’ were arrested by the Tsar’s troops and expelled from Mount Athos. During the 1920s a circle of Name-Worshippers was hosted by Losev and his wife, the astronomer Valentina Sokolova, at their home, which was attended by both Fyodor Andreyev and Florensky. Yudina would undoubtedly have heard of Losev from them, and have read his recent publications, ‘The Dialectics of Artistic Form’ and ‘Music as an Object of Logic’, which appeared in 1927. Losev and his wife were secretly tonsured on 3 June 1929, taking the monastic names of Andronik and Afanasiya. Soon afterwards, Losev’s tract * Acronym for White Sea–Baltic Sea (Canal) Camp.

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The Dialectics of the Myth, published early in 1930, was viciously attacked, and he and his wife were arrested. At the Sixteenth Party Congress, held between 26 June and 13 July 1930, Losev was denounced by Party Commissar Lazar Kaganovich. This was fuel to Marianna Gerasimova, sister of the wellknown film director Sergei Gerasimov, as she was the investigator in his case. Gerasimova charged Losev with ‘obscurantism’, dabbling in the Kaballa, and other ‘harmful mystical nonsense’. Her close association with Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD, did not bode well – she was dubbed by Losev the ‘affectionate cobra’. Losev and Sokolova were sentenced respectively to ten and five years in the camps. While Sokolova was incarcerated in the distant Altai Steppe, Losev was sent to the BelBaltLag – the complex of labour camps set up to build the White Sea–Baltic Canal. This project was masterminded by Naftali Frenkel, a fraudster with a genius for organization, who had invented the Soviet system of penal labour for construction projects while an inmate of the Solovetsky labour camp. Later dubbed by Solzhenitsyn the ‘Demon of the Gulag Archipelago’, Frenkel used shock tactics, rewards and punishments, mercilessly eliminating lazy or physically exhausted prisoners, while offering ‘carrots’ to stimulate hard work. Losev evidently lacked physical strength for the imposed task of timber-logging and was soon transferred to do clerical work. The punishing hours and terrible lighting conditions contributed to a rapid deterioration of his vision. This grandiose project required a multitude of skills, and prisoners like Alexander Meier and Nikolai Antsiferov, both friends of Yudina’s, were retrained in fields like hydrology and soil exploration. Although Yudina visited various labour camps, it is unclear whether she ever went to the BelBaltLag complex; she avoided advertising such activities so as not to endanger her friends. Through the good offices of Yekaterina Peshkova the Losev couple were reunited in 1932 at Medvezhya Gora, the central camp of the extended BelBaltLag complex. One of the anomalies of the penal system was the organization of entertainment by a special cultural-educational department of the OGPU. Orchestras played music as the prisoners worked; the artist Alexander Rodchenko was sent to photograph the heroic enterprise, and his images were published anonymously in the magazine The USSR in Construction, to demonstrate the social usefulness of hard labour. The OGPU workers’ club 125

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hosted evening lectures, debates and theatrical entertainment at Medvezhya Gora, where the despised ‘bourgeois-intellectuals’ excelled. Antsiferov recalled attending a lecture on the history of materialism given by Losev, where he spoke of Einstein’s theory of relativity from a philosophical point of view!29 Another prisoner spoke of ‘Sun Yat-sen and Secret Societies in China’, while a Book-Lovers’ Circle devoted an evening to the presentation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s recent book on Dostoevsky. Meier, now working in the planning department, used his free time to write a long thesis on Goethe’s Faust. Not without irony, he called Medvezhya Gora ‘the new capital of the Russian intelligentsia!’30 After the White Sea–Baltic Canal was completed, all sentences were automatically reviewed. The Losevs were amongst those given early release; they returned to Moscow in the autumn of 1933. Shortly after Losev attended Yudina’s Moscow recital on 1 December, their contact was renewed with particular intensity. Her playing left an extraordinary impression on him, and inspired him to write a short prose story, ‘The Woman Thinker’, part of a trilogy* which was only published after his death in 1988. The premise of his story was simple: ‘Can a woman be a thinker?’ Yudina’s friend Lyubov Shaporina would have answered affirmatively, for she had remarked in her diary, ‘I prefer M.V. to all other pianists, for her every note thinks.’31 Losev was equally emphatic in his fictional story: ‘Well today I can say that a woman can be a thinker! Although until yesterday I was in doubt about this. [. . .] You may think I met some lady Professor of Mathematics, a woman who works at one of our numerous scientific institutions. Oh no, you have a poor opinion of me then. Yesterday I went to a concert of Radina, the pianist.’32 The name Maria Valentinovna Radina seems a barely disguised reference to Yudina, while her new patronymic, Valentinovna, recalls the given name of Losev’s wife. Radina’s physical attributes are undoubtedly borrowed from Yudina: ‘A massive figure in black . . . yes, yes always in black, de rigueur! Additionally, sparkly decorations and black lace display the flirtatious playfulness of a sorcerer, decorations from which one might recoil – as if from an apparition.’33 Transfixed by the visions she conjures up as she plays, her unseeing gaze focused on some distant chimera, she transports the listener * The two other stories were ‘Meeting’ (Vstrecha) and ‘The Tchaikovsky Trio’.

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to a world of colossal events and fathomless tragedies. The author suggests that one should learn from Radina – not from Hegel – how to think, so that ‘Thinking and Being’ and ‘Thinking and Action’ are indistinguishable. Radina plays Bach best of all because Bach is constituted of pure thought. The protagonist of the trilogy, Nikolai Vershinin, is a music-lover, who has heard Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Busoni and Liszt perform. ‘Radina can count among their number, a European Olympian,’ he announces. Yet she displays neither temperament nor passion – she is monstrously cold. Her fascination lies in her profound thought processes. From December 1933 to February 1934, Losev actively wooed Yudina, believing that their two minds could set sparks flying. There was little inconsistency for him in being married and a secret monk to boot; he pointed to the precedent of ‘Abbé Franz Liszt’. He instructed: ‘You who are married or who know women in lawful or unlawful relations, have no insight into the secrets of sex. [. . .] Only to a monk are the beauties of the mind accessible, and only through the sweet-smelling mystery of prayer can he gaze at the meaningful destiny of world creation.’34 In Losev’s story, away from the concert platform Radina proves to be totally commonplace. On a first visit to her flat, Vershinin finds her squabbling noisily in the communal kitchen, saucepan lids flying. The other lodgers accuse her of having three lovers, unprepossessing men with ridiculous nicknames, Pupsik, Bachchik and Beethovenchik. It seems that Losyev’s portraits have little to do with real-life personages. Commentators nevertheless attribute the ridiculous names Bachchik and Pupsik as farcical prototypes of Bakhtin and Pumpyansky; perhaps Beethovenchik referred to Gnesin? Radina herself has no interests – she only plays Bach because Pupsik likes it, and is more concerned about the rising cost of eggs. When questioned about her interpretations, she replies that she merely does what her teacher had told her. In other words, away from the keyboard she is far from being a thinker. Vershinin is determined to save Radina from her squalid surroundings. Yet without this milieu she cannot function. The story ends with Radina being shot dead, but with a spiritual apotheosis; Vershinin understands that her true values are hidden in an otherworldly existence. In early February 1934 Losev gave Yudina a manuscript copy of the story for her perusal. Her outraged reaction can be inferred by the ensuing 127

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correspondence, although only Losev’s side survives. He wrote to express his bewilderment: ‘It is so hard to write to you – and useless. I cannot part painlessly from the marvellous image of you with which I have lived these past three months. It seems that we had a deep-deep, long-long, beautiful, luminous friendship, and suddenly – this terrible break!’35 He repeats what he wrote in the story – the captivating force of her playing conveys true philosophical enlightenment. ‘You and Rachmaninov remain for me incomparable luminaries in my philosophical sky.’36 Losev was deeply wounded by Yudina’s rejection of ‘The Woman Thinker’: ‘Your emotional reaction is so full of contempt for me! Your evaluation of me as philosopher and writer, as a human being and a person, is completely destructive.’37 Losev reproached Yudina’s critical approach: ‘That you associate the characteristics of the novel’s heroes either with the author himself or with real people shows your facile, simplified perception – it is a mystery why the brilliant Yudina should fall for it. Furthermore to write about your real weaknesses – even if I could distinguish them – would be as humiliating as slipping my hand in your pocket and robbing you of 100 roubles.’38 Losev reached an unexpected conclusion: ‘My description of Radina’s life (not such a simple life as you assume) seems to touch on your own, for you now consider yourself “unmasked”, and even fear “defamation” of character. To me this reveals a lot about you [. . .] You don’t know that Radina’s faults are taken from an important Russian writer, one of the founders of Symbolism – somebody higher than yourself.’ Seemingly Losev was referring to Andrei Bely, who had just died in early January 1934. Perhaps to provoke Yudina’s jealousy, Losev wrote of his experiences as a monk ‘with our friends, the nuns. Their attitude was probably no less moral than yours, but this did not hinder me from visiting them on my own at the monastery and giving myself over to the intimate joy of the fraternizing of souls [. . .] And the secret of the spiritual charm of our friendship depended not on their having taken monastic orders, but on their sweet-smelling and delicate femininity.’39 However unbending in her moral rectitude, Yudina was nonetheless governed by her passions, and would have deeply resented such snide attacks on her womanhood. Yudina disdained replying to Losev; instead she decisively severed all relations with him. For her ‘The Woman Thinker’ was not an objective work of art, but an offensive personal insult. Losev believed that such implacable 128

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moral judgement was an impediment to philosophal development. Yudina was replete and had abandoned her philosophical quest, whereas Losev was a ‘famished seeker’. He failed to understand that Yudina’s interests were linked to the tangible world, where her need to alleviate other people’s sufferings often overshadowed grand philosophical concerns. ‘The Woman Thinker’ was eventually published in 1994. Florensky’s sonin-law, Sergei Trubachyov, observed that ‘the initial apotheosis of Radina is perceived through a heightened romanticized perception of music [. . .] in the spirit of E.T.A. Hoffmann. As her image is debased to the vulgar and commonplace, so it assumes the quality of perverse self-negation, through the split between elevated, creative phenomena and the mundane [. . .] I became convinced that the likeness to Maria Veniaminovna was arbitrary, even if her Petersburg circle of friends is hinted at. Losev’s concept is incomprehensible if it is isolated from the context of the other stories of his trilogy, united as they are by a single philosophical idea.’40 By the end of May of 1934 there was a dramatic reduction in Yudina’s concert schedule in Moscow and Leningrad, although she still performed concerts that season in Baku and Kiev. In the late spring of 1934, on Peshkova’s initiative, she was invited to play for Gorky at his dacha Gorki to the west of Moscow. The motive behind this second visit was to gain permission for Florensky’s family to visit him in Siberia, where Father Pavel was serving his sentence in a research station at Skovorodino, an obscure railway junction halfway between Lake Baikal and the Pacific coast. Yudina recalled driving down with Peshkova: ‘We passed through beautiful and fragrant woods, full of bird-song [. . .] Then suddenly Yekaterina Pavlovna announced, ‘You know that there is no grand piano, only an upright.’ ‘Take me back straight away,’ I exclaimed, ‘the music will be completely distorted.’ But we agreed that we would take what came, what will be will be!’41 Yudina described Gorky’s residence – a white stone landowner’s house situated by a river – as perfect: ‘The park, the river and the quay on its banks, the lower and upper gardens, the colourful flower beds – everything as it should be. Yet there was something impersonal about it [. . .] We got a warm welcome from Nadezhda Alexeyevna, the Maitre’s daughter-­in-law, who had recently been widowed.’42 Gorky’s son Maxim Peshkov had died in strange circumstances – reputedly killed on Stalin’s orders. The atmosphere of police control was stifling, with the sinister head 129

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of the NKVD, Yagoda, in evidence, courting the beautiful Nadezhda Alexeyevna – as he had done in the last year of Maxim’s life. Gorky struck Yudina as a prisoner in a golden cage – his influence receding rapidly and his health failing. Before he appeared, Yudina proceeded to the studio where the ill-fated upright piano stood: Suddenly – oh what joy – Alexei Tolstoy burst into the room at a run, combining tempestuous dionysian traits with practicality. ‘Only an upright? So you are discouraged? Depressed?’ he quipped. ‘We’ll fix it!’ With that he threw off his jacket and got onto the floor, unscrewed the lower cover, then the upper one. The strings were liberated allowing the instrument to resonate! How often was I to have recourse to this method – in hospitals, in front-line clubs, on boats – where only some miserable upright was available.43

Yudina played for Gorky without stint: Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations, Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Chopin’s Mazurkas. ‘And lastly Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata (Op. 31 no. 2), a rebellious stormy work, whose first movement recitatives look forward to the Ninth Symphony [. . .] Not that the second movement can soothe a soul’s desperation. Here Gorky lost his composure, his heroic heart succumbed – he wept, as if releasing some pent-up, inner rage through abundant tears. He laid his magnificent lion’s head on my shoulders and cried for a long time.’44 In her only known recording of the ‘Tempest’ sonata from a live recital in 1954, Yudina creates a sense of turbulent rebellion through the exaggeratedly fast tempi of the outer movements (Largo-Allegro and Allegretto). It brings to mind Yudina’s confession of once being driven in performance by images of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman – perhaps in this very sonata: ‘I wanted to convey the hoofbeats, the chase, the fear.’45 After so much agitation, which the philosophical middle movement (Adagio) cannot dispel, release must follow: hence Gorky’s unsuppressed weeping. Yudina will have recalled Florensky saying that Gorky’s tears boded well. What she and Peshkova didn’t perceive was that Gorky was fast becoming an anachronism, a ‘living monument’ no longer able to wield authority. The intelligentsia could not forgive his passive acceptance of concentration camps in Solovki and BelBaltLag, and for becoming the regime’s propaganda tool after extolling rehabilitation through forced labour. 130

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Peshkova and PomPolit were also losing influence. Nevertheless she won the right for Florensky’s family to spend six weeks with him in Siberia during the summer of 1934. Yudina’s hopes of visiting Father Pavel were shattered when, immediately after his family’s departure, he was thrown into solitary confinement, then transferred to the Solovki ‘corrective labour’ camp. Here in July 1937 he was condemned to death by a NKVD ‘troika’, taken to Leningrad and shot on 8 December. Solzhenitsyn named Florensky as perhaps the most remarkable person devoured by the Gulag. Even during imprisonment, Florensky continued his scientific work, conducting research into permafrost at the Skovorodino Research Station, and into the extraction of iodine from seaweed in Solovki. In the camps Florensky’s ‘letter quota’ was used exclusively to write to his family. He made a single exception for Yudina, including a note for her in a family letter written on 19–20 April 1936. Having befriended Florensky’s wife, Anna, and eldest daughter Olga, she was a regular visitor to the family home. Her deep friendship with Father Pavel was underpinned by his genuine love of music – and Mozart above all. In this last letter to Yudina, Florensky chided her for ‘living in broken rhythms’. Mozart was an example of divine harmony and equilibrium – that golden paradise lost to mankind. ‘As I grow older, the atmosphere of my childhood emerges with increasing clarity, that is to be with Mozart and in Mozart. This is no dreamt-up theory, or a question of aesthetic taste, but a purely inner feeling, where only in Mozart, quite literally and not allegorically, can we find protection from storms.’46 He went on to declare: ‘I want no Capriccio, no Schumann, I don’t want ARBITRARY RULE. Freedom is found where there is legitimacy, even if there is absolute necessity in the arbitrary.’ He repeated to Yudina ‘all that is needed is this clarity, which we actually hold in our hands’.47 Bourgeois culture in its current state of disintegration was ‘dissembling and illusory’ and responsible for this lack of clarity. At his home on Posadskaya Street in Sergiyev Pasad, Florensky kept two instruments in the light and spacious dining room, a Kampf upright and a forte­­­piano from Glinka’s times. The upright piano was fragile, of a certain vintage, and under Yudina’s touch the strings broke regularly. His daughter Olga, who played four-hand versions of Mozart symphonies with her father, confessed that she preferred her Papa’s more gentle rendering of Mozart. 131

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Yudina swallowed her pride but reminded Olga: ‘Nevertheless I play the piano better.’48 Yudina liked to quote Florensky’s definition of Bach versus Mozart: ‘Bach climbs majestically to the heights like a pious aspirant, whereas Mozart is always at home there.’49 If Florensky saw perfection of form, light and transparency in Mozart, Yudina for her part saw drama and tragedy, and tended to approach his music either from a theatrical-operatic or a spiritualreligious viewpoint. In her interpretations of the Fantasias in D minor K.397 and C minor K.475 she was able to combine these qualities, seeing in those works a premonition of the middle-period Beethoven. Her ways of investing music with her own moods of despair were perhaps another way of seeking emotional release. As Sergei Trubetskoi noted, it was all the more striking that Florensky recognized her as an artist.50 In 1967 Yudina expressed her gratitude to Olga Florenskaya for their rare friendship: ‘I can only write the same enduring and eternal truth: that for me there is no one in the world greater than Father Pavel, and there never has been.’51 At the end of August 1934 Yudina wrote to Lyosha Skrzhinskaya asking her to find ‘the whereabouts’ of Milya Zalessky, now awaiting sentence after his arrest in December the previous year. As was customary, Zalessky was being shunted from one prison to another. ‘I haven’t yet sent him any parcels, as I had no money throughout the summer [. . .] Now I have the parcel ready, but I fear that it mightn’t reach its destination.’52 Although she was ‘dying to come’ to Leningrad, she explained disconsolately to Lyosha that money was short. Despite earning good fees with concerts in Baku earlier that month, she had spent most of it, paying back debts. Yudina kept Skrzhinskaya informed about her Moscow life. She had been to hear Florent Schmitt conduct his music, which she found ‘boring and vulgar. It sounded like Glière. I cannot think why my Greek friend [Mitropoulos] performs his music!’53 She attended a reception at VOKS: ‘I gave a full report on contemporary music (in German!) to a grey-haired American pianist, evidently only a beginner. He was terribly pleased!’54 On 11 September Yudina informed her friend that she had hired a grand piano, which was ‘very bad, but passable’, so at last she could practise in her own home! On a lighter note, she reported going for a drive with Lyosha’s sister, Irina, now a proud car-owner – a rare sign of privilege for a private

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individual. A woman driver was an even greater rarity! Irina recalled Yudina ‘showing her off’ to the young conductor, Kurt Sanderling, who had fled from Nazi Germany in 1936 and worked with the Moscow Radio Orchestra in those years. Irina was instructed to take him for a spin around Moscow in her car.55 On 18 October Yudina started the new 1934/35 season in Moscow with another performance of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto under Jascha Horenstein at the Hall of Columns. This was followed on 2 November by a performance in Kiev of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto conducted by Joseph Rosenstock. Yudina then travelled to Voronezh in mid-November for a solo recital and Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 with the local orchestra. Voronezh held special interest, for in June 1934 the great poet Osip Mandelstam was exiled there for three years. As Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poet’s wife, later recalled, ‘Maria Veniaminovna Yudina went out of her way to give concerts in Voronezh so she could see M. and play for him.’ Other musicians, such as the conductor Leo Ginzburg, did likewise. ‘Visits like these were events in our life, and M. with his sociable nature couldn’t have lived without them.’56 Yudina noted how much Mandelstam missed seeing art, the ‘French painters’ in particular. ‘Whenever [Yudina] came to Voronezh M. would ask her about them, even while she was playing to him. She once sent him an album put out by the gallery, but the reproductions were very bad and only whetted his appetite.’57 Back in Leningrad on 22 November, Yudina performed Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto in the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia under Georges Sébastien. By now, her relations with the Philharmonia were quite strained because of her continuing cancellations and postponements. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the director, Ossovsky, lost patience with her. She received no further invitations until the next season. The New Year of 1935 saw Yudina determined to play more concerts and radio broadcasts so as to pay off her debts. She happily added new works to her repertoire, including many by Leningrad composers, whom she always liked to promote. On 9, 10 and 13 January she participated in the last performances of Stravinsky’s Les Noces under Klimov at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. Stravinsky’s music was being eliminated from concert programmes from the mid-1930s onwards, as were those of all Russian émigré composers and the Western avant garde. On 9 February

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between two Les Noces performances Yudina presented Moscow audiences with a novelty, Alfredo Casella’s Partita for piano and chamber orchestra conducted by the composer at the House of Scientists. ‘[Casella] is a very dignified and kind person, vivacious and reliable – it’s very pleasant to meet such a harmonious personality. But I had little to play, as he wrote the piece with his own limited technique in mind. The Italian Embassy turned out in full for the concert – the ambassador’s wife wearing a glass-beaded jacket with a thick plait wound round her head. Her tender profile and grace are alien to us.’58 In reality Casella was a musician and pianist of stature, who did much to promote the music of his contemporaries. His work as an editor saw the emergence of Vivaldi’s oeuvre in Italy, as well as his benchmark edition of Beethoven’s sonatas. He himself had in fact performed the Partita in Moscow on an earlier visit. The concerto dated from 1924–5, was written in neoclassical style (although Yudina saw it as popular in origin), and showed Stravinsky’s influence in the clarity of orchestration. Meeting Casella inspired in Yudina the desire to learn Italian and read Dante. She was deeply disillusioned by Dante’s prose-poem La Vita Nuova – his prose irritated her, ‘for it only says what can be better expressed in poetry’.59 Neither did she approve of his preoccupation with Beatrice. Dreams of learning Italian were soon put aside as Yudina decided to show her mettle as a keyboard virtuoso, performing under Leo Ginzburg a marathon of three concertos in one evening on 16 March at Moscow’s Hall of Columns. For this occasion she learnt the Schumann Piano Concerto, adding to it Tchaikovsky’s First and Prokofiev’s Second. Each being a massive work in its own right, the three concertos constituted over an hour and 40 minutes of music – requiring colossal stamina from the pianist. Prokofiev, recently relocated to Moscow from Paris, was in attendance; neither he nor Yudina were satisfied with the orchestra’s contribution. In early July he wrote to her after hearing her perform the concerto more successfully at an out-oftown concert: ‘Thank you for your performance of the Second concerto. I am terribly glad that at last the conductor and orchestra were serious in their attitude, because the Moscow experience (with Ginzburg) was very difficult, given that the management only allowed one and a half rehearsals – for which I wanted to box their ears. I felt embarrassed that you personally were caused such anguish by that performance.’60 We don’t know what 134

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performance the composer referred to; perhaps one Myaskovsky mentioned without a date with the conductor Joseph Rosenstock – who like Horenstein had been banned from conducting in Germany.61 Ginzburg for his part later described Yudina as an extremely awkward soloist, who frightened away many conductors. ‘Whereas in chamber music she was an ideal partner [. . .] she felt inhibited by an orchestra, and did impossible things, like skipping 20 bars, forgetting chunks of the music and jumping from one theme to another.’62 The spring of 1935 saw another fiasco in Yudina’s personal life. She had met the well-known architect Vyacheslav Vladimirov late in 1933, and they began a romantic attachment. A member of the Organization of Contemporary Architects and follower of Le Corbusier, Vladimirov had designed a series of exemplary constructivist buildings in Moscow, including the Institute for Experimental Veterinary Sciences. As an enthusiastic supporter of communal living, Vladimirov also worked on collective projects, designing such wellknown blocks of homes as the Narkomfin* on Novinsky Boulevard and with the architect Georgi Lutsky the Aviators block of flats at the Patriarch’s Ponds. One of Vladimirov’s landmark constructions was the large apartment building for ‘workers of the Moscow Arts Theatre’, erected in 1938 – including built-in microphones to eavesdrop on such famous residents as Chekhov’s widow, Olga Knipper, and the theatre director Nemirovich-Danchenko. The Skrzhinskaya sisters recalled Vladimirov as a prepossessing man with the confidence of one accustomed to worldly success. Yudina herself seemed convinced that their attachment would lead to marriage – and announced to her friends that she wanted to have at least twelve children.63 Vladimirov was a music-lover; in turn he stimulated in Maria a passionate interest in architecture. Vera Yudina recalled that they even went together to ‘choose a piano for their new home’. Then suddenly and unexpectedly, Vladimirov got married to another woman, leaving the unsuspecting Yudina humiliated and grief-stricken. In late March 1935 she wrote to Skrzhinskaya in despair: ‘He is not worthy of me nor I of him. But he is unique in his purity, his charm and much else.’ She was ashamed of her previous happiness with him, and now had to face harsh reality. ‘Ira [Lyosha’s sister], Nicoletta [Nina Zbruyeva], and Pasha [Nina’s maid] saved me from * Dom NarkomFina – The House of the People’s Commissariat of Finance.

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suicide. Time is no healer, it just drives me deeper into despair.’64 As so often in times of crisis, Yudina thought of changing profession, even of taking monastic orders. She complained to Skrzhinskaya of the solitary bitterness of the pianist’s life. But which new profession she intended to choose wasn’t clear – one day it was architecture and the next it was medicine.65 On 23 and 24 March Yudina performed two concerts in Odessa. From there she travelled to Sevastopol for a day to see Yevgeniya (Zhenya) Tilicheyeva, whose husband had just been arrested. ‘I didn’t notice the south or the sea. At Zhenya’s all I did was weep. But I still want to hope, to feel remorse and hope. With my head at least, I want to enter into another’s misery.’66 Before long Tilicheyeva herself was arrested as an enemy of the people and would remain incarcerated in the Gulag for nineteen years. Yudina told Skrzhinskaya, ‘I am using all my strength to play and earn. I want to pay off my debts. I hope to come to Leningrad soon and save my room.’67 Once again Yudina was neglecting her career so as to help unfortunate friends. She played one more concert in Moscow performing Taneyev’s Piano Quintet on 27 March with the Beethoven Quartet; thereafter she didn’t play in the capital for two and a half years. She cancelled her recital at the Leningrad Philharmonia in early May. Despite her profuse apologies to Ossovsky, she wasn’t invited to appear there again for the next year. She certainly was not earning money. That spring a new campaign was launched against ‘socially dangerous elements’, implying people with noble ancestry. While Natalia Andreyeva was living in exile, her mother looked after her twin daughters, Masha and Anna, in Leningrad. Arrested for being the daughter of a general, her mother was exiled to Cheboksary on the Volga with her two sisters – they were never seen again. Sensing imminent danger, Natalia Andreyeva sold off all the family possessions and set off with her twin daughters for Bryansk to stay with her brother, all their worldly goods crammed into one small suitcase.68 At this point Valya Zhdan (Yasnopolskaya), a devoted friend of Father Fyodor Andreyev, suggested that Natalia apply for work on the Volga– Moscow Canal, another grandiose project built with penal labour between 1933 and 1937. Zhdan had served her sentence in the Dmitlag, the largest branch of this particular Gulag system, near the ancient city of Dmitrov 136

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sixty-five kilometres north of Moscow. At its peak, the camp was estimated to hold 1.2 million people working on the canal’s construction. Prisoners died and were shot in their hundreds, engineers and architects were repressed after the canal’s opening. Irina Skrzhinskaya recalled Yudina travelling to Dmitlag to visit friends amongst the prisoners. By accepting work as a hired labourer of the NKVD in Dmitrov, Natalia Andreyeva and her twins were able to live relatively close to Moscow, initially with the Florensky family at Sergiyev Pasad, then at a rented winter (heated) dacha, just two stops from Dmitrov on the railway. Between 1935 and 1938 Yudina spent a lot of time with the family, and was spiritually at her closest to Natalia Nikolayevna. The twins recalled being shocked when they heard her discussing her love affairs with their mother – ‘it seemed incredible that “old women approaching the age of 40” could talk about love’.69 In 1938 Natalia Nikolayevna was sent to work on the construction of the hydro-electric station (Gidrouzel) in Kuibishev (former Samara). The twins were left under Yudina’s guardianship. By now the girls were teenagers and quite self-sufficient in household matters. Yudina liked to spoil them, and using the maintenance money left by their mother she would appear twice a week bearing cakes or other goodies. Once the ‘treats’ were finished, the twins went back to a diet of beans and Yudina to her own affairs.70 During the summer of 1935, Yudina gave herself over to architectural studies, strolling around Moscow’s outskirts, sketchbook in hand, making ‘hopeless drawings of ancient architectural monuments, mostly in ruins, alas!’71 She was enervated by depression and her preoccupation over the fate of imprisoned friends. When Yudina learnt that the famous writer and humanist Romain Rolland was to visit Moscow at the invitation of Maxim Gorky, she sought a meeting with him during his stay between 23 June and July 1935. Yudina knew of Rolland’s hatred of repression, his admiration of Stalin and the Soviet Union. She hoped that if informed of the facts Rolland would intercede for Florensky, now imprisoned in Solovki and working in the harshest conditions. Rolland and his wife stayed most of the time with Gorky, and were kept busy meeting political leaders from Stalin downwards. Yudina’s hopes that Peshkova or Gorky would arrange a meeting proved to be unfounded, while her offical request was turned down. When a group of intellectuals – including the composers Kabalevsky, Bely, Knipper, and the 137

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pianist Neuhaus – were invited to meet Rolland at Gorky’s dacha in July 1935, Yudina’s absence was glaring. Staying in Moscow on the off-chance of a meeting with Rolland meant cancelling her concerts in Baku that July, where Yudina was to play Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. Ironically the work was programmed as the primary condition of accepting the engagement. Prokofiev wrote to Yudina saying how much he regretted her cancellation. ‘There will be a good French conductor, Roger Désormière,* who will be very attentive and could be useful in securing engagements abroad.’ He was evidently annoyed that ‘other compositions of mine have been struck off the programme to make room for my Second Concerto’.72 At this point Yudina confided in Prokofiev, and in her reply of 12 July asked him not to divulge the true reason for her cancellation. (He was about to go to Baku himself.) The director of the Baku Philharmonia was sending her menacing telegrams and threatening to take her to court. She immensely regretted that Désormière had to forgo Prokofiev’s originally programmed works, but surely they could be reinstated – she had warned the Baku Philharmonic of her cancellation three weeks earlier. As for engagements abroad, ‘at this moment this holds no interest for me. Thank you for thinking of me. Forgive me. I hope that I will play the Concerto during the next season.’73 As 1935 drew to a close, Yudina dreamt of moving back to Leningrad to work at the Hermitage. She stayed in Moscow, feeling so despondent that she could not participate in Yavorsky’s Bach seminar that October at the Courses for Professional Education. ‘Forgive me! I am the loser, not you. To play at your seminars is an incredible joy and honour,’ she told Yavorsky. ‘I cannot explain it, but I would be unable to retain my self-possession in front of people.’74 She reiterated to Skrzhinskaya: ‘Just now I cannot play for people. I am looking for a separate room. If I find a decent one, then I’ll come to Leningrad to fetch Milya’s and my books, and the green armchairs.’75 Already back in October 1934 Yudina had written to her Leningrad friend, Yulia Veysberg, interceding for her former student Yulia Kremlyov, who was ill, without work or the means for survival. (Later Yudina got the Union of

* Désormière conducted Prokofiev’s ballets Le pas d’acier and The Prodigal Son for Diaghilev’s company.

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Composers to give him funds.) En passant, she mentioned a recent invitation she had received from the Moscow Conservatoire. She haughtily dismissed it – ‘I killed my first youth through pedagogical work, so why should I now kill my second youth? I will wait to teach until old age sets in.’76 The year 1936 began with bleak prospects. Yudina had no concerts on the horizon, and she rejected another proposal to teach at the Moscow Conservatoire. However, by the summer of 1936 she changed her mind – doubtless through the persuasion of her good friend, the current Conservatoire director, Heinrich Neuhaus. A professor’s regular salary was not to be sniffed at when concert engagements were so scarce, and Neuhaus exemplified the compatibility of teaching with performing.

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THE MOSCOW CONSERVATOIRE AND MUSICAL PROJECTS

And Schubert on shimmering water, Mozart in the twittering of birds, Goethe whistling on the winding path, And Hamlet – pondering in fearful footsteps, All felt the pulse of the crowd, taking it on trust. Osip Mandelstam1 In the autumn of 1936 Yudina took up her duties as professor of piano at the Moscow Conservatoire, renowned in particular for its superlative piano faculty. She was fortunate to do so while Neuhaus occupied the position of director between 1935 and 1937. A teacher of immense popularity, his Conservatoire career had started with his arrival in Moscow in 1922 as a protégé of Felix Blumenfeld, and was to last for forty-two years. Senior to him were Konstantin Igumnov, considered the doyen of piano teachers, and Alexander Goldenweiser, no less famous for his scholarship and his connections with Lev Tolstoy. Appointing a renowned performer as Rektor (director) of the Moscow Conservatoire had become a tradition that was started in 1866 by its founder, the composer and pianist Nikolai Rubinstein. His successors included the renowned composer/pianist Sergei Taneyev, and more recently Goldenweiser and Igumnov. On the other hand, Neuhaus’ direct predecessor, Stanislav Shatsky, a distinguished teacher, is chiefly remembered for founding the Central Music School, a hothouse of precocious, musical talent and a springboard for the Conservatoire itself. During his incumbency as director, Neuhaus’ personal life was complicated by his own illness and the death of his parents. In 1937, when his elder son Adik was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone, he asked to be released from his duties. 140

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Neuhaus was a generous colleague and amongst his students a muchloved pater familias – his classes were always overflowing with listeners. His pupils included such renowned pianists as Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter, Yakov Zak, Stanislav Neuhaus (Heinrich’s son), Lev Naumov, Eliso Virsoladze and Alexei Lubimov. With his wide-ranging interests and erudition Neuhaus was less interested in technical perfection than in musical vision – in this he differed from the pianistic lions of the day. In the words of the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Neuhaus was ‘simple, full of humanity and wit, altogether natural – a far cry from the conventional image of mentor’.2 While greatly esteemed as a teacher, Yudina never achieved quite the same renown as Neuhaus; neither did any of her students attain the status of a Richter or Gilels. The older Professor Igumnov’s rival school had produced a plethora of wonderful pianists including Lev Oborin, Yakov Flier, Naum Shtarkman and Maria Grinberg. Even the more pedantic Goldenweiser produced pianists like Dmitri Bashkirov and Rosa Tamarkina, a mercurial talent with a prodigious technique and a free spirit. According to Gavriil Yudin, Goldenweiser had no time for Yudina: ‘He was a dry old stick, an envious person.’3 Igor Zhukov, an Igumnov student, recalled his professor: . . . going to all Yudina’s concerts and being outraged. ‘What is she doing? How is it possible to play like this?’ And yet he would go again and again to hear her. We asked, ‘Konstantin Nikolayevich, why bother to go if you don’t like her playing?’ He would answer, ‘How could one not go? She is a real musician!’4

Neuhaus had presented Yudina to Pasternak as ‘a much better pianist’ than himself. Yet as time went on, he found her performances too wayward. In moments of extreme exaltation she completely ignored the composer’s markings, often investing the piece with the heroic rhetoric of the times. Neuhaus found this exasperating, as Gavriil Yudin witnessed: ‘Once Maria Veniaminovna played Mozart’s Lacrymosa from the Requiem in Saltykov’s transcription and played five fortes. Neuhaus, who was sitting near me in the hall, raised his hands in mock horror and exclaimed “Perché?” ’5 Similarly, at a concert given during the Second World War, Yudina played some Bach Preludes and Fugues with enormous fervour. Afterwards Neuhaus asked 141

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her, ‘Maria Veniaminovna, why did you play everything fortissimo?’ She retorted, ‘But Genrikh Gustavovich, we’re at War!’6 Other musicians recalled her wartime performances as having such conviction that ‘one imagined Berlin had just been captured!’ Yudina often put down her idiosyncratic interpretation to a particular stimulus, perhaps to vivid images of Faust and Mephistopheles or to Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman. Pianists who played too loudly were treated by Neuhaus with disdain – ‘they should be called fortists, not pianists’. Yudina would doubtless have agreed with his definition of a good pianist as a ‘crescendo-diminuendo-ist’. Her own dynamic range was enormous, and her quiet playing had rare intensity. Neuhaus was renowned for the beauty of his rounded cantabile, a hallmark of his school of playing. His emotional approach to music was tempered by masterly control of rubato and dynamics, and in contrast to Yudina he favoured the quieter end of the sound spectrum. In fact, he and Yudina had a fundamentally similar approach to music; any differences did not interfere with their friendship. Neuhaus’ cosmopolitan outlook and his broad European culture were a result of his upbringing as a citizen of the Russian Empire of mixed Polish, Ukrainian and German extraction. He was steeped in the traditions of Liszt and Anton Rubinstein, instilled by teachers such as his uncle Felix Blumenfeld, Karl Barth (a pupil of Liszt’s) in Berlin and Leopold Godowsky in Vienna. Neuhaus was close to his cousin, the composer Karol Szymanowski, whose third piano sonata he premiered, remaining its only interpreter for many years. He also spent eighteen months living in Florence, and spoke five European languages. Neuhaus moved with ease in literary and artistic circles. Like Yudina, Neuhaus became a close friend of the poet Boris Pasternak. The circumstances behind their friendship were most unusual. The two men and their respective wives had met in the late 1920s, when Neuhaus fell under the spell of Pasternak’s poetry. In 1931 his first wife Zinaida, the mother of his two sons Adrian (Adik) and Stanislav (Stasik), left him to marry Pasternak. Neuhaus himself already had a daughter by Militsa Borodkina, who became his new wife. Despite these complicated arrangements, the Neuhaus and Pasternak families maintained a close friendship throughout their lives. Like Neuhaus, Yudina tended to pass on the interpretation that she had worked out as a performer. Yet if she saw her ideas didn’t work, she did not 142

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insist, understanding that a student should not be forced to go against their convictions. Yudina’s one-time student Anna Artobolevskaya, later to become a highly successful piano teacher in Moscow, claimed that she lacked the obsessive quality necessary for teaching7 – the reserves of patience to follow things through. Indeed, Yudina would complain that training pianists as soloists involved loathsome drudgery, nevertheless she conscientiously equipped her students with technique, particularly in such aspects as sound production, articulation and phrasing. She invented special exercises to help them develop a richer sound palette, always drawing analogies with orchestral colour – what she dubbed ‘Sympho-interpretation’.8 It was also through sound that mood and character were conveyed.9 While the learning process entailed constant checking against the musical text, it also involved searching for meaningful insights between the lines of the score. Here Yudina liked to quote from E.T.A. Hoffmann: ‘Music speaks through wonderful and mysterious sounds, which we try in vain to encapsulate in signs. Yet these artificially formulated sequences of musical hieroglyphs only retain a faint hint of what we have just heard.’10 Thus Yudina taught her students to understand music as part of a metaphysical system, where ‘a musician’s task is to arouse the listener’s spiritual interest, to achieve a relationship to the music which acts as an impetus for a new understanding of reality’.11 A synthesis of symbolic ideas – literary, philosophical and visual – inhabited her perception, at whose centre lay Man as the carrier of the Idea, whose journey and quest gave sense to the musical narrative. Years later she explained to Metropolitan Filaret Vakhrameyev that her interpretations offered a unique theological and philosophical understanding of the world, while the true face of music remained hidden from most people, even musicologists.12 Yudina endorsed the principles behind Vladimir Favorsky’s art, whereby a conscious rejection of illusory – and conversely ‘faithful’ – reproduction allowed Favorsky ‘to discover inner laws and connections between a large sphere of phenomena’.13 The essence of an image lies in its connective force, not in the visualization of the depicted object – analogous to a ‘photographic reproduction of the notes’.14 Yudina also subscribed to Pavel Florensky’s ideas expressed in his essay Reverse Perspective: the more a work of art is created along ‘correct’ parameters (he was referring to icons), the more it tends to exude coldness and loses connection with reality. ‘Being “correct” 143

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does not guarantee the vitality of creation, but contradicts it.’15 Applying this maxim to music implied a continuous search for symbolic meaning, something which became for Yudina a lifetime’s preoccupation, not least in her understanding of Bach. While the study of The Well-Tempered Clavier was obligatory for Yudina’s Leningrad students in the 1920s, the pianist Lev Oborin, her colleague at the Moscow Conservatoire, recalled that she excluded Bach altogether from her Moscow students’ repertoire, believing his music was too difficult to comprehend at a sufficiently deep level. Instead, she set them polyphonic works by earlier composers, or by later nineteenthcentury Russian and German composers.16 Yudina’s class with its atmosphere that encouraged discussion was also popular with outsiders. A regular visitor was the wonderful pianist Maria Grinberg, a student of Blumenfeld and Igumnov. She was set for a grand career after winning second prize at the All-Union competition in 1935. But two years later her father, the Hebrew scholar Izrael Grinberg, and her second husband, Stanislav Stand, a Polish poet and convinced communist, were arrested and shot as enemies of the People. Grinberg was dismissed from her position as soloist with the Moscow Philharmonia and earned a scanty living by playing for amateur ballet classes. While Yudina had no delusions about the Soviet system, Grinberg believed in it. Tormented by doubts that her husband might really have been ‘an enemy of the People’, she reputedly wrote to Stalin – foreseeably without getting a reply. Yudina could not understand such naivete – it was tantamount to a truce with officialdom.17 Her relationship towards Maria Grinberg was coloured by ambiguity. When Grinberg was finally permitted to return to the concert platform, Yudina sent flowers, but did not attend her recital at the Small Hall of the Conservatoire. Later they became close colleagues at the Gnesins’ Institute. Yudina declared that Grinberg was the one person she wanted to play at her funeral.18 Grinberg found Yudina’s classes of enormous interest but did not believe she was a natural teacher – ‘her forceful, almost combative nature crushed anybody who had dealings with her’.19 A later student and biographer of Yudina’s, Marina Drozdova, the niece of Yudina’s own teacher, Vladimir Drozdov, disagreed. Students were inspired rather than crushed by Yudina’s powers. It was difficult not to respond to her kindness and her desire to impart spiritual knowledge.20 144

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In 1937, at the suggestion of the head of the voice faculty Anatoli Dolivo, Yudina took on a class of vocal chamber music. Since the days of her duo with Kseniya Dorliak, she had been passionately interested in singers and the lieder repertoire. Dolivo believed that young vocalists would benefit immensely from contact with such an exceptional musician, and indeed Yudina exceeded his expectations in the imaginative way she approached her work. Between 1937 and 1945 she held special courses on vocal repertoire for teachers and compiled a report for the Opera Studio’s Chamber section,21 outlining five important principles: the first was for composers and interpreters to work together to create new repertoire; the second was to choose good poetic texts; the third was to commission dependable translations (of German lieder in particular) into Russian; the fourth principle emphasized the interplay between creative, theatrical and philosophical aspects of vocal literature; while the fifth dealt with thematic programming. A programme could be built around a general subject, such as ‘Nature’ or ‘the Ballade’, or it might highlight an individual poet like Goethe – or alternatively different composers’ settings of the same poetic text. Yudina’s ideas about vocal chamber music largely coincided with Yavorsky’s principles, which were conceived through his experience of working with singers. The historical cultural background should define musical style and the conceptualized imagery. Cantilena and bel canto were skills as necessary as articulation in recitative and conviction in narration, where dramatic talent was combined with technical control. Yudina’s class became a laboratory for discussing all manner of problems. Performance was essential to the course; Yudina herself accompanied her students at concerts and in radio broadcasts. Beforehand, she would briefly introduce the texts and their settings. Like Yavorsky she believed in the supremacy of the words over the music – how they were set remained a secondary consideration.22 Yavorsky’s profound social principles were based on the idea of universal music education. With the support of Lunacharsky, he founded the First Music Technikum in Moscow in 1921, where his educational theories were put to the test, working with students of all ages, from small children to adults, professionals to amateurs. In Yavorsky’s view the aspect of ‘active listening’ had been systematically neglected, so he added courses on musical appreciation to conventional disciplines, such as composition and 145

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conducting. His brilliant seminars on a variety of musical topics were a highlight of the courses both for Technikum students and outside listeners – not least from the Conservatoire. In the mid-1920s Lunacharsky asked Yavorsky to reform the Moscow Conservatoire’s curriculum. Yavorsky met with significant resistance from staff members and found the Conservatoire’s ideological slant deplorable. Dismissed from the Technikum in 1930 for his advanced views, Yavorsky found work on the artistic council of the Bolshoi Theatre and as the main editor at the music publishing house, Muzgiz. Such was his authority within the profession that in 1937 Shostakovich – by then an established and highly successful composer – asked Yavorsky to give him private composition lessons. To Yudina the exclusion of such a brilliant mind from the Conservatoire seemed criminal. She persuaded Neuhaus to issue an invitation to Yavorsky to teach, seconded by the musicologists Grigori Kogan, Isaak Rabinovich and Viktor Zuckerman. Next she had to use her powers of persuasion to make Yavorsky accept the proposal: ‘You are so necessary to us, all the best people here think so [. . .] Remember, that even those not well disposed towards you in the past can correct their errors.’23 Quoting Pushkin, she urged: ‘To praise and slander be indifferent – And never argue with a fool!’* Yavorsky set out his conditions – he would create his own course programmes, and Sergei Protopopov was to be appointed professor of choral studies. Protopopov, as a student of Yavorsky’s in Kiev, was the most assiduous disciple of his musical theories, exemplified in his three ‘modernist’ piano sonatas whose harmonic language echoed late Scriabin. From 1918 Protopopov and Yavorsky lived openly as partners until the latter’s death in 1942. The fledgling Soviet state promoted sexual freedom, easily obtainable divorce and abortion, and legalized homosexuality in December 1917. By the early 1930s the situation had regressed dramatically. Under Stalin, ‘bourgeois’ family values were reintroduced, and in 1933 homosexuality once again became a criminal offence. The following year, Protopopov was charged with practising homosexuality and sent into exile, until the accusations were dropped in 1937. Yavorsky’s tastes in this direction were well known (as indeed were those of such eminent piano professors as Igumnov * Quoting Pushkin’s poem ‘Exegi Monumentum’.

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and Nikolayev). In the mid-1920s Shostakovich, who sometimes stayed in Yavorsky’s Moscow apartment, left comic descriptions of barricading himself in his room to rebuff his mentor’s presumed advances. In the new academic year of 1938/39, Yudina greeted Yavorsky’s ‘triumphal entry into the Conservatoire on a White Horse’.24 She no less warmly welcomed Protopopov to the teaching staff, praising his gifts as choirmaster and his conscientious precision as a musician. As she pointed out, attention to minutiae was the hallmark of scrupulous craftsmanship, necessary for the creation of masterpieces, whether musical compositions, medieval cathedrals, or Russian icons.25 After all, ‘a great artist risked perishing in medias res!’ The meticulous Protopopov made a good foil to the passionate Yavorsky, whom Yudina compared to Mahler in his ‘fanaticism, self-igniting flame, and absolutely uncompromising attitudes!’26 In reality, Yudina displayed this same fanaticism. When she developed a passion for architecture, inspired by her albeit unsuccessful relationship with the architect Vladimirov, she was ready to give up everything else. Her friends were highly alarmed! In the autumn of 1936, Lyubov Shaporina visited Yudina in Moscow and confided in her diary: M[aria] V[eniaminovna] has started studying art and drawing, and dreams of becoming an architect. Her drawings are very naïve, very poor. One could start like that at 15 years of age, not at 36. I said this to her, adding that every form of Art demands complete sacrifice. MV feels she has squeezed all she can out of her musical career and money doesn’t interest her. To feel alive, she needs to explore new horizons, and cannot live without this. It’s a vice, a worm, and it’ll prevent her from becoming one of the world’s greatest pianists. [. . .] She says, ‘Just look at all those famous names – they have a tiny repertoire, go on tour and travel abroad, always playing the same old pieces. I couldn’t do that.’ However, nothing will come of her painting.27

In 1937 Yudina took on a ‘clerical position’ at the Museum of Architecture where she sorted and catalogued photographic material. An architect colleague, M.V. Budylina, recalled how the pianist dreamt of producing a book – a synthesis of literature, painting, monumental architecture and music. She had in the meantime chosen as her study theme ‘The Architectural 147

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Ensembles of the Country House and Park’. In Yudina’s words, ‘it was a relatively unexplored field, to which I believe I have something to contribute’.28 Apart from her drawing lessons, Yudina studied the Bauhaus architects and the great masters, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. She nurtured a particular sympathy for the multi-disciplined artist László Moholy-Nagy, who was closely associated with the Bauhaus. His maxim ‘Man, not the product, is the end in view’, struck a deep chord: ‘this could have been written just for me’.29 While believing that Art should serve Man, Yudina extended Moholy-Nagy’s premise – Art should also glorify God, illuminating the divine element in Man. Towards the end of the decade, Yudina’s interest in architecture waned, as other events in her life took precedence. In the meantime, she applied architectural laws to musical structure, no doubt thinking of Florensky’s devotion to the Golden Mean. This mathematical law, Father Pavel explained, related not just to architecture and the visual arts but also to music; Beauty and Elegance became an objective expression of a unified whole. ‘Each time we met, Father Pavel would ask, “When are you going to apply the Golden Mean to music?” ’30 Yudina recalled. Now, belatedly, she was executing his wish, perceiving the function of the Golden Mean as relevant to a person’s inner life and concordant with the principles of Alexei Ukhtomsky’s ‘Theory of Dominance’. After a lean period without concerts, Yudina returned to performing, largely thanks to the Austrian conductor Fritz Stiedry, the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra’s chief conductor from 1934 until 1937. She played Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto on 6 April 1936 at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia, and in October that year Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, all under Stiedry’s direction. In March 1937 they performed together Mozart’s A major concerto K.488, and at another concert Bach’s D minor concerto and the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto. In 1936 she made her first shellac recording (on 78 rpm) of Bach’s C minor Toccata BWV 911, available today digitally. Between March 1937 and January 1939 Yudina played no fewer than ten concerts at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia. This was in stark contrast with Moscow, where she remained absent from the concert stage between April 1935 and November 1938. Despite having a professor’s salary, Yudina remained chronically short of money; certainly her architectural job did nothing to allieviate her finances. The Leningrad Conservatoire observed its 75th anniversary in the 1937/38 148

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season. Yudina and Prokofiev were amongst the graduates invited to participate in the celebrations. On 7 January 1938 she wrote to the composer suggesting they perform his Schubert Waltz Suite for two pianos. ‘If you played them with Kamensky, perhaps you can also play them with me?’31 Now, she had to beg the money to get to Leningrad; she could not afford the train ticket. She asked Steinberg, her former composition teacher, whether the Conservatoire would provide the promised travelling expenses: ‘At some point I will have to leave the city and I will need the means to do so.’32 Yudina was staying at her partioned room on the Palace Embankment, and suggested to Steinberg, half-jokingly, ‘Why can’t the Conservatoire pay me a per diem?’ – after all they hosted their other guests. ‘So, am I worse than them? A hotel room would cost the equivalent of a train fare.’ She assured him that she would ‘not bolt the money down greedily like some Gargantua!’ This was merely a practical solution: ‘Please don’t think that Marusya Yudina is developing commercial interests. Alas, I am forced into this by disastrous turns in my life.’33 The latest in the ‘disastrous turns’ was the arrest of Vladimir Rugevich, husband of her doctor friend Anna Sergeyevna Rugevich, who had introduced her to Fyodor Andreyev. An ‘ideal personality’, Anna Rugevich was also an intimate friend of Bakhtin’s – they had all met as members of the Voskreseniye circle. Anna now anticipated imminent arrest and had her possessions transported to a place of exile, but she lost everything in the process. Yudina devised a plan, exploiting the fact that Anna was the granddaughter of Anton Rubinstein, founder of the St Petersburg Conservatoire. The Conservatoire’s 75th anniversary was attracting much publicity, and Yudina mobilized colleagues like Igumnov, to write of Anna Rugevich’s relationship to Rubinstein. An investigating Leningrad official demanded, ‘Is it true that you are Anton Rubinstein’s granddaughter, who lived on Rubinstein Street?’34 It was true, Anna replied, although Rubinstein had lived on Troitskaya Street, which was renamed in his honour after his death in 1894. On 28 November 1938 Yudina made a spectacular return to Moscow concert life, performing Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto at the Grand Hall of the Conservatoire, conducted by the composer. Their performance was rapturously received, and they repeated the Scherzo (a vivace moto perpetuo with hands in octave unison) as an encore. Finally, Yudina played Montagues and Capulets from Prokofiev’s recent transcriptions of Romeo and Juliet. The pianist Yakov Zak found her immensely dramatic 149

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interpretation to be completely her own, not necessarily complying with Prokofiev’s demands to follow his indications closely. ‘The music had immense power, permeated by relentless rhythm, unwavering emotional discipline, and great turmoil of spirit. The impression was stunning. The listeners’ faces lit up, and the composer himself applauded enthusiastically.’35 Apart from Zak, other pianists came to hear the concerto; some said that Yudina was showing prize-winners like Gilels and Oborin how to play. Only the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky deemed Yudina’s performance to have been ‘unsuccessful’.36 Perhaps he preferred Prokofiev’s own interpretation. Yet when Prokofiev had performed the concerto recently in London with the BBC orchestra under Ernest Ansermet, he got into a terrible mess – his fingers no longer retained the music.37 Indeed the Second Piano Concerto requires enormous energy and technical stamina from the pianist, particularly in the exhilarating but fiendishly difficult cadenza. This first occasion in Russia when Prokofiev had conducted rather than played one of his piano concertos saw him gradually relinquishing his role of pianist for that of conductor. Just a few months earlier, on 19 March 1938 at the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Yudina had given the world premiere of Prokofiev’s Suite no. 2 for piano from Romeo and Juliet, which she played from the manuscript in a mammoth programme, including Brahms’ Handel Variations, Scriabin’s Third Piano Sonata and Prokofiev’s Second Piano Sonata. Prokofiev had extracted two orchestral Suites from his Romeo and Juliet in 1936–7, but apparently at Yudina’s suggestion he also transcribed those pieces from the Suites suitable for piano. Yudina chose to play this Suite no. 2 containing five of the most popular pieces from the second orchestral Suite. Shortly afterwards Prokofiev rearranged ten of the pieces from the two orchestral Suites, giving them a new title and opus number (Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet Op. 75), in this manner making a chronological narrative of the story. Confusion over names was perpetuated by Yudina’s continued use of the title ‘Second Suite’ when playing the five piano arrangements which also feature in Op. 75. Meanwhile, Romeo and Juliet as a ballet had encountered serious obstacles in getting staged in the Soviet Union, and was premiered abroad, in Brno (Czechoslovakia) in December 1938. The orchestral Suites and piano transcriptions allowed parts of the ballet to be heard in Soviet Russia. By the 150

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time the ballet received its first national performance at Leningrad’s Kirov Theatre in 1940, much of the music was already familiar. Now Prokofiev’s works were at the forefront of Yudina’s repertoire, which already included his Visions Fugitives Op. 22, and Piano Sonatas numbers 2, 3, 4 and 5. In 1936 Prokofiev presented Yudina with a gift copy of Chose en soi Op. 45a, inscribed ‘To Maria Veniaminovna. In memory of her performance of the Second concerto’. There were in fact two separate Choses en soi (Op. 45a and Op. 45b), dating from 1928. Their title referred to Immanuel Kant’s concept of the empirical ‘Thing in Itself ’, well suited to Yudina’s philosophical bent. Yudina only performed the first Chose en soi much later, in 1965, when she also recorded it. However, on 7 April 1937 she gave the first Soviet performance of another Prokofiev work, Pensées Op. 62 (Mysli), at the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The cycle, consisting of three short pieces – Adagio Penseroso/Moderato, Lento and Andante – was written in Paris shortly before Prokofiev’s relocation to Moscow. The music is a world apart from his piano sonatas, more cerebral and darkly introspective. That Prokofiev entrusted Yudina with these performances was a compliment; evidently such rising stars as Emil Gilels and Yakov Zak preferred the brilliance of his early piano works and the immediacy of the sonatas, as did the Soviet critics. It is difficult not to associate the atmosphere of grim foreboding in Pensées with Prokofiev’s relocation to the Soviet Union in 1936, of hopes raised and dashed. By the time Prokofiev came to write his next three Piano Sonatas, numbers 6, 7 and 8, composed between 1940 and 1944, he no longer felt up to performing them. Gilels gave the first performance of Sonata no. 8, and Sviatoslav Richter of Sonatas no. 6* and no. 7. The last of Prokofiev’s piano sonatas, Sonata no. 9, was written in 1947 and dedicated to Richter. Although Yudina was not a ‘first performer’ of these sonatas, she quickly learnt the eighth, which she recognized as ‘a work of genius’. In her Conservatoire class Prokofiev’s works were assiduously studied. When Yudina taught the Second Piano Concerto to her talented student, Rosa Chernobrova-Levina, she asked the composer if he would listen to her. Yudina apparently had scrawled as a reminder at a particularly difficult

* Prokofiev gave the first performance of Sonata no. 6 as a radio broadcast.

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place just one word in the margin of the score: ‘Think!’ Prokofiev was intrigued: ‘Think? In this of all places! Shouldn’t one always think?’38 During Yudina’s first years at the Moscow Conservatoire, she was able to realize a cherished project – a semi-staged performance of Taneyev’s opera Oresteia, based on Aeschylus’ tragedy. She had first nurtured the idea of presenting the opera in the early 1920s, a reflection of her high esteem for Taneyev. The subject also appealed to her ‘as a classicist who never completed my studies’. Now, furthermore, she could involve many esteemed colleagues in the Oresteia production. ‘It was easy and joyful working at the Moscow Conservatoire, where “events of wide significance” were encouraged. Before the War the two directors I worked under – our inimitable Heinrich Neuhaus and his successor, Valentina Shatskaya – complemented each other, despite their different approaches.’39 Yudina substituted the orchestra on the piano and worked with the soloists on their roles. Dolivo recruited singers from his class as well as hers. Her superlative team of collaborators saw Yavorsky as consultant, Protopopov as director of the student choir, and Vladimir Favorsky as set and costume designer. ‘Vladimir Andreyevich created provisory symbolic costumes for the female roles. He designed rotating shields depicting various subjects, and a multi-function stage curtain which served to hide the organ in the Conservatoire’s Small Hall.’40 Finding a director was more difficult. Yudina and Yavorsky wanted to invite Vsevolod Meyerhold, but his theatre had been forcibly closed in January 1938. In Yudina’s words, ‘Our precious Meyerhold felt downtrodden and depressed. I wanted to elevate the student forces under his directorship and in turn to revive his spirit.’ Early in 1938, Stanislavsky invited Meyerhold to work as his assistant. He was then appointed director of Prokofiev’s stillunfinished opera, Semyon Kotko, based on the novel, I, Son of the Working People by Valentin Katayev. On 20 June 1939, just a week before Prokofiev completed the piano score, Meyerhold was arrested. This unrealized collaboration between Meyerhold and Prokofiev was just one in a long list of ‘mighthave-beens’, starting with the production of The Gamblers at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1916–17. More recently a Meyerhold production of Pushkin’s verse play, Boris Godunov, with incidental music composed by Prokofiev, was banned just before the opening. Some days before his arrest Meyerhold had spoken his mind at a Conference of Theatre Directors in Leningrad, declaring ‘In hunting down formalism you have eliminated Art.’41 Meyerhold 152

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disappeared without trace – for the next two decades even the date of his death was unknown, let alone the details of his interrogations and torture. Friends and colleagues were deeply shocked when, a month later his wife Zinaida Raikh was brutally murdered. Only now Prokofiev did understand the enormity of his miscalculation in returning to the Soviet Union. Yudina and Yavorsky now addressed the conformist ‘socialist’ director, Serafima Germanovna Birman, who objected to the Oresteia for not being contemporary, and hence irrelevant. Birman, one might add, took over from Meyerhold as director of Prokofiev’s Semyon Kotko. It was her bad luck that the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop non-aggression pact on 23 August 1939 had a negative impact on the opera. Much had to be changed – not least the villainous German soldiers had to be substituted by a different enemy, namely Ukrainian nationalists with monarchic tendencies. In the end Minas Gevorkyan, a lecturer at the Gnesins’ Institute and the Theatre and Arts Institute (GITIS), took over the direction of the Oresteia. In reality, it was Boleslav Yavorsky, himself a composition and counterpoint pupil of Taneyev’s, who exerted the greatest influence on its staging. He and Yudina explored questions of dramatic convention, much influenced by Meyerhold’s theory of ‘conditional theatre’, based on symbolic or non-representational theatrical devices. In preparation for the concert performance, Yavorsky recounted his meetings with Taneyev in a series of packed-out lectures for Conservatoire students and the opera’s participants. Taneyev’s was the only Russian opera to be written on a classical subject, where profound emotions and intense musical expression are channelled through myth. Yavorsky recounted the paradox in Taneyev, who was by nature a conservative, yet endowed with inordinate musical curiosity about compositional innovation. This objectivity allowed him to accept in others what was alien to him, not least in his very dissimilar students, Scriabin and Rachmaninov. Taneyev had a grudging admiration for Wagner, but preferred Handel or Mozart. Yet Taneyev’s views on Wagner were equivocal; he disliked the music dramas, while admiring the daring harmonic language and prowess in orchestration. His famous quip to his one-time teacher, Tchaikovsky, that ‘much could be learnt from Wagner, including how not to write operas!’,42 must be seen in the context of Taneyev’s profound knowledge of Wagner’s Ring cycle. As he was writing the Oresteia, Taneyev was completely immersed in analysing Siegfried, and he 153

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borrowed from Wagner such features as construction of through-drama, a densely chromatic harmonic language, and reliance on archetypal mythology and leitmotifs as a form of premonition and reminiscence. Protopopov wrote of the significance of the denouement in the finale of the Oresteia, where catharsis is reached ‘through founding a new order, bringing truth, justice and peace under the protection of the law’.43 This moral concept characterized the emergence of social concerns in late nineteenth-century Russia, but had glaring relevance in a society where the law no longer protected its citizens. Protopopov trained the student choir in its traditional role of commentator in a Greek Chorus, for which Taneyev had written music of great polyphonic complexity. Yudina valued Yavorsky’s active participation in the rehearsal process: ‘Sometimes we had heated discussions or arguments about the tempi and the characteristics of the leading roles. Yavorsky was implacable in his views, but I too could be equally unyielding, having formed my judgements during my classical studies at Petrograd University.’44 Yavorsky’s understanding of the Oresteia, according to Yudina, resulted from his ‘identification with the eternal through the temporal, the uniting of distant voices with their opposites, the inexorable advance to the crux of the tragic conflict. In the context of despair caused by the sequence of murders, Pallas Athena (Goddess of Truth and Wisdom) and Apollo transport the maimed heroes to light and redemption.’ Yudina recognized the immense scale of Taneyev’s opera, ‘Yet at the same time it often lacks tension in the rhythmic structure and ordered harmonic flow. So what saves the work? Without doubt, its connection to antiquity [. . .] distracts from the music’s weaknesses – like a person who loves an ugly face lit up by some spiritually precious quality!’45 Certainly the principal features of Greek tragedy – doomed heroes, horrific atrocities and reprisals – seemed to mirror what was happening in the Soviet Russia of this period. Yudina’s semi-staged production of the Oresteia was triumphantly received at the Small Hall of the Conservatoire on 6 May 1939. Yavorsky congratulated all involved on the shared success of the venture. ‘In the crowded small green room he gave his verdict: “The Dead have opened the eyes of the Living.” ’46 The director of the Opera Studio, Nazary Raisky, declared that Yudina had ‘created a monument to Taneyev’.47 Even when taken up with rehearsing the Oresteia for the first half of 1939, Yudina did not cease her concert activity. On 16 February she 154

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performed four concertos in one evening at Moscow’s Hall of Columns under Abram Stasevich’s direction. This pianistic marathon was to consist of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Mozart’s Concerto in D minor K.466, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy and Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds (1923–4), which Yudina had learnt for the occasion. Two decades later she recalled that at the time ‘the Stravinsky score was nowhere to be found in Moscow or Leningrad, so to my eternal shame I played instead Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto!’48 Later that year she repeated the ‘shameful’ concerto in Leningrad with the Radio Orchestra under Karl Eliasberg. In fact, despite his émigré status, Rachmaninov was coming back into fashion in Soviet Russia. Yudina nursed a colossal prejudice against his music; in the last decade of her life while busy promoting contemporary music, she branded Rachmaninov as synonymous with everything retrograde. Admittedly she loved his religious choral music. Now on 5 March Yudina performed a mixed programme at the Moscow Conservatoire’s Grand Hall, designed to appeal to public taste: a group of Rachmaninov’s Preludes and Études-Tableaux, Bach’s C minor Toccata, Mozart’s A minor Rondo, and Liszt’s variations on Bach’s cantata ‘Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Sagen’ (of which Sviatoslav Richter proclaimed her performances were ‘phenomenal’), as well as various transcriptions – Bach–Busoni Chorale Preludes, Rameau–Godowsky’s Élégie and Schubert– Liszt’s Doppelgänger. A novelty in that programme was an arrangement for piano of the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem made by Kirill Saltykov, a young student who had joined Yudina’s class the previous year. She had first played the piece in Leningrad’s Grand Hall of the Philharmonia on 25 December 1938, together with Haydn’s F minor Variations, Brahms’ B minor Intermezzo from Op. 119, Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, and Prokofiev’s Second Piano Sonata and Romeo and Juliet pieces (‘The Second Suite’). She was to programme Saltykov’s Lacrimosa transcription frequently, and often played it as an encore. The addition of a male pianist to Yudina’s class served to break the monopoly of female students. In contemporary photos the girls appear like disciples, dressed simply in black with white collars. Kirill Saltykov was a man of many talents. By profession he was a constructor of aeroplanes; now he was studying to become a composer and pianist; his former piano teacher, 155

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Vladimir Belov, had been arrested earlier in 1938. Notwithstanding the fifteen years’ age difference, Saltykov and Yudina developed an intense attachment. Possibly Yudina read more into the relationship than he did; in any case she considered herself betrothed by the end of 1938. When she performed Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto under the composer’s baton, she confessed that this ‘resurrection’ in her playing was not because she played for him or the audience, but because she performed for one particular person, her new fiancé Kirill Saltykov.49 She described him as ‘a person of great education and rare spiritual beauty, and also of extreme daring and knightly courtliness’.50 Bakhtin confirmed her view: ‘Kirill was an absolutely charming young man, slender and handsome.’ Yudina and Kirill visited Bakhtin and his wife in Savyolovo, bringing books necessary to his work. Even Yudina’s closest friends were not sure of Kirill’s status. Yelena Skrzhinskaya declared: ‘Kirill was never a fiancé. MV [Maria Veniaminovna] got it into her head that they were engaged.’51 Her sister Irina recalled Kirill as ‘a degenerative type, with a prominent forehead, a flattened nose and rough facial features. He was tall, lanky and uncoordinated. I saw him first at his father’s funeral. MV first buried Kirill’s father, then Kirill himself.’52 A close friend of Natalia Andreyeva and schoolmate of Kirill’s, Kseniya Grishtayeva believed the whole affair was imagined by Yudina. A one-time piano student and ardent admirer of Yudina’s, Grishtayeva was involved in looking after Andreyeva’s twin daughters while Yudina was acting as their guardian, and she was remembered for her infectious charm.53 Grishtayeva now accused Yudina of destroying her possibilities of becoming a pianist. While hardly an objective witness, she spoke of Yudina’s ‘strange fantasies’ of marrying Kirill Saltykov. According to her, Yudina had demanded that he give up music to dedicate himself to profound meditative prayer.54 Yudina’s letters provide proof to the contrary – if one of them was to give up music, it would be she and not Kirill. In early June 1939 Kirill, a keen amateur alpinist, left Moscow for Nalchik to take part in a climbing expedition in the North-West Caucasus. Shortly after his departure, Yudina succumbed to a particularly acute attack of rheumatic fever, while staying outside Moscow in rented rooms in the village of Nikolskoye. ‘The first night of illness was particularly terrifying. My friend Nastya was staying, but I sent her downstairs thinking I might be infectious. 156

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I remained alone. In the morning, when they started driving the cattle to pasture, after a night maddened by pain and sleeplessness, I crawled on my knees to the balcony and implored the herd owners to call a doctor, but they refused. Then I crawled to the stairwell and decided to wake somebody. Then I experienced great kindness and was given home-made remedies.’55 Her doctor-brother, Lev Yudin, arranged her admission to the civil aviation hospital in Moscow. In a letter to the musicologist Grigori Kogan written three weeks later, she lamented, ‘To start with my legs were in agony [. . .] then my whole world collapsed, as if I had been hurled to the ground by a storm [. . .] I am told I cannot get up, because of the danger of infection spreading and damaging the heart.’56 Yudina’s letters to Kirill reflect her mood of hopelessness: And the days passed without any letter from him. ‘My Kisinka, darling! Today is the third day that the post brings nothing from you. Zigi [her name for herself] with tears trickling down her cheeks says to herself: “God gives and God takes away.” What else is left if Kisa forgets me?’57 A visit from Yavorsky and Protopopov did not bring comfort – they bore the chilling news of Meyerhold’s arrest and his wife Zinaida Reich’s subsequent brutal murder. In the meantime, Yudina felt mounting concern for Alexander Meier’s second wife, her friend Kseniya Polovtseva. After being released from the Gulag in 1935 and 1933 respectively, the couple had moved to Dmitrov where Meier worked as a hired labourer on the Volga–Moscow River canal. Now he lay dying in a hospital in Leningrad.* Banned from the big cities as a former Zek,** Polovtseva was unable to see her husband. Yudina informed Kirill that she would shortly visit Kseniya in Dmitrov. ‘I will suggest she comes to stay with me, both when I am at home and when I am away.’58 As it was, illness prevented Yudina from going anywhere in this period – she was not discharged from hospital until early August. The six weeks of separation were intended to test Yudina’s and Saltykov’s feelings for each other. Yet she was full of foreboding: ‘My feeling of Terror has been growing. I have stopped thinking that you don’t want to write to me, supposing that some catastrophe might have befallen you. Yesterday I was in despair – can you begin to understand this? It was as if all my life, my * Meier died on 19 July 1939. ** Zek is slang derived from zaklyuchyonny, meaning prisoner/camp inmate.

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hopes, my happiness with you, was disintegrating – every fibre of my being trembles as if hanging by a single hair!’ Yudina asked herself if life was worth living should Kirill leave her. The alternative was ‘to live for those who might need me’. She thought of the altruistic professions, perhaps to become a nurse. As for music, she would only play the most abstracted music possible. ‘I will quietly live out my days, burning slowly like a one-kopek church candle and then snuff it out, my heart’s thoughts for my handsome Kirillushka.’59 Two days later, his long-awaited letter arrived but it brought no relief, showing ‘hurry and indifference’. Yudina saw his destiny embedded in his character. ‘Kirill asked me to “release him” to go to the mountains just one last time before we married and got involved in looking after our children, for we both dreamt of having a large family. Had his mother and I been more prescient and cautious, we would not have allowed him to depart for these ill-fated mountains.’60 Yudina had only recently heard of alpinists who had perished on the slopes of Mt Elbrus. These mountains were treacherous. Yet only a month or two earlier, she had dreamt of joining Kirill in the Caucasus, to climb, ski or simply to indulge in the communion of spirits against the backdrop of Europe’s highest peaks. On 28 July three members of the student party, including Kirill, were swept up and buried in an avalanche when climbing the peak of Bzhedukh on the borders of Kabardino-Balkaria and Georgia. For Yudina the death of Kirill marked a closed chapter in her life. His body was recovered and transported to Moscow, where he was buried on 7 August at the Vvedensky or ‘German’ Cemetery. Yudina may have derived comfort from the belief that they would be reunited in the next world; in just over thirty years’ time she would be buried next to him. Through their shared grief Kirill’s mother, Yelena Nikolayevna Saltykova, and Yudina overcame their mutual diffidence. Yudina now took over Kirill’s responsibilities as a son, regarding Yelena Nikolayevna as her mother-in-law. To start with she moved into Saltykova’s Moscow apartment at Sytinsky Tupik and occupied Kirill’s room. Even when they weren’t living under the same roof, Yudina included Yelena Nikolayevna in all aspects of her life and looked after her until the end. She could only make sense of her existence by living her life as a memorial to Kirill: ‘My earthly life is over. This is an aboutturn of 360°, away from life, towards death.’61 She prayed: ‘Lord, let me bear the Cross of repentance, help me bear the void in my life without him, 158

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without everything which gave my existence sense, strength and joy when he was here [. . .] Give me fortitude to atone for my sins towards his mother through acquiring love for her.’62 Yudina’s friends urged her to resume her musical activities. ‘When I left the clinic, hardly able to stand on my legs, I had lost that which was most precious to me [. . .] Yavorsky cajoled and cursed me and insisted I continue my work. “You are an artist,” he said. “You must not allow yourself to be consumed by grief.” ’63 Yet music gave no comfort, and Yudina cancelled all performances for the next year. She even handed over her role of pianist/ producer in a repeat performance of the Oresteia. ‘It slipped off my shoulders like a mantle.’ At a small gathering in the Conservatoire director’s office in memory of Kirill and the two other students who lost their lives, Yudina performed in their honour. In 1940 she gave a single public concert on 24 March, performing Mozart’s D minor concerto under Nikolai Rabinovich at the Leningrad Philharmonic Hall. On 10 October 1939 she wrote to Prokofiev with a ‘crazy and terrible’ request to write a Requiem for Kirill: ‘I seem fated to have your works appear as symbols of the most important events of my life. And now, it is immeasurably more serious than five years ago! I remind you of that “Prelude to Catastrophe” only from fear you might do so yourself. And another of your great works, Romeo and Juliet, was a threatening symbol for us.’ Kirill was an immense admirer of Prokofiev and kept his photograph on his desk. Yudina saw similarities between their personalities – ‘profound, with hidden tenderness and gentleness, and actively striving forward’. A possible Prokofiev Requiem would be ‘not just for the departed life, but in some measure for me – of course there is no return now to earthly life, the gates to Eternity are thrown wide open [. . .] I think I merit a response to my request: maybe other pianists play your works better than I, but few play them as I do, as if for the first and last – the only time.’64 Yudina could not help remembering that Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, which she adored ‘with her life’s blood’, was written as a memorial to the composer’s close young friend Max Schmidthof. Prokofiev never wrote that Requiem, but in his next work, the Sixth Piano Sonata, the unleashed fury of the first movement and the clear associations with his Romeo and Juliet in the second movement were possibly related to Yudina’s request. Giving vent to her sorrow, Yudina sought comfort from the Florensky family – in particular from Olga, Father Pavel’s daughter. It was as if she 159

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needed to cling to those who understood the full meaning of loss. The family still nurtured faint hopes that Florensky might be alive – they were informed of the date of his death only many years later. On the first anniversary of Kirill’s death Yudina wrote to Florensky’s widow, Anna Mikhailovna, asking her to pray for herself and Kirill (‘Your prayers surely find their way to God!’). Her pain was unbearably acute – it felt as if Kirill’s death ‘happened only yesterday. I can only thank God that my grief does not heal!’65 At the same time Yudina rejected any form of pity. When her wellmeaning piano students decided to petition the Conservatoire director to give their beloved professor a proper living space, she was beside herself with fury. The students were probably unaware of her new living arrangement with Kirill’s mother, and addressed various influential people, including Prokofiev amd Nikolai Myaskovsky. Yudina immediately wrote to both composers: ‘Only three days ago I discovered the outrageous interference in my life on the part of my students and of their incredibly “tactless” collection of signatures. Fortunately, I discovered this from a good friend of mine to whom they had confided their “good deeds”. I beg your forgiveness on their behalf [. . .] They could not have caused me greater moral harm if they had tried, for all my life I have been beholden to nobody.’66 The students had not understood that Yudina’s independence was sacred, as was her complete disregard for material possessions.67 Towards the end of 1940 Yudina fractured her leg and spent most of November in hospital – this time at the Moscow University clinic, where the leg was operated on and put in plaster. In answer to a telegram from Yavorsky, sending wishes for a quick return to the ‘blossoming’ of her artistic life, she wrote, ‘Thank you for your telegram, whose text displays a certain venom! My leg hangs like a clock’s pendulum on a Rathaus tower in one of the fast-disappearing towns of Europe. You might be reminded of a leg of a Red October* piano – indeed, my leg weighs as much as the rest of me! The next stage will be crutches – so a rapid “blossoming” is not foreseeable.’68 Once out of hospital, Yudina was soon back on the concert platform. On 12 February 1941 she performed Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 with the Leningrad Philharmonic under Nathan Rakhlin. A professor of musicology at

* A make of Soviet piano of dubious quality, with ugly stout legs.

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the Leningrad Conservatoire, Yekaterina Ruchevskaya recalled ‘Maria Veniaminovna walking across the stage to the piano on crutches, her leg still in plaster; however, this in no way impeded the enormous impression her playing made on me.’69 Yudina retained a slight limp for the rest of her life. With only one more concert to play that season, Yudina’s thoughts turned to Schubert, whose lieder represented the ideal combination of poetry and music. Her profound knowledge of German poetry underscored her passion for German-Austrian lieder. Like Shostakovich she did not believe in singing in a language that was not understood – it risked becoming a phonetic exercise. Hence, translations of quality were fundamental, ensuring easy comprehension and the coincidence of poetic and musical stresses. ‘Innumerable times I was struck by the imperfection of the texts of vocal works, not to speak of the very mediocre quality of Russian poems set by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov (settings of forgotten poets like Rathaus, Apukhtin, Galina!),’ Yudina confessed. ‘Particularly vexatious were the old-fashioned translations of lieder by Schubert, Brahms and Schumann. And there are simply no modern translations of the marvellous song literature in French, German, Polish, such as the complete lack of translations of Carl Loewe’s Ballads.’70 She decided to initiate a project commissioning isometric translations of Schubert lieder, where not one note of the music would need adjusting. An antecedent lay in Dolivo’s recent anthologies of Beethoven songs, with excellent translations by Andrei Glob. Yudina also knew Sergei Zayaitsky’s excellent contem­ porary translations of Wilhelm Müller’s texts in Schubert’s Winterreise and Schwanengesang. Two enlightened people, the Conservatoire’s administrative manager and the director of the Gnesins’ Institute, supported Yudina in helping her find funds for the project. Paradoxically, censorship ensured the extremely high standard of literary translation in Soviet Russia. Poets like Akhmatova and Mandelstam, unable to publish their original work, resorted to translation in order to earn money. From the late 1930s Pasternak became known for his brilliant translations of Shakespeare’s plays, and later of Goethe’s Faust. The poets may have resented the time taken from their own work, yet Soviet readers reaped great benefit from their wonderful translations. The first translator whom Yudina addressed was Boris Pasternak. In late 1940, the Moscow Arts Theatre decided to use his translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which went into production, although it never reached the stage. 161

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Although terribly busy with rehearsals, Pasternak was interested in Yudina’s idea. In early February he wrote: ‘Dear Maria Veniaminovna! I had a completely crazy January, which might explain my seeming carelessness. At the beginning I gave my agreement to your proposal, but largely because it was you asking me, and you who needed it. My wish to do something for your collection has the same lack of obligation, which deprives me of willingness to partake in anything of significance. Look at it like this. From the practical point of view my promise is worthless. Consider me as one of your reserve team of contributors, not as an active participant. Believe me, in this role I am never late.’71 Work on the Schubert anthology was to be interrupted by the Second World War. Some of Yudina’s contributors were to be called up; others, like the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, were languishing in Siberian exile. In the spring of 1941 Pasternak and Neuhaus suggested involving Marina Tsvetayeva as a translator – the poet was multi-lingual: her famed correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke was written in German. Pasternak in particular was well aware of Tsvetayeva’s desperate plight since returning to Russia from exile in France with her son. Her daughter Ariadna (Alya) and her husband, Sergei Efron, preceded her to Moscow; both were arrested shortly after Tsvetayeva’s return. Efron, a compromised figure, was shot in 1941. Ariadna was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag. In desperation, Tsvetayeva hanged herself in August 1941 in Yelabuga. Her son Georgi (Mur) was killed in action during the Second World War. Yudina confessed to knowing very little of Tsvetayeva’s poetry at the time. Now in February 1940 she arranged to go and see her: In preparation for the meeting with Tsvetayeva my head was filled with thoughts of Pasternak’s ‘Maria Ilina’ in [his verse novel] Spektorsky. A rickety staircase led up to a dark attic room. One was immediately overcome by an atmosphere of heart-rending melancholy, of disarray, of impending catastrophe. A mutually alienated greeting – I see an elderly, broken woman – I try to be respectful, courteous, and kind [. . .] I sit on the edge of the chair and show her the Schubert lieder. ‘Well, if anything, then only Goethe,’ Tsvetayeva said with severity. ‘Of course,’ I answer, ‘he is the best.’ To start with I suggested ‘Mignon’s Song’, and the ‘Harpist’ from Wilhelm Meister. She agreed absent-mindedly, and I hurried away. From some door or other her youthful, handsome son appeared.

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1. Maria Yudina, a year after her debut in Petrograd in 1921, as newly appointed professor of Petrograd Conservatoire. The skull on her desk indicates her studious interest in philosophy and all things spiritual.

2. Maria’s father, Veniamin Gavrilovich Yudin: a doctor and social organiser, co-founder of Nevel’ hospital.

3. Maria’s mother, Raisa Yakovlevna Yudina.

4. Anna Yesipova, concert pianist and professor of St Petersburg Conservatoire, where Yudina was her pupil for just over a year.

5. Bakhtin’s circle recreated in Leningrad, c.1924–6. (L–R) sitting: Yudina, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Pumpyansky, Pavel Medvedyev, unidentified woman; standing: Vaginov’s wife, Konstantin Vaginov, Bakhtin’s wife Alyona, unidentified man.

6. Yudina at piano, late 1920s/early 1930s.

7. Detail from Alisa Poret and Tatiana Glebova’s composite oil canvas The House Cut Open (1931). This is the bottom right-hand corner of the painting: Yudina at home.

8. Yudina playing for naval officers in besieged Leningrad, summer 1943.

9. Concert in wartime Moscow with conductor Nikolai Anosov at the Grand Hall of the Conservatoire, 8 June 1943.

10. Poster for Yudina’s recital at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia in besieged Leningrad, 3 October 1943. Her programme features works by César Franck, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt and Sergei Prokofiev.

11. Pencil drawing of Maria Yudina by Vladimir Favorsky, January 1949.

12. Yudina with Igor Stravinsky at the opening of the exhibition in his honour at the Leningrad House of Composers, 6 October 1962.

13. Stravinsky receiving applause at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. Beside him (L–R): Kirill Kondrashin, Tikhon Khrennikov, unidentified woman, Aram Khachaturian, Maria Yudina (in white scarf), Karen Khachaturian (in dark glasses). Moscow, September 1962.

14. The Union of the Composers First Secretary Tikhon Khrennikov and Maria Yudina. Moscow, 1962.

15. Yudina’s desk-cum-dining table at her flat on Rostovskaya Embankment, 1967. Her cat Malva playfully bites her arm.

16. Yudina reading from the Gospel at Pasternak’s grave on the 10th anniversary of his death, 30 May 1970 – four and a half months before her own death. Behind her in glasses is Yudina’s Russian biographer, Anatoli Kuznetsov.

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But I should have thrown myself at her feet, kissed her hands and washed them with hot, bitter tears. I should have removed some burden or other to lighten her load. It’s hard for me to understand why I was so reticent, even indifferent. Perhaps because I bore on my shoulders the fate of so many people, old and young, sick, torn from their homes through exile and the onset of war. All these people had to be fed, I had to think of everybody [. . .] Yet there was no justification, my sin was that of insufficient love.72

Yudina returned to examine the translations that Tsvetayeva had completed. They proved to be unusable, for the words did not fit with Schubert’s music. ‘When I quietly explained this to Tsvetayeva, the poet simply did not hear me. There was nothing left but to go away!’73 Many years later Yudina wrote to Pierre Souvchinsky: ‘Hers is not my poetry, although Tsvetayeva had unlimited talent, was innovative – a poet worthy of the greatest respect and compassion. But everything is pronounced in fff, and the whole world is proclaimed guilty before her – even before she met her terrible fate. All this is alien to me [. . .] Now Mandelstam – he’s my poet!’74 Yudina needed a literary consultant for her cherished Schubert project – Mikhail Bakhtin, or ‘Mikh Mikh’ as she referred to him, was the obvious choice. Yudina had kept in close touch with him during his years of exile, first in Kustanai in north-west Kazakhstan, where he worked as a bookkeeper, and then from September 1936 in Saransk in Mordovia, where he found employment at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute. But as the purges of 1936–7 extended outwards from the capital cities to the provinces and outlying regions, Bakhtin and his wife rightly foresaw that the Pedagogical Institute would be ‘cleansed’, and they therefore decided to leave Saransk. They moved to the small town of Savyolovo, a railway junction on the banks of the Volga. Here they rented accommodation just outside the obligatory 100 kilometres from Moscow, the nearest distance permitted to former ‘exiles’. Savyolovo was already full of ‘100-kilometre’ people in positions similar to theirs – Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam had been living there for a few months, Polovtseva was not far off in Dmitrov, and Emilyan Zalessky, their friend from Leningrad days, recently released from prison, was in Kimri, on the opposite bank of the Volga. In the meantime, Bakhtin suffered from a deterioration of his osteomyelitis, necessitating the amputation of his right leg in February 1938. 163

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A survivor by nature, Bakhtin was determined that this impediment would not hinder his work. In Savyolovo he returned to his writing, aided by Zalessky and other members of his Circle, Ivan Kanaev and Matvei Kagan, in gaining access to libraries and books, which were unobtainable in provincial exile. Soon Bakhtin was being offered occasional paid work, and participated in a Shakespeare conference in Moscow’s House of Literati in April 1940. Yudina regularly sent money and books to Bakhtin, and used her contacts in academic circles to facilitate the acceptance of his doctoral thesis on Rabelais. Amongst the potential reviewers, interlocutors and examiners she sought out was Leonid Timofeyev, a member of the Academy of Sciences and department head of Soviet Literature at the Gorky Institute of World Literature. Timofeyev gave his full support to Bakhtin, thereby opening the doors for the presentation of his thesis at the Institute. In September 1940 Yudina wrote to Bakhtin, saying she had ‘unexpectedly found a direct route to a certain Professor Isaak Nusinov [. . .] Let me know at once if he is necessary to your work, and if so, who should approach him.’75 It transpired that Nusinov’s sister-in-law was the pianist Esfira Fedorchenko, married to Yudina’s singing student Pyotr Derevyanko – a participant in the Oresteia performance. Nusinov, a specialist in French literature, acted as one of the three official examiners at Bakhtin’s presentation of his doctoral thesis in November 1946. Yudina continued consulting Bakhtin on her Schubert project. She had just met the poet Mikhail Lodzinsky in Leningrad: ‘A delightful and most honourable person! Notwithstanding his illness and busy schedule, he promised to read the Schubert song texts.’76 However, Lodzinsky was now exclusively occupied with his magnum opus, a translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia, and could not participate. Yudina implored Bakhtin to write a short essay on Goethe’s significance to composers as an introduction to a radio broadcast on ‘Goethe in Beethoven and Schubert’. All these small jobs paid decently – Yudina sent Bakhtin 200 roubles as an advance for the Goethe piece. ‘But best of all if you were to come to Moscow,’ she wrote. ‘Then we could invent all kinds of work, great and small! What’s holding you back?’77 There was good news too – Muzgiz (the State publishing house) would publish the Schubert anthology. In the meantime Yudina was busy with friends and relatives. On 29 March she wrote to her ‘dear Mikhis! We haven’t 164

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gone mad because we didn’t answer – it’s been pandemonium with friends and relatives all descending simultaneously.’78 Kseniya Polovtseva had been visiting, Yelena Nikolayevna’s sister was admitted to hospital, and her own sister, Anna, was operated on for a hernia. Between one thing and another there was little space left for performing. Yudina’s musical activity during the 1940/41 season was reduced to a mere four concerts. From that point of view, things changed emphatically for the better with the start of what became known as the Great Patriotic War in June 1941. Yudina performed concerts and became one of the country’s most active radio broadcasters, reaching a vast circle of listeners from frontline soldiers to those under siege or in far-off exile. She found a new sense to her existence in fulfilling her heroic destiny.

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WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

The Muses [. . .] are not silent in Leningrad. They sound in dialogue with the voices of War. Maria Yudina1 On 22 June 1941 the Soviet Union awoke to find itself at war with Hitler’s Germany. Within days people from all walks of life – professionals, students and workers – rushed to volunteer at recruitment centres and Party and Komsomol offices. The so-called Narodnoe opolchenie, a popular levy or militia home guard, which appeared spontaneously in moments of national crisis, was once again formed from volunteers, mostly without any military training. The Moscow Conservatoire, like all educational and professional institutions, announced its participation in the war effort, under the banner ‘The Conservatoire – To the Front’. On 5 July a first contingent of Conservatoire students and staff joined the 24th regiment of the Krasnaya Presnaya Division of the Moscow militia. Here students were deployed at military academies for training, in the preparation of defences, digging trenches or helping on the land. Over the summer vacation, the Conservatoire remained open for basic military instruction and first-aid courses run by the Red Cross reserve. Yudina’s initial reaction was to rush off to the front; more sensibly, she decided to attend the Red Cross two-week course. She was honest in assessing her nursing abilities: ‘I had to admit that I didn’t know how to do anything. In practice I would have simply wept abundant tears over the heavily wounded and would have been no use to anybody.’2 She was, however, ‘inordinately proud’ of her military pass. In early August a first contingent of the Conservatoire’s oldest professors under their current director, Alexander Goldenweiser, was evacuated to 166

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Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria in the North-West Caucasus. Part of the group, the composers Prokofiev and Myaskovsky, paid tribute to their place of refuge by incorporating Kabardinian folk songs into their works.* Like them, Yudina belonged to the so-called Golden Fund of the Arts and would have been eligible for evacuation. She and her ‘motherin-law’, Yelena Saltykova, received instructions about leaving for Nalchik. ‘We both felt terribly uneasy – in this we were like-minded. We simply said to each other, “If needed, we will stay and dig trenches outside Moscow. Together with the People, we will accept only Death or Victory.” ’3 Never for a moment did Yudina abandon her unswerving belief in a Soviet victory. With the rapid advance of the Nazi troops and collapse of initial resistance, the overriding public faith in the Red Army as a well-equipped military machine disintegrated. Public perception of the war swung from resilient defiance to anxious foreboding; by the end of the summer public morale reached a low point. Events were moving with lightning speed. By early September the Nazi troops were at the gates of Leningrad, subjecting the city to incessant gunfire, air raids and artillery bombardment. The rush for evacuation started, but as the city was surrounded, ordinary citizens remained stuck in the city to endure a 900-day siege. The situation in Moscow was hardly better, and by late September the government gave orders for the evacuation of all academic institutions. In these operations of enormous logistical complexity, every effort was made to ensure institutions remained cohesive. Thus, the Central Musical School was evacuated to Penza, the Leningrad Conservatoire to Tashkent, the Leningrad Philharmonic to Novosibirsk, and the Malegot Theatre to Kuibyshev (one-time Samara), the city where its most famous wartime inhabitant, Dmitri Shostakovich, completed his Seventh Symphony. The Moscow Conservatoire, however, was split up, the largest number of teachers and students deployed to Saratov in early October. Another group, including the composers Shebalin, Glière and Kabalevsky, were transferred to Sverdlovsk. In November 1942 the first Conservatoire evacuees had to leave Nalchik, which by now had been captured by Rumanian troops. Igumnov, Goldenweiser and Prokofiev relocated to Tbilisi, Myaskovsky and Shaporin to Frunze. In fact a substantial

* Prokofiev’s Second String Quartet and the finale of Myaskovsky’s Twenty-Third Symphony.

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number of teachers and students remained in Moscow, even if during the first, bitterly cold winter of the war, the Conservatoire had to close its doors. In the first months of the war students and established artists – Yudina amongst them – formed brigades to perform in hospitals, recruitment centres, military clubs and in outdoor spaces. On occasion the performers got too close to the front line. Georgi Artobolevsky, the husband of Yudina’s former student Anna Karpeka, was shot dead by an enemy bullet while reciting poetry during a concert. Many illustrious musicians who played for the troops – the violinist David Oistrakh, the pianists Emil Gilels and Yakov Zak – had joined the Eighth Krasnaya Presnaya Volunteer Division, together with writers, historians and journalists. A good number of the 250 Conservatoire volunteers were sent to the front lines, and not all survived. An inspirational example came from the Pro-Rektor (vice-director), Abram Dyakov, the first Conservatoire musician to volunteer. An excellent pianist, a student of Igumnov’s, Dyakov was professor of chamber music between 1936 and 1941, and performed in duo with such eminent violinists as Oistrakh and Miron Polyakin, and the cellists Emanuel Feuermann and Enrico Mainardi. Although a skilled organizer, Dyakov adamantly refused to occupy an administrative position, and was determined to do active service. He participated in the Smolenshchina, the ferocious battles in and around Smolensk, which held up the German advance on Moscow. On 4 and 5 October 7,500 volunteers of the Eighth Krasnaya Presnaya Division were encircled and annihilated outside Vyazma. Dyakov was captured by the German troops, and his whereabouts were unknown for several years. Later it transpired that he was tortured and died in a Nazi concentration camp. He was honoured as the Conservatoire’s principal wartime hero. Yudina’s admiration for colleagues and students who were called up or volunteered knew no bounds. Those like her dear comrade Dyakov and Konstantin Shotinov, an editor friend at the Radio killed in action, were fulfilling a destiny beyond patriotic duty: ‘To those heroes who lost their lives at the Front – Eternal Memory!’ she declared.4 Yudina sent food parcels to her students serving in the army. Lev Lyubetsky, one of the recipients, wrote to thank her, while insisting he had not merited such kindness, for he had ‘accomplished no feats!’ Yudina didn’t agree. ‘That’s how in these tumultuous times ordinary, good people [. . .] achieved genuine heroism. They laid down their lives for the Motherland. My student Lev [was killed] leaving his beautiful wife, Lida Leshchinskaya, and a small daughter Tatochka.’5 168

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Yudina was already in the habit of sending food to friends in prison. Now she sent parcels to Heinrich Neuhaus after his arrest in 1941 – he was imprisoned for the mere crime of having a German surname! He worked in exile at Sverdlovsk’s Conservatoire. Thanks to the intervention of Gilels and other pupils, he was allowed back to Moscow in 1944. A former postgraduate student of Yudina’s, Vladimir Apresov, was currently in Baku. She wrote explaining why she was staying in Moscow: ‘I preferred to suffer deprivation and danger than run away to save my skin.’ She declared her conviction ‘of the impossibility of the damned Germans appearing on our land’, while pointedly asking him, ‘What are you doing for the frontline?’6 On a practical note Yudina asked Apresov to send dried fruit up from the south: ‘Sweet things are the only items essential in maintaining my strength and ability to work, I am completely indifferent to all other forms of benefit.’7 Yudina’s immense moral authority shone through her correspondence with the young musicologist, Viktor Bobrovsky. He had written telling her of the indelible impression made by her radio broadcast of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ sonata (Op. 31 no. 2). In her reply Yudina had declared, ‘I only respect those who serve in the army or take part in our Common cause,’8 words which caused great anguish to the demobilized Bobrovsky: I lived at home, teaching at the Music School, but in the hidden recesses of my soul I could find no peace. That’s why I couldn’t reply to you, I felt I would be deceiving you. Then in the summer war burst into our town like a hurricane. Enemy bombs destroyed all that I held dear. The Germans burnt everything, even all 40 of our pianos! [. . .] I lived for six months with my wife and one-month-old son, buried alive in the grave of Fascist occupation. And your words reverberated in my head as an accusation. Then one day I saw overhead an aeroplane, painted with our red stars – it was indescribably wonderful. Four days later we saw the Red Army soldiers. My whole being was overwhelmed by profound emotion [. . .] Your words were still alive in me. I joined the Red Army, although it was difficult to leave my family, my two little children.

Bobrovsky was put to work organizing musical activities for the troops. ‘I know it is hardly heroic stuff, but if you knew how glad I am for it. Each song we learn, each minute of leisure is a blow against the enemy.’9 169

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Amongst the Conservatoire students who enlisted as professional soldiers were the musicologist Pavel Apostolov and the pianist Viktor Merzhanov. Apostolov was to become a member of the Central Committee, and a ‘Party activist’ at the Union of Composers, who hounded Shostakovich in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When Apostolov was struck down with a heart attack during the first ‘closed’ performance of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony in June 1969, it was seen as just retribution. Merzhanov, a budding virtuoso, enlisted in the summer of 1941 after graduation. He joined the Tank Academy in his native Tambov, quickly attaining the rank of commander. He never saw action: ‘Your front line is here – playing for the people!’ he was told.10 Merzhanov learnt to play horn and percussion, skills which enabled him to join military bands. He was demobilized just in time to get himself back into pianistic form and to participate in the All-Union competition in December 1945, where he shared first prize with Sviatoslav Richter. His ‘legendary’ performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto earned him accolades. By October, with German troops literally on the outskirts of Moscow, the government was hurriedly relocated to Kuibishev under Vyacheslav Molotov, with the diplomatic corps in tow. Stalin’s strategic decision to remain in Moscow signalled to the world that life was going on as usual; instructions were given to open concert halls, cinemas and theatres – although they remained unheated. On 4 October David Oistrakh opened the season with a performance of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto in the new Tchaikovsky Hall.* On 12 October, in the same hall, Yudina played a marathon concert of three concertos – Mozart’s K.488, Beethoven’s Fourth and Tchaikovsky’s First under Gorchakov’s direction. These performances occurred at the height of ‘Operation Typhoon’, the ferocious German assault on Moscow. By mid-October the enemy had reached a point only twenty-two kilometres from the city centre, well within Moscow’s present-day boundaries, now marked by a memorial of heavy crosses representing a giant tank trap. It was here that Nazi forces were decisively repulsed by Soviet troops. Yet at the time, the outcome seemed so uncertain that Moscow was seized by panic; factories closed, Communist Party offices burned their archives, while * The Tchaikovsky Hall was conceived for Meyerhold’s Theatre. After Meyerhold’s arrest, it was turned into a concert hall, which opened in 1940.

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private citizens got rid of portraits of Party leaders and destroyed their Party cards, to avoid reprisals should the Germans occupy the city. It was precisely during the war years that members of the Soviet intelligentsia and the most eminent musicians joined the Communist Party out of patriotism, amongst them David Oistrakh, the conductor Kirill Kondrashin, and the pianists Yakov Flier and Yakov Zak. Although equally patriotic, Yudina rejected out of hand any involvement with the Bolshevik Party, which had so mercilessly persecuted her fellow believers. Now, during the war, religious repression was eased, for the Church was useful to the Party in galvanizing patriotic war efforts. Apart from Yudina, a handful of musicians stayed in Moscow, including David Oistrakh and the Beethoven String Quartet, and her friends ‘the conductor Nikolai Pavlovich Anosov – an incredibly kind-hearted, sympathetic person [. . .] the renowned singer Natalia Rozhdestvenskaya, the violinist Marina Kozolupova, and the baritone Sergei Migai, still in complete possession of his magnificent voice!’11 As she recalled, Sviatoslav Richter’s star was in the ascendant. Until 1943 the only orchestra left in Moscow was the All-Union Radio Orchestra. Music was largely in the hands of the Radio; it sounded throughout the Soviet Union for the duration of the war, except for the first two months when it seemed an irrelevancy. The musicians remaining in Moscow trekked to the famed DZZ (Dom Zvuko Zapisei – House of Sound Recordings) on Kachalov Street* to make broadcasts. The daily programmes were made up of a mixed bag of live transmissions and recorded music, classical music side by side with military marches, poems praising Stalin, and patriotic songs. Felix Mendelssohn’s music featured frequently to counteract the Nazi ban on the composer. Rachmaninov, now no longer condemned as an émigré but praised for his donations to the Red Army from his benefit concerts in the USA, became incredibly popular. Yudina made an average of six direct broadcasts a month from the DZZ’s Studio 15, given in slots of ten or twenty minutes. Very rarely, she could extend the time limit, with a work like Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ sonata, which lasted twenty-three minutes. In a handwritten list of 153 pieces that she broadcast

* Now reverted to its pre-revolutionary name, Malaya Nikitskaya.

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from July 1941 to June 1943, we see how her repertoire emphasized the patriotic, from Glinka to Rachmaninov, from Borodin to Prokofiev. She also played Chopin and Beethoven regularly; she noted that she deliberately ignored Schumann – who knows, perhaps one of his descendants was fighting with the Nazi troops? There were also special broadcasts to Allied countries: for instance, Yudina chose to acquaint British audiences with Shaporin’s Second Piano Sonata. Yudina’s popularity was at its zenith during the war, on a par with David Oistrakh’s – or to draw a different analogy, with Myra Hess, whose inspirational National Gallery concerts in London were a beacon of light during and after the Blitz. Early in 1942 Oistrakh wrote to his wife, Tamara, and son, Igor, who had been evacuated to Sverdlovsk, describing his visits to the Radio during curfew. Armed with special passes, artists had to make their way on foot – all transport stopped functioning as darkness set in.12 Many broadcasts, particularly those relayed abroad, were programmed after midnight. The abnormally low temperatures of the Russian winter of 1941–2 made performing concerts and teaching particularly difficult. Vadim Borisovsky, the viola player of the Beethoven Quartet with which Yudina performed frequently, described the atmosphere at their concerts in unheated halls: ‘The audience sits in its fur coats and felt outdoor boots. It’s very cold in the hall, about 4°C. The success was enormous, and public and performers alike are in excellent spirits. The audience really appreciate that musicians have remained in Moscow to share its hardships, sorrows and joys.’13 Yudina put it slightly differently to Viktor Apresov: ‘We are freezing here, and the heating is minimal. I personally live and play in temperatures between –1° and +3°C. But this is of no consequence as long as Victory comes. And all the more so as these strong frosts are after all useful to us! It puts one to shame before the Armed Forces to be living under one’s own roof, at home, getting on with one’s work. (I speak of myself, of course, not you!)’14 To the Steinbergs, now evacuated to Tashkent with the Leningrad Conservatoire, Yudina announced that she was alive and ‘diminished in weight and volume, no bad thing for me’. She went on to confide: ‘I nearly left for Tashkent when everybody around me was upping sticks, but I considered it superfluous to leave. There was no point in going to Saratov – in my view it would have been simply undignified under such a Conservatoire 172

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director as Stolyarov* – a form of madness! In Saratov there are only 50 students, while here in Moscow there are 270 – but they don’t allow us to start lessons, because of the terrible cold and lack of heating. But then one remembers that at the front line it’s much colder, and that with spring victory will come!’15 Yudina may not have missed the ‘rubbishy’ director Stolyarov, but she greatly missed Yavorsky, now in evacuation to Saratov. Dedicated teachers like Yudina and Oistrakh simply taught their students at home, waiting for the Conservatoire to reopen. As the latter wrote to his wife on 8 December, ‘It’s cold in our flat, there’s been no heating for two days. I have to work with my students here, as at the Conservatoire it’s like being inside a refrigerator or on an ice-rink.’16 It was at this time Yudina started teaching part-time at the Gnesins’ Institute, a position which was formalized in 1944. From mid-March, as the days grew longer and temperatures became bearable, the Conservatoire started functioning again. Its main Moscow branch boasted a strong teaching staff, including Yudina, Lev Oborin, Oistrakh and members of the Beethoven Quartet. Only at the end of winter 1942–3, when the battle for Stalingrad was decisively won, was the Conservatoire reunited in Moscow under Vissarion Shebalin’s directorship. Yudina saw in the New Year of 1942 with a daytime recital at the Tchaikovsky Hall, performing Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations in C minor, Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, and pieces by Chopin, Bach and Mussorgsky. During the preceding days she had stayed with the Yefimovs, where she could practise as long as she wished. Nina Simonovich-Yefimova wrote to her geologist son, Adrian, about Yudina’s preparation: ‘Of course she knows everything already, she is just exercising her fingers. She plays wonderfully, sometimes so lightly, that the sounds merge into each other – like drops of water in a single stream, like milking a cow, when the jets of milk resound off the bucket: Vj-j-j, Vj-j-j, or like an elf, swift and smoothly fleeting [. . .] M.V. says she works well here – it’s as quiet as at the bottom of a well. Nobody rings the doorbell, nobody phones us – simply, nobody’s left in town.’17 Yudina stayed overnight to avoid the long walk home – trams stopped running at 10 p.m., although the curfew had been extended for New Year’s Eve until 3 a.m. * Grigori Stolyarov, professor of conducting, acting director of the Moscow Conservatoire in evacuation.

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On 22 January 1942 Yudina attended the ceremonial reopening of the Tchaikovsky Museum at Klin. The Nazis had taken the town on 23 November 1941, and during their three weeks of occupation had billeted one hundred soldiers in the museum, the composer’s last residence in the town. Scant respect was shown for the property, and soldiers used whatever came to hand to heat the stoves. Fortunately, the museum’s treasures, including Tchaikovsky’s piano and his manuscripts, had been removed to safety in September. Just before the New Year, Soviet troops recaptured Klin, and only four days later the Soviet authorities arranged a visit by a delegation headed by the British Minister of Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden, to see the devastation caused. Klin now acquired a symbolic significance, both as a national shrine to Tchaikovsky and as the first Soviet town to repulse the Nazis. On 1 March Yudina performed at the first concert held there, together with members of the Beethoven Quartet, the singers Rozhdestvenskaya and Migai accompanied on piano by Anosov. Yudina and her colleagues from the Beethoven Quartet, Dmitri Tsyganov and Sergei Shirinsky, performed the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio, entitled ‘In memory of a Great Artist’. Yudina wept as she played, unable to fight back her tears. M. Rittikh, the vice-director of the museum, recalled: ‘She barely managed to wipe them off the keyboard with a handkerchief during the pauses.’18 During 1942 Yudina played no fewer than six solo recitals in Moscow’s two most prestigious venues, the Tchaikovsky Hall and the Grand Hall of the Conservatoire. She programmed Beethoven’s most popular sonatas, Chopin’s cycle of 24 Preludes, a recital dedicated to Bach, and as a patriotic gesture one concert consisting entirely of Russian music from Glinka to Prokofiev. Yudina continued advocating the great German masters, whose music, she insisted, transcended national significance. Although she understood that she provided comfort to her large audiences through her art, Yudina still dreamed of going to the front line. She wished to emulate her elder sister Flora, who worked as a military doctor: ‘Flora was with the Soviet Army, both in retreat and in attack, working in various medical capacities, not least in the sanitary trains which were subject to all kinds of catastrophes. She survived unharmed, and from inherent modesty never wore her military decorations.’19 Likewise, Yudina’s elder brother Lev served as a military doctor at the front lines. 174

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Yudina’s thoughts were steadfastly with Leningraders – the siege was claiming so many casualties, amongst them her personal friends. In particular, she grieved the loss of Yulia Veysberg, composer and second wife of Rimsky-Korsakov’s son, Andrei: ‘[Their son], Volik was one of the first victims of hunger during the siege, when tall young men were particularly prone to perish, suffering turbulent and agonizing deaths.’20 Holding out hopes that her son was alive somewhere in the city, Veysberg went in search of him, only to be killed by enemy artillery fire. ‘It’s a terrible sorrow for me,’ Yudina lamented to the Steinbergs. ‘I loved them very much, and over the last years we always met with the greatest joy.’21 She ached to be in Leningrad, where she surely could be useful. ‘I wanted to carry provisions over Lake Ladoga. I could have helped many people, but I met with indifference from the Committee on the Arts and the Union of Composers.’22 To Yudina’s mind, being the provider of art was not enough. When it became possible to send things to Leningrad across Lake Ladoga, she took immediate action: Somehow, through the Union of Composers, an enormous quantity of nutritional bars of Hematogen (known as ‘Blood Candy’) was obtained to send to Leningrad. Together with the splendid old janitor, Pyotr, we dragged a load to some river harbour from whence it was to be delivered by water* to give succour to the dying, and resuscitate those still stoically clinging on to life. Did the Hematogen reach its destination? Did other things sent to the besieged city arrive? When it was impossible to help many, then we helped a few. Kind, willing and courageous pilots were happy to take small packets and bundles. We managed through mysterious channels to seek them out, and they in turn tracked down the addressees, if those had not in the meantime been transformed into frozen corpses in glacial rooms of empty, half-destroyed homes.23

Echoing Father Pavel Florensky, Yudina believed in the vital role of personal conscience – ‘one often has to renounce the heroic and merely carry out one’s duty, to be submissive’.24

* Moscow is connected to Leningrad through the canal and river systems.

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Yet Yudina was irrevocably attracted by the heroic. In attending the first performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh, ‘Leningrad’, Symphony in Moscow, some three weeks after its premiere in Kuibyshev,* she immediately understood its significance. After the concert she sought out Shostakovich and asked him to use his influence to get her to Leningrad. ‘Dmitri Dmitreyevich wanted to help me serve the People and the Fatherland, and thought it essential for me to talk to General Milovsky, who [as chief of the Home Front] could have commandeered me to Leningrad for some useful purpose. Alas, our paths never crossed, and Dmitri Dmitreyevich returned to Kuibyshev. On my own, I was unable to achieve any form of “mobilization” ’.25 While Moscow’s ordeal could not compare with Leningrad’s, the city nevertheless suffered considerable damage. A bomb fell on the house where Yudina had lived near the Bakhrushin Museum and destroyed it. On the outskirts of Moscow such damage was far more widespread. She informed Apresov, ‘The house just outside Moscow where we used to meet no longer exists, and many, many other places likewise.’26 It was certainly nothing to the devastation that afflicted her home town of Nevel’, which was taken by the enemy on 16 July 1941, right at the beginning of the war. Her father, Veniamin, tried to persuade all Jewish citizens to leave the town straight away. However, many refused to believe that the Germans would harm them and perished. On 6 September 1941 some 2,000 Jews (including many women and children) were shot – after digging their own graves – at the ‘Blue Dacha’, just outside Nevel’. Veniamin Yudin and his family avoided extermination, by escaping at the last minute to the provincial capital, Kalinin. From there they relocated to the town of Molotov (as Perm was called between 1940 and 1957). On their hazardous journey they were ‘robbed to their last thread’.27 Their dreams of joining Maria in Moscow remained unrealized. Having devoted his life to working as a doctor and social organizer in his home town, Veniamin Yudin died heartbroken on 2 June 1943. The atrocities committed against the Jews made Yudina deeply aware – and proud – of her Jewish roots, and this did not conflict with her Christian

* The world premiere at Kuibyshev under Samuil Samosud was on 5 March 1942. The Moscow premiere on 29 March at the Hall of Columns, was performed by the Radio Orchestra reinforced by musicians from the Bolshoi Theatre.

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beliefs. It was something she discussed with Solomon Mikhoels, the great Jewish actor and founder of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre. Yudina admired Mikhoels’ gifts enormously – initially they were much taken with each other. When she wrote to congratulate him after seeing his theatre’s production of Freylekhs, she complained that ‘you have become more indifferent to me’. He obviously deplored her conversion to Christianity, but she defended her position: ‘Did it not occur to you that for me it was no easy matter to turn my back on Judaism in these years? Yes, it might have been “easier” – but to do so would have been morally as great a crime as denying Christ, something which was often expected of me.’28 Certainly her baptism into the Orthodox Church did not loosen her ties with her family. Yudina was still supporting her brother Boris and her sister Anna, as well as Yelena Saltykova. The latter, it transpired, was something of a spendthrift; Yudina did not deny her ‘mother-in-law’ anything, but privately started to complain, not least of not being able to practise in their shared home. Yudina’s own health was under stress: ‘I am working in many fields, busy from morning to night. I keep my spirits up. Thank God I still have enough strength, despite immense fatigue.’29 Getting to Leningrad remained Yudina’s strongest desire, while getting others out of it was her duty. Thus she saved ‘the last fragments of a family – mother and daughter, who are very close to me’,30 a reference to the philologist Yelena Sosnovskaya and her daughter Masha. Sosnovskaya, a fellow Josephite and close friend from the 1920s, was married to the religious thinker, founder of the Seraphim Brothers and psychiatrist, Ivan Andreyevsky, who had recently been captured by the Germans. After the war was over, Andreevsky chose not to return to the Soviet Union, and emigrated to the USA. Sosnovskaya and her two small daughters, Masha and Lyolya, knew nothing of his fate, and now, in besieged Leningrad, were gradually dying of dystrophy – the younger daughter could not be saved. Yudina turned to the writer Samuil Marshak on the basis of their Leningrad friendship. Before the war, as head of Detgiz, the State Children’s Publishing House, he had taken under his wing unemployed Leningrad artists and writers, including Kharms and Zabolotsky. Now living in Moscow, he used his considerable influence to rescue Leningraders from the besieged city. ‘The wartime Marshak was quite something,’ Yudina exclaimed. ‘Papa Sam [. . .] took infinite trouble over the lives of others.’31 177

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When Yudina informed Marshak that Sosnovskaya was a goddaughter of the writer and human rights activist, Vladimir Korolenko, he interrupted her: ‘After thinking for a moment, he exclaimed, “I know, we’ll turn the goddaughter into a niece!” And there on the spot he dashed off a written dispatch to be sent to the highest authorities in Leningrad. Afterwards we chatted a bit more, and to end our meeting I played a Bach fugue. Then I rushed to the Central Post Office. Marshak’s signature was worth a lot – it evoked absolute trust; nobody questioned me about the document’s authenticity.’32 In her eagerness to send the telegram, Yudina absent-mindedly left a large sum of money on the counter. An air force officer returned the bank notes, ‘new and crackling’, which she had just received from the Radio. Honesty was another feature of the war years! Marshak’s letter did the trick, and Sosnovskaya and her six-year-old daughter were flown out of Leningrad. The usual route for evacuees across Lake Ladoga involved manifold risks and was restricted to carefully selected civilians. Saving young children was a priority, but good work qualifications also played a role. Thus, Yudina’s closest friend Yelena Skrzhinskaya and her small daughter Marisha became eligible for evacuation and left Leningrad in May 1942. On arrival in Moscow, Skrzhinskaya gained immediate employment at the Archaeological Institute attached to the USSR Academy of Sciences. The privations and stress of evacuation took their toll in the war-torn country. Leonid Nikolayev, Yudina’s one-time piano teacher, died from typhoid fever in Tashkent in October 1942. Shostakovich, likewise his student, wrote his Second Piano Sonata in his memory, paying homage in quoting from Nikolayev’s compositions. The sonata soon became pivotal to Yudina’s repertoire. Only a month later, Boleslav Yavorsky died from a heart attack in Saratov. For Yudina the death of her mentor was an irreparable blow. During the last fifteen years nobody else in her orbit – apart from Prokofiev – had held such high musical authority. Just before his death on 26 November 1942, Yavorsky had conducted two immensely successful seminars – the first an extended analysis of both volumes of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, while the second was devoted to Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan. As discussed in Chapter 3, Yavorsky and Yudina shared opinions about the religious and symbolic significance of Bach’s music. Yavorsky’s notes and lectures for these seminars were seen as his legacy, yet to be comprehensively published. 178

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Naturally Yudina participated in the first concert held in Yavorsky’s memory at Moscow’s Scriabin Memorial Museum, no. 11 Vakhtangov Street, an event that became an annual tradition. The museum was run by enthusiasts* – ‘by those who revered Scriabin, Sofronitsky and Yavorsky. It was here that Scriabin’s archive was guarded and that Sofronitsky loved to play.’33 Many recordings from Yudina’s performances at the museum over the years have survived. The New Year of 1943 started with the news that Soviet troops had encircled twenty-two German divisions in Stalingrad. Shortly afterwards, on 18 January, the blockade of Leningrad was broken, when the Red Army took Shlisselburg and freed up a corridor of approximately eight to eleven kilometres on the southern shores of Lake Ladoga. Now at last transport and supplies (and people) could pass on ‘dry land’. The Committee on the Arts – the future Soviet Ministry of Culture – decided to send three brigades of artists to entertain the exhausted civilian population of the besieged city. Yudina was amongst them, at last able to visit her ‘second, spiritual home’. Her willingness ‘to die at the walls of Leningrad’ was now put to the test. On the eve of her departure the All-Union Bureau for Concert Tours signed the authorization for her visit to Leningrad from 11 February to 1 March, a document essential to justify her absence from her official place of work. Yudina had already informed her friends that she would take messages and packages to relatives. On 2 February she urged Skrzhinskaya to come with her messages: ‘I haven’t got time to rush over to you, I don’t even know if I’ll manage to get to the airport and catch the plane, I have so many responsibilities and duties.’34 Typically, Yudina’s brigade was made up not only of musicians but of actors, singers and speakers: amongst them the mezzo-soprano Irma Yaunzem, her husband, the actor Grigori Appolonov, as well as the immensely popular actor Vladimir Yakhontov and his pianist Elizaveta Loiter. ‘We flew over Lake Ladoga, with a machine gunner. We were shot at by the Germans, but survived intact,’ Yudina recalled.35 Oistrakh’s brigade included the pianist Yakov Zak, who later recounted his impressions of their journey for the radio: ‘We flew at

* The sisters Tatiana and Anastasia Shaborkina, and Scriabin’s daughters, Yelena and Maria, from his first marriage.

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night, low over the ice, stopping at Tikhvin.* David Fyodorovich never lost his sense of humour, and pointing to the machine-gunner’s nest which towered above our heads, remarked, “I have never flown in such stupendous company.” ’36 The pianist Yakov Flier, in another brigade, got stranded in Tikhvin for several sleepless days and nights. Witnesses recall the unforgettable sight of Yudina arriving at Leningrad’s military airport, with an enormous soldier’s kit bag slung over her shoulders, stuffed full of provisions. Zak recalled her ‘in a soldier’s greatcoat, with a stick, bold in life as in art, not bothering to take cover from shooting and bombing. Her smile expressed a challenge to the enemy and derision of danger.’37 All that Yudina saw and learnt in these days filled her with awe. David Oistrakh was similarly impressed, as he wrote to his ten-year-old son, Igor on 23 February 1943, ‘The town has been under the Fascists’ siege for nearly a year and a half [. . .] They have encircled [it] in a tight ring and are trying to starve out the population through hunger and cold. They are destroying [Leningrad] with daily bombardments from long-range artillery cannons. And despite this, the city continues to live, to work, to fight the enemy, and to entertain itself. Art and music are essential to man [. . .] You can imagine what joy I get from performing in this “hero-city” for the soldiers and commanders defending it, and to visit enormous ships which engage in mortal battle with the Fascists, to play, knowing that my music brings them joy during their hours of leisure.’38 Naturally, as a father writing to a child, Oistrakh avoided depicting the distressing realities that Leningraders recorded in their siege-time diaries. Yudina will have heard many accounts of the abnormally cold first winter of the war, where people were tormented by frostbite and suffered hallucinations of food. Boris Pasternak’s cousin, Olga Freidenberg, left searing diary records of the devastating effects of the bombing and starvation in the city. ‘Hunger destroyed our nerves, memory, willpower. All of us were overwrought and half-crazy. Women in the shops shouted, wept, struck one another, went into fits of hysterics [. . .] People died in droves. No epidemic, no German bombs and shells could have killed so many people.’39 In a fast-deteriorating situation even the Soviet propaganda machine stopped * Tikhvin, the strategic railway junction town 200 kilometres east of Leningrad, played a vital role in getting supplies to the city through Lake Ladoga.

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talking of the heroic resistance of the city, while citizens were forbidden to complain or appeal for help. Freidenberg believed that the problem of starvation was in part due to an uncaring Soviet leadership. Stalin’s hostility to Leningrad was notorious. In the summer of 1942, when things had eased somewhat after the cruel winter, Freidenberg reported: ‘We feed on wild herbs and grass, we make our own fires by burning memoirs and floorboards. Prose, it turns out, provides more heat than poetry. History boils our tea kettle for us. A parquet floor makes the best fuel. There is no “tomorrow” for us.’40 Yet the planning involved in organizing a performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in the city to which it was dedicated showed that the authorities did indeed have thoughts beyond tomorrow. Concentrated efforts by the conductor Karl Eliasberg to find the players to swell out the remnants of the Radio Orchestra, to feed those otherwise too weak to blow or scrape their instruments, resulted in an extraordinary concert on 9 August. For the two hours’ duration of the concert, Soviet troops kept up an intense bombardment of the German forces to ensure that the musicians and their audience were safe from air raids and artillery attacks. The symphony was not only heard in the Philharmonia, but broadcast throughout the country. By February 1943 the Radio Orchestra under Eliasberg’s direction was functioning full time, and it accompanied guest soloists. Yudina could not praise the orchestra and its director highly enough: ‘Whoever, like myself, had the honour to play with the Radio Orchestra can state that the force of the human spirit is indomitable. In its discipline and sense of purpose, its steady dedication to work and culture, this collective [. . .] manifested all the features of high symphonism, the absolute fundament of all musical life.’41 David Oistrakh was equally impressed, not least by Eliasberg’s sangfroid. ‘Despite the vicinity of the front line and the continual danger, he rehearsed the orchestra, working in scrupulous detail on phrasing and on sectional intonation, remaining oblivious to all else.’42 Oistrakh recalled performing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in the freezing cold, packed-out Grand Hall of the Philharmonia: ‘As I was playing the second movement, Canzonetta, the sirens started wailing, indicating an attack from the air. Not a single person in the hall even stood up, and I played until the end. I was amazed that here in Leningrad, with the enemy at 181

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its very walls, there were so many people who loved music. Tchaikovsky’s melody flew over the hall like a song predicting victory.’43 Yudina’s concert with Eliasberg and the Radio Orchestra took place in the same hall on 27 February, with performances of Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto and Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’. Before that she had given two recitals, again at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia, on 20 and 24 February. The first was a repeat of her Moscow ‘Russian programme’, with Borodin’s Little Suite, Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet pieces as their centrepiece. She concluded with the Russian Dance from Stravinsky’s Petrushka, ignoring the unspoken ban on his music. Lyubov Shaporina attended Yudina’s second recital on 24 February: ‘She played marvellously – some Bach Preludes and Fugues, Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ [and Chopin’s F minor Fantasy and 4th Ballade].’ However, one of Shaporina’s acquaintances, a certain Golubyev, was unhappy: ‘he could not bear to see all these badly dressed people in their overcoats and felt boots and the dilapidated chandeliers’. Furthermore, he disliked Yudina’s Chopin. For Shaporina the external circumstances which repulsed Golubyev were the very things that touched her most: People suffer from cold and hunger – and Yudina plays! She warms her hands on an electric stove, placed on a chair nearby her piano stool. And we come in our fur coats and felt boots to hear her, and return home in complete darkness. Not that the great concert artist is provided with transport – she too returns to the Astoria Hotel on foot. Poor little people, having sat out the siege for 20 months, having experienced its innumerable horrors, still have the courage and fortitude – and most importantly – the DESIRE to listen to Yudina’s inspired playing. One should bow down before them!44

The historian, literary critic and expert on Voltaire, Vladimir Lyublinsky, attended all of Yudina’s concerts. Her playing left a shattering impression on him, and he sought her out after the first concert. They already had a nodding acquaintance, going back to their participation in Karsavin’s seminars at Petrograd University. Ten years after meeting her in besieged Leningrad, Lyublinsky recalled ‘the joy of our conversations after the concerts, the many meals and festivities, our expeditions to Krestovsky Island and other amazing 182

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events in those last days of February 1943!’45 Initially they established a ‘tender relationship’ built on very strong mutual attraction. Lyublinsky was married to a highly intelligent woman, the historian Alexandra Dmitreyevna (née Stefanovich), and from the start it was understood that he would not sacrifice his marriage. Rather, he took upon himself the role of adviser and confidant, a figure lacking in Yudina’s life. Their friendship lasted until his death in 1968 and was enshrined in a lively correspondence, full of feline endearments. (She addressed him as ‘Dear Miaou’ while he called her ‘Dear Myava’ or ‘Myavenka’.) On 1 March Yudina returned to Moscow and to teaching at the newly reunited Conservatoire. She continued performing concerts and making radio broadcasts, and cemented her duo partnership with the violinist Marina Kozolupova. But she longed to be back in Leningrad, because this, she felt, was where she was needed. She found an ally in Boris Zagursky, recently retired from his position as Director of the Leningrad Conservatoire to head the Leningrad City Council’s Management for Artistic Affairs. Zagursky organized the necessary permits, and on 28 June signed the official authorization for Yudina’s two-month visit. Four weeks later he arranged to extend her stay, so she could give consultation lessons to Conservatoire students and teachers. Zagursky also ensured ration cards and dining rights at the mess, and arranged safe-conducts for her concerts in military zones, on naval vessels, in clubs and hospitals. On 1 September the Leningrad Radio requested that her Leningrad ‘registration’ be prolonged until the end of October.46 By mid-October, Yudina was receiving threatening letters from the Moscow Conservatoire, demanding that she return immediately to her teaching duties. Again it was Zagursky who defended her, and guaranteed her return to Moscow by 1 November. At the start of this second visit, Yudina broadcast a remarkable speech to Leningraders, declaring solidarity with the city: Each person honoured to visit LENINGRAD first and foremost feels here a General UNIVERSALITY. There is no front line and no rearguard, no dividing lines between the military and civilian, between primary and secondary things, between ‘my own’ and that of others. There are no residents, only citizens. Each Citizen is a Warrior. Your faces are tempered by suffering, scorched by lines, recording the casual and the trivial, and

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illuminated by hope and by that quiet certitude that the common goal is victory, the smashing of the enemy. Here all are equal, the soldier, the shop assistant, the manager, the nurse, the policeman, the musician.47

Her rhetoric adhered to essential communist principles, yet it was softened by warm individual tributes to those musicians and organizers who had stayed in Leningrad, ensuring that ‘the Muses were not, and are not silent in Leningrad. They sound in dialogue with the voices of War, sirens, bombs, the blasts of artillery, and the roar of aeroplanes.’48 Yudina started by making live broadcasts from the Leningrad Radio House. On 15 July she performed music by Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, and the following evening performed in direct transmission the Tchaikovsky concerto with Eliasberg and the Radio Orchestra. A month later, on 15 August, they performed the concerto again at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia. The day before she gave a benefit concert in the same hall to collect money for rebuilding a theatre in Stalingrad. This was followed by a marathon solo programme on 19 August of Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Scriabin’s Third Sonata, Prokofiev’s Fourth Sonata, and Liszt’s Variations on a Theme of Bach. Her next complete solo recital on 3 October consisted of music by three Romantic composers, Franck, Chopin and Liszt. During her stay Yudina encouraged Leningrad composers to write for her: BogdanovBerezovsky produced a piano sonata, whose first movement she broadcast on 28 September. Shaporina saw a lot of the pianist during the summer. She advised Yudina to leave for Moscow as the bombardments were so heavy, Yudina had no money, and the Astoria Hotel was expensive. ‘I won’t leave,’ Yudina insisted. ‘I am staying here – it’s important for my biography.’49 Shaporina noted that Yudina lived by selling her books. ‘She goes around in sandals with bare feet, a black velvet beret, a black, silk, ankle-length dress and a dark-grey jacket, in her pocket a green-edged kerchief! On 5 August she will play at the Philharmonia.’ Yudina responded negatively when Shaporina asked whether she would play Bach: I told her, ‘In these terrible times, Bach is the closest of all to me – his music is uplifting and sustaining. Audiences associate you with Bach – your inspired spiritual nature is best suited to him.’ Yudina did not agree.

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‘The more I am asked to play Bach, the longer I will desist,’ she reiterated. She is very stubborn – like with her former obsession with drawing, for which she wanted to give up music. Now she is longing to go to the Front.50

Soon Yudina’s wishes were fulfilled through supervised front-line visits to naval vessels and submarines at Leningrad’s port. Here she played on upright pianos, unscrewing the front panels as Alexei Tolstoy had taught her. Photographs show Yudina socializing with naval officers, hearing their stories of naval battles. She obviously enjoyed being a woman in this predominantly male world. Just before she left for Leningrad in late June, Yudina joyfully informed Boris Zalesky that ‘the Bakhtins have been found’.51 After a long period of silence two letters arrived from them; they were still in Savyolovo, some 125 kilometres from Moscow. Although perilously near the front line, the town had remained in Soviet hands. Yudina immediately sent the Bakhtins money and mobilized her friends to collectively guarantee the couple 300 roubles a month. Yudina also sustained her friend Milya Zalessky, who had miraculously survived prison, the camps, fighting in front-line brigades, and being wounded. He was particularly downcast at the loss of all his possessions, not least his precious library for a second time – it included such treasures as signed books by the Futurists and Anna Akhmatova. With telephones cut off and postal services reduced to a bare minimum, many people lost contact with each other. Relatives and friends of Leningraders did not know whether their dear ones were dead or alive, whether they had been evacuated, or were holed up in the city, famished and dying of cold, or at the mercy of enemy fire. Yudina well understood the anguish suffered in such desperate situations. At Pasternak’s instigation she sought out his cousin, Olga Freidenberg. Their letters to each other had remained unanswered for over a year – Pasternak assumed that Olga had been evacuated with the university to Saratov. Now Yudina transmitted the news that she and her mother had never left Leningrad, and that Olga had been seriously ill that winter with scurvy. On discovering Yudina was going to Leningrad, Anna Akhmatova wrote to her from Tashkent, asking her to track down the pathologist, Vladimir Garshin, to whom she was romantically attached. Evidently his letters had not reached her in Tashkent. Yudina 185

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was now able to deliver Akhmatova’s letters to Garshin, as well as small food parcels sent by the Tomashevsky family, now relocated in Moscow. Years later, Freidenberg was commissioned to write about the heroism of Leningrad women: I had no wish to write about those [. . .] whom officialdom had loudly proclaimed heroines.* I was interested in the little people. With two of these women I formed a lasting friendship. One of them was Maria Yudina. I had heard of her long ago [. . .] when we had supplied her with books on antiquity from our department library. Later I learned she was a friend of Borya’s and Zhenya’s [. . .] She would come all the way from Moscow to give concerts in Leningrad. Her heroism was genuine. One had to have a mighty and unbending spirit to choose to come to our grim city, risk the deadly bombardments, and return to a room on the seventh floor of the Astoria Hotel, in the pitch blackness of Leningrad nights. Mother was enchanted with Yudina; she immediately felt an affinity with her that was almost familial.52

This new friendship brought Yudina closer to Pasternak. Gratefully, he informed Freidenberg that ‘Yudina found you some days ago and gave you back to us again.’53 A second letter written three days later, on 8 November 1943, reported how ‘Yudina’s messages brought me joy beyond words [. . .] She told me a great deal and reassured me [about your health].’54 Back in Moscow, Yudina’s next concerts celebrated a flurry of anniversaries. In Klin, to honour fifty years since Tchaikovsky’s death, she once more joined Tsyganov and Shirinsky in the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Trio on 21 November. At the Conservatoire’s Small Hall, she celebrated the ‘Twentieth Birthday’ of the Beethoven Quartet on 25 December, in the company of pianists Igumnov, Goldenweiser, Oborin and Richter. With the ‘Beethovens’, Yudina performed the Largo from Taneyev’s Quintet. Earlier, on 8 December, she had participated in another collective concert entirely dedicated to Prokofiev’s music. Here for the first time Yudina played the composer’s own arrangements of Waltzes from his ballet Cinderella, and * Referring to Olga Bergholz and Vera Inber, writers renowned for their Radio broadcasts from besieged Leningrad.

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from War and Peace.* Prokofiev had just completed his first revised version of the opera, which was to undergo three more revisions before receiving authorization to be staged. At a concert of Soviet Music on 13 February 1944, at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, Yudina devised her programme as a showcase for Leningrad composers. To Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Yuri Kochurov, Orest Yevlakhov, she added Prokofiev and Shostakovich, both graduates from the Petersburg/Leningrad Conservatoire. She again played selected pieces from Prokofiev’s Op. 97 Cinderella Suite and the whole of the Op. 96 Suite (Prokofiev had added a Contradanza and Mefisto Waltz from the film Lermontov to the Waltz from War and Peace). The principal offering was Shostakovich’s recent Second Piano Sonata Op. 61, which was composed in evacuation in Kuibishev in the spring of 1943, while the composer was recovering from typhoid fever. Dedicated to the memory of Leonid Nikolayev, Shostakovich incorporated references to Nikolayev’s own compo­­­­ sitions, the Suite for two pianos in particular. Within its basically traditional structure, the sonata offers much that is original. The toccata-like textures of the opening movement, with its baroque-like clarity and rigour, are in contrast to the second movement’s bizarre, slowed-down Waltz, which recalls the early atonal pieces of Schoenberg. The final movement, a set of elaborate Variations based on a theme of Russian intonations, places the work in a national context. The composer himself gave the premiere of the sonata on 6 June 1943. Within six months both Gilels and Yudina were performing it. With the latter, the sonata suited her polyphonic bent, and she enhanced its Bach-like transparency through sparing use of pedal. If Gilels’ interpretation favoured beauty of sound and faster tempi, Yudina’s underlined the conflict and acerbic quality of the work. By New Year 1944 the smell of victory was in the air. The closer it came, the more histrionic the tone of the press and leaders’ speeches. It became obvious that Stalin would acquire unlimited power, which he could dangerously misuse. The arts risked serving as a panegyric to elevate his achievements. In spring 1944, glad to get out of the capital, Yudina set off on a fifteen-day visit to Novosibirsk, where the Leningrad Philharmonic had * Not to be confused with the popular ‘Natasha’s Waltz’ written for a later version of the opera.

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been evacuated. The orchestra had been musically active under its artistic director Ivan Sollertinsky and chief conductor Yevgeni Mravinsky. In Novosibirsk she performed eight concerts within a fortnight, including three concertos (Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto, Mozart’s C minor K.491, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s) with the Leningrad Philharmonic, under the direction of Kurt Sanderling rather than Mravinsky. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Sanderling was now working as the orchestra’s second conductor. He and Yudina established a warm musical understanding and sincere friendship. Exactly a month before Yudina’s arrival, Sollertinsky had died in Novosibirsk of a heart attack on 11 February at the age of forty-two. Her last recital on 24 March with two ‘Second Sonatas’, by Shcherbachov and Shostakovich, may well have been intended as homage to the brilliant polymath, whom she had met through Bakhtin and Pumpyansky in the days of Nevel’ and Vitebsk. At the end of the year, Yudina became one of the first soloists to play with the Leningrad Philharmonic back at their home base. Shaporina attended this concert, featuring Mozart’s C minor concerto K.491 and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. ‘Sanderling conducted very well and Yudina played marvellously. What a brilliant, sparkling occasion; the Philharmonia, with its diamond-cut candelabras, created a haven isolating us from the outside world. What a difference too, remembering how the hall looked in 1942 and 1943. Now it is heated, full, and the audience well dressed. The war has receded far away from us into the distance.’55 It pained Shaporina that the war was so quickly being forgotten by Leningraders, while those returning from evacuation could not even imagine what the ‘blokadniki’ (those living through the siege) had been through. ‘Only a priest prays for warriors, yet on the battlefield, women of all ages stand and weep – it is they that take away the dead. Today I went to Church, remembered my friends by name, those who died in 1941–2 and saw the eyes of women who haven’t forgotten the war.’56 If Shaporina bemoaned the shortness of collective memory, she was equally overwhelmed by revulsion at the rising hysteria of Soviet propaganda, which grew in proportion to the nearing approach of victory. ‘26 December. It’s cold in the room. It’s terrible to be ill and on one’s own in our Soviet conditions. As I crawled across the room, I picked up the newspaper – suddenly I was seized with a stabbing, painful realization that this enormous country has 188

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only one newspaper, one way of thinking, one political understanding, and even in literature, music and history there is only one point of view.’57 She confided these thoughts to Yudina, who dismissed them as something not worth discussing: ‘If you start thinking like this, then you cannot live, you have to die. I haven’t read the newspapers for months. One has to create a kind of aristocratic isolation around oneself, that is the only way to exist.’58 ‘Aristocratic isolation’ was famously adopted by Anna Akhmatova as the only honourable mode of defence. All the more so when in August 1946 she came under assault through publication of the Central Committee’s Resolution, condemning the Leningrad journals The Star and Leningrad where her work had recently appeared. The architect of this attack, Andrei Zhdanov, singled out Akhmatova and Zoshchenko as writers of an ‘antiSoviet’ outlook, turning them into unpublishable authors. On her next visit to Leningrad, Yudina made a point of looking up Akhmatova, and bringing Zoshchenko an enormous bouquet of flowers. Writers were more vulnerable to attack than composers – provided they refrained from setting texts. Now Shostakovich was subject to enormous pressure to compose a grandiloquent glorification of Victory in his next symphony, his Ninth. Instead, in a paradoxical manner typical of the composer, he wrote a work of sparkling wit and irony, with only brief reference to tragic themes. The cultural authorities attacked the Ninth Symphony for its light-heartedness, and for having not extolled the momentous Victory under Generalissimo Stalin’s leadership. It was soon removed from the repertoire. By coincidence, just within a month of the surrender of Nazi Germany on 9 May 1945, the first concert performances of Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace took place at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall with the forces of the Bolshoi Theatre under Samosud’s direction. The work surely symbolized everything that Russians felt about the war years, and their hopes for a better future. Yudina attended the premiere and two days later, on 9 June, she wrote to Prokofiev: Dear, most treasured Sergei Sergeyevich, even three days afterwards, my state of shock is so great that I couldn’t write straight away to express my gratitude. It’s hard to do so even now [. . .] but it’s essential to say at least some things of fundamental importance. You have created not just an epos, something possible in the world of opera – but you have done this for the very first time in opera’s history [. . .] You have achieved Tolstoy’s

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aims in the patriotic and historical concepts, solved the psychological and dramatic issues, and you have proclaimed – for those with ears to listen – the triumph of good and of love. You make this affirmation of life with its universal values, notwithstanding all the malevolence that negates it, and despite the fact ‘that the earth is besmirched with evil’. How did you manage to create it, with what? The concept both in its entirety and in its minutiae – the transformation from the personal into the general through use of melodic motifs and orchestral palette – represents the summation of your thinking and musical language. Not that this surprises me, since for a long time I have perceived the voice of Eternity in several of your works.59

Yudina attended the two subsequent performances in the Grand Hall of the Conservatoire, and was dismayed to discover that the whole of Scene 9 had been removed. She wrote an open letter to Vladimir Vlasov, the director of the Moscow Philharmonic, to express her outrage. ‘How could you raise a hand to cut a single note of this masterpiece?’ She considered this scene to be one of the opera’s best, ‘in its concept, in the brilliant dramatic and compositional solutions and the inventiveness of the orchestration’.60 She asked if the cut was an expedient to shorten the opera’s duration? Vlasov admitted as much in his reply, saying while he agreed with her, nevertheless an audience could not be expected to sit through five hours of music and then get home after public transport had stopped running. While her sincerity was never in doubt, Yudina was also not afraid to ‘blurt out’ unpleasant truths, as Prokofiev joked. She considered his music for Cinderella lacked this ‘highest quality’ – apart from the famous Adagio – because of the ‘over-luxuriousness’ of orchestral texture. Now War and Peace was another matter: ‘it burst in on us with incredible force – like the rising sun – fistfuls, bucketfuls – whole sheaves of blinding golden rays, which you scatter with abundance over us, your contemporaries and people of the future, heralding the triumph of the Good that stands firm and resists every kind of trial! [. . .] And to create something like this NOW!’61 Her prediction of the power of Good would have carried less force had she known what was awaiting Prokofiev – and others of the Soviet intelligentsia during the last repressive period of Stalin’s rule.

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THE ANTI-FORMALIST AND ANTICOSMOPOLITAN CAMPAIGNS

And seized by furious inspiration Midst orchestras’ roars and thunder unfurled, Cloud by cloud you ascended the stairs Brushing against music of our world. Nikolai Zabolotsky1 In September 1944 Shostakovich wrote to Vyacheslav Molotov, Deputy Premier of the Council of Ministers and Foreign Minister, requesting that Maria Yudina should be granted living space adequate to her needs.2 It was hoped that as a three-time Stalin Prize-winner, Shostakovich had the authority to achieve the desired result. Since 1939 Yudina had been living in a two-room communal flat, with only an upright piano, and with her semi-invalid ‘mother-in-law’, Yelena Saltykova. Unable to practise at home, Yudina was saved by her wonderful memory. As Zoya Tomashevskaya recalled, whatever she sight-read once, she could play by heart.3 Yudina herself now penned a letter to Molotov; it was the first time she had ever addressed a prominent political figure on her own behalf: Over the nine years I have lived in Moscow, I have had no official residence. For two to three years, I inhabited part of a room in a damp semibasement, separated from the rest by a piece of hardboard. Here I developed severe rheumatism of the joints, which twice put me out of action as a musician. During the Great Patriotic War, this decrepit building was destroyed by bombing. Since then, I stay with relatives, without having a separate room where I can work. Today the situation

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remains unchanged. Despite my intense artistic activity at the Radio, mostly playing chamber music [. . .] I cannot arrange a single rehearsal at home.

Such conditions were ruinous to her hands and endangered her professional career. ‘I too have the undeniable right to my own living space; as a citizen I gave my all to the Fatherland in the service of Art.’4 Most probably, she never sent the letter. In the summer of 1945 Yudina suffered another severe bout of rheumatic fever. Barely able to stand, she struggled to pay daily visits to her hospitalized ‘mother-in-law’. She demanded of the institutions where she taught that she be granted access to accommodation intended for staff members. The Conservatoire mumbled promises of an attic room needing renovation – the Gnesins’ Institute had nothing available. Yudina grew impatient: ‘Will you give me your word that the attic room will be ready in three to four days?’ she asked the Conservatoire directors. Her pleas assumed urgency after a medical commission diagnosed a serious heart condition. ‘The doctors gave me a fright, saying I would soon be crawling and no longer walking – that was a month ago. Indeed, I can barely walk without a stick. If the promised living space on which my artistic life depends is not forthcoming, then as a last resort I will be forced to write to Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin saying that professionals are not cared for, despite his orders to look after cadres.’5 This was doubtless regarded as an empty threat. In another letter to the Union of Composers, Yudina reminded the organizational committee of her active propagation of Soviet composers. In the past she had received money from Muzfond, the Union’s funding organization. Now she applied for full membership of the Union, hoping this would ensure the right to living space and a regular income, even if it meant resigning from the Moscow Conservatoire. She reminded the committee, ‘when the Germans threatened Moscow, the Radio relied on me and the Beethoven Quartet exclusively for serious music. Now it hardly remembers my existence.’ And she wanted to make recordings. ‘We are all mortal; without them, what will remain of my professional activity, my interpretations of Soviet works?’6 In early October, Yudina accused the Conservatoire of sending ‘ominous epistles at a moment when my mother-in-law is ill, with fatal complications. 192

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I too have a similar incipient illness! It’s entirely due to my goodwill as an artist that I am working at all. I am at the peak of my creative powers, ready to realize the most interesting projects.’7 Amongst these projects was a proposal from Konstantin Popov, artistic director of the Ensemble of Soviet Opera, to stage Taneyev’s Oresteia as part of the Bolshoi Theatre programme. She requested that the Conservatoire reduce her teaching load by half: ‘I cannot undermine the production of the Oresteia [. . .] everything rests on me.’8 Late in 1945, Prokofiev came to Yudina’s rescue, offering her use of a ‘two-and-a-half ’ room apartment on the Mozhaisk Highway,* which he had received the previous year from Moscow’s council (Mossoviet). He and his second wife Mira stayed there briefly, before transferring residence to her parents’ flat in the city centre. On 16 January 1946 Yudina wrote to Yelena Skrzhinskaya: ‘I am temporarily living like a Tsaritsa in Prokofiev’s empty flat. My friendship with him and Mira is a gift from heaven.’9 Towards the end of her stay she wrote thanking them: ‘I cannot express my gratitude in words or deeds. I hope that during my lifetime I’ll have the chance to demonstrate my indebtedness to you.’10 She confessed to a few breakages, but had found replacements, and promised the floors would be washed, the piano tuned, and the telephone bill paid in advance. Even with accommodation problems temporarily resolved, Yudina’s nerves were on edge. She easily erupted in anger when things went badly at the Oresteia rehearsals. She declared that her January recital at the Tchaikovsky Hall had been ‘catastrophic’.11 Perhaps the ‘catastrophe’ was totally subjective, and unobserved by the audience. Live recordings, however, show Yudina as an erratic performer, with occasional memory slips and ‘splashes’. On this occasion, Yudina’s professional pride was hurt, for she had invited Prokofiev to hear her perform his Sonata no. 8, inserted between Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ and Shostakovich’s second sonata. In general, as Yudina told Skrzhinskaya: ‘I am in good health for a person who only sleeps five hours a night, consumed by the burning pressures of work – albeit of the most fascinating kind.’12 Initially, Yudina relished working with Popov and the wonderful artists from the Stanislavsky Theatre. Yet as rehearsals for

* Later renamed Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

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the Oresteia proceeded, she became increasingly frustrated with Popov’s consistent undermining of the production’s musical side. Their relationship soon deteriorated into acrimony. Popov accused Yudina of complaining over his head to the Theatrical Organization. ‘I simply cannot believe that it is you who wrote this letter, our former comrade, the great artist M.V. Yudina, until recently loved by us all.’ Yudina had discredited him, and he had lost face. ‘There are cases in life when it’s easier to bury a person than to part with him in life,’ Popov fumed. ‘However, it’s difficult to tell from your chaotic letter what you actually want from me.’13 A reconciliation of sorts was effected when Yudina withdrew her complaints to the Praesidium, although she sounded decidedly unapologetic: ‘You are disillusioned in me as a person? Well, I am disillusioned in you,’ she wrote to Popov. ‘But I kept quiet about it, since we meet for work purposes only.’14 In her view, Popov had overridden all interpretative considerations, showing no respect for her or the cast, not even for the designer, Favorsky, or the librettist, Kochetkov. He was using power as a substitute for moral authority, leaving the rest of the team to find ‘emergency solutions’ to the production’s failures. The Oresteia received a single performance at the hall of the House of Scientists on 21 February 1946. True to spirit, Popov closed the show without consultation. An ignominious epilogue occurred six months later when the Directors’ Office demanded that Yudina immediately return a dress she had been lent to wear at this sole performance. Thanks to Yelena Fabianovna Gnesina’s intervention with Mossoviet in May 1946, Yudina received her own apartment at 1a Begovaya Street, a new two-storey building built by German prisoners of war. At last, she had somewhere to practise and host friends. Her first guest, Bakhtin, stayed the whole of June. He had returned to Saransk the previous autumn to discover a catastrophic situation; the town was without food, fuel or accommodation. He and his wife found rooms in the former prison. Bakhtin resumed his former post at the Pedagogical Institute, and was now ready to present his doctoral thesis on Rabelais and the theory of ‘Carnivalization’. While staying with Yudina in Moscow, he promoted his dissertation. After his departure he delegated to Yudina various tasks, including the important mission of finding external examiners (opponenty) sympathetic to his cause. In August Yudina took his manuscript to the Leningrad historian Yevgeni Tarlé – her one-time neigh­­­ bour on the Palace Embankment. He in turn passed it on to the renowned 194

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philologist, the Academician Shishmarev, currently director of the Gorky Institute of World Literature, who arranged for the thesis to be examined there. However, the timing was against Bakhtin. He had submitted his dissertation just as the Central Committee passed a Resolution on 14 August 1946 condemning ideological laxity amongst literary figures and academics. Within a fortnight the notorious Resolution criticizing the journals Zvezda and Leningrad was published. All this signalled a drastic tightening of ideological control. The examination of Bakhtin’s thesis, now set for 15 November 1946, became a cause célèbre. Based on his theory of Carnivalization and reversal of archetypal roles, its theme was dangerously subversive in Stalinist times, implying a topsy-turvy world, with the de-crowning of the Carnival King. The commission was divided; three examiners were highly enthusiastic, wishing to award Bakhtin the full ‘Doctor’s’ degree; three others vehemently attacked the dissertation on ideological grounds. After endless protraction and referral to a Higher Attestation Committee, Bakhtin was finally awarded the lesser ‘candidate’s’ degree in May 1951.15 Yudina had recently discovered from Pasternak that Lev Karsavin, her university professor, was living in Vilnius. After deportation from Russia in 1922, Karsavin had settled in Paris, and in 1928 he took up a visiting professorship in Kaunas, then the Lithuanian capital. After the Nazi occupation of France, he moved with his family to Vilnius, where he received a permanent university post. Within months the country was annexed by the Soviets, then occupied by the Germans in June 1941, only to be retaken by the Soviets in 1944. Thus, through an unlucky twist of fate, Karsavin became a Soviet citizen again. Dismissed from his university, he was now working as director of the Vilnius Arts Museum. Yudina hastily arranged a concert tour in Lithuania in August 1946, and informed Skrzhinskaya, Karsavin’s one-time lover, that she would search him out. Skrzhinskaya asked that nothing be said about her – except that her address remained unchanged should he wish to write. Yudina recalled Karsavin sitting in the front row at her Vilnius recital, listening intently. They met at his home, exchanged news, and renewed discussion. When Karsavin came to Moscow in 1948 on business for the Arts Museum, Yudina held a celebration at her Begovaya Street apartment, where he was welcomed by friends and admirers with gifts of books and toasts to his achievements. 195

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Towards the end of that year, his eldest daughter was arrested in Vilnius. Six months later Karsavin was imprisoned and sent to a labour camp in the Komi Republic in the north-east of European Russia. Here in June 1952 he died ‘a martyr’s death’. At the end of August, Yudina snatched ten days of holiday at the Union of Composers’ House of Rest and Creativity in Sortavala, on the shores of Lake Ladoga. ‘There one breathed lightly and joyfully,’ she recalled. Composers, musicologists and performers worked away in their rooms, furnished with bad upright pianos, and in their spare time enjoyed the splendours of the northern landscape, the rustling of pines and silver poplars, and the lake as stormy as the sea in inclement weather. By mid-1946, Yudina had returned to her precious Schubert lieder project, which had been abandoned during the war. She now renewed her efforts to create new Russian texts for the songs, without changing a note of Schubert’s music. Yudina addressed a dozen potential translators amongst the country’s poets. In the end, the published anthology only used translations by Marshak, Kochetkov, Pasternak and Zabolotsky. Samuil Marshak was renowned for his brilliant translations of Shakespeare and Robert Burns, but he proved to be an equally good translator from German. Yudina often ‘swapped’ performances of piano music for her friend’s readings of poetry. She recalled Marshak’s voice ‘with the timbre of a viola da gamba, dusky, mysterious as the Milky Way! In its elegiac quality, it resembled Botticelli, and captured that golden quality of Rembrandt’s portraits, with their overtly melancholic glances.’16 For the anthology, Marshak ‘started with Goethe, creating the Russian text to ‘An Mignon’, a poem where it is difficult to render the repeating rhymes (such as Herzen Schmerzen), which always coincide with the piano’s Neapolitan Sixth chord, so steeped in lyrical significance. Naturally Marshak coped with ease and great virtuosity, conveying the wistfulness, transparency and atmosphere of the song, characterized by Schubertian Sehnsucht – that untranslatable concept, on which the whole of Romanticism is constructed.’17 Marshak (with Yudina’s musical editing) prepared isometric translations of some forty songs, of which only a fraction were actually published in the Schubert anthology. Yudina got to know the poets Sergei Shervinsky and Alexander Kochetkov while staying with Nina Zbruyeva at her dacha on the banks of the Moscow 196

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River. The former had hosted Marina Tsvetayeva on her return from France in 1939; more recently Anna Akhmatova was a regular visitor. While Shervinsky turned down Yudina’s request to contribute isometric translations, Kochetkov took up the challenge with relish. As the singer Yuri Fyodorishchev recalled, Kochetkov was highly successful in capturing the phonetic aspect of the original German. ‘His translations not only preserved the pattern of rhythmic stresses, but the sound of the poetic language, which in itself was a source of inspiration to Schubert.’18 Gentle, modest and assiduous in his work, Kochetkov was the ideal collaborator. Yudina used his textual translations of Schubert lieder, and also commissioned poetic versions of Bach’s cantatas and Schumann’s songs. Nikolai Zabolotsky first came to Yudina’s attention as a founder of the Oberiut movement along with Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. While Kharms delighted in the absurd, Zabolotsky’s first volume of poetry, Scrolls (Stolbtsy; 1929), was pure grotesque, a parody of urban street life. By the 1930s, his interests were focused on nature and man’s place in it. However, when Zabolotsky’s poem The Triumph of Agriculture (1929–30) was attacked as a ‘formalist’ mockery of collectivization, his position was endangered. Not even his peace offering, Gory Symphony, praising Stalin’s birthplace (albeit written as a paean to nature), could save him from arrest in 1936. Charged with anti-Soviet propaganda, Zabolotsky spent eight years in the Gulag. He completed his seminal translation of The Lay of Igor’s Campaign* in exile at Karaganda. When Zabolotsky returned to Moscow, Yudina was amongst those who welcomed him at the Writers’ House in March 1946, when he read his version of The Lay of Igor. She wrote congratulating him, and invited him to participate in her Schubert project. A meeting was agreed in Peredelkino, where the poet and his family were currently staying. ‘It was an easy and joyful occasion. I found Zabolotsky in the courtyard by the edge of the forest, chopping wood. His lovely school-age children were playing nearby. “This is Natasha, this is Nikita,” he introduced them [. . .] I sat down on a tree stump, while they gathered the chopped logs. Inside in his study, I explained my proposal in detail. Nikolai Alexeyevich agreed to it willingly; he loved music, symphonies and oratorios.’19 Zabolotsky had no technical knowledge * Dating from circa 1200.

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of music, so Yudina instructed him how to make the verse’s long and short syllables coincide with the rhythmic stresses of the musical setting. In the autumn they met at Yudina’s Begovaya Street apartment, where Zabolotsky gave her a copy of his volume Wooded Lake and read her his masterpiece, ‘Thunder’ (Groza). Yudina played Beethoven for him, believing his music would appeal most. Indeed, Zabolotsky’s poem ‘Beethoven’ was evidently inspired by her performance, with its second stanza an apt metaphor for creativity. As Zabolotsky’s knowledge of German was approximate, Yudina wrote out word for word translations of the ‘very best of Schubert’s songs’. She approved his predilection for the tragic figure of Johann Mayrhofer and his choice of ‘Memnon’, which Yudina considered Mayrhofer’s best poem. ‘Here finding an isometric translation proved very difficult because of the way Schubert set the poem. I was always extremely careful in suggesting any modifications to Zabolotsky. Work is work and Schubert is Schubert, and I never forgot with whom I was conversing. In this case Zabolotsky’s Russian text of “Memnon” was not organically successful.’ In all Zabolotsky created eight Russian isometric texts from Schiller, Ossian, Goethe, Rückert, as well as Walter Scott in Adam Storck’s German translation. However, only four of his texts appeared in the published anthology. Schiller’s ‘Ritter Toggenburg’ was excluded because of its length, while his ‘Die Bürgschaft’ (‘The Pledge’) and ‘Ellens Gesang 1’ (‘Raste Krieger’) were rejected by the censor. ‘The Pledge’ was considered inflammatory through Schiller’s reference to Damon’s use of a dagger ‘to free the State from a Tyrant’. Yudina was exasperated at the stupidity of the censors: ‘It was explained that the opening of Ellen’s song “Soldier, rest, Warring is over!” was equally suspect. What Soldiers? What Wars?’20 Initially, Zabolotsky enjoyed his collaboration with Yudina – ‘I could work with such an editor all my life’. But in December 1946, after delivering an agreed number of poems he withdrew from the project. Yudina was mortally offended: ‘Your unexplained contempt for our common cause [. . .] sees the collapse of what I imagined to be the sublime world of poetry, of shared thoughts and friendship [. . .] It is like being struck in the face.’21 Despite her censorious tone, Zabolotsky avoided quarrelling with Yudina. As she told Pasternak, he had achieved some superb Schubert translations, ‘but has become arrogant since the publication of his new poem Creators of Roads [. . .] We have bid each other farewell.’22 198

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From the start, Yudina believed Pasternak’s involvement was integral to her project. Initially, he had wished to be ‘held in reserve’. Even before the war ended, he had embarked on a prose work ‘for the drawer’ entitled ‘Boys and Girls’, and in its next intermediary stage ‘The Notebooks of Doctor Zhivago’. In October 1946 Pasternak confided to Olga Freidenberg: ‘It is my first real work. In it I wish to convey the historical image of Russia over the past forty-five years. At the same time, I wish to express in the story [. . .] my own views on art, the Gospels, the life of man in history and much more.’23 It was a red-letter day when Pasternak agreed to read the opening chapters of the novel to a select audience at Yudina’s flat on Begovaya Street. Although chronically short of money, she proved extraordinarily inventive when it came to financing the event. Zoya Tomashevskaya, her chosen accomplice, received a telegram from Yudina asking her to drop by the Conservatoire: I duly appeared. Yudina immediately announced, ‘We’re off to get some money.’ She sought out the Conservatoire’s supply manager, from whom she demanded an order for galoshes. They cost her about five roubles, but could be sold in the markets for a thousand roubles. The manager put up a show of resistance: ‘Professor Yudina I already gave you such an order,’ he said angrily and walked away determinedly, with Yudina marching confidently after him, and me traipsing behind. Soon the order was in her hands, and she addressed me in front of the manager: ‘Here Zoyechka are five roubles, go and get the galoshes, then sell them in the market, and with the proceeds buy some herring, potatoes and vodka. Then send a telegram to Boris Leonidovich Pasternak to come.’24

The reading was to take place on 7 February 1947. Three days earlier, Yudina sent a guest list for Pasternak’s approval. It included the art historian Mikhail Alpatov, her old friend Nikolai Antsiferov, the medieval historian, the Rilke expert, Alexander Neusykhin, the literary critic, Lida Sluchevskaya, her one-time student Artobolevskaya and her sister, as well as Favorsky, whose friendship, she informed Pasternak, ‘came as a gift from Florensky [. . .] It will be a tight squeeze, but we will all fit into my “luxurious one-celled palazzo.” Tea will be served “from the heart”.’25 Pasternak replied immediately, adding two former employees of the Scriabin Museum to the list, and 199

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requesting a punctual start at 7 p.m. ‘Altogether such an incredible gathering! Joking aside, I am flattered and shaken,’26 he exclaimed. The writer Lydia Chukovskaya drove to Yudina’s flat with Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya, whom the poet had just met and fallen in love with. Ivinskaya, presumed by some to be the prototype for Lara in the novel, Dr Zhivago, recalled that the car journey took place in a snowstorm. Pasternak had forgotten the address – the swirling blizzard hindered visibility – then miraculously they saw a light shining. It was Yudina’s home!27 Before embarking on his reading, Pasternak explained various aspects of the novel to the assembled guests. Chukovskaya recorded Pasternak’s passionate recitation – ‘as if his life hung by a hair [. . .] I was aware of his heated countenance, and his way of turning towards me as if to address me. He was reading not just for everybody but also for me.’28 Yudina’s biologist friend (and her cats’ vet), Yulian Selyu, was struck ‘by Pasternak’s ability to immediately make his personages seem totally familiar’.29 After a pause Pasternak went on to read half a dozen of the ‘Zhivago’ poems, including ‘Hamlet’, ‘Indian Summer’, ‘Holy Week’ and, most recent of all, ‘Star of Nativity’. Yudina was completely enthralled by the latter, with its startling Christmas imagery and symbolic visions of the future lending it eternal significance. She told Pasternak,‘If you had only written that one poem your earthly fame would be ensured! I implore you, allow me to make a copy!’30 Two days later she wrote thanking the poet: The shadow thrown from your colossal height not only obscures us all, your listeners of yesterday, but throws our own thoughts, work and ideas into the shade. Yet it’s not a question of us, because it suddenly became so clear – who and what you are. A piece of fruit can mature more or less visibly. Your spiritual power has suddenly erased all that is of secondary significance, and now, calmly without malice, smiles at those struck dumb from astonishment, saying ‘How is it that you did not recognize me earlier? I’ve been here all the time.’ And it’s not just your having openly turned towards Christianity, towards Christ, Love and Grace – but all this taken together.31

Pasternak’s views on the ethical aspects of Christianity were rooted in the Gospels. He himself defined his views as ‘somewhat different and wider in scope than Quaker or Tolstoyan Christianity’.32 For Yudina, the novel’s 200

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grandiose unified concept confirmed its place within the classical tradition, ‘as in Gluck, Mozart, and in the architecture of St Petersburg, I purposely avoid all literary analogies!’ She marvelled at ‘the commensurate rightness of each word, each turn of phrase, the concise and polished sentences’.33 These impressions were undoubtedly heightened through Pasternak’s expressive reading. Afterwards, she and Yelena Saltykova had endless discussions about the novel’s characters: ‘They have today become our friends, our blood relatives, one cannot stop thinking about them. And that Lara was wrong – why did she go to the restaurant with that scoundrel?’34 In his reply of 9 February, Pasternak thanked Yudina for her analysis and praise, and ‘most of all for the enormous significance of your letter – the letter of a Great Person – thank you for not withholding yourself, for giving so much of your own strength. You have no idea of the seriousness and importance of what I am saying. I send you ‘Star of Nativity’. I read it with a hoarse and exhausted voice, which gave the poem an extra dramatic quality, without which you will like it less.’35 Pasternak’s handwritten copy of the poem became one of Yudina’s most prized possessions, and she copied it many times over for friends – an early instance of samizdat.* Only a fortnight later she wrote scolding Pasternak for his continual procrastination in his Schubert translations. ‘Before the war you used the excuse of Hamlet! Now that I have become afraid of you – you criticized my forte in the “Appassionata” sonata – it becomes difficult to ask anything of you.’36 More galling still – Pasternak found time to fulfil requests from actors! ‘And I have to go on bended knee to implore you to translate some of Schubert’s Goethe settings.’37 As it was, Pasternak was already immersed in Goethe, for he was now translating Faust. He agreed to Yudina’s request on condition that the poems were ones he had already translated. They would amend them together to fit the music. In reality Pasternak hardly needed guidance, for he possessed an excellent knowledge of music. In his youth, under Scriabin’s influence, he had aspired to become a pianist and composer, only renouncing his dream at the age of twenty, when he went to Marburg to study philosophy. Yet for the rest of his life, he enjoyed playing the piano at home. In the 1950s, on a visit to * A form of self-publication of Soviet dissident writers in the 1960s and 1970s, allowing their manuscripts to be circulated.

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Peredelkino, the poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko heard Pasternak playing fourhand duets with Yudina and was amazed at his ‘almost professional’ level of playing.38 In November Yudina was still waiting: ‘Could I ever imagine that one of the cruellest blows of fate would be delivered by The Poet and Person I honour so much? It is not for me to teach you Boris Leonidovich, that a given promise is an absolute unconditional truth! I have not troubled you for eight months [. . .] I believed in the deadlines you gave me yourself.’39 At last, in 1948 Yudina’s work with Pasternak started in earnest. The Goethe poems chosen were ‘An Mignon’, ‘Der König in Thule’ (from Faust, Part I) and ‘Gesänge des Harfners’, a small cycle of three songs from Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister. Yudina visited Pasternak at his dacha in Peredelkino: . . . in the magical month of July, so celebrated in his poems [. . .] The foregathered company, hale and hearty [included] the tragic but courageous Nina Tabidze,* radiant in the glow of the Pasternaks’ hospitality. I had brought some sweets and some wine and was promptly told I understood nothing about wine, which of course was perfectly true! Nevertheless, my bottle was drunk. All was suffused in sunlight, then the flaming colours of sunset lit up the sky. We went to do a bit of work, and afterwards sat up talking through the night. A bed was made up for me in the glass-covered veranda, from where one could see the cemetery [. . .] Who would have thought then that this would be Pasternak’s final resting place?40

Their work was intermittent and slow – nevertheless by March 1949 the poet was delivering the promised Goethe translations. Later that year Pasternak held a Goethe reading at Yudina’s home, this time of his translation of Faust, Part I. Mikhail Bakhtin was present on this occasion; he recalled Pasternak calling for dry red wine, gradually drinking the whole bottle placed in front of him as he recited. Afterwards, there was a lively discussion of poetry. ‘Pasternak claimed that poetic language had to be as close as possible to conversational language (not of course mundane everyday language), in the way it avoids literary stamps.’41 * Widow of Pasternak’s close friend, the famed Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze, executed by the NKVD in 1937.

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Yudina’s Schubert song anthology was published with a beautifully designed cover featuring an engraving by Vladimir Favorsky. She believed that the wider significance of the Schubert project lay in its educational purpose. The 150th anniversary of Schubert’s birth fell conveniently in 1947, allowing the organization of concerts and broadcasts of Schubert songs, where her students performed under her piano accompaniment. From March 1947 the new translations by Kochetkov and Zabolotsky were already in use at lieder recitals at the Glinka Museum and Gnesins’ Institute. Around this time her former student and secretary, Alexei Bykov, informed Yudina of the incarceration of the art historian Georgi Vagner in Kolyma, in north-eastern Siberia. Her first instinct was to intercede for him, if necessary, writing to Stalin. On Vagner’s release in early March 1947 he came to visit Yudina. Their talk covered many themes ‘from philosophy, divinity, aesthetics, psychology, literature, music and the visual arts’ – not least a shared love of the artist and mystic Nikolai Roerich. As a token of his respect, Vagner presented Yudina with an album of watercolours of Kolyma – she found them fascinating and ‘reminiscent of India’, perhaps thinking of Roerich’s passion for the Himalayas. During her recital at the Conservatoire’s Grand Hall on 2 April 1947, Yudina kept the album beside her on the piano, as a symbol of Vagner’s ‘return to the living’.42 Her huge programme included Schubert’s B flat Sonata D.960, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Handel, and the premiere of Georgi Sviridov’s Partita no. 1, a dark, brooding piece, at times violent, at others manifesting Shostakovich’s influence. Additionally, she played Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata, her last performance of the work before it was banned in 1948. Alas, her homage to Vagner’s ‘resurrection’ was premature, for he was arrested again the following year, spending another eight years in the Gulag. The year 1947 saw Yudina’s return to the recording studios with her interpretation of Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 with the USSR State Orchestra directed by Alexander Gauk. It was issued as a set of eight 78 rpm shellac phonograph records, of which seven sides were occupied by the concerto, the eighth by the finale of Mozart’s C minor sonata K.457. Previously the recording date was given as 1944, while a legendary story of Yudina and Stalin evolved around the recording, whose veracity was never put to the test (I deal with it in the Appendix). 203

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From now on Yudina recorded regularly. In July 1947 she laid down her majestic and very idiosyncratic reading of Schubert’s B flat major sonata D.960. The initial very slow tempo – an almost static Molto Moderato of the first movement – makes Richter’s famously slow performance seem fast. However, Yudina, unlike Richter, does not stick to one tempo, and after the initial statement of the theme she gives way to agitation, pushing the tempo forward dramatically. Despite this, her emotional reading retains an imperious logic and overall unity. The development in particular seems to contemplate the doomed narrative of Schubert’s own tragic fate, evident in the recurrent motif of a bar of threatening bass trills. Even more heartrending is the second movement Andante Sostenuto, where Yudina takes a new tempo in the middle section, embarking to another promised land in the major. None of these fluctuations of tempo are indicated by the composer. Through her intimate knowledge of the lieder, Yudina identified with Schubert, feeling that the meaning and emotions articulated in the songs are also reflected in his purely instrumental music. Various friends applauded Yudina’s Schubert lieder project: Alpatov commented that, ‘your guiding hand is felt in the whole concept, the style and the music itself ’.43 Irina Tomashevskaya, the wife of the Pushkinist, Boris Tomashevsky, felt on the contrary that Yudina was sacrificing her solo career: ‘You can be as angry as you like, but I say – “The piano and only the Piano!” Here your intelligence, your imagination, your culture and your worldvision come into their own. But with mediocre singers, whatever miracles you may produce, it’s not the same thing. Boris Viktorovich heard your Schubert programme on the radio, and was not much impressed. And people said that in the Oresteia it was you alone who shone. God only knows, but your aim to attain the heights of musical culture sometimes seems merely academic! You belong to Art and should not waste your energies. People today need your inspired playing to counteract current professional indifference and cultural impoverishment.’44 In Tomashevskaya’s mind, ‘cultural impoverishment’ implied Zhdanov’s anti-formalist campaigns, the ideological attacks affecting every aspect of culture. Between 10 and 13 January 1948 Zhdanov convoked a conference to unmask the pernicious influence of formalism in music. The agenda also touched on the vexed subject of misappropriation of funds from Muzfond by Vano Muradeli, its director, and Atovmian his deputy. This was merely a 204

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prelude to the Central Committee’s Resolution of 10 February 1948 ‘On Muradeli’s opera The Great Friendship’, which unleashed an unprecedented onslaught on the country’s most prominent composers – Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Myaskovsky, Shebalin and Gavriil Popov. Although the ‘formalist’ label applied principally to composers, it was also attached to performers. Yudina was amongst a handful of Conservatoire professors criticized for not going to political meetings and for encouraging students to ignore their studies of Marxism. In early March, Mikhail Chulaki, representing the Leningrad Union of Composers, censured Yudina as a ‘performer-formalist’, while concentrating his attack on the Leningrad Philharmonia as a hotbed of formalist tendencies.45 When the Resolution of 10 February was published, Yudina was in Kiev, where on 8 February she performed Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto with Sanderling. On 11 February she gave a recital comprising works by Mozart, and Wagner–Liszt transcriptions, wishing to demonstrate that Wagner was not ‘the exclusive possession of Nazi-Fascists!’ Her concluding piece, the Funeral March from Götterdämmerung in Busoni’s arrangement, surely must have echoed the sombre mood of the Soviet musical community. On her return to Moscow, Yudina hastened to convey her support to Prokofiev: ‘Dear Sergei Sergeyevich, I wished to express to you my deepest respect and loyal sentiments [. . .] You know that the whole world and all your admirers are with you in this moment. Your steadfastly devoted, Yudina.’46 Similarly she demonstrated her loyalty to Shostakovich. On the occasion of Yevgeni Mravinsky’s triumphant performances of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony in the latter half of 1948 she wrote to the conductor, sending ‘my most respectful and devoted feelings, gratitude, admiration, affection and pride for your performance of the Fifth in the attendant circumstances’.47 The Fifth was one of the composer’s few works still allowed to be performed, and was programmed in concerts in Leningrad on 27 May and 7 December that year. The day that Zhdanov convoked the composers in January 1948, the shocking news reached Moscow of the death in Minsk of Solomon Mikhoels, the great Jewish actor whom Yudina had befriended. It was understood that his ‘fatal accident’ had been set up, making him the first prominent victim of the anti-Semitic cosmopolitan campaign. Within days of the 10 February Party Resolution, Prokofiev’s first wife, Lina Cordin, was arrested and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment; some eighteen months later 205

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Pasternak’s mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, was incarcerated and sent to the Gulag. These sadistic actions, designed to hurt both composer and poet, underlined the weakness of their personal positions. While absolutely opposed to divorce, Yudina turned a blind eye to the behaviour of such ‘geniuses’ as Prokofiev and Pasternak. The latter remained with his family while openly continuing his affair with Ivinskaya until his death. Yudina, loyal to his wife Zinaida and her children, continued to be a regular visitor at the Sunday ‘social’ lunches in Peredelkino. Prokofiev left his first wife, Lina, for Mira Mendelson, on the eve of the Second World War. Yudina managed to enjoy friendly relationships with both of his wives. On 14 February 1948 a list of forbidden repertoire was drawn up by Glavrepertkom. Amongst the banned ‘formalist’ works were Prokofiev’s Eighth Piano Sonata and Shostakovich’s Second – pieces that appeared regularly in Yudina’s programmes. But now, as the number of her concerts was drastically reduced, she could no longer perform them in any case. Nevertheless, she managed to slip Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto into a marathon concerto programme in Riga on 22 November that year. The conductor, Leonid Vigner, had greatly impressed Yudina when they first played together four months earlier. Now they performed Mozart’s C minor concerto K.491 and Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto, followed by the Prokofiev concerto. The following day Yudina wrote to Vigner, thanking him and the orchestra for their warm support: ‘[This] helps me bear the cruel, stunning blow of my unsuccessful performance [. . .] My honest and confident preparation was crowned not by victory but defeat.’48 She apologized profusely, hoping she would ‘have the happiness’ to play with him again. We are left none the wiser about what went wrong – the critic V. Zost noted no mishaps in his review, rather noting Yudina’s immense stature as an artist. For him the highlight of the evening lay in Yudina’s interpretation of Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto and her crystal-clear passagework. He found the textures in Yudina’s Mozart somewhat over-heavy, the fortes occasionally unnecessarily violent. In compensation her quiet playing had extraordinary quality. Zost praised Yudina’s technical prowess and ‘musically erudite’ performance of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, notwithstanding its ‘regrettable signs of formalism’.49 The concert was broadcast nationwide; Yudina telegraphed Prokofiev, reminding him to listen in.50 Eighteen months earlier Yudina had been censured for playing Shostakovich’s Second Sonata in Kharkov, a work of ‘formalistic 206

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over-sophistication and lacking in depth and content’. The finale only showed ‘glimpses of melody’, and the first two movements were a ‘confused medley of sounds, conveying emptiness and poverty of invention’. Such language was reminiscent of the notorious 1936 article ‘Muddle Instead of Music’. The critic berated Yudina for wasting her energy on music exemplifying ‘art for art’s sake’.51 Yudina attended the opening of the First All-Union Congress of Composers in Moscow on 19 April 1948, specifically to support her Leningrad composer friends. In the days that followed she witnessed the unedifying spectacle of composers recanting or casting blame. Yudina was upset by Mikhail Gnesin’s acquiescent address, and equally distressed by Shostakovich’s speech of abnegation on 24 April. She invited the Leningrad composers home for tea and cakes, reminding them, ‘In my house all formalist squabbles are nullified.’52 Before the Congress of Composers was over, Yudina left Moscow to visit her godmother, Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva, recently returned from Siberian exile. Her arrest had taken place late in 1937, shortly after her husband’s execution. Yudina had failed to keep up with Tilicheyeva during her long years in the camps. Now she sought her out in Ivanovo, a town known for its textile industry, just outside the stipulated 100-kilometre perimeter from Moscow. Tilicheyeva’s response to Yudina’s contrite letter was conciliatory: ‘I don’t have to “forgive” you, because when I saw your letter, my dearest, my heart was overwhelmed by an indescribable joy.’53 She was thrilled when Yudina offered to give a concert at the town’s Musical High School. The following year Yudina castigated herself again for having recently ignored their mutual friend, Kseniya Polovtseva. Tilicheyeva consoled Yudina with wise words: ‘Don’t allow yourself such confused feelings at Kseniya’s quiet death. In the love, which unites a rather large number of people there is a kind of mutual dependence. We are guilty before one person, and so compensate for this, each in our own way [. . .] Who knows, but perhaps the time, effort and attention which made you restart correspondence with me came in part from Kseniya, as you yourself suggested – and it was for this reason that you then forgot her, since it was impossible for you to gratify everybody. And maybe when you abandoned me, another person was rewarded, and all I had to do was wait.’54 At a time when loyalties were stretched to breaking point, disloyal behav­ iour was beyond the pale. In May 1948 Yudina wrote to berate the Leningrad 207

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composer Mikhail Matveyev, whose works she had recently played, for not acknowledging her at the Congress of Composers in Moscow – evidently he was avoiding contamination with ‘a formalist’. Matveyev also failed to greet her at her Leningrad concert on 5 May, where she performed Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy with Sanderling. Although well-wishers were discouraged from going backstage during the interval, persistent friends like Lyubov Shaporina and Yuri Kochurov ‘broke through the blockade’. Faithful admirers like Sofia Vasilyevna Shostakovich (the composer’s mother) and Akhmatova stayed until the end of the concert to thank her.55 While in Leningrad Yudina both performed and recorded Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with Kurt Sanderling and the Leningrad Philharmonic. Back in Moscow in June 1948, she recorded with Gorchakov and the Radio Orchestra Mozart’s D minor concerto K.466. Her authoritative and dramatic reading of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue was also recorded that summer. ‘Making gramophone recordings nearly every day is exhausting work,’ she complained to her friend Antsiferov in July. ‘In the evenings I either have to practise or lie erschöpft [prostrate] – I haven’t had a day’s rest.’56 In August she managed a short summer holiday with Yelena Saltykova at the renowned Pleshcheevo Lake near Yaroslavl – it proved to be nearly devoid of water and a terrible disappointment. Hastily they took themselves off to the Crimea, but here the mosquitoes ruined their vacation. On returning to Moscow, Yudina was shaken to learn that her elder brother Lev had survived a terrible air crash, where many were killed, burnt or horribly mangled. The following year, Yudina formed important new friendships with two talented young composers, Alexander Lokshin and Mikhail Meyerovich, whom she met at the Union of Composers’ Rest Home in Sortavala in August 1949. Lokshin in particular impressed her by his vast musical erudition, his excellent pianism, his interesting compositions, and his total immersion in Mahler’s music. In 1945 he was appointed assistant to his teacher Myaskovsky at the Moscow Conservatoire, but he was then dismissed in 1948 for propagating ‘formalists’ such as Mahler, Berg and Shostakovich. Yudina sent off a barrage of letters to help him find employment, initially to Mikhail Gnesin and his sister Yelena: ‘Not to engage him at your Institute would mean overlooking a phenomenon of enormous stature, to misunderstand and to 208

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undervalue him. Everything in art comes to him easily, as with Mozart [. . .] What can he teach? Absolutely everything: theory, harmony, orchestration, composition, score reading, musical literature and ensemble.’57 Yudina particularly admired Lokshin’s two-piano duo with Meyerovich, and told Gnesina that she would give up her own chamber music class to him. However, Yudina was overlooking the fact that Lokshin had been viciously attacked by Tikhon Khrennikov* at the 1949 Plenum of Composers. When Lokshin was offered a position on the Gnesins’ Institute faculty of folk instruments, she scoffed, ‘That’s like offering Sviatoslav Richter an accompanist’s job in the class of trombone.’Yudina helped Lokshin through performing his Brahms transcriptions – in November 1950 she played at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire his arrangements of the Third Symphony’s third movement, and the first movement of the Clarinet Quintet Op. 115. Both Yudina and Lokshin were in the terminology of the times ‘politically unreliable’. When the vice-director of the Institute, Yuri Muromtsev, criticized Lokshin as ‘politically impure’, Yudina rose to his defence. ‘Lokshin cannot be responsible for [. . .] my reputation for “political illiteracy” [. . .] If I am not trusted, then it is I who should be quitting your Institute.’58 In a huff, Yudina handed in her notice. Gnesina persuaded her to stay. Unexpectedly, another ugly problem arose, when allegations were made about Lokshin being an informer. At least two people concluded that he wrote the denunciations responsible for their arrest and incarceration – the poet and mathematician Alexander Yesenin-Volpin (son of the famous poet Sergei Yesenin) who was arrested in 1949, and Vera Prokhorova, teacher of English and Sviatoslav Richter’s close friend (known to him as VIP), arrested in 1951. Both firmly believed that Lokshin was a seksot (secret collaborator). This accusation was later contested by his family. Whether or not Lokshin had been ‘recruited’ or ‘trapped into serving’, he received no apparent benefits, while the stigma of stukach (informer) haunted him for the rest of his life. He had to endure the humiliation of people refusing to shake his hand or perform his music, as allegedly was the case with the conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky. By 1953 Yudina and Lokshin had stopped seeing each other. ‘He probably hasn’t the strength to put up with both his and my misfortunes, and I can no longer carry his burdens as I did earlier.’59 Thus it * First Secretary of the Composers’ Union from 1948 to 1991, when the Union was disbanded.

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was that Lokshin composed his striking Piano Variations in 1953 for Maria Grinberg, and not for Yudina. Soon he found a committed champion of his music in the conductor Rudolf Barshai. Such figures as the violinist Leonid Kogan (another alleged informer) and Lokshin should also be considered as victims of the tragic age in which they lived. Much was contradictory and paradoxical in those years. Yudina struggled to maintain her teaching positions, but now she was suddenly allowed to perform again in Moscow – over the previous two years she had only given concerts in Leningrad. The lifting of this boycott in spring 1950 paved the way for permission to travel to Leipzig as a member of a large Soviet delegation, headed by Shostakovich, for the bicentenary celebrations of Bach’s death. Before leaving, Yudina paid homage to the great Master in a recital at Moscow’s Hall of Columns on 4 June, performing a variety of keyboard works and Cantata arias with the soprano, A. Pazovskaya – here religious texts were permitted, an instance of the inconsistency of Soviet censors. The Soviet delegation arrived in Germany on 17 July. The festivities started with a Bach Competition, held in Weimar, where the young pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva won the piano section and Igor Bezrodny the violin section. Yudina made her pilgrimages to the places associated with Bach, reputedly walking barefoot to his grave in Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, and making friends with the Kantor, the organist Günther Ramin. The solemn opening of the BachFest took place in the Thomaskirche on 28 July in the presence of the President of the GDR, Wilhelm Pieck. The official attitude in East Germany towards Bach, endorsed by Soviet ideologists, elevated his instrumental music at the expense of the religious. ‘Kapellmeister Bach’, rather than ‘Kantor’ Bach, replaced ‘dead formulas with human feeling and experience, thereby expressing the bourgeois humanist opposition to declining feudal society’. Soviet musicians paid instrumental homage to Bach on 29 July at Leipzig’s Schauspielhaus. The concert opened with Mstislav Rostropovich’s performance of the Fifth Suite for solo cello, followed by Yudina playing the C minor Toccata BWV 911 and a set of four Preludes and Fugues. After the interval the mezzo-soprano Zara Doloukhanova sang an aria from a religious cantata, and Mikhail Waiman performed Bach’s E major violin concerto. Lastly, the Concerto for Three Pianos was performed by Isai Braudo, Pavel Serebryakov and Shostakovich 210

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as a last-minute substitute to Yudina, who had cried off because of severe inflammation of her hands. In a review of her concert at the Soviet House of Culture in Berlin on 31 July, Yudina (wrongly dubbed a Stalin Prize-winner) was praised for her Bach interpretations, including a group of eight Preludes and Fugues, the C minor Toccata, and the Italian Concerto BWV 971. The rest of the programme celebrated two later German composers: Brahms’ Intermezzo Op. 117 no. 3 and Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations WoO 80. On her return to Moscow Yudina continued with her own Bach celebrations. She gave the complete cycle of The Well-Tempered Clavier at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, performing volume I on 4 November and volume II on 4 December. The recordings from these concerts demonstrate Yudina’s predilection for slow tempi and spiritual catharsis in the great minor fugues, in contrast to the sparkling clarity of the motor-like, fast preludes (sometimes even rushing too much!), where use of pedal was scrupulously avoided. Sometimes in imitation of the organ, she would double the bass- line in heavy octaves, seemingly a relic from nineteenth-century traditions and Busoni’s organ transcriptions. Despite Yudina’s mastery of the polyphony she occasionally takes a wrong turn, one imagines from sheer cerebral fatigue – as in the A major Fugue and the magnificent B minor Fugue from volume I, where she resorted to jumping to an abrupt halt on the tonic. Hearing Bach in Leipzig had in turn inspired Shostakovich to compose his own cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues Op. 87. On 31 March and 5 April 1951 he auditioned his new cycle at the Union of Composers on Miusskaya Street, a normal procedure allowing for publication and a commission fee. By his own admission, Shostakovich was nervous and played badly. Afterwards he explained to the large gathering of composers and musicologists why he was following Bach’s inspirational example. The ensuing discussion saw Shostakovich’s principal persecutors of 1948, the ‘official line’ Union secretaries Vladimir Zakharov and Marian Koval, denounce the work’s ‘formalist tendencies’. Musicologists Israel Nestiev, Tamara Livanova and Sergei Skrebkov added their accusations. The latter rejected the D flat major Fugue as ugly – ‘a formalist fugue, a caricature’. The composer Dmitri Kabalevsky berated the cycle as ‘a grave miscalculation. It could not have served as preparation for Song of the Forests.’ In general, the genre of polyphony was deemed too abstract, a ‘formalist aberration’.60 211

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The Polish musicologist Alexander Jackowski was invited to attend the two auditions; as an outsider, he was amazed at the professional ineptitude of the discussion, and no less astonished by two women, Yudina and Nikolayeva, courageously rushing to the composer’s defence. Most composer-colleagues such as Yuri Levitin, Nikolai Peiko, Georgi Sviridov and Grigori Fried were lukewarm in their support. The drama critic and Meyerhold expert Lyubov Rudneva recalled Yudina’s indomitable figure enveloped in a voluminous dark dress proclaiming fearlessly: ‘We pianists are eternally grateful to Dmitri Dmitriyevich [. . .] these marvellous works will be performed by pianists throughout the world.’61 Yudina dismissed those who argued there was no need for polyphony – ‘such child’s prattle is not worth discussing’.62 Similarly, she ridiculed the Comrades, who saw Shostakovich’s music as mere caricature. ‘And if indeed amongst the Preludes and Fugues there are instances of caricature, tell me what’s wrong with that? Maybe some of us deserve to be caricatured. Life is far richer and more varied than the recipe provided by Comrade Skrebkov, who is incapable of writing a single Prelude and Fugue!’63 Unsurprisingly, Yudina was accused of ‘revisionist aims and dragging old formalist ideas into the discussion’.64 Such a grotesque reception would have normally dashed all hopes for publication. Now an acknowledged Bach expert, Nikolayeva persevered with learning Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues in their entirety, and presented the complete cycle at a second audition at the Union of Composers in the summer of 1952. Her calm, concentrated performance won Shostakovich’s critics over; the cycle was accepted for performance and publication in December 1952. In the meantime, Gilels, Neuhaus and Nikolayeva were performing part of the cycle off manuscript copies, soon to be followed by Yudina, Grinberg and Richter. In the summer of 1951 Yudina informed Skrzhinskaya with pride that she had ‘played in Moscow to date twelve times, and also in Kishinev, Archangelsk and Baku, and worked with my students until numbness set in! I am suffering from extreme fatigue, I have grown fat and my heart is petering out as I am always seated at the piano. But my spirit keeps going strong!’65 By the end of July, Yudina was overcome by exhaustion and accompanying depression. As so often she turned to her old friends, the Bakhtins: ‘Everything inside me is weeping; [. . .] I feel that I not only possess a head

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and hands, which are always at work, legs which always ache, a heart which always strives to give thanks to God, shoulders which carry heavy burdens, a stomach which doesn’t digest (forgive me!), a throat which always demands hot sweet tea, and a soul, always full of hopes, but also nerves stretched to breaking point.’66 Unexpectedly the Bakhtins had sent her a large sum of cash – she thanked them profusely for their ‘Dickensian money – your blood and diamonds’. She explained she had to spend it on her needy relatives, which pre-empted her going on holiday herself. She suggested that ‘Mikh Mikh’ and his wife Alyona come to Moscow – ‘to drink tea and talk, as in the days of Nevel’, Vitebsk, St Petersburg, Leningrad’.67 In the event it was she who visited them in Saransk later that month, giving a private concert for their friends at the local Radio. Yudina was now having to cope with a new problem: the complaints of the Begovaya Street neighbours about her long hours’ practising. A temporary solution was found when her friends, the economist and literary critic Boris Udintsev and his wife Yekaterina, found summer accommodation for her in the housing cooperative at Solomennaya Storozhka. This colony of dachas, a cultural oasis in a spacious wooded area to the north of Moscow, had been designed by Karl Gippius in the late 1920s for the Timiryazevsky Academy of Arts. The following spring Yudina transferred her residence to the same dacha 28 in lot 33 of Novoe Shosse, opposite the Udintsevs, and in spring 1954 moved across the road to the Artemievs’ dacha (no. 30) – her permanent home for the next ten years. The Begovaya Street apartment was left to her geologist half-sister, Vera. Yudina wrote to Vladimir Lyublinsky of her good fortune: ‘Dear Miaooa [. . .] I am living in an earthly paradise! My attic room has bevelled windows, overlooking the forest, with orchards all around, and is naturally divided into two rooms with all the necessary furniture. The grand piano only just squeezed in. The cats got used to it at once, and go visiting our neighbours. It’s a lot cheaper for me! [. . .] This is all thanks to wonderful friends, the Udintsevs.’68 The artist Tatiana Glebova left a description of Yudina’s picturesque home: The attic, reached by a rickety outside staircase, has a tin roof, boiling hot in summer and incredibly cold in winter. A solid fence enclosed the

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whole square of dacha-like houses, in the middle of which stood a majestic edifice with Corinthian columns. Beams of electric light were projected from the building, illuminating enormous, life-size sculpted figures – this was the studio of the monumental sculptor, Vuchetich. And in a nearby attic, the great pianist Yudina breaks up a chair to heat her room – she was expecting guests that day!*69

The summer season was particularly beautiful, despite the many mosquitoes, Yudina’s sworn enemies. In winter menial tasks included chopping logs for the wood-burning stove, fetching water, and clearing the snow. Vuchetich’s studio with his busts of Stalin and other Marxist effigies piled up against the fence were an eyesore – Yudina would shake her fist at them! Despite the inconveniences, the compensations were in sparkling fresh air, and the luxury of being able to play at any time of day or night. Fortunately, Yudina’s closest neighbours, the Udintsevs, loved the sound of her practising. Another reliable neighbour, Olga Ivanova, an evangelical Christian, became a firm friend, helping her with household duties. The main inconvenience of Solomennaya Storozhka was its distance from the city centre. It was not well served by public transport, so Yudina spent a small fortune on taxis! With no telephone, she had to rely on a secretary, Serafima Alexandrova Bromberg, who kept her schedule and acted as intermediary between herself and students, concert organizers and friends. A highly cultured woman, married to a literary critic, Bromberg acted as Yudina’s secretary from 1952 to 1968, and became a close friend. While Yudina was away with the Bakhtins in Saransk, storms were gathering at the Gnesins’ Institute. Educational matters and ideological control were now entrusted to Party functionaries of the Committee on the Arts. The new Director of the Institute, A. Aksyonov, threatened the Gnesin family members with dismissal. Yudina was accused of not attending political lectures and openly espousing religion. She now contacted her friend, Pavel Yudin, a member of the Supreme Soviet, asking him to intercede on her behalf with Nikolai Bespalov, Chairman of the Committee for Affairs in the Arts. At the height of the crisis she wrote to Yelena Gnesina, saying ‘I hope I can stay on next year, work in various disciplines, and will not be separated from my beloved students, nor thrown out of the Institute, treasured by me no less than by others. I really do not want to go and see Bespalov or the 214

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Central Committee, neither to disturb you through mention of my name.’70 With the excuse of budgetary cuts, Aksyonov relieved seventeen teachers and accompanists from their duties during the 1951 summer break. The composer Mikhail Gnesin and his sister, Yevgeniya, co-founder of the Music School, were amongst those dismissed. Having reduced her workload at the Moscow Conservatoire by half in 1946, Yudina had transferred most of her teaching to the Gnesins’ Institute. In 1950–1 she had one remaining Conservatoire student, graduating at the end of the year. It was decreed that the Conservatoire had no further use for Professor Yudina. Effectively she was dismissed because of lack of students, but clearly at the height of the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns her very existence was suspect! With such uncertainty, Yudina considered a long-standing offer of a professorship at the Kazan Conservatoire, where her former student Vladimir Apresov now taught. She told Apresov that she could take on a couple of good singing students, two or three first-study pianists and up to three good chamber ensembles. She also recommended Lokshin as a teacher, recounting how ‘we make music together, and I play him my concert programmes. His critical comments carry the greatest authority [. . .] He is a phenomenon – not a person!’71 She suggested playing a group of Shostakovich’s new Preludes and Fugues – it would serve as a rehearsal for a later performance that December. After her staunch public defence of Shostakovich’s cycle, Yudina confessed to Lyublinsky her disappointment in the work: ‘Strictly between you and me, the more closely I study Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues, the less inspiring I find them.’ What were these works compared to cats, she asked, enthusing about her own cat, Kisanov, whose tail ‘reaches all the way to Ostankino, who runs up and down my Shakespearean staircase, knocks at my window and prefers Mozart to Bach! [. . .] Cats are indescribably wonderful, Shostakovich’s fugues less so.’72 Yudina made her first trip to Kazan in the second half of October. She stayed with Apresov’s family, held masterclasses, gave a Beethoven recital, and met with the Conservatoire Director Nazib Zhiganov. It was agreed she would come to Kazan on a monthly basis for thirty hours’ teaching and one solo recital. She returned to Moscow in a state of extreme exhaustion; chronic lack of sleep made her feel nauseous. As she wrote to Lyublinsky, 215

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everything in Kazan felt alien, but she would give it a go for a year. In actual fact she went back once. Having resumed work at the Gnesins’ Institute, she realized it was impossible to sustain a double teaching load and perform concerts. After a short respite, the purges in education were resumed. Yelena Gnesina received orders from the Chief Department of Educational Institutions ‘to relieve Professor Yudina of her duties at the Gnesins’ Institute, as she cannot ensure the political instruction of her students [. . .] because of major defects in her ideological-political work’.73 Once again Yudina appealed to Pavel Yudin, refuting accusations of ‘demonstrative’ non-attendance of meetings, and ‘cutting herself off from the Collective’. ‘There is nothing “demonstrative” in my non-attendance. In the 1951/52 academic year, I attended at least 90% of the social-political activities – before that I was not always present; much of the time I was seriously ill, and I was also busy with concert tours [. . .] I can hardly be accused of being cut off from the Collective when I systematically give benefit concerts for the Mutual Assistance Fund and Professional Committee.’74 Yudina was also charged with her ‘formal’ manner of study of Marxism and Leninism. ‘How does this follow? I actively studied this interesting subject, first in group lessons, and then with an individual instructor, Comrade Y. Osiyeva, who encourages me and lends her approval.’75 Further complaints regarded Yudina’s promoting Ravel and Debussy, but she made the point that these composers’ music is ‘regularly performed in concert by Stalin Prize-winners like Richter, Mravinsky, Kondrashin, Oistrakh, in programmes sanctioned by the same Committee on the Arts. So why can’t students occasionally be given the chance to study these works?’ Yudina approached them ‘from a Soviet critical point of view’. And to be censured for teaching Shostakovich’s Piano Trio no. 2 ‘when the composer himself, Oistrakh and Knushevitsky were performing it throughout the country!’ Even the gramophone record of the Trio had been issued ‘after the 1948 Resolution’.76 Her advocacy of Bach’s vocal music cost her the class of chamber singing; in the bicentenary year it had been allowed – now it constituted religious propaganda. Yudina protested the charges of baptizing students’ children and having icons at home. ‘This is my right, they are works of art. However, to say I hang amulets and horseshoes on my walls is simply a bad joke. I 216

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belong to the Russian Orthodox faith, the religion of the Russian people. Amulets are attributes of paganism and I have none, while horseshoes [. . .] have nothing to do with religion.’77 Yudina kept her position, thanks to Pavel Yudin and Yelena Gnesina, who in the meantime was shunted upstairs to a lifetime position as ‘Honorary Artistic Director of the Institute’ – something she suffered in dignified silence.

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The artist’s hand is now empowered To strip from all the dust and dirt. Through his palette life, truth, reality, Re-emerge with freshness and fidelity. Boris Pasternak1 In our [Soviet] democratization of culture there lies a great Truth. It’s a Christian Truth, only its creators don’t know the name of God. Maria Yudina2 By a grim coincidence Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day – 5 March 1953. Yudina was not amongst the musicians like Gilels, Richter, Oistrakh and the young musicians of the future Borodin Quartet who had been commandeered to play at Stalin’s funeral. Although unable to attend Prokofiev’s – the city centre was blocked by crowds of mourners hoping to glimpse Stalin’s funeral bier – she paid homage to Prokofiev at a later memorial service organized at the Union of Composers. The dictator’s death signalled change, a gradual process of rehabilitation. Former prisoners (Zeks) and camp inmates started returning to their homes, while the lifting of the ‘100-km ban’ allowed them to move to the large cities, providing they could get a residence permit. Many had spent most of their adult life cut off from the ‘normal’ world in conditions of extreme hardship. Yet returning to the ‘free world’, finding work, or resuming rudely interrupted studies posed many problems. Yudina made it her business to help former prisoners, with loans of money – usually borrowed from others – or in other practical ways. 218

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In May 1953 Yudina’s old friend Milya Zalessky was liberated after a second term of imprisonment. She was overwhelmed to learn of his lastminute reprieve from execution by firing squad. ‘I sat in a pit waiting for death,’ he recounted. ‘Through a chink in the roof – a seeming coffin lid – I glimpsed the moon and clouds scudding past.’3 Now settled with a new wife in the Smolensk region, Zalessky found employment as a labourer – ‘physical work has its use for stupefying and numbing the brain!’ he wrote. Yudina commiserated: ‘Milya works as a truck loader, and dreams of finding employment on a research expedition, where he can show his qualities.’4 She wrote to Pavel Schultz, archaeologist and expert on Scythian culture, asking him to engage Zalessky. Schultz pointed out that archaeological digs involved hard physical labour – would Zalessky withstand the gruelling heat of the Crimean steppe? The art historian Georgi Vagner, arrested for a second time in 1948, finally returned from the camps in 1956. He resumed contact with Yudina, yet their relationship no longer retained its spiritual intensity. The same year, the French-born pianist Vera Lothar-Shevchenko was released from the Gulag, where she had spent some eighteen years. She courageously started giving concerts again, and was encouraged in this by Yudina. They first met in Sverdlovsk in 1956, where Vera attended her concerts and was deeply moved. Their ensuing friendship, carried on through correspondence and the occasional meeting in Moscow, was cemented by a common outlook on life and music. Lothar-Shevchenko was grateful to Yudina’s generosity of spirit and equally for revealing ‘the true spirit and profundity of Beethoven’s thoughts’5 – something which took her back to the interpretations of her one-time teacher, Eugen D’Albert, in Vienna. Yudina was even more affected by the fate of another musician, Sergei Valentinovich Diaghilev, for it typified the wasted lives of so many Zeks. Nephew of Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, the founder of the renowned Ballets Russes, he was also godson to Father Fyodor Andreyev. In 1937, just weeks before graduating as a conductor from the Leningrad Conservatoire, Sergei Valentinovich Diaghilev was arrested and spent the next nine years in the Gulag. After the war he was exiled to Norilsk, beyond the Arctic Circle. Here, Diaghilev was joined by his wife, Militsa Stepanova, and small daughter – they had lost touch during the war. Yudina gave Militsa hospitality in Moscow just before they set off. 219

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In Norilsk, Diaghilev worked in whatever job came his way – bookkeeper, factory workshop manager, and digging foundation pits. He managed to put together a small orchestra, which he conducted in a few concerts before it was forcibly disbanded. Now in 1954, his wife Militsa wrote to Yudina: ‘Many are being rehabilitated and leaving – those who had survived long years in the terrible climate of Norilsk.’ Her husband was also applying to leave, ‘however, we have no idea when the authorities will get round to examining his case [. . .] He is 44 years old, his spirit is strong, and he dreams of performing Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. If only we could leave this desolate place!’6 Eventually Diaghilev and his family were rehabilitated. In Moscow he consulted Yudina about his options, and spoke of his enthusiasm for Stravinsky. He returned to his studies, gaining his diploma in conducting, but could only find work with a provincial cinema orchestra. As Yudina noted, ‘this is far below his musical possibilities’.7 In his case, however, she was unable to help professionally. The 1950s were a time of exciting musical ventures for Yudina. After her Bach homage, she initiated a long-term project to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Beethoven’s death, coming up in 1952. Although Yudina never played the complete cycle of thirty-two sonatas, she performed twenty-two of them, representing the best of each period in Beethoven’s life.* She carried out her exploration over eight years in her Leningrad and Moscow recitals, repeated in towns like Tallinn, Kiev, Tbilisi and Yerevan. Apart from the sonatas, she added to her repertoire several sets of Beethoven Variations. Her interpretation of the monumental Diabelli Variations Op. 120, with its colossal structure, inherent wit and philosophical depth, became one of her notable achievements – together with the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata (Op. 106) and the last Sonata, Op. 111. On 23 September 1953 she wrote to Skrzhinskaya: ‘I just batted off two concerts, Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto on the Radio and then on 20 September a mammoth programme, including Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 110 and my first go at the Diabelli Variations.’ The second half of the concert was dedicated to Schubert. Yudina described the concert as ‘exceptionally successful – All the way to the Nikitsky Gates people were begging for tickets [. . .] As Rostik Dubinsky,** that wonderful violinist, said – it was “Ace” * She played Sonatas 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 and 32. ** First violin of the Philharmonic Quartet, the future Borodin Quartet.

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[Zdorovo!]. It wasn’t me playing, but some Higher Forces operating through me – I had humbly called upon their help.’8 Beethoven’s chamber music was at the centre of her teaching programme at the Gnesins’ Institute. She herself performed pieces like the Archduke Trio Op. 97 with Tsyganov and Shirinsky, and the sixth violin sonata Op. 30 no. 1 with Marina Kozolupova. In the words of Yudina’s Russian biographer, Anatoli Kuznetsov, Mozart was ‘the Sun radiating out from the centre of Yudina’s solar system’.9 A live recording from a Mozart programme at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire on 6 October 1951 reveals Yudina’s full range of expression, from a shimmering lightness of touch and brilliant finger dexterity in the D major K.284 and A major K.331 sonatas, drama and tragedy in the A minor K.310 and C minor K.457 sonatas, and profound philosophical insights in the D minor and C minor Fantasias (K.397 and K.475). She also recorded other Mozart works in the studio. While Western contemporary music was actively discouraged during this period, Yudina paid her dues to living Leningrad composers Shcherbachov, Gavriil Popov, Kochurov and Bogdanov-Berezovsky in a recital on 28 June 1953. By early August, with money in her pocket, Yudina announced to Lyublinsky, ‘I am going on a paid holiday (yes me!) at the Union of Artists’ Resort in Majori on the Riga coast! I couldn’t resist, I miss the sea so much!’10 She recounted to Skrzhinskaya some comic moments of her holiday: ‘I bathed eight times, wearing a long blue dressing gown; from the shore I heard shouted comments: “Look, a new form of Sport” or “Hey, there’s an Auntie bathing in a dress!” However, I couldn’t care less, and took the gown off when I got into deep enough water.’11 She paid for the holiday (600 roubles for twelve days), from the proceeds of her recent recordings of Bach, Brahms Intermezzi and Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives made over five sessions that July. Now she informed Lyublinsky of her new hobby – the viola! She was taking lessons from a student and unofficial assistant, Lev Markiz – she wanted to understand the mechanics of string playing. Only there was no money to buy an instrument. At the Gnesins’ Institute, Yudina became the object of humorous verse: ‘Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si/ Maria goes riding in a large Taxi!/Wearing her black old tattered cape/On the viola she likes to scrape.’12 Like Shostakovich, Yudina was still dubbed a Formalist. She heard the premiere of his new Tenth Symphony, ‘an ominous, majestic work, even if 221

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we are unlikely to hear it again soon.’13 She knew that the Composers’ Union had attacked the work for its ‘persistent formalism’. In the meantime Yudina had overcome her private doubts about his ‘formalist’ Preludes and Fugues.14 Not even bad health – bouts of rheumatism and arrhythmia of the heart – could undermine Yudina’s tough schedule. Nevertheless, as she told Skrzhinskaya, mortality weighed on her thoughts: ‘Lyoshenka, something extraordinary is happening to me. Probably I am about to die – I keep thinking of people who have passed away – mostly of my father. I am endlessly guilty before him. You knew him, and you are all the dearer to me for that reason.’ She was ‘working like a machine’, with thirty-one chamber music students: ‘Each plays three concerts a year – that makes ninety-three performances. I could do three times less for the same money! But I am a stickler for quality!’15 She had a punishing regime – with evening concerts followed by night-time rehearsals, and perhaps a plane to catch at dawn. A highlight of her 1953/54 Moscow season were three performances in March of Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto K.466 with Kurt Sanderling. ‘My precious Mozart had a loud success,’ she announced to Boba Zalesky. Physically she felt overstretched. ‘Only my hands, made of steel, withstand the pace.’ Yet, however much Yudina earned, she remained constantly in debt. Borrowing and paying back money was a constant theme of her life. She spent next to nothing on herself, was far too lightly dressed in winter, without a proper overcoat or adequate shoes. Most of her salary was given to her family – her brother Boris was a regular beneficiary. Yudina excused him as ‘chronically unlucky’. He had no qualifications and suffered mental health problems. He stuck doggedly to writing scenarios nobody needed. His wife worked as a seamstress for a pittance. To add to Boris’s troubles, he was expelled from the Party in 1952 although reinstated a year later. More tiresome was dealing with her ‘mother-in-law’, Yelena Saltykova, whose health was rapidly declining. As Yudina wrote to Skrzhinskaya, ‘She is going out of her mind [. . .] Her condition is awful, her future is unclear. Her care costs a small fortune, and it’s beyond my strength to sit with her.’16 Life got easier when spring came with warmer weather. She told Zalesky, ‘I have paid for two-thirds of my winter coat, I no longer need logs for the fire, and I have water again. AT LAST, I’ll be able to pay back my debts.’17 Yudina was grateful for his constant friendship – ‘It’s not just a question of your 222

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systematic help in my chronic troubles, but a deep common understanding of life.’18 Her friend Lyublinsky (now no longer ‘Miaouiya’ – but VEES, from his initials, Vladimir Sergeyevich) was another source of support. In July she wrote to thank him for a money loan, which had arrived at a critical moment. Totally unexpectedly, she had been offered a concert tour of Poland: On 2 July, the department for Foreign Relations of the Ministry of Culture informed me that I was urgently being sent abroad. Then as suddenly as it was proposed, the tour was postponed – supposedly ‘temporarily’. Poor Mikhail Waiman, the violinist, was summoned from Leningrad only to have to return immediately [. . .] Can you imagine, my feverish practising of Mazurkas, Nocturnes and Preludes in elephantine doses, while temperatures outside soared to 40°C and I was devoured by the most ferocious mosquitoes. Practice ceased only for moments of vanitas vanitatum – photographers, reporters and trying new outfits. All my money was swallowed up for concert attire [. . .] Now my new shoes are stored in the attic, and my new concert dress risks the same fate as my wartime gown, its white lining, stained yellow by mothballs.19

That summer Saltykova fell ill again: Yudina decided to sell her upright piano to pay for the medical expenses. ‘My gracious Princess was discharged from hospital in the midst of my frantic preparations for “Non-travel!” ’ Yelena Nikolayevna stayed with Serafima Bromberg a few days before moving to Yudina’s home. ‘These last two weeks my home has become a clinic [. . .] One cannot but pity her, she has almost entirely lost her vision and ability to walk, but not her appetite, all her biological functions work normally.’20 Most irritatingly, Saltykova’s other relatives had vanished, leaving Yudina a slave to Yelena Nikolayevna’s whims. ‘My summers are caricatures of winters,’ she told Lyublinsky, paraphrasing Pushkin. Yudina wrote to Anna Rugevich, asking that she commandeer Saltykova’s friends and relatives to help with the care: ‘I am alone – they are a whole family [. . .] If my concert activity and my trip to Poland is rescinded, it’ll be the end of me! I am desperate, dropping from fatigue.’21 A few days later Yudina decided to repudiate Saltykova, while continuing to provide 700 to 223

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800 roubles a month: ‘Let others use this money to organize some form of human life for her [. . .] If not, I will perish as an artist.’22 The forthcoming trip to Poland inspired Yudina to return to Chopin’s Preludes Op. 28. ‘They are immeasurably great [. . .] You see how right I was to teach chamber music instead of solo piano, for now I rediscover the piano literature with childish glee.’23 Yudina arrived in ‘Frédéric’s homeland’ on 7 September. Her ‘fairy-tale journey’ started in Katowice with Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto conducted by the Czech conductor Václav Smetáček. The tour continued in Warsaw, Białystok and Łódź where she played the same concerto with Witold Krzemieński. Her last concerts took place in Lublin on 24 and 26 September performing Mozart’s D minor concerto under Olgierd Straszyński. In Warsaw she partnered Mikhail Waiman in violin sonatas by Beethoven and Brahms, and played works by her compatriots Shostakovich and Prokofiev, as well as Bach and Schubert in a solo recital. Yudina met Poland’s most interesting composers, amongst them Grażyna Bacewicz and Kazimierz Serocki, who together with Tadeusz Baird was to found the Warsaw Autumn contemporary music festival in 1956. She befriended Witold Lutosławski – ‘an amazing, unusually refined gentleman and Poland’s leading composer’.24 He presented her with his Variations on a Theme of Paganini for two pianos. Yudina returned to Moscow, her suitcases bulging with scores by Polish composers whom she wished to promote. Chopin had hitherto never been essential to her repertoire, although during the war she regularly broadcast his more popular works, as a sign of solidarity with the Polish people. Now she regularly programmed the complete cycle of Chopin Preludes with other Polish works like Szymanowksi’s Op. 3 Variations, Lutosławski’s Paganini Variations for two pianos, or Kazimierz Serocki’s Suite of Preludes for solo piano. Viktor Merzhanov attended such a concert on 26 May 1955 at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire: ‘I wish to thank you once again for your Chopin Preludes, which have remained with me for long afterwards. There was a rare unity of the cycle, where almost every Prelude spoke so much. The Lutosławski Paganini Variations with Yuri Ponizovkin produced a strange impression, with such artificial harmonies heaped onto Liszt’s etude. However, it sounded very effective.’25 In Yudina’s view, Chopin’s Preludes were still misunderstood; they carried a philosophical, revelatory meaning – ‘Death and Resurrection’. Previously, she had written in a student’s score the key or psychological mood, which 224

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served to unlock the image or symbol for each of the twenty-four Preludes. While excluding a narrative, she conceded concrete images. Thus, the second, A minor Prelude was ‘An empty Chapel – a numbed condition of the spirit’, the third Prelude, in G major, was ‘A Burbling stream. Patterns of birds in flight against an evening sky’. And number seventeen in A flat represented no less than Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. Yudina’s well-trained memory allowed her to hold an enormous number of works in her head and hands. In the six months between December 1954 and May 1955 alone she programmed some twenty-six major recital works, not to mention concertos and a large number of chamber music pieces. At the end of 1955 and the first months of 1956 she devised a concert series entitled ‘Sonatas’, working her way from Scarlatti and Haydn to Prokofiev and Shcherbachov, and adding to her repertoire Carl Maria von Weber’s Second Sonata, Schumann’s Second Sonata and Chopin’s Third Sonata. Nina Zbruyeva wrote to Yudina after the first concert on 14 December 1955: ‘How amazing that an artist can be so mistaken in evaluating his own playing [. . .] Yesterday you were dissatisfied – but in reality, yesterday’s performance was superb and perfect. Even your slightly angry Haydn (E minor sonata Hob. XVI/34). As for Mozart (A minor sonata K.310), Beethoven (Sonata no. 4 Op. 7), Schubert (D.960) and Prokofiev (Sonata no. 4) you achieved heights unattainable by any other artist. Surely you can’t think that some insignificant error could cast shadows on your magnificence? [. . .] People change in front of one’s eyes as they listen to you! You bring to the surface the very best in them, their everyday faces are illuminated and transformed!’26 By the second half of the 1950s, Yudina’s repertoire revealed a significant shift towards contemporary music. She explained to Lyublinsky, ‘The great majesty of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music has already been uncovered and experienced, its problems solved.’ She often declared: ‘In the age of Einstein one cannot live according to Krayevich’s* textbooks.’27 The poet Osip Mandelstam had expressed similar thoughts on the author of the standard physics textbook of 1897, saying that Krayevich could never lead to new ideas. The so-called ‘Thaw’ saw the gradual relaxation of restrictions at home and a cautious policy of cooperation with the West. However, when Nikita * Konstantin Krayevich (1833–92), physicist known for his educational work.

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Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 in a ‘secret’ speech, it had shattering repercussions. Its liberating effects in Soviet society were counterbalanced by Party hardliners’ claims that the political situation was being destabilized, allowing popular revolts to explode in satellite countries. The Soviet military invasion of Hungary in November 1956 shocked the world, but surprisingly did not greatly affect cultural exchanges, which were instrumental to both East and West in promoting international prestige. Companies like the Bolshoi Theatre travelled to the West, and in return the Comédie-Française and Royal Shakespeare Company came to Moscow and Leningrad in 1954 and late November 1955 respectively. Soviet instrumentalists – David Oistrakh, Emil Gilels, Leonid Kogan and Mstislav Rostropovich – made their debuts in Western Europe and America in 1955 or 1956 to enormous acclaim, upholding the supremacy of the Russian School. Two notable artists were missing from this list: Sviatoslav Richter, who made his Western debuts in 1960, and Maria Yudina, who never travelled outside the country after her Polish trip. Richter’s ban was due to his mother living in ‘hostile’ West Germany, having escaped from Odessa during the war. Yudina was too unpredictable, too apparently ‘un-Soviet’. Although unable to travel abroad, Yudina kept abreast of Western cultural developments. She confided to Lyublinsky: I crawl along to the Lenin Library – the times when I took taxis are long past – hopefully not forever. There I look up foreign music journals, and much becomes clear [. . .] There is a composer of enormous significance, Carl Orff; he lives in Vienna, but to his shame, he befriended fascism [. . .] Over here a Yugoslav choir and orchestra played – guess what – his Carmina Burana, grounded in the Middle Ages – or mythology. Bohuslav Martinů lives in America (his legs are paralysed) – the Czechs now claim him as theirs. ‘My friend’ Hindemith is at the zenith of his fame, and his new works are performed everywhere. In a word, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich is not the only composer in the world, and that makes life easier to bear – it would be too hard to live only with his perception of the world.28

Discovering this parallel musical world gave Yudina the intellectual stamina to sustain ‘the hopeless struggle for minimal comforts, like pacifying one’s 226

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neighbours [. . .] One must assume a youthful romanticism, banishing forever all unattainable dreams of material well-being,’ she explained to Lyublinsky. However, material necessity required replacing her lost glasses, and enduring physical pain. ‘Yesterday my legs were so sore I was reduced to tears.’29 On 21 January 1956 Yelena Saltykova died in Moscow’s Botkin Hospital. Writing to the composer Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Yudina described how they buried her in temperatures of minus 32°C on 23 January ‘with splendour and pomp next to her husband and son’. Her open coffin was carried by some twenty-five of Kirill’s old friends. ‘Her face had a triumphantly joyful expression, and her body was adorned with flowers and green foliage – she looked splendid.’30 The Saltykovs’ grave, where Yudina too would be laid to rest, was embellished by a marble monument donated by Boris Zalesky and sculpted with a cross and the Vine of Truth designed by Favorsky. ‘Things have come full circle, and once more I am alone,’ she wrote to the Bakhtins. ‘The only thing that truly interests me is the life of the soul after death, and all feelings and actions associated with this. Maybe I am on the right path – God calls me in the Name of Eternal Life from the abyss of life’s vanity, bustle, careerism and other such nonsense [. . .] Even if I end up in hell, it doesn’t matter as long as I can see Yelena Nikolayevna from afar – in bliss, discoursing perhaps with her idol, Pushkin – maybe she will forgive me!’31 Fortunately, Yudina still had people to care for – ‘otherwise there would be nothing to live for,’ she wrote to Florensky’s daughter, Olga Trubachyova. ‘However, my only spiritual solace comes from your family – particularly from you.’32 Friends such as Zbruyeva and Milya Zalessky tried to stop her relentless self-castigation, which made her grief even harder to bear. Already the previous year Yudina had lost many friends – her one-time neighbour in Leningrad, Yevgeni Tarlé, the Dante scholar Lodzinsky and his wife, the writer Mikhail Privshin, Olga Freidenberg and Sofia Vasilyevna Shostakovich, the composer’s mother, ‘whom I will miss above all, when I come to Leningrad’.33 She also learnt, after some three years’ delay, of Lev Karsavin’s death in the camps. ‘God grant his Kingdom to this martyr, great thinker, stoic, and knight.’34 These losses affected Yudina so deeply that she started doubting the usefulness of her existence. Zalessky, whose life had been maimed by repression, sternly rebuked her: ‘No, my dear Maria Veniaminovna! You cannot bring back what is lost! But this shouldn’t kill our hopes of knowledge, love and joy, 227

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the pleasures of creative art, of nature. No, I say – thrice NO! You are a great person, and [. . .] cannot deprive those who love your playing of that which helps them live – your playing is dearer to them than daily bread!’35 Yudina alleviated her sorrow through religion. She celebrated the forty-day remembrance Panikhida at a ‘wonderful monastery’ in Vilnius, and organized a memorial concert for Saltykova of poetry and music at the Scriabin Museum. For Yudina, consolation came principally from Pasternak: ‘After visiting your house, I am satiated with happiness, radiant luminosity, lightness and cheer,’ she confessed. ‘One sees God’s world differently through your creations – it’s as if you had erased the dirt from the opaque glass of our everyday, mundane perceptions. It’s not just your poetry, it’s you yourself, your dazzling, sparkling “Major key” that instructs us spiritually, for it is said “Rejoice evermore!” ’36 Pasternak was probably irritated when Yudina grandiloquently named him ‘Genius Poet’, but he never doubted her sincerity. At his home in Peredelkino, Yudina met the ‘majestic’ Anna Akhmatova, and the young poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko. The latter recalled how ‘Yudina would look at Pasternak adoringly, as if he had walked out of an icon [. . .] She seemed an eternal schoolgirl – people found her slightly ridiculous.’37 She developed a touching relationship with Pasternak’s youngest son, Leonid (Lyonya), who wished to study music but felt overshadowed by his pianist half-brother Stanislav (Stasik) Neuhaus. She gave Lyonya piano lessons, wanting him to gain pleasure from music, without taking it up professionally. Early in 1954 Pasternak presented Yudina with his ‘beautifully inscribed’ translation of Goethe’s Faust, Parts I and II. ‘I could not tear myself away from reading it,’ she wrote. ‘However, I am scared of Faust – evidently my spiritual strength is insufficient – I cannot read for long of the incarnation of Evil, so cleverly, wittily, even at times brilliantly declaimed. It’s difficult to explain, but it makes me want to affirm: “Christian forces are on our side – Shoo, Get Thee gone!” How were you able to withstand it? For me the Word is absolute reality.’38 Within three days Pasternak replied: ‘Nobody apart from you could so astutely and exhaustively define and understand the root problem with Faust, the reason why all flights of fantasy are so heavily weighed down. Here lies the fundamental hurdle I faced when translating – its essence was a mystery that remained hidden from me, while you were able to name it so easily and precisely. I was devastated by these unthinkable, inexplicable, impermissible examples of a sudden drooping of wings after 228

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such dizzily conquered summits, the pages of filth and vulgarity that supersede the images and tragedies of purity and tenderness, the vacuous scholarship, which far from being outstanding is infused by gentlemanly conceit [. . .] I deeply admire your perspicacity and cannot help but express my delight!’39 By the summer of 1956, Pasternak had completed the second part of Dr Zhivago, and sent out the novel to various literary magazines, despite being pessimistic about it passing censorship. He had copies made for friends, and ensured a typescript was made available to Yudina: ‘Read it at your leisure, without stealing time from your work, and without forcing yourself. Keep it as long as you wish, but if your schedule is busy for long, then give it to somebody, so it doesn’t lie around without being read.’40 On 3 September Yudina wrote to Pasternak giving her reactions: It made the same shattering impression on me as did Die Walküre and Parsifal in my youth, and later Shostakovich’s Symphonies and [Mahler’s] Song of the Earth – when a work of art crashes down and overwhelms you. It’s impossible to understand how a person can create something like this on his own [. . .] How could you achieve this grand scale and withstand such sorrow? To me your novel is superior to Dante [. . .] No one has returned from the shores of Hell; but you, our Pasternak, our contemporary, have documented such things that make one’s hair stand on end – on this side of the shore.41

Yudina compared the novel to the Iliad or the Odyssey. She also voiced her reservations: why was Lara of French origin, without a drop of Russian blood? Personally, Yudina disliked this central female character, and was also puzzled by Zhivago’s mysterious brother, Yevgraf. However, the overall effect was overwhelming: ‘Never before have I felt so strongly how little I am worth.’ She begged a manuscript copy for an unnamed person, obviously Bakhtin. ‘If I write of your incredible Polyphony in this book – it’s precisely [Bakhtin’s] terminology I use!’42 Pasternak was indirectly responsible for Yudina’s return to the fold of the Orthodox Church through introducing her to the sisters Yekaterina and Maria Krasheninnikova, both deeply involved in Church matters. Yekaterina recalled, ‘At our first meeting, we sat down at table and not very confidently sang a 229

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hymn to one of the saints [. . .] I told MV (Maria Veniaminovna) of what we had learnt about her – she was a Catholic and slept in her coffin, wearing chains.’43 Yudina was much amused: ‘I knew about being called a Catholic, but sleeping in a coffin – that’s a new one on me!’ Yudina admitted that she had not confessed since the schism of the mid-1920s – she refused to recognize Patriarch Sergei. ‘How is this?’ countered Yekaterina, ‘Patriarch Sergei is long dead, and his successor Patriarch Alexei has broken none of the Church canons, although he continues Sergei’s policies.’ Yudina’s eyes flashed angrily as she retorted, ‘In the Church there are many false Priests.’44 The sisters cited examples of clerics who had lived through imprisonment and repression, and taken their congregations ‘into the catacombs’, only to accept that Patriarch Sergei had acted justly in saving the Orthodox Church. They told Yudina categorically that to be a true Christian it was necessary to confess. After lengthy discussions, Yudina concluded that the Church offered salvation. She agreed to talk to Father Nikolai Golubtsev, Krasheninnikova sisters’ confessor, and decided to attend his services at the Church of the Deposition in the Donskoi Monastery. Golubtsev not only became her confessor but a firm friend until his death in 1963. Yudina’s life now centred around her teaching. She acquired wonderful young assistants, graduates from the Moscow Conservatoire at the start of their professional careers – the violinists Rostislav Dubinsky, Maria Grossman, the cellist Lev Yevgrafov and the pianist Yuri Ponizovkin. A firstyear violin student of Yuri Yankelevich, Lev Markiz was asked to replace a sick student in a performance of Shostakovich’s quintet led by Dubinsky with Valentin Berlinsky as cellist (both members of the future Borodin Quartet). The first rehearsal took place in Yudina’s chamber class. She immediately won Markiz over. Now chamber music became his passion, to the chagrin of his violin professor. Soon he was working as one of Yudina’s assistants. His official appointment to the position was hindered because he was registered as a Jew at a time when ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’ was still in force. Markiz described the atmosphere in class. Yudina would sit beside the piano in an armchair, listening to her students. She spoke little, occasionally demonstrating a phrase at the piano. ‘One learnt from example, from her wide culture, and the aura of her presence,’ he recalled. Yudina was unstintingly generous with her time and was the last to leave the building in the depths of night. The students learnt most from playing with Yudina herself 230

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and her wonderful assistants. At one point she decided to create a chamber orchestra and wished to involve Markiz. On discovering that Rudolf Barshai was starting the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, she saw no point in competing and pragmatically suggested that Markiz join forces with Barshai.45 Yudina believed musical education should include philosophy and the arts in general. She proposed to the Gnesins’ Institute a series of lectures from illustrious persons working in the humanities. Her suggestions were ignored. Nevertheless, she brought Mikhail Bakhtin to the Institute to talk about the literary and musical significance of the Ballade. Altogether, she was proud of the high level achieved by her students. To Lyublinsky, she wrote of her class concert in April 1953: ‘The Gnesins’ Institute Hall was full to bursting, we had three hours of wonderful music, almost all magnificently played. Our [chamber music] faculty is truly superlative. I have gathered together some truly outstanding students – creative love reigns between us.’46 Two years later she boasted to Skrzhinskaya of another chamber concert, devoted to Shostakovich. ‘I played with my pupils the Trio [no. 2] and the Cello Sonata, while the Piano Quintet and Concertino were performed by students. It was really a triumph, even more than the last time you came.’47 Yudina’s friends, including Boris Zalesky, Pasternak and Favorsky attended these class concerts regularly. The latter made a wonderful woodcut print of students performing the Shostakovich quintet. Pasternak in profile is easily distinguishable in the audience. In May 1957 Yudina bought tickets for a concert given by an unknown twenty-four-year-old Canadian pianist in Moscow, and invited Boba Zalesky to accompany her to hear some ‘extremely interesting repertoire’. In the event because of her sister’s illness, she could not go. The pianist was of course Glenn Gould, who created a furore in the Soviet musical world. At his debut on 7 May, playing part of Bach’s Art of Fugue, the hall was half-empty – the wider public considered Bach was ‘boring’. The audience was stunned by his artistry and rushed out in the interval to call friends: ‘Come immediately to the Grand Hall – it’s incredible!’ By the end of the concert the hall was full to overflowing! At the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire Gould’s ‘interesting repertoire’ included Berg’s Sonata, Webern’s Variations Op. 27 and Krenek’s Third Sonata – each work introduced by the pianist. His improvised lecture on atonal Viennese composers caused some of the officials to walk out, loudly banging their seats. 231

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Gould’s brilliant, intellectually argued interpretations of Bach’s Art of Fugue and Goldberg Variations created a new yardstick in Bach interpretation, and contrasted with the more Romantic traditions favoured in the Soviet Union, notwithstanding that pianists like Yudina and Samuil Feinberg were superb Bach interpreters in their own right, as was the younger Tatiana Nikolayeva. Yudina was offended that audiences appeared to have no idea who Krenek was; after all she had been playing his music in Leningrad in the 1920s! Perhaps the most important consequence of Gould’s visit was the apparent legitimizing of dodecaphony and the New Viennese School – forbidden fruit to Soviet musicians for nearly three decades – yet in reality Soviet musicians were still unable to follow his path. Yudina was one of the few ready to take this step, recklessly plunging into avant-garde ‘Western’ music! Although she never heard Gould play live, Yudina intuitively recognized him as a brilliant and original musician, who possessed a spiritual quality connected to the experience of physical suffering – Gould as a boy had overcome a serious spinal injury, which she wrongly believed was poliomyelitis. Lyublinsky wrote to Yudina after hearing Gould in Leningrad: ‘I am in the full sense of the word shaken. And this happens so seldom in life – for me not since February 1943!* And he is still just a boy!’48 Within months of Gould’s departure from Moscow, Yudina was programming repertoire similar to his – Krenek’s Second Sonata of 1928, an arresting work, rooted in semi-tonality and striking idioms, and Hindemith’s Third Sonata, one of the composer’s most inspired works, with its colossal fuguefinale. At her recital in Kiev on 14 October she wrote to Lyublinsky: ‘I played the [Hindemith] not ideally, but well, some things exceptionally well.’ Recently, her friend the Academician, Abram Alikhanov, had brought back from abroad a score of Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata Op. 1, which Yudina immediately set about learning. ‘So, just like Pushkin,’ she announced to Lyublinsky, ‘without leaving the country, I am more European than those who travel and are interested in nothing besides stupid pleasures and cuts of meat.’49 Another momentous event of 1957 was the ‘Sixth World Festival of Youth’, held in Moscow between 28 July and 11 August. Organized by the Soviet Komsomol, the festival was attended by some 34,000 people from 131 countries. A whole range of cultural and sporting events were held under the * A reference to Yudina’s concerts during the Siege of Leningrad.

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festival’s umbrella, including ‘Youth competitions’ for classical musicians. For the competitions’ chamber music category, Yudina prepared two excellent groups from her class. One ensemble led by the pianist, Viktor Derevyanko, a Conservatoire student of Heinrich Neuhaus, presented Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet. At her request the composer agreed to listen to the group before the competition. Yudina was mortified that they had come without flowers to thank him. In an impulsive gesture she plucked from her pocket a cameo of Christ’s head by Guido Reni, a gift to her from Lyublinsky. She wrote to VEES, explaining: ‘I told Dmitri Dmitriyevich about the flowers. “Quite right, cut flowers fade,” he quipped. Then I blessed him with this symbolic object, which I always kept with me [. . .] Now it will be forever connected to our great contemporary. I think he was glad, linking the gift with his Mother, the late Sofia Vasilyevna.’50 Derevyanko’s group went on to win first prize at the competition, her other students taking second place. Shortly after the festival began, Yudina was urgently requested by the Organizational Committee to learn a piano concerto by a young Belgian, Paul Danblon. Within days she had mastered the score, but as she reported to Lyublinsky, ‘I had to play with such an irresponsible conductor and horrendous orchestra that I refused to perform it. A tough decision, as opinions were divided as to the rights and wrongs [. . .] All this was half-hidden from the international jury. The upshot was that the composer won second prize for his work. He is twenty-six, a terribly nice lad, with a peasant face, looking as if he stepped out of a Brueghel landscape, with a charming halfGerman wife, a singer.’51 Yudina took the blame – her large fee, 1,500 roubles, ‘floated past my nose’, she lamented ruefully. She entertained Danblon and his wife, presented them with flowers from her garden, and ‘even sent them home in a taxi with a black [American] violinist, since no public transport was available – masses of people were out protesting about Hiroshima, attending Carnivals or such events.’52 Exhausted and deflated by ‘financial disaster’ – the money spent on innumerable taxis, a new ‘modest’ dress, a few decent meals in town – Yudina nevertheless saw the festival as a joyful experience. It gave young Russians a first opportunity for spontaneous interchange with foreigners. Indeed, the authorities miscalculated how enthusiastically Soviet youth responded to ‘capitalist decadence’ – pop music, blue jeans and fashion trends. No less dangerous were the awkward questions asked about Soviet politics. 233

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The All-Union Radio now invited Yudina to record Danblon’s concerto; a date was set for spring 1958 – all that was lacking was a conductor. Yudina simultaneously invited three – the young, ‘extremely talented’ Yuri Aranovich, Nathan Rakhlin and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky. Each gave their separate agreement! As an afterthought she also wrote to Alexander Gauk, asking him to conduct this ‘wonderful work’! As she explained, ‘it shows the influence of Prokofiev, Hindemith and Messiaen – and the Flemish polyphonist Dufay in its fugati for piano solo’.53 In his warm reply, Gauk advised that as he was preparing a tour of Japan, ‘it would be expedient to record the concerto with Genya Rozhdestvensky’.54 Thus started a musical collaboration based on a shared interest in contemporary music. On 11 April 1958 they recorded the Danblon piano concerto at the Radio House. Shortly afterwards Rozhdestvensky toured Belgium, and discovered that Belgium musicians had only the vaguest idea of who Danblon was.55 The Youth Festival also provided new musical friendships with younger musicians: the cellist Natalia Shakhovskaya and the viola player Fyodor Druzhinin, both first prize-winners at the festival’s instrumental competitions. With the former Yudina performed recitals with cello sonatas by Brahms, Debussy and Shostakovich as well as two twentieth-century works – Hindemith’s Sonata Op. 11 no. 3 and Samuel Barber’s Sonata. In 1961 they recorded Debussy’s Cello Sonata, and in the same year Yudina recorded Prokofiev’s Cello Sonata with her one-time assistant, Lev Yevgrafov. Druzhinin was already a teacher and assistant to his teacher Borisovsky at the Moscow Conservatoire. Now Yudina summoned him to play chamber music with her at Solomennaya Storozhka. He was astonished by her room and furnishings: . . . if a collection of arbitrary and unimaginable objects could be defined as furniture and if an attic with open timbers could be classified as a room. Most of the objects were barely visible, submerged under music, books, papers and letters, which lay in disarray on the floor, chairs and the piano. I remember two tables, one a desk, where she ate and wrote. The room was dominated by a concert grand piano ‘comme une île flottante’, whose size, noble form, and sound waiting to be released suggested that it was the true proprietor here. Guests were offered a seat on a simple wooden park bench – I never saw one like this in any other home.56

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Yudina asked Druzhinin to play new works with her – initially sonatas by Hindemith and Honegger. Similarly, at the Gnesins’ Institute, Yudina got her students to perform novelties – William Walton’s Piano Quartet, Hindemith’s instrumental sonatas (several of which she recorded with various partners in the next years) and almost unknown Soviet works, such as Galina Ustvolskaya’s Violin Sonata. At the end of 1957 Yudina discovered the uniquely talented young composer, Andrei Volkonsky, who was born into an ancient princely family in Geneva in 1933, and was brought up in France, where his music teachers included Nadia Boulanger and Dinu Lipatti. After the war, in a flush of patriotism, the Volkonsky family returned to Russia, where Andrei’s parents were peremptorily exiled to the area where their ancestors once owned estates. Andrei studied composition under Shaporin at the Moscow Conservatoire between 1950 and 1954, before starting a career as pianist and harpsichordist. His four-movement Piano Quintet Op. 5, dedicated to Shaporin, was written while still a student and first performed with the composer at the piano. Now Volkonsky made the quintet available to other pianists; Yudina decided that her prize-winning group with Viktor Derevyanko would perform it. On 22 November her chamber music class gave a ‘colossal’ programme, with Shostakovich’s Quintet and Second Trio, Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, his First Violin Sonata and the Piano Quartet by Mikhail Gnesin. Volkonsky’s Piano Quintet concluded the evening, causing ‘a sensation’, as Yudina reported to Lyublinsky. ‘ “Prince” Volkonsky himself was present – he’s a direct descendant from the Decembrist Prince! He was called out on stage many times; afterwards I gave a short speech as epilogue.’57 Yudina asked Volkonsky how he composed the work under Shaporin’s tuition, for he was ‘light-years’ behind the times. ‘Volkonsky answered, saying, “He’s a good person, and he didn’t hinder me. True, it was Nadia [Boulanger] who taught me how to develop music!” ’58 The quintet’s first movement starts off conventionally; in its use of ‘classical sonata structure’ and tonality and use of Russian themes, it arouses expectations of a typical Socialist Realist work. However, Volkonsky developed the movement with great originality reflecting different stylistic influences. The second movement Burlesque, full of youthful vigour and wit, contrasts with the third movement’s dark, dissonant Passacaglia, its theme in the bass being a twelvenote series. The final movement starts out in the spirit of a Hindemith fugal 235

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exercise, which is developed in a masterly manner. Yudina particularly praised its ‘superb form and polyphony’. Yudina herself performed the quintet on 14 March 1959 at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire with the Komitas Quartet. The contemporary music Yudina performed in the 1920s for the most part no longer interested her. When performing Nikolai Medtner’s music in a recital in December 1957 Yudina exclaimed to Nina Bruni-Balmont, ‘I had exhausted his music’s possibilities some 25 years ago. It’s nothing but Russian provincialism!’59 She could not refuse to perform it, any more than she could refuse to perform Yuri Shaporin’s Second Sonata for his seventieth birthday celebrations in January 1958, ‘an unexpected excursion back to our Youth’. She assumed that re-learning the work would be easy, but it had slipped from her fingers and memory. She bewailed to Shaporin, ‘It’s very difficult, almost anti-pianistic and “super-uncomfortable!” [. . .] Its latent melancholy is reminiscent of Blok; intellectually, it is irreproachable – far greater than Rachmaninov. In the mysterious, fragmentary Lament, I hear our Leningrad, a contemplation of Russian destinies and our individual fates.’60 Shaporin’s sense of his own importance was in stark contrast to her ‘nauseating semi-disgrace’. Yudina did him the service of recording the sonata in May 1958; the previous year she had recorded Medtner’s Triad sonatas Op. 11. Another composer with whom Yudina was closely connected at the time was Valentin Bogdanov-Berezovsky. She programmed his well-crafted Piano Preludes (each one dedicated to a different person) in recitals dedicated to Leningrad composers in Moscow. It proved problematic arranging a performance in Leningrad itself. Yudina’s relationship with the city’s Philharmonia swung between favour and neglect. She did not get on with the current director; furthermore, she felt that ‘Mravinsky punishes me for refusing to recognize him as a great conductor [. . .] Take away Shostakovich and nothing remains!’61 She had last appeared with the Leningrad Philharmonic in the autumn of 1956 in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy under Sanderling. More recently she performed Taneyev’s Quintet at the Philharmonia’s Small Hall with the ‘Beethovens’. It was belittling not to have been offered a solo recital. As for Taneyev, ‘he is for me long debunked,’ she wrote to Isai Braudo. ‘It’s like superimposing Gounod’s Ave Maria over the blameless Bach C major prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier.’62 Yudina had thoughts of taking up the organ seriously – and suggested she could act as Braudo’s 236

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assistant at organ recitals. In return, she would bring him organ pieces by Olivier Messiaen – a composer still unknown in Russia. Embracing Yudina’s cause, Bogdanov-Berezovsky engaged in a frustrating battle with the Philharmonia’s administration. Yudina advised him: ‘Wash your hands of them [. . .] Better to organize my two concerts in other Halls, either the Capella or the Conservatoire.’63 The Conservatoire however had no budget for outside concerts, while the Capella was dependent on the Philharmonia. To turn her popularity with Leningrad audiences to good account, Yudina suggested selling tickets for two concerts simultaneously – a popular programme of Beethoven and Schubert, tied to a contemporary programme consisting of music by Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Hindemith, Berg, Shostakovich, and ending with some Volkonsky or Serocki. In the meantime, Yudina undertook a money-earning tour of Siberia during the 1958 winter scholastic holidays. In Novosibirsk she performed a recital, and two concertos with orchestra – Mozart’s D minor concerto and Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’, directed by her cousin, Gavriil Yudin, whose musicianship she incidentally disparaged. From Novosibirsk she flew to Tomsk, where her plane crash-landed, fortunately without injury or loss of life. She described to Lyublinsky the hazards of provincial touring: There’s no point in your asking me for my impressions of Siberia; alas, this is no expedition to see the taiga, the majestic rivers, where all is genuine and all-powerful. This tour in the sticks is merely a means of earning money. Not a single authority on music is to be found in these parts, the small orchestras are mediocre, the public is backward, although thirsty for knowledge. Audiences are despondent, but submissive – they don’t leave the hall in the face of the monumental scale of my programmes. For I make no concessions and earn my money honestly. Novosibirsk is an ‘exemplary’ city of our times, with great contrasts between its genuinely prosperous and terrifying ghetto-like quarters, full of life at a pulse rate of 140, while outside temperatures reach minus 39 [. . .] Tomsk, the former ‘Siberian Athens’, is a filthy hole, worthy of Gogol’s pen. It has lost all its former charms and acquired no new ones, and now is just a stopover on the Moscow–Peking railway route. No need to dot the ‘i’-s and underline that I am not playing in Vienna or Prague – not even in Leningrad!64

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Reading was a way of keeping her sanity during these tours: ‘How is it possible that over fifteen years of friendship you never told me that Alexander Dumas’ trilogy [the D’Artagnan Romances] was the most interesting of all secular books?’ Yudina demanded Lyublinsky. ‘From Tomsk, I hurried home where I was awaited by Athos’ immeasurable nobility, Raoul’s charm, the terrors of Milady, scenes of gluttony so dear to me, Porthos, Aramis’ refinement and the eternal righteousness of D’Artagnan. I soaked it all in, wept and chuckled all night long!’ She asked Lyublinsky as an expert in French literature about the text’s fidelity: ‘Richelieu, the strange disdain of Cromwell, the deplorable opulence of the French court? [. . .] The dethroning of the Catholic hierarchy, followed by the much-needed Reformation – from there it’s not so far to “my” Couperin and Bach!’65 Before Dumas, Yudina had immersed herself in British literature – Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins and Shakespeare’s chronicle plays. ‘I must read while I can – maybe I’ll lose my sight when I am old – what terrible retribution that would be from Yelena Nikolayevna!’66 She had tried out Joyce – ‘not my cup of tea!’ – and in 1959 was reading with disdain Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus. ‘Mann was worse than that grumbler, Hemingway! He should be taken to court for his treatment of the medical theme at the centre of Faustus, and the associations with Arnold Schoenberg at the end!’67 Yudina also kept abreast of novelties at home, and defended Vladimir Dudintsev’s controversial novel Not by Bread Alone when it was mercilessly criticized at the Writers’ Union. Privately she termed it ‘not so bad in the literary sense, but Dudintsev misses the point on various issues’. Later she got to know him through attending the same church. In an inscription Dudintsev made in a new edition of his novel he spoke of their shared devotion to the Church ‘where there are pits in the floor made also by my knees’.68 All domestic literary events paled in comparison with the colossal scandal which erupted over Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago. The novel’s descriptions of the brutal and contradictory events of Revolution and Civil War were seen as a deliberate desecration of the 1917 Revolution. Despairing of publication at home, Pasternak allowed Dr Zhivago to be taken to Italy, where it was published by Feltrinelli in an Italian translation in November 1957. Soon editions followed in English, French and German. Pasternak’s independent action was already intolerable to the Soviet authorities, but their 238

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fury knew no bounds when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1958. Mercilessly hounded in the Soviet press, expelled from the Writers’ Union, and threatened with having his citizenship revoked, Pasternak was left with little choice but to renounce the Prize. Even while Yudina couldn’t name Pasternak in letters, she visited ‘the Poet’ in these difficult months. She was present at his birthday celebration on 10 February, where most invited guests were too intimidated to appear. Heinrich Neuhaus came with Vera Prokhorova, who recalled how many invited actors had rung Neuhaus, asking him to pass on their excuses to Pasternak. ‘At least Prokofiev’s first wife was honest,’ Prokhorova remarked – ‘she didn’t want to risk her sons’ lives!’69 Notwithstanding the censure of the Western press over the Dr Zhivago scandal, cultural exchange with the United States got off to a big swing in the summer of 1959. An ‘American National Exhibition’ opened at Sokolniki Park, with Vice-President Richard Nixon in attendance. This was followed in late August by the visit of the New York Philharmonic sustained by President Eisenhower’s Special Program for Cultural Presentations. Yudina visited the exhibition and wrote enthusiastically to Tatiana Kamendrovskaya, daughter of Yudina’s dear friend Nikolai Antsiferov, now living in New York: ‘Everyday life, cars and fashion hold little interest for me. As far as Art is concerned, what I found closest to me was Jackson Pollock’s painting The Cathedral.’70 She had been profoundly moved by Pollock’s canvases when they were first displayed during Moscow’s 1957 Youth Festival. The Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy had been the first American orchestra to perform in the Soviet Union in 1956. The visit of the New York Philharmonic under its flamboyant director Leonard Bernstein marked the musical highlight of the decade. Bernstein dazzled in his triple role of composer, conductor and pianist; he revelled in giving short impromptu talks to audiences about music and the need for ‘mutual political understanding’. In Moscow alone the orchestra performed eight concerts between 22 August and 12 September in programmes ranging from Ives and Gershwin, Barber and Bernstein, to the European classics. Tribute was also paid to the two greatest living Russian composers – Stravinsky and Shostakovich – the first moreover a US citizen! Yudina attended the American orchestra’s rehearsals and concerts, and befriended Seymour Lipkin, their soloist in Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano 239

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and Winds. She got to know Bernstein and defined their relationship ‘as short-lived, but deep and heartfelt, elevated and abstract.’71 She told him, ‘Not since Klemperer’s concerts in the 1930s did I go crazy over a conductor – now it’s happened again!’ The great musician Bernstein was ‘a very kind, open person, one feels it in everything’.72 In contrast, the other immensely popular American, the pianist Van Cliburn, winner of the first Tchaikovsky Competition, left her indifferent because of ‘his dated repertoire’. On 11 September Pasternak attended the Philharmonic’s concert at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire – his first public appearance since the brouhaha over the Nobel Prize. Bernstein and his wife took credit – they had lunched with Pasternak in Peredelkino and persuaded him to come. Images of Pasternak greeting Bernstein in the Green Room, published worldwide, were seen as ‘positive rehabilitation’ of the disgraced writer. Yudina noted with pride, ‘I was the last Soviet-Russian citizen to see Bernstein at the airport, fifteen minutes before his flight took off. Those who said they’d come either overslept, or their cars didn’t start, or last night’s celebration had been their farewell! When Bernstein saw me, he said “Vous êtes trop gentil” [sic], and his exquisite, doting Lady lisped pleasantries in English and we all embraced.’73 In the same letter Yudina reminded Lyublinsky that her 60th birthday had just passed on 10 September. As she had wished, there had been no celebration. Her gifts lay in a new ‘friendship’ with Bernstein, and through Pasternak a direct contact with Pierre (Pyotr) Suvchinsky, musician, philosopher and friend of avant-garde composers living in Paris. Pasternak had been corresponding with Suvchinsky since 1927. Their epistolary exchange came to a halt during the years of Stalinist Terror, and only in 1957 did they resume contact. Recently Pasternak had passed on via Suvchinsky greetings to Yudina from Karlheinz Stockhausen. Pyotr Petrovich Suvchinsky* was the ideal person to reveal to Yudina the world of Western contemporary music – he had known Prokofiev and Stravinsky since his youth. In 1954 he co-founded the ‘Domaine Musicale’ concert series with Pierre Boulez, Jean-Louis Barrault and Hermann Scherchen, and was a supporter of the musical avant-garde. Born in 1892 in St Petersburg and trained as a pianist, Suvchinsky was characterized by his * Known in France as Pierre Souvtchinsky.

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friend Boris Asafiev as ‘a passionate lover of music, a serious specialist in Russian poetry and literature, and a man of the widest interests’. After leaving Russia in 1917, Suvchinsky lived in Sofia and Berlin, before settling in Paris in 1925, where he became a leader of the Eurasian movement with Dmitri Mirsky, his London counterpart. By the late 1920s Parisian Eurasians veered strongly towards communism; Suvchinsky was amongst those who applied to repatriate in the Soviet Union – but his application was rejected. When he did visit the Soviet Union in 1937, the experience destroyed any desire ever to return. On the other hand, those like Mirsky who did return perished in the Gulag. In 1936 Suvchinsky created the libretto for Prokofiev’s Cantata on Lenin (soon renamed Cantata for the XX anniversary of the Revolution) from texts by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, one of the first works Prokofiev wrote after relocating to Moscow. Predictably, his original and modernist setting of these texts ensured that the Cantata was never performed during his lifetime. In 1934 Suvchinsky had married Marianna, second daughter of the philosopher and fellow Eurasian, Lev Karsavin, whom he regarded not so much as a father-in-law but as a cherished friend and spiritual adviser. The same year Suvchinsky’s ex-wife, Vera Guchkova, by now a committed communist, moved to Moscow where she married an English journalist, Robert Traill, who died fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 the now widowed and heavily pregnant Guchkova demanded an interview with Nikolai Yezhov, the sinister head of the NKVD, to petition for Mirsky’s release. Yezhov promptly sent Guchkova back to Paris, with instructions to inform on the Russian community there. On 16 September, six days after her 60th birthday, Yudina finally sat down to write to Suvchinsky, introducing herself as a friend of Pasternak, pianist, professor of chamber music and devotee of new music. Her letter concluded with a request for scores of Stravinsky, Webern’s Piano Quintet and ‘everything of Boulez’s with piano in its formation’.74 She promised repayment – in roubles – to any friends or relatives in the Soviet Union. ‘Listen to this, Miaua!’ Yudina enthused happily to Lyublinsky, ‘I have entered into correspondence with one of the Poet’s friends – he is not only at the Centre of the New Music Avant-garde, but – but – but – he is the son-in-law of the late Lev Karsavin! Two days ago, I received from Paris his really amazing letter. People (he and I) – who have never even dreamed of each other’s existence – immediately 241

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spoke in the same language, as if we had parted only yesterday on some street corner in Paris or Leningrad of the 1920s!’75 Suvchinsky proved a generous friend, providing Yudina with the addresses of Boulez, Messiaen and Stockhausen and their scores.Additionally, he immediately informed Stravinsky about her. Replying to Yudina, Suvchinsky enthused about Stravinsky’s ability – at the age of seventy-five – to absorb Schoenberg’s system in his own idiosyncratic manner, while he dismissed his former friend Asafiev for succumbing to careerism. As for ‘poor Prokofiev, through his thoughtlessness, his inborn apathy towards culture has caused much harm to himself and others.’76 Suvchinsky judged Soviet music as ‘provincial, incompetent and without taste’. Yet he was painfully aware of Soviet musicians’ ignorance of contemporary developments. Now Yudina was to become the chosen recipient of avant-garde scores delivered punctually by the Soviet post – which afterwards would be subjected to censorship by Soviet repertoire committees! In early October 1959 Yudina received from Stockhausen his iconic Klavierstück XI, a graphic score of short fragments played in random order. Shortly afterwards, Suvchinsky’s gifts arrived – for which Yudina was infinitely grateful: ‘Now the creations which I read and dreamt about are lying on my piano and desk! I can study them, and adhere to this innovative, luminous world!’77 On 25 October she was going to visit Pasternak to show off her treasures: signed copies of Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître and Improvisation sur Mallarmé! Heinrich and Stasik Neuhaus would be there, and she brought with her Druzhinin and Volkonsky to perform the latter’s Viola Sonata for the company. On 22 November Yudina was scheduled to appear as soloist with the Radio Orchestra (the BSO), playing three concertos under Gennadi Rozhdestvensky: Mozart’s C minor K.491, Brahms’ First Piano Concerto and Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds of 1923–4. But neither conductor nor soloist had access to Stravinsky’s orchestral score or parts. Although these were available on hire from Western publishers, Soviet citizens could not pay hire charges in hard currency. The Soviet Union did not adhere to international copyright conventions; usually the conductor ordered copyists to write out orchestral parts by hand from an available score. At Rozhdestvensky’s suggestion they substituted the Concerto for Piano and Winds with his Concerto for Two Pianos of 1935 – a bravura 242

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piece that Stravinsky had written to perform with his son Soulima, and a personal favourite amongst his instrumental pieces. He described the second movement Nocturne ‘not so much night-music, as after-dinner music – a digestive to the larger movements’.78 The third movement’s Four Variations reflected Stravinsky’s current immersion in Beethoven’s and Brahms’ Variations. The impressive final Fugue was based on the Variation theme. Rozhdestvensky, an excellent pianist, rehearsed the piece with Yudina in a crowded-out Gnesins’ Institute classroom: ‘Maria Veniaminovna accompanied the rehearsal with interesting commentary – the lesson continues! Under her fingers, the Institute’s clapped-out old instrument is transformed, and one stops noticing the passage of time; soon it’s long past midnight, and we have to disperse.’ Rozhdestvensky had to adapt to Maria Veniaminovna’s manner of producing sound. ‘It wasn’t so simple. Try playing simultaneously martellato and legato!’79 Yudina wrote to Suvchinsky about their performance: ‘It was declared that I played very well [. . .] I learnt this magnificent work in eight days. We were so pressed for time that I gave up my beloved Brahms concerto, with its marvellous “Benedictus” second movement. Instead, we performed Beethoven’s “Emperor ” .’ She had the feeling that ‘Stravinsky’s works were written for me, if it wasn’t I that was made for them. [. . .] The Concerto’s every detail provokes delight – the energy and dynamism of the first movement, the fairy-tale Nocturne, the incredible Variations [. . .] The astounding polyphonic perfection of the fugue. We played the Nocturne and the Variations as encores.’80 She also acknowledged receipt of Stravinsky’s Piano Sonata and Septet, both of which she would learn immediately. Just before the New Year holiday, Yudina fell ill with ‘a strong attack of angina pectoris – they thought it was a heart attack – it was a near thing!’81 She avoided hospitalization, rested at home, and postponed her concerts. Being so ill made Yudina realize that she could no longer cope with conditions at Solomennaya Storozhka. She resolved to move to the city centre. Over a year before she had put her name down for a flat in a House of Scientists’ housing cooperative. This necessitated a large deposit, and Yudina had begged and borrowed the money: Bogdanov-Berezovsky lent her 3,000 roubles, Bakhtin 1,000, Neuhaus another 1,000. Pleas to the Union of Composers for financial assistance went unheeded – a bitter pill to swallow, after her lifelong promotion of Soviet contemporary music. 243

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In March 1959 Yudina had a touching reunion with the conductor Nikolai Malko, when she attended his Moscow concert. Yudina suggested that as chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra he might invite her nach Australien. ‘I won’t shame you or the Art of my country. I play everything except Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Kabalevsky and Khachaturian!’82 Malko replied after about a year’s delay: ‘Why, don’t you know how to perform Tchaikovsky?’ She was wrong in thinking he could choose his own soloists in Sydney. Malko had recently attended Otto Klemperer’s rehearsals in Sydney: ‘It was his first appearance after his resurrection – he nearly burnt to death in his bed. We spent lots of time together, it was wonderful, we talked about you.’83 Malko, however, proposed Yudina to the Danish Radio, while recommending the composer Niels Viggo Bentzon, an ultra-modern meshugener!* If Bentzon was a meshugener, Yudina retorted, that made two of them! The Danish contact came to nothing, and the following year Malko died. Early in 1960 Yudina informed Rozhdestvensky that she had received from Paris the score of Messiaen’s piano concerto Le Réveil des Oiseaux: ‘I would really like to perform it with you. May I suggest it to the Philharmonia, do I have your agreement?’84 Earlier the conductor had suggested performing André Jolivet’s Piano Concerto, which he dubbed ‘Concerto Slap-on-the-Face!’ – because of its aggressive textures. Helpfully, Suvchinsky supplied Jolivet’s address – Yudina should ask the composer to send the score. He passed on his friends’ opinions of Jolivet: ‘Naturally Stravinsky and Boulez can’t stand him – Messiaen probably as well, but he doesn’t show it.’85 On the other hand, Jolivet opened up the possibility for an invitation to Paris! By chance, just as Stravinsky heard about Yudina from Suvchinsky, he received a missive from an unknown twenty-two-year-old Ukrainian conductor, Igor Blazhkov, assistant conductor of the Ukrainian State Symphony Orchestra and passionate devotee of contemporary music. Blazhkov asked Stravinsky for scores, which were unobtainable in the Soviet Union, and told him of the desolate musical scene at home. In conclusion he hoped that ‘in some ten or fifteen years all this will be a distant memory. And we will achieve this – we, the young! Oh! We have marvellous young people!’86

* ‘crazy’ in Yiddish.

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Suvchinsky alerted Yudina to Blazhkov’s existence. Soon they were in correspondence; it was obvious, she wrote, that they should unite their efforts – she would send him scores to be photographed. Yudina suggested performing together Stravinsky’s Capriccio for piano and orchestra in Kiev. Blazhkov expressed astonishment at Yudina’s go-ahead repertoire: ‘Normally elderly musicians are terribly conservative and mortally afraid of everything! I am immeasurably glad to find in you a like-minded person!’87 Yudina approved Blazhkov’s ambitious plans of performing Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen. ‘But you are right, not straight away, or they’ll confiscate your conductor’s baton!’ She instructed him to forget the second-rate – Roussel, Barber and Gershwin – ‘Gershwin was the one black spot on the marvellous, radiant Leonard Bernstein!’88 Yudina also befriended Blazhkov’s fiancée, the talented musicologist Galina (Galya) Mokreyeva; like Blazhkov, she was often in trouble with the authorities. In the meantime, the scores that Stravinsky had sent to Yudina from London never arrived. Suvchinsky suggested he send them a second time, via himself in Paris. When at last they arrived, Yudina wrote to Stravinsky thanking him for ‘such magnificent works: In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, Concerto in D, the Mass, Symphony for Winds and Orpheus. I don’t know what I should be most grateful for – perhaps Orpheus, perhaps the Mass. In your presence I feel like a timid schoolgirl.’89 Yudina informed the composer she was programming his Piano Sonata in May, the Septet and Concerto for Two Pianos in the autumn. Suvchinsky reported that her letter ‘had intrigued and touched Igor Fyodorovich deeply’.90 Enclosed in this letter was Stravinsky’s first reply, which neatly fitted on the back of his visiting card: ‘My sincere and heartfelt greetings and gratitude for your most kind and interesting letter. Please write again!’91 Suvchinsky now conveyed some good news: the ‘Concerts Pasdeloup’ in Paris were inviting Yudina to perform Jolivet’s Piano Concerto under the composer’s direction on 29 January 1961. ‘Jolivet, while hardly an interesting composer, is an officially recognized person, and acts as a kind of “vice-minister on musical matters” to André Malraux (the Minister for Culture and the Arts). Only he can organize an official invitation, arrange for your visa and so on.’92 Soon afterwards, Jolivet confirmed the invitation in writing, and asked Yudina to repeat his concerto in Moscow.93 Yudina was planning to perform the ‘Hopi-Snake Dance’ from his Danses Rituelles. Now for health 245

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reasons, she had to postpone her concerts of new music from spring until autumn. By April she was well enough to record at Moscow’s Melodiya Studios two works by Hindemith, the Third Piano Sonata and the Viola Sonata with Fyodor Druzhinin. Just as things seemed on the upturn, two disasters struck simultaneously. The first, Pasternak’s death on 30 May 1960, came as a shock to Yudina. Having been unwell herself, she hadn’t kept in touch these last two months and was unaware that Pasternak’s cancer was advancing at fulminating speed. The second event – not totally unexpected – was Yudina’s dismissal from the teaching staff of the Gnesins’ Institute. The brilliant successes achieved by her chamber music class aroused hostility in certain quarters. Yelena Gnesina was a mere figurehead, ‘living out her days, sitting by the telephone at her desk [. . .] on half pay with half a class. Real life, administrative and creative, has bypassed her. She did an incredible amount for education, but has always had dreadful taste in people.’94 The Institute’s administrators who surrounded Gnesina were incompetent flatterers, who abandoned her when she lost power. Yudina did not fight to maintain her teaching position. In a letter to Suvchinsky, Yudina left a detailed description of Pasternak’s funeral: ‘We buried him in the village cemetery [in Peredelkino], at the foot of the parish church on the hill on 2 June at 5.30 p.m. The illness, which erupted on the surface on 24 April, lasted for five weeks. The last days were the most excruciating [. . .] Boris Leonidovich understood he was leaving this earthly life.’95 The time and place of the funeral were not advertised, nevertheless people thronged to Pasternak’s house. ‘Boris Leonidovich was laid out in the large downstairs dining room, covered with flowers – after all spring is here in all its exuberance. His body remained there until the end, so people could make their farewells, while we – Stasik Neuhaus, Andrei Volkonsky and myself and two sympathetic young instrumentalists [Lev Yevgrafov and Grisha Feigin] – played music in the ground-floor bedroom with the grand piano. Poor Stasik’s hair turned white overnight.’96 Pasternak’s widow Zinaida had requested the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Piano Trio, a work the poet cherished because of childhood memories of his mother performing it. Finding musicians proved problematic: ‘To their shame certain players refused to be involved [. . .] I got up at dawn to practise, having at last found partners, so we could fulfil Zinaida 246

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Nikolayevna’s request. At the end she burst out sobbing, and embraced us all, saying “You don’t know what you have played!” We then played the exquisite andante from Schubert’s first trio, which calmed her down.’ Stasik played appropriate movements from Chopin, while Volkonsky played Sarabandes from Bach’s Suites: At Lyonichka’s request I played the Largo from Beethoven’s Seventh Sonata (Op. 10 no. 3). We waited for Richter. Zinaida Nikolayevna had asked him for the Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung, but he had forgotten the music. He had left Leningrad early that morning and arrived after two, with Harry (Neuhaus). He immediately sat down to play – several Adagios from Beethoven sonatas and then other things – none of us got a chance to play again. This made a really dismal impression on me – such self-centredness, and complete disdain of us ‘common mortals’.97

Crowds waited outside the garden fence to say farewell. Many had travelled down on the local train: ‘simple people, Pasternak’s readers, the young, the old – respectable white-haired members of the intelligentsia, pensioners, ignoring their heart attacks and strokes. Also unknown, miserably dressed people, who had spent their last kopek on a bunch of lilies of the valley, as well as many celebrities, writers, actors, translators, philosophers, mathematicians. And the local people were all present – those Russian people that [Pasternak] loved and venerated.’ The philosopher Valentin Asmus gave the graveside elegy. ‘After the family had dispersed, some three hundred people remained by the grave and spontaneously started reciting Pasternak’s verse, each according to his abilities, desires and memories.’ Yudina was particularly affected by the recitation of ‘August’, a poem in which Pasternak recounts a dream of his own funeral in this very cemetery. ‘It was the People who laid the great Poet to rest – and not just the People – all of Nature, the larks and birds were singing in the most incredible way!’98 The death of Pasternak left Yudina grief-stricken and forlorn, while she reacted philosophically to the loss of her chamber music class at the Gnesins’ Institute. To be pensioned off at sixty was ridiculous, given that the acting artistic director, Yelena Gnesina, was in her eighty-sixth year, and other professors taught well into their seventies! In reality, an ideological battle 247

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was ongoing in all educational establishments, as recorded by the archival stenographic report of the Institute’s Artistic Council. Speaking out against Yudina were Colonel Nemyrya, head of the Military Training Faculty, Anna Melnikova, head of the Faculty of Marxism and Leninism, and the musictheory teacher Pavel Kozlov. The latter claimed that Yudina’s crushing authority ‘disrupted the correct line of work with young people’. Worse still, ‘her propaganda of composers of an evidently anti-Soviet nature, such as Jolivet and Stravinsky, is completely out of place in a musical-pedagogical Institute’. Amongst Yudina’s defenders was Adolf Gottlieb, professor of chamber music, who emphasized the consistently excellent level of Yudina’s class. He asked, ‘Why does Comrade Kozlov consider Stravinsky belongs to the antiSoviet group?’ Kozlov’s reply that Stravinsky was ‘a famous reactionary’ was ludicrous even for those times. Gottlieb insisted, ‘But you say anti-Soviet?’ Kozlov retorted, ‘Surely you agree that Stravinsky is our sworn enemy!’ Gottlieb stuck to his guns: ‘I don’t agree. Why shouldn’t one get acquainted with Stravinsky’s works [. . .] I see no ideological harm to our students.’ The issue of Yudina’s religious beliefs also aroused debate. Why was she allowed to teach music with sacred texts? The Marxist Melnikova thought one could be simultaneously religious and Soviet. Colonel Nemyrya thought differently: ‘It is incompatible with Soviet morals!’ When her students were summoned to give evidence against Yudina, they assured the officials that religious themes were never discussed. Kozlov nevertheless won the day in declaring Yudina ‘completely unsuited to the education of Soviet Youth’.99 Yudina’s dismissal was formalized on 1 July 1960. The director of the Gnesins’ Institute, Yuri Murmantsev, was powerless to stop it. It had been orchestrated by the Ministry of Culture, which was defending Soviet Youth ‘from corrupting influences’. It was one thing for foreign artists like Gould and Bernstein to perform Stravinsky and Webern to Soviet audiences, quite another when performed by their own artists. Only recently Yudina’s friend, the Estonian conductor Roman Matsov, was forbidden at the last minute to perform Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms in Tallinn. He fumed: ‘150 members of the Choir turned up in concert dress on the day and were cynically informed the concert was off ’.100 Two more programmes were now cancelled – Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis because of its religious aspect – and his concert with Yudina scheduled on 21 May, 248

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performing the Soviet premiere of Messiaen’s Le Réveil des Oiseaux – the work of ‘a modernist decadent’. Paradoxically within twelve months official negotiations were taking place for Stravinsky’s visit to Russia. There was no consistent logic in such swings in cultural policy, any more than the ban on Dr Zhivago occurring four years earlier than the sanctioned publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Yudina wrote to Lyublinsky, ‘I do not despair, I have other work – presuming it won’t be cancelled. The students and everybody round me are immeasurably indignant; I asked everybody to calm down, my heavy teaching load was suicidal, so it’s all for the best.’101 To Grigori Kogan she exclaimed, ‘It’s all gain for me – more time, no more dismal impressions, no more spending on taxis, and best of all the preservation of my intellectual and spiritual strength.’102

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THE FINAL DECADE

Beauty does not belong to an aesthetic category, but to a spiritual, metaphysical category. It is the highest condition of everyday life, of existence. Father Vsevolod Shpiller1 Everything is magnificent in a person who is turned towards God. Father Pavel Florensky2 Yudina’s final decade saw her achieve a lifelong dream, to welcome Stravinsky back to Russia and to play for him. It also brought humiliation, official opprobrium and illness. Banned once more from the concert platform, she used her time to contemplate and write about her extraordinary life. Yudina’s ‘modernist’ crusade was initiated with a series of performances of Stravinsky and other contemporary composers. On 2 October 1960 at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire she first performed Krenek’s Second Sonata and Stravinsky’s 1924 Sonata, together with Prokofiev’s Fourth and Shostakovich’s Second Sonata. An intrusion of Italian ‘gallant’ sonatas by Paradisi and Galuppi started the recital. A few days later she repeated the programme at the Leningrad House of Composers; BogdanovBerezovsky’s selected Preludes and Hindemith’s Third Sonata replaced Prokofiev and the Italians. Bogdanov-Berezovsky was enchanted: ‘All details of your performances are engraved in my memory. I carry them lovingly within me.’3 The young Leningrad composer, Boris Tishchenko, found himself ‘drawing parallels’ with Glenn Gould, who had reintroduced Krenek to Leningraders. ‘Later Maria Veniaminovna also played Webern’s Variations 250

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– here one could talk of “perpendiculars” – Gould’s performances were transparent and crystal-clear – Yudina’s active and protesting! [. . .] Altogether Yudina’s playing was categorical, convincing, penetrating, magnetic and hypnotic.’4 Tishchenko composed his second piano sonata under her influence. Although dedicated to her, Yudina never played it. From Paris, Suvchinsky wrote with the latest news: he had been to the Leningrad Philharmonic’s concerts in the city. Their programmes (Rachmaninov and Kabalevsky) were awful, and Yevgeni Mravinsky was unworthy of this magnificent orchestra. ‘He stabbed and thundered his way through the unfortunate [Tchaikovsky Fifth] symphony, tearing it apart!’5 Suvchinsky was indignant to read Shostakovich’s interview in Pravda of 8 September, in which he stated that Stravinsky had reached a compositional impasse! ‘That’s like saying Pushkin wrote verse in Chukchi!’6 Stravinsky was in South America, conducting his own music; in Europe, Boulez had been invited to conduct Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth. For Boulez, such success as a conductor risked interfering with his compositional work. Other things also interfered when Boulez signed the Manifeste des 121 – the so-called ‘Declaration on the Right of Insubordination in the Algerian War’. ‘He is now banned from the Radio and all official concert platforms!’ wrote Suvchinsky. ‘While in principle I agree with him, it’s a blow to our musical activity.’7 Suvchinsky transmitted gossip about Jolivet taking Boulez to court: Two years ago at a performance of Boulez’s music at the Domaine Musicale, Jolivet declared loudly, ‘If I was un Préfet de police, I would forbid such music.’ Boulez retorted loudly, ‘That’s not surprising, you’ve got the ugly mug of a sleuth!’ Jolivet, being a terrible coward, fell silent and vanished. This spring, his wife, a horrendous, bellicose lady who treats her husband like a wet rag, bumped into Boulez. She suggested to him they smooth over the incident. Mme Jolivet was wearing an enormous, unbelievably hideous hat. Boulez responded, in front of her husband and other witnesses, ‘When a person has a chamber pot on her head, what’s the use of speaking to her. I advise you to empty your brains into your hat and chuck them down the gutter!’ At this Mme Jolivet made for Boulez with her fists. They were separated – Jolivet stood frozen to the spot.8

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Fortunately, none of this disrupted the negotiations for Yudina’s Paris concert, Suvchinsky assured her. Jolivet had talked to Kabalevsky, who stated ‘that the Soviet Union of Composers would not hinder your visit to Paris’.9 Jolivet wrote himself, advising Yudina to contact the French cultural attaché in Moscow.10 However, in late November the Soviet Embassy in Paris notified the Concerts Pasdeloup that ‘due to her enormous workload, Mme Joudine [sic] will be unable to perform at the concert on 29 January 1961.’ Suvchinsky was downcast, for he had just persuaded Radio France to offer Yudina two recital programmes. Jolivet was in despair, and Yudina was furious. Suvchinsky and Jolivet devised a new plan, whereby she would come to Paris sometime in May to play the latter’s concerto with the Orchestre National de France, which was considerably better than the Pasdeloup orchestra. Over the next months, Yudina’s enthusiasm for Stravinsky grew in proportion to her disillusionment with Jolivet. She never got to Paris. No other Soviet instrumentalist did so much to publicize Stravinsky’s works. As she explained to the composer, ‘I am playing your music as often and as well as possible, so as to encourage others to do likewise. If needed, I will instruct other performers as best I can, so they may approach the truth as closely as possible. Soon I will have mastered your Serenade. Mon Dieu, quelle Musique!’11 Yudina gave the first Soviet performance since the late 1920s of the Serenade on 25 December at the Gnesins’ Institute. Her recital should have opened with Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur L’enfant-Jésus, but the censor rejected the work for its religious title. She substituted Messiaen with Mozart’s D minor Fantasia (in her view, it was no less spiritual), followed by Bogdanov-Berezovsky’s Preludes before Stravinsky’s Serenade. The second half of the concert was shared with her favourite partners Derevyanko and Drozdova, performing (respectively) Stravinsky’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Hindemith’s Sonata for Two Pianos. On 29 December they repeated a modified version of the programme in Leningrad’s new Concert Hall near the Finland Station. In her first letter to Stravinsky, Yudina had told him, ‘It was rumoured during Bernstein’s Moscow visit that you would return as a guest to your country of birth. I was seized with such joy!’ Stravinsky was taken aback. ‘To come as a guest – to one’s country of birth?’ he wrote in the margins of the letter. She had touched the émigré Russian’s sore point, the inevitable tragedy 252

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of being deprived of a homeland. For his part, Stravinsky had also transgressed when he wrote saying he counted on seeing Yudina soon in Paris. How little these émigré Russians understood of a Soviet citizen’s non-existent rights to travel, she complained. Her reply of 28 November, reputedly forty pages in length (most of which are lost), is said to have taken Stravinsky several days to read, and touched on many themes from Sofia, the embodiment of wisdom, to her hopes for his visit – ‘Ah, Igor Fyodorovich, you would receive such enormous recognition here – and more.’12 Yudina undoubtedly played a significant role in Stravinsky’s decision to celebrate his eightieth year in Soviet Russia. On 16 January 1961 he replied to her letter – her performances of his music gave him great joy. ‘I see you are not just interested in Firebird and Petrushka, which until recently were branded as decadent. I would like to come to you this year, but it won’t work out. I have too many engagements which I cannot not fulfil.’13 Yudina for her part was also fulfilling engagements. Despite the ban on appearing at the Leningrad Philharmonia, she and Fyodor Druzhinin gave a recital at the Small Hall on 10 February 1961. Acting as ‘accompanist’, she played sonatas by Schubert, Honegger, Hindemith and Volkonsky. In March, Yudina was to give her first performances of Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta – Fantasie Ricercata. Because of ill health she postponed the concert until 6 May. Most of the programme was with two pianos, performing Bach Contrapuncti from The Art of Fugue with Volkonsky, Hindemith’s Sonata with Drozdova, and with Derevyanko, Ruslan Nikulin and Valentin Snegirev their first performance of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. ‘The Bartók required an incredible amount of preparation – some forty rehearsals,’ Derevyanko recalled. ‘We rehearsed until ready to drop – often until 2 a.m. Yudina was very demanding!’14 Each rehearsal cost her six roubles, for she herself paid for the hire and transport of the percussion instruments. Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta provoked the audience’s wildest applause. Yudina told Arvo Pärt that ‘although [Volkonsky] did not write it for me, Musica Stricta seems to have been composed for me, and I am extremely flattered by his dedication’.15 Altogether it was ‘a miracle!’ The programme was repeated twice in Leningrad. At the second concert on 12 May at the House of Composers, Yudina and Drozdova gave the first Russian performance of Stravinsky’s Sonata for Two Pianos. The Bartók went particularly 253

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well, Yudina boasted to Lyublinsky: ‘We were literally carried on high [. . .] given flowers and photographed by TASS. I am terribly pleased – our unbelievable amount of work was justified. We were overjoyed.’16 In May the Secretary of the Composers’ Union, Tikhon Khrennikov, set off for the USA at the head of a delegation of Soviet composers. In early June they attended the new Los Angeles Festival, where Stravinsky conducted a performance of his Symphony of Psalms. Only a few days later the composer attended a concert of Soviet works, including Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony and Khrennikov’s Violin Concerto of 1959. Robert Craft reported Stravinsky’s groans as he rushed out before the interval. Stravinsky told Suvchinsky that the music was ‘terrible trash’, but escape was impossible, ‘especially as the previous day all these Soviet musicians had paid me a visit, we entertained them, and they invited me to celebrate my eightieth birthday next year with them in Moscow (if I’m still alive)’.17 An account of this meeting published by the Soviet musicians (written by Boris Yarustovsky) confirmed Stravinsky’s wish to visit Soviet Russia.18 The composer skilfully evaded journalists’ questions such as ‘Why go to a country where copyright fees aren’t paid?’19 Igor Blazhkov gave Yudina an ‘authentic’ second-hand version of the story: ‘I.F. (Igor Fyodorovich) invited Khrennikov to his house and they had an unusually frank discussion. I.F. asked why his works were played so little in the USSR, and why he attracted such hostility. Khrennikov answered “we really love your work, but you are fierce in your criticisms of the USSR” [. . .] It ended up with I.F. crying on Khrennikov’s shoulder and telling him he dreamt of spending his eightieth birthday in Russia.’20 Khrennikov was referring to an article in the February 1961 issue of Sovetskaya Kultura, which in turn referred to Stravinsky’s critical Washington Post interview. Yudina complained to Suvchinsky that Stravinsky’s statements were counter-productive. If he negated Soviet culture, she passionately defended it: ‘You know that in our democratization of culture there lies a great Truth. It’s a Christian Truth, only its creators don’t know the name of God [. . .] There is the Domain of the New Viennese School and Boulez, and no less the Domain of Shostakovich, the Domain of Festivals of Massed Songs!’21 Suvchinsky was sympathetic, but wisely advised against raising such matters with Igor Fyodorovich. ‘Instead, play his music in Russia as much as possible – always and everywhere.’22 254

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At the end of June, Yudina received Stravinsky’s letter telling of his invitation from the Union of Composers, signed by Khrennikov, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Shaporin and Kabalevsky. ‘I sent a telegram saying I would gladly be with them in a year’s time in Moscow. If all goes well, I will realize this great joy, which will be further intensified through meeting you.’23 He gratefully acknowledged the gift of a rare volume of Balmont’s verse donated and inscribed by the poet’s daughter, containing Zvezdoliki (King of the Stars), which he had set for male chorus and orchestra in 1911. Stravinsky had mixed feelings about visiting Russia: ‘It’s scary to peer into my eightieth year, scary to think of the musical goings-on in Russia, scary the idea that they should celebrate “their venerable musician”, who happens to smile when he feels like throwing up.’24 A sign of better times came with the staging in May 1961 of Malegot’s production of Petrushka in Leningrad – Stravinsky’s ballets had last been seen in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Although unable to attend the premiere, Yudina suggested to Malegot’s director, Boris Zagursky, she could ‘review’ a performance for Stravinsky and additionally mount an exhibition on Stravinsky’s creative life. He accepted both proposals. When Yudina finally attended Petrushka on 16 July it proved a disappointment – the theatre was on tour in Australia, and the second cast didn’t impress: ‘The stage seemed far too empty for the festive Maslenitsa (Shrovetide Fair), and there was a similar dearth of strings in the orchestra and lack of virtuoso wind players.’25 She waited to write to Stravinsky. Yudina continued her Beethoven exploration throughout 1961. On 15 May she played a whole recital with the ‘Appassionata’ and Ops. 101 and 109, as well as the ‘Eroica’ Variations Op. 35. She had recorded the latter in January as well as the 12 Variations on a Russian Dance WoO 80. Now came the turn of Beethoven’s last work for piano, the 33 Variations on a Theme of Diabelli Op. 120 – that ‘Mikro-Makro Kosmos!’26 On 30 May Yudina started the Diabelli recording. Later that day she travelled down to Peredelkino with Pasternak’s son, Leonid (Lyonya), to mark the first anniversary of Pasternak’s death. ‘Here, at the poet’s graveside, crowds of people had gathered of all ages, predominantly the young – there was a sea of flowers. All were silent or spoke in whispers. As night fell, they started reading poetry, by the light of the full moon!’27 The anniversary of Pasternak’s death became an annual event at Peredelkino, which Yudina observed with recitations by his graveside of his verse or readings from the Gospels. 255

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In June Yudina was back in the recording studios, recording Debussy’s Cello Sonata with Natalia Shakhovskaya and completing the Diabelli Variations. Her next project was recording Stravinsky’s Sonata and Serenade – ‘I’ve lived to see the day!’ she exclaimed.28 However, the initial session on 10 July was disastrous. Amplified noise from a reception at the Yugoslav Embassy swamped the neighbouring Gnesins’ Institute Hall, in use as a studio. Additionally, Yudina complained, the premises smelt overpoweringly of naphthalene. ‘Furthermore, both pianos have gone out of tune [. . .] making it impossible to record such transparent music as Stravinsky’s.’29 Yudina informed the Melodiya Studios that she would wait for the Conservatoire halls to become available, and she demanded that the recording should be in stereo (a novelty). She needed to consult Stravinsky on various details but was unable to do so before embarking on the recording, just before the New Year. Only later did she discover that the printed scores of Stravinsky’s Sonata and Serenade contained errors. Yudina was distraught – how could the fastidious Igor Fyodorovich permit such misprints? Stravinsky passed on a message via Suvchinsky: ‘A good musician knows everything and can play with misprints, it’s not important.’30 It transpired that Stravinsky was more disturbed by stylistic discrepancies and her fast tempi in the outer movements. Yudina admitted to playing quicker than the metronome markings. ‘Yudina often took it upon herself to override a composer’s instructions and to effect quasi-compositorial decisions, which only someone of her calibre has the right to,’31 noted the pianist and writer Susan Bradshaw. Yudina’s version of the Serenade’s final Andante absolutely convinces as a flowing allegretto, while the extremely slow speed of the Sonata’s second movement suggested a semiquaver – rather than a crotchet – pulse. In July 1961 Yudina attended London’s Royal Ballet production of Firebird in Moscow and fell in love with the work. It was to be the second (after Petrushka) of Malegot’s triple bill of Stravinsky’s ballets, and at Yudina’s prompting Orpheus (1948) was chosen as the third – a first Soviet performance! The exhibition about Stravinsky’s life was scheduled to coincide with the composer’s visit at the end of May 1962. Yudina had accepted curatorship because of her direct contact with Stravinsky and having access to unique material. Back in August 1961, Suvchinsky had sent her Stravinsky and Robert Craft’s Dialogues, which she had devoured impatiently. She 256

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proposed to the Leningrad journal Sovetskaya Muzyka that it should be translated and published. ‘I’ll lend them my copy on condition they don’t scold Webern, Robert Craft or dodecaphonic music.’32 Yudina’s summer of 1961 was devoted to her family. Her sister Anna came to stay to escape the city’s oppressive heat. They got on each other’s nerves. ‘Anna is ill, weak, capricious and stubborn, altogether unfortunate – it’s difficult to find the right approach to her.’33 And Anna abhorred Maria’s chaotic lifestyle. Her room ‘overflowed with books and scores from Paris and the USA’. Yet she possessed no decent clothes – not even essential underwear. Maria’s ‘debts, taxis, worries, secretaries’ were incomprehensible to Anna, while Anna’s scorn of her fifteen-year-old cat Nellichka was highly distressing. Yudina exclaimed, ‘I have no intention of chasing her away at the end of her distinguished cat’s life.’34 Nelli had given birth to more than a hundred kittens, Yudina was proud to tell, and shared her desk, food and bed. On 31 July news came of her eldest sister Flora’s sudden death in an accident in Bogoroditsk, a small mining town near Tula, where she had worked as a doctor. For Yudina, Flora’s funeral was as moving as Pasternak’s. Her former patients ‘prayed openly, not caring if they were observed. The miners and her doctor-colleagues carried her coffin for two kilometres to the cemetery, where there were many heartfelt speeches!’35 A month later Yudina was burying her former classmate, the legendary pianist Vladimir Sofronitsky, recently in semi-disgrace. Acknowledging him as ‘great, honest, and true to himself in his own world’, she wept copiously and at his funeral played Saltykov’s arrangement of Mozart’s Lacrimosa. At the end of August, Suvchinsky wrote proposing that Yudina should go to Helsinki, as Stravinsky would be there between 10 and 14 September: ‘I.F. said he would be terribly happy to see you.’36 Yudina expressed astonishment to Blazhkov – Suvchinsky’s letter was ‘naïve to the point of madness!’37 Instead, she borrowed money to send a telegram to Stravinsky in Helsinki. It was returned, however, for he had already left! She borrowed more money to telegraph Paris. She upbraided Suvchinsky for his tactlessness: ‘Excuse me, this was rubbing salt in the wound. Or as they say, dear Pyotr Petrovich, “your elbow may be close, but you cannot bite it!” Surely you didn’t think I could just up sticks and go to Helsinki?’38 Suvchinsky had assumed – wrongly – that Shostakovich could easily help Yudina gain permission to travel. ‘You 257

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and you alone could help Igor Fyodorovich resolve the many questions he has.’39 Suvchinsky also overestimated the time needed to obtain an exit visa! Stravinsky better understood the realities when he protested: ‘Nice people!? This is the country those Soviet obscurantists want to invite me to! But they wouldn’t give Yudina a passport to come and see me in Helsinki. Thank you. I shan’t go there.’40 For her part Yudina worried about her appearance. ‘Even if I was entitled to go to Helsinki for one day, I am so badly dressed that it’s unthinkable!’41 Yet when Suvchinsky and his wife sent her a sartorial New Year present, Yudina thanked them ‘for the luxurious gloves and scarves – for me, the old work-horse! Such elegance doesn’t suit me. Please never again spend money on such things [. . .] they don’t like me – the dislike is mutual!’42 In late July Blazhkov received a letter from Stockhausen expressing the wish to perform in Moscow with the pianist David Tudor and percussionist Christoph Caskel. Blazhkov asked Yudina to help. She immediately contacted Shostakovich, who instructed Stockhausen to approach him officially through the Composers’ Union. Stockhausen wrote to Yudina, explaining his convictions: ‘The feeling never forsakes me that my music can acquire a homeland in Russia [. . .] A deep kinship links me to people like you, in whom tenderness and steadfastness are closely intertwined [. . .] It would be the devil’s doing, if we cannot slowly and patiently transform the frost and bestial hate between peoples into love.’43 Stockhausen’s visit never materialized; however, in September it was rumoured that Messiaen was in Moscow. Yudina recalled: ‘Young musicians rushed around in agitation, and we kept ringing the Union of Composers!’44 It proved a false alarm! However, another mythical composer did visit – Varèse’s colleague Vladimir Usachevsky, pioneer of electronic music. He and Yudina met and indulged in long discussions. She helped ‘smuggle’ him into the Scriabin Museum, which had been closed after the ceiling collapsed. ‘He made a serious impression,’ she informed Suvchinsky. Usachevsky was added to her list of correspondents who sent journals and scores, as did the ‘sympathetic’ German musicologist, Fred Prieberg, a specialist in the Nazis’ repression of music. Nearer to home Yudina discovered (through Blazhkov) the Kiev composers Valentin Silvestrov and Leonid Grabovsky, both students of Boris Lyatoshinsky. And through her conductor friend, Roman Matsov, 258

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Yudina learnt of a young Estonian composer and sound engineer, Arvo Pärt. Without having heard a note of his music, Yudina became convinced of his importance – ‘one day he will become like Shostakovich’.45 She informed him of her overwhelming desire ‘to play for people in the language and tensions of our epoch [. . .] This is why, dear Arvo Pärt, I strove and still strive to see, hear and play your music.’46 At the end of October Yudina was scheduled to perform Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds with Matsov. As she confessed to Pärt, ‘when I was rushing down to Tallinn [. . .] I had a premonition of impending catas­ trophe – then the accident occurred – three splashes in my adored concerto by the adored Stravinsky’. She hoped he would obliterate these errors from his sensitive ‘tonmeister’s ears!’47 Suvchinsky consoled her by telling her of Stravinsky’s own memory lapse at the first performance. In his view, the second movement contained the most tragic music that Stravinsky had ever composed. ‘You will agree that Stravinsky is one of the rare composers who has the right to write religious music. In some mysterious way he addresses “The Other World”. It’s not a question of encapsulating emotions of religious character, but a genuine fact, when the Divine and musical creators come face to face.’48 At a solo recital on 19 November at Leningrad’s Small Hall of the Philharmonia Yudina placed Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations next to Stravinsky and Krenek. She also performed Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta and Webern’s Variations for the first time to wild acclaim, and had to repeat both the Volkonsky and Webern. Yudina’s hands were sore – she had cut her fingers opening a tin of cat food, and she couldn’t play anymore. The audience wouldn’t let her go – so she recited verse for her encore. As she told Lyublinsky, the ‘lovely, sympathetic Irina Semyonova (the hall administrator) was frightened to death when I read two unpublished poems by Zabolotsky and Pasternak!’49 Unpublished verse was by implication censored. While some welcomed Yudina’s recitations, others criticized her for bringing trouble on herself and others. This foray into poetry led to a complete severance of her relations with the Leningrad Philharmonia. Yudina was to encounter similar difficulties in Moscow, where she also read poetry in her encores. This was more acceptable in the informal surroundings of the Scriabin Museum, where she performed concerts in memory of Yavorsky on 28 November and 17 December, and astonished her listeners with poems by Pasternak and Zabolotsky as well as Webern’s 259

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Variations and Stravinsky’s Serenade. An unrepentant Yudina accepted the consequences: ‘With the reading of Zabolotsky’s poem “Yesterday Reflecting Upon Death” and Pasternak’s poem “Lessons of English” a stop has been put to my concert life.’ She wished this to be recorded in the archives, ‘so future generations understand Soviet Cultural History’.50 In the Soviet Union, Stravinsky’s eightieth birthday celebrations started with a concert of his works at the Leningrad House of Composers on 10 January 1962. Yudina put together the programme herself, and played in two works, the Concerto for Two Pianos with Derevyanko and the Duo Concertante with the violinist Viktor Pikayzen. The Septet of 1953, the Elegy for viola solo, the Pribaoutki, and the neo-classical Octet for winds (1923/53) were performed by Leningrad musicians. The hall was packed and the concert declared a triumph,51 even if Yudina was struggling on her feet with double pneumonia. ‘Sweat poured from me as if I was working in open fields in July or had typhoid fever [. . .] All this in honour of Igor Fyodorovich!’52 On 27 January Yudina performed Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds in Moscow with Gennadi Rozhdestvensky with the BSO [Radio Orchestra] with ‘their wonderful winds’. The performance was transmitted on radio, and a studio recording for Melodiya was made with the same forces on 5 and 6 May. Shortly afterwards, Yudina and Pikayzen recorded the Duo Concertante, which she defined as ‘unrivalled in difficulties in terms of balance and texture’.53 On 9 February she participated in a concert of Volkonsky’s works, where his Suite of Mirrors with García Lorca texts was premiered. Yudina played Musica Stricta and was specifically asked not to give encores that evening: ‘I agreed – I didn’t want to complicate Volkonsky’s life.’54 Notwithstanding its ‘brilliant triumph’, his Suite of Mirrors was proscribed, and Volkonsky’s works were no longer performed. On 22 February Yudina was in Lvov (L’viv) performing Stravinsky’s Sonatas for one and for two pianos – the latter with Drozdova, and three days later Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds with Matsov. Her return journey took her through Kiev where she finally met Blazhkov and his wife Galya Mokreyeva. She wrote to him of the strong impression this brief meeting made, ‘particularly for the sadness which dominated your image, behaviour, and sparse words, dear Igor Ivanovich’.55 Knowing how reactionary Kiev was, Yudina tried to get Blazhkov work outside it. She invited him to conduct Hindemith’s Four Temperaments for piano and 260

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strings, which she planned to perform and record. But by mid-June, as Yudina informed Suvchinsky, ‘our Igor Blazhkov and his wife Galya have been deprived of work – because of Galya’s article [on young Ukrainian composers] in the Polish journal Ruch muzyczny, and their presumed advocacy of “avant-garde music” ’.56 Blazhkov could only conduct in provincial towns, Mokreyeva was dismissed from her teaching job. Yudina convinced them to move to Leningrad, where Blazhkov found work at Malegot and by the autumn of 1964 was working as Mravinsky’s assistant at the Leningrad Philharmonic. Mokreyeva enrolled at the Leningrad Conservatoire to write her doctoral thesis on Stravinsky. After various recitals and a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth, ‘Emperor’, Piano Concerto in Yaroslavl with Yuri Aranovich (a very talented conductor, although ‘retrograde in choice of repertoire!’), Yudina could devote herself to creating the Stravinsky exhibition. In the autumn of 1961, in Leningrad, she had discovered Stravinsky’s niece, Kseniya, daughter of his deceased brother, Yuri. Kseniya had last communicated with Stravinsky in 1947, the year before her mother’s death. She now wrote to Uncle Igor in November 1961: ‘We still live on Kruykov Canal but in the apartment that belonged to [the conductor] Napravnik, just opposite your family’s home.’57 Kseniya helped Yudina with the exhibition through contributing material from the family archive. On 12 March Suvchinsky wrote to Yudina, suggesting Stravinsky’s Russian visit should be postponed until his eightieth birthday celebrations were over. ‘Igor Fyodorovich has become very nervous and shows no restraint in his judgements or conversations. His view is: I want to see Yudina and young people, but my invitation is from officials, so I won’t be allowed to see them. I have no wish to argue with these musical “obscurantists”.’58 Only now did Suvchinsky understand Yudina’s problematic relationship with the Union of Composers. ‘How can Stravinsky be divided with official Soviet composers?’ he wrote. ‘Remember that I.F. despite his apparent rationality does not possess an intellectual nature. He is emotional and sensitive. It takes nothing to offend him, and that puts an end to any possible discourse.’59 Nevertheless by late March, Stravinsky’s visit had been confirmed for the second half of September. Suvchinsky informed Yudina, ‘it is due to you that he understands the full significance of this journey’.60 In the meantime, the Stravinsky triple bill was premiered at Malegot on 29 March 1962. Yudina wrote to Suvchinsky, ‘I am as exhausted as if I had 261

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danced the roles of Firebird, Kashchei and the Angel of Death myself.’ She found Petrushka over solid, and Orpheus still unready – Firebird was the most promising. Yudina expounded her criticisms concerning ‘the dullness of orchestral phrasing, the lack of fantasy in the choreography, and unsuitable costumes’.61 The co-creator of the Exhibition, Kira Liephart, agreed that the Firebird’s finale ‘was static, ugly and dark until the last moment, by which time the audience has forgotten what preceded it’.62 Yudina had contacted the choreographer Georges Balanchine in New York through his brother, the composer Andro Balanchivadze, her former piano student from Leningrad days. Balanchine duly sent photos of his productions of Orpheus, Agon and Monumentum pro Gesualdo. Zagursky, Malegot’s director, was infinitely grateful to Yudina: ‘If it were not for you, we would never have staged Orpheus. Whatever the production’s shortcomings, we now have some inkling of Stravinsky’s later compositions.’63 He assured her that new and better sets and costumes were being commissioned for Firebird from Tatiana Bruni. On 30 April Yudina wrote to Stravinsky, rejoicing that he had overcome his hesitations. His ‘non-arrival’ would have caused misery to Soviet Russians and implied ‘a slithering backwards’. Yudina told him how she adored Firebird: ‘Even if it’s an early composition, it is eternal. This is often true of creative genius; in Bach’s cantatas, one can be completely overwhelmed by “Christ lag in Todesbanden” (Cantata no. 4) and prefer it to Actus Tragicus (Cantata no. 106). Over time, one perceives genius in different dimensions – in Pasternak’s words: “You are hostage to Eternity/And captive to time.’’’64 Yudina hastened to reassure Stravinsky that ‘by the time of your arrival in Moscow the Malegot productions will have improved’.65 In July Yudina learnt that she was not allowed to travel to Poland, where she had been invited to the Warsaw Autumn Festival. She held Volkonsky responsible: by sending the score of Musica Stricta to the festival committee, he implied another pianist could perform ‘her piece’.66 She was disappointed not to meet Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and other of her ‘modernist’ correspondents. On the other hand, it gave her more time to prepare the Malegot exhibition, which with Zagursky’s retirement had been reduced to a few stands illustrating Stravinsky’s ballets and operas. Yudina had in mind a grandiose Le Corbusier-type ‘scenario’, representing Stravinsky throughout his lifetime. At this point, Yevgeniya Vykhodtseva, director of the Leningrad 262

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House of Composers, agreed to take on the exhibition to coincide with Stravinsky’s visit to Leningrad. Yudina submitted a detailed plan of the exhibits – scores, photographs, letters, reproductions of relevant works of art and of opera and ballet productions. She created the accompanying text exclusively from the composer’s own words, using Chronicle of a Life and Dialogues. The exhibits were to be arranged chronologically, occupying twelve glass cases in the main hall, and two in the second room. Extra material would be mounted on stands and the walls. Work was interrupted for a three-week vacation in August with her halfsister Vera’s small daughters Anya and Lyusya at a seaside resort in Latvia. She adored her nieces but looking after them was a responsibility; ‘dangers abounded everywhere – the sea, boats on the river, unknown people [. . .] and answering for their outward appearance – children will get wet and dirty’.67 Now under pressure of time, Yudina spent September assembling vast amounts of material for the exhibition. She complained that her contract hadn’t provided an adequate expense budget, and Vykhodtseva treated her ‘like a flunkey’.68 Penniless as usual, Yudina had to borrow money to cover travel costs between Moscow and Leningrad, make international phone calls, buy and post expensive Soviet art books in exchange for Stravinsky scores, photos and catalogues. Until the very eve of departure on 21 September, Stravinsky hesitated about his Soviet trip. In Robert Craft’s words, ‘Yudina was more responsible than any other individual for Stravinsky’s decision to go to the USSR. In the tense days in Paris just before the trip he said again and again, “I can’t let Yudina down.” ’69 Crowds of musicians, artists and officials gathered at Sheremetyevo Airport to welcome Stravinsky, amongst them Tikhon Khrennikov, Karen Khachaturian, Tatiana Bruni-Balmont, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, as well as Yudina and Stravinsky’s niece, Kseniya. As the latter recalled nerves were on edge – the plane was thirty minutes late. ‘And now Igor Fyodorovich comes out of the aircraft smiling, stops on the gangway, takes off his hat and waves it in greeting. He’s wearing a black coat, dark glasses – behind him his wife, Vera Arturovna and Robert Craft.’ Kseniya was pushed forwards through a sea of journalists and photographers towards Stravinsky. ‘We embraced and kissed three times. I introduced Yudina and she fell heavily on her knees in front of him and started to kiss his hands. Uncle was frightfully embarrassed and tried to lift her up (she was a bulky woman!), and he himself kissed her hands.’70 Craft 263

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observed the general excitement at this long-anticipated moment. ‘For Yudina it must fulfil a lifelong dream. That is why the atmosphere is like a child’s birthday party, why everyone is bursting with relief!’71 Yudina herself was in a feverish state of excitement, travelling back and forth four times between Leningrad and Moscow. During the days she attended several of the Moscow rehearsals for Stravinsky and Craft’s concerts, but was not included in the composer’s scheduled meetings or sightseeing tours. Khrennikov wanted to show off the country’s ‘new achievements’; Yudina’s proposed visits to Zagorsk* and the Andrei Rublyov Museum in the restored Andronnikov Monastery smacked of religion and old Russia. An invitation to tea with Mikhail Alpatov, Lina Prokofieva and her son Oleg was likewise ignored. Robert Craft put it succinctly: ‘Yudina was a great nuisance to Khrennikov and company, and this was embarrassing for Stravinsky. Such passionate Christianity pouring out of a Jewish intellectual at the most unseemly moments, together with outspoken criticisms of the regime was awkward and incongruous beyond description.’72 Even when Stravinsky was taken to the Scriabin Museum to see the ANS electronic instrument,73 Yudina was excluded. ‘Neither was there room for me in the car when they visited Archangelskoye,’ she lamented to Suvchinsky.74 The Malegot triple bill was to take place at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, with its enormous, cavernous hall totally unsuited to ballet. There was a new inexperienced conductor in charge, and her beloved Orpheus (for which she felt responsible) was unrecognizable. Yudina was justifiably anxious, and devised a plot with Kseniya whereby Stravinsky would arrive late and miss Orpheus – the first item. The plan backfired, as Stravinsky got to the theatre well before Kseniya. Furthermore he preferred Orpheus to the other productions, even if it was musically turgid! The festive crowd scenes in Petrushka were reduced to minuscule proportions. Kseniya observed Stravinsky growing ever gloomier. When she asked what he thought about Petrushka, he retorted, ‘They should be ashamed. Why couldn’t they learn the piece properly? I understand that Orpheus is for them a new ballet, but Petrushka has been around for 50 years.’ Firebird produced an even worse impression – at the apotheosis, Ivan Tsarevich and the Tsarevna descended what appeared to be an aeroplane gangway, and ‘the * Soviet name for Sergiev Posad.

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wonderful ballerina Safronova as the Firebird looked like а tiny fluttering dragonfly. As soon as the last notes died away, Uncle got up and gasped – “Let me out of here, the quicker the better.” ’75 The concerts with orchestra were more successful. As a conductor, Stravinsky relished speaking Russian to an orchestra for the first time in his life! Indeed, to Craft’s astonishment Stravinsky seemed to get more Russian by the minute! To the horrified Union of Composers’ officials, Yudina’s behaviour smacked of the pre-revolutionary Russia that Bolshevism had tried to eradicate. Kseniya observed, ‘every time she met him, Yudina tried to kiss Uncle’s hand. This wasn’t just being eccentric – she was a person way ahead of her times in art, but in displaying her feelings and adoration she was a daughter of her age.’76 Yudina in turn was frustrated by Khrennikov’s entourage – Karen Khachaturian, admittedly always affable, was in constant attendance. On the two occasions she visited Stravinsky at his hotel suite in Moscow, her attempts to start a serious conversation got nowhere. On 4 October Stravinsky and his party flew to Leningrad – an emotional homecoming to the city where he had spent the first thirty years of his life. Yudina was frantically busy, rehearsing the Septet and getting the exhibition ready – she and her collaborators finished mounting it literally half an hour before the opening on 6 October. Five hundred guests came to view the Stravinskyana, which filled walls and glass cases in several rooms. Craft saw the occasion ‘as Yudina’s night of glory. She escorts Igor Stravinsky through the exhibit, listens to the Octet sitting by his side, receives him “humbly” on stage at the end.’77 The Conservatoire students performing the Octet were ‘excellent, but their tempi erratic and the Octet finale is played faster than we ever supposed possible [. . .] For the Septet Yudina steps forward to the piano, an instrument she plays with skill and control, although the music, the Gigue anyway, makes little sense here and cannot have pleased the audience, no matter how earnest their applause [. . .] Her own stage behaviour might have been learned from Klemperer. She will not bow or smile and our most energetic applause is acknowledged by a trifling nod.’ Craft somewhat cruelly compared Yudina’s profile to ‘Bach without his wig. Full face in the street with her cane and handbag, from which she is forever pulling books, jars of honey, sweets, poems by Pasternak – she looks like (and is) a Doctor of Philosophy.’78 The Leningrad Composers’ Union offered Stravinsky a unique possibility of meeting their young composers in the Red Salon of the Philharmonic’s 265

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Grand Hall. Boris Tishchenko, a postgraduate student of Shostakovich, recalled: ‘As people were gathering, Yudina’s vast figure could be seen moving through the crowd. She trod on Gusin, the chief editor of the Soviet Composers’ publishing house and waved in front of his face a smallish book, loudly proclaiming: “This is a revelation – The Dialogues of Igor Fyodorovich with Craft! It is brilliant, and urgently needs to be published here.” At the time we read the Dialogues in [samizdat] copies typed out by enthusiasts. The book was indeed published, but eleven years later and then in truncated form.’79 Stravinsky himself made an indelible impression. He started the meeting by saying, ‘I want to shake every young composer’s hand.’ He recounted stories of Debussy, his work with Ramuz on the Histoire du Soldat, and his early life in emigration. He spoke of dodecaphonic music and answered questions on Boulez and the serialization of components like rhythm and dynamics. Stravinsky recommended dodecaphonic technique as a discipline, explaining its role in musical development. When Yudina made a public plea for the publication of the Dialogues, Stravinsky raised himself from his armchair and proclaimed, ‘They will be translated!’ Yudina described to Suvchinsky how ‘Everyone was awestruck, myself included. At the end, when everybody had dispersed, I pronounced spiritus fiat ubi vult* – I.F. smiled and answered “Ubi, ubi . . . in Leningrad!” ’80 Stravinsky’s concert at the Leningrad Philharmonic, a uniquely symbolic occasion, made an even more profound impression. Before conducting his works, Stravinsky turned to the audience, pointing to the back of the hall: ‘When I was very small, I came here with my mother and sat over there. And Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky came out to conduct his Sixth Symphony. It was his last concert ever.’81 These words encapsulated the intense concentration of Russia’s musical traditions. The whole visit passed as in a delirium for Yudina – she only slept two hours every night. Immediately after the exhibition, she travelled overnight to Moscow, and next day performed Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds with Matsov and the Radio Orchestra. She had hoped for more time with Stravinsky: ‘Once in Leningrad Igor Fyodorovich invited me to lunch, but there, and at the dinner after his Leningrad concert it was impossible to direct the discussion along essential lines.’ She quoted the words of a * ‘The spirit breathes as it wills’ (John 3:8).

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favourite proverb: ‘food flowed down the moustache without falling into the mouth!’82 Yet she described Stravinsky’s conversation to Fred Prieberg ‘as spiritual, full of humour, the unexpected and profound, an amazing fusion of the great and the touchingly childish’.83 Yudina was at the airport with Igor Blazhkov to see the Stravinskys off on 11 October. This time they weren’t allowed to accompany the guests to the aircraft; Khrennikov pointedly asked for ‘people to be shooed away’. As soon as she could draw breath Yudina wrote to the Suvchinskys: ‘I am returning to life as if after typhoid fever, a stormy sea passage, or fantastic dreams from which one cannot be woken. Yes, it was the real, tangible Stravinsky, the great Master – he himself – the darling Igor Fyodorovich, witty, loving, such an old, close friend!’84 Stravinsky as conductor impressed her; ‘his hands of genius stimulated artistic pride in the orchestral musicians’. Best of all was his Firebird in Leningrad. ‘Here he was at the height of his powers. Orpheus came alive at the first concert and was magnificent; yet at the rehearsals I.F. seemed more dead than alive.’85 She had searched in vain for meaningful contact: ‘I.F. was surrounded by an enormous retinue, an impenetrable “barbed wire” barrier. Add to this a legion of photographers and journalists, lots of tedious, pushy people, phoney artists, women with bouquets and the worst kind of brash musicians with presumptuous, stupid questions.’86 Stravinsky’s wife, Vera Arturovna, produced the impression of one ‘tired out and exasperated’ by the visit. Yudina confessed to Suvchinsky, ‘I was unable in all sincerity to come to love Vera A. We are so different.’87 Robert Craft was ‘an abstract person’, whom Yudina dubbed ‘Mr. Number’. She valued his precision (and not much more) as a conductor. ‘I was alien to Number-Craft!’88 A note of disillusionment – later to crystallize into a feeling of mortal offence – crept into this first account to Suvchinsky. She felt the exhibition had not been sufficiently appreciated and as she shouldered all the expenses herself, she now had massive debts to repay. The Stravinskys were showered with ‘ostentatious, garish objects, which produced in them a childish glee’.89 Yudina gave what she could: homemade jam and honey, and a rare book or two from her library. Suvchinsky gently explained the nature of Stravinsky’s genius: ‘It is easy to love I.F. too much or too little. One must always exclude any psychology in relations with him. The very highest level of his creative personality, and the bewildering contradictions of his nature (seismically opposed in his susceptible perception of certain things, and complete paralysis in others) must 267

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condition one’s contacts with him. First and foremost he is to be loved as a miracle.’90 Suvchinsky reassured Yudina that ‘I.F. was thrilled by his stay in Moscow and Leningrad. I have your photo with him and Lina Prokofieva [. . .] I.F. spoke with enormous fervour about your playing. “Her fingers are a miracle!” ’91 Ultimately Yudina had to understand that the right conditions for ‘meaningful’ contact were impossible during an official tour. Even before Stravinsky’s departure, the New York City Ballet and its founder, Georges Balanchine, had arrived in Moscow. Their visit occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which unfolded between 16 and 28 October. Despite the high level of international tension, Muscovites gave the warmest reception to Balanchine and his company. Yudina saw as many performances as possible – she was ‘mad about Balanchine’s productions of Prokofiev’s Prodigal Son and Bizet’s Symphony’ and loved Martha Graham’s choreography of Webern’s music – particularly the miraculous arrangement of Bach’s six-voiced Ricercar. She told Blazhkov that ‘Balanchine – the person and artist – is in his way as much a genius as Stravinsky.’92 Yudina was now possessed by a wild dream of working for Balanchine’s company, and wrote offering her interpretations of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, Schumann’s Kreisleriana or Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion as suitable subjects for choreography.93 Yudina saw the Diabelli Variations ‘as a Synthesis [. . .] a mysterious mountain chain, The Milky Way.’94 With its infinite variety and contrasts it constituted a ‘Universum’. Nevertheless some of the imagery she proposed hardly seemed conducive to choreography. Variation 14 (Grave e maestoso), for instance, was the Pergamon Altar: ‘Its bars like slabs of frieze, where horses’ hooves, tails, hair, shoulders, distorted by the horrors of battle spill over into each other.’ Then the C minor thirty-first Variation was Passion Music, followed by the E flat major fugue – a dazzling Gloria. In the final thirty-third Variation, the Minuet theme is transcended, becoming ‘a hymn to all living things Praising the Lord.’ Yudina reminds us ‘everything has been praised thirty-two times – this is the Amen.’95 She didn’t mention the humour in the work, in which she herself revelled, as in the twenty-second Theme and Variation, with its reference to Leporello’s aria (Notte e giorno faticar) from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It is not recorded whether Balanchine even considered her proposals, which in any case were totally unrealistic for a Soviet citizen labelled as 268

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‘Nevyezdnaya’ (‘forbidden to leave’). All in all Yudina and Balanchine met a few times. She travelled to Leningrad to see more of his ballets, but without a spare kopeck was unable to follow him to Tbilisi, despite the possibility of concerts arranged by Andro Balanchivadze. Before 1962 was out, Yudina was due to play Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon (1942–3) for speaker, piano and string quartet in Leningrad, and Hindemith’s Four Temperaments in Ordzhonikidze (the former Vladikavkaz). She herself postponed the Schoenberg concert, as she had found no adequate translation of the text based on Byron’s verse. She even asked Akhmatova to translate it, a request she made when they met again in Moscow. Yudina was not a devoted admirer of her poetry, but at this meeting ‘felt crushed by Akhmatova’s majesty, the force of her spirit and destiny’.96 Yudina felt inspired that Hindemith’s Four Temperaments had been written for Balanchine. She learnt it in ten days, practising until her fingers were cracked and bandaged. However, the concert in Ordzhonikidze was cancelled because of bad weather conditions. In recompense she attended the premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony in Moscow, a vocal setting of Yevgeni Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar and other poems. Stunned by the composer’s ferocious indictment of anti-Semitism and people’s sufferings under Stalinist repression, Yudina immediately wrote to Suvchinsky: ‘Shostakovich has once more become close, our own kith and kin [. . .] He elevates Yevtushenko’s poems to enormous new heights, although in themselves they are marvellous in their rigour and universality [. . .] I rejoiced, and kissed Shostakovich’s hand, but he withdrew it; then we embraced as in old times. There is truth and absolute innovation of language here, just as with your Boulez, and there is truth in the archaic forms which encompass the highest human values.’97 While understanding her point of view, Suvchinsky confessed that Shostakovich’s music drove him to despair: ‘He is both a hero and a victim,’ he wrote to Yudina. ‘All the fundamental problems in contemporary art and aesthetics are interwoven into his music and his fate.’98 Yudina started to pen a letter to Shostakovich in 1963. After assuring him that ‘flattery and falsehood are not my particular sins’, she explained that ‘Kissing the hand that wrote the 13th Symphony was a Symbol of Love connecting the whole human race.’ Shostakovich’s unique ability to empathize with suffering deserved the gratitude ‘of those who died unable to endure torture, the Jews to whom you have always been metaphysically 269

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linked in a mysterious way, the Russian people’s endless Christian patience, which you narrate [through music], and with whom I am forever attached through the Church’. She thanked the composer ‘in the name of the late Pasternaks, Zabolotsky, the tormented and afflicted – Meyerhold, Mikhoels, Karsavin, Mandelstam, and the hundreds and thousands of nameless “Ivan Denisovichs” (one can never count them all) – of whom Pasternak said “they were tortured alive”. You yourself know this – they all live inside you. We are consumed in the pages of your score, which you have given to us, your contemporaries and to future generations.’ Yudina felt saddened that they had grown apart. ‘You presumably don’t wish to know or see me.’99 At the end of January 1963 Yudina spent a congenial ten days in Tbilisi with her young colleagues Drozdova, Derevyanko, Snegirev and Nikulin, playing two-piano repertoire, including Bartók’s sonata for two pianos and percussion. She also performed recitals and Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds. Back in Moscow on 4 February, she played Brahms’ First Piano Concerto in a studio performance with Rozhdestvensky and the BSO (Radio Orchestra). She longed to perform it for a ‘live audience’. Such an opportunity arose in late May with the BSO and Matsov. She asked Alexei Lubimov to turn pages at the rehearsal. However, she felt so unwell that she was unable to perform that evening, despite entreaties from Matsov and Lubimov.100 The Radio recording was transferred to Maria Grinberg. Yudina’s next engagements took her to Khabarovsk, where she performed Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto with Matsov. Bad flying conditions caused delays; Yudina spent forty-eight hours stuck in Novosibirsk Airport. She arrived on 24 February just in time for an afternoon orchestral rehearsal, and then went straight to the concert. ‘Let others say how I played; I gave Khabarovsk musicians an excellent example of responsible professional behaviour.’101 At her solo recital, Yudina presented twentieth-century ‘classics’ – Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Hindemith. She met with students at the Khabarovsk Musical High School, an invitation accepted on condition she would not play, but only talk about contemporary music. She could hardly have foreseen such a shocking outcome – the director of the School, Comrade Mirsky, wrote an open letter of complaint, dated 7 March, to the newspaper Izvestiya, copied to the Ministry of Culture and signed by twenty-five high school teachers. Yudina was accused of anti-Soviet sentiment. She spoke ‘predominantly of foreign composers – Berg, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, calling them geniuses [. . .] There was 270

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no mention of Sviridov, whom the Soviet people had put forward for the Lenin Prize!’ She did not want to speak about Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony. Yudina named Volkonsky a genius but did not illustrate his music – no doubt she avoided playing ultramodern composers, ‘in order not to expose her extremely subjective views on contemporary art’.102 The invective continued in this vein for several pages. Her insinuation that Khabarovsk citizens were behind the times was insulting – it was a mere eight hours’ flight to Moscow, and they read the main newspapers on the same day! ‘We are united in our fundamental love for REALISTIC ART, in our wish to educate young musiciancitizens to love the Motherland!’ Yudina’s greatest sin had been reciting Pasternak’s poems with ‘the ulterior aim to subvert Soviet youth, through promoting abstract art and sabotaging the realistic position of Soviet Art’.103 These accusations were in sharp contrast with the lively discourse with her audience at her last Siberian concert on 28 February at Komsomolsk-on-Amur, where the subject of Fantasy was discussed – ‘not just Volkonsky’s Fantasia Ricercata, but creative imagination, cybernetics and cosmonauts’.104 Back in Moscow, Yudina wrote to Alexander Kholodilin, head of the music section of the Ministry of Culture, denying Comrade Mirsky’s accusations. Yet she underestimated the negative impact of the Khabarovsk teachers’ letter. Now the state concert agencies, Mosconcert and Rossconcert, were instructed not to employ her, and Yudina was denied official concert platforms for the next three years. This sudden removal from concert life coincided with Yudina’s move to her cooperative apartment on Rostovskaya Embankment across the river from the Kiev Station. She had chosen the flat on the top floor – the ninth, with ‘the sky over my head’. She would miss ‘the snow, the frost, the flame in the stove, the silence, the constellations’ at Solomennaya Storozhka.105 The Khabarovsk denunciation left a festering wound: ‘I am at an all-time low, with no state assistance, without funds, a woman suffering serious illness as a result of her labours and her lack of material funds.’ At least she was not imprisoned or exiled – ‘This is no longer the fashion!’106 Yudina’s time was divided between church attendance and playing concerts at Scientific Research centres, for literary events and at funerals. She got to know Moscow’s young ‘dodecaphonists’ – Edison Denisov and Nikolai Karetnikov. She played the former’s Variations (1961) before its official world premiere. Karetnikov, however, didn’t like her interpretation of 271

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his Lento Variations (1960) and asked for the Radio recording to be destroyed.107 In October 1963 she met and was charmed by the avant-garde composer Luigi Nono when he visited Moscow. Although a convinced member of the Italian Communist Party, he found official Soviet music obnoxious. And in January 1967 at Denisov’s apartment she at last met Pierre Boulez, on tour in Moscow with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Yudina apparently monopolized the conversation – to the chagrin of Volkonsky, acting as interpreter between her and Boulez! Fortunately throughout this period the Melodiya Studios were always open to Yudina. In 1960 a new recording producer, Valentin Skoblò, was allocated to her. He was warned she was a difficult artist, so was justifiably nervous when she arrived to record Shostakovich and Hindemith piano sonatas. Yudina sensed his anxiety, and claiming to be tired, spent the session putting Skoblò at his ease. In reality, he found Yudina easy to work with, despite her being totally uncompromising. She preferred using whole ‘takes’, performing whole movements with full emotional impact, repeating the process as often as needed. This system produced better results than ‘patching up’ errors. Alexei Lubimov was one of two outstanding students of Anna Artobolevskaya at the Central Music School who got to know Yudina in his teens. Yudina responded to his insatiable curiosity about contemporary composers and music in general. He would turn pages for Yudina, run errands for her, befriended sick people at her behest, and gave a home to one of Nelli’s kittens. Yudina took him with her to meet Stravinsky at the airport, and lent him scores of contemporary music. Thus he copied out by hand Webern’s Variations (unavailable even in specialist libraries), and also made a copy of Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta, which he started performing with Yudina’s blessing. Soon Alexei was performing works by John Cage, Stockhausen and Boulez, which she had studied but never actually performed. A few years later, the fourteen-year-old pianist Yevgeni Koroliov appeared at Yudina’s home at Artobolevskaya’s behest. She asked who his favourite composer was. When he answered ‘Bach’ she invited him to play for her regularly, while suggesting their meetings should remain ‘secret from everybody’. They both took delight in such complicity. Yudina was impressed with Yevgeni’s capacity for polyphonic comprehension and foresaw he would become a superlative Bach player. She was convinced that both Alexei and Yevgeni had a brilliant musical future, and in this she was not mistaken. 272

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For Yudina, 1963 and 1964 proved to be years rich in recordings. Just before going to Khabarovsk, she recorded Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion with her erstwhile partners. Her next LP was a Mozart programme – the sonatas in D major K.284 and A major K.331, the Adagio in B minor K.540 and the A minor Rondo K.511, both in intensely moving interpretations. In 1964 Yudina returned to Bartók, recording selected pieces from Books 5 and 6 of Mikrokosmos. She suggested to Lubimov dividing the task – each would record seven or eight pieces, and additionally the two-piano version of Chromatic Invention, no. 145. The issued LP excluded Alexei’s contribution except the Chromatic Invention. The same year Yudina recorded Berg’s Piano Sonata. Her interpretation attempted to provide unity to this expressionist work. But in so doing, she ignored the various sections within the one-movement construction and flattened out the tempo changes. She also fulfilled her promise to Jolivet, recording three pieces from the cycle Mana. In 1965 she joined forces with the clarinettist Lev Mikhailov in recording Berg’s Four Pieces for clarinet and piano and Bartók’s Contrasts, where they were joined by the violinist Viktor Pikayzen. The same year she recorded both sets of Schubert Impromptus (Op. 90 and Op. 142) as well as Schubert – Liszt’s Am Meer in a dramatic and moving interpretation, and various of her beloved Brahms’ later piano pieces. Two major achievements in her discography date from 1967 – Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition and Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988. Yudina’s health now started to decline. On 24 November 1963 she was rushed to casualty with a double hernia of the intestine. Afterwards she wrote to Suvchinsky, ‘The operation took place at night under local anaesthetic. It lasted 3½ hours. Throughout I recited poetry to the four surgeons, and indulged in lively conversations to accompany the “score” of this difficult operation. This time I nearly didn’t pull through!’108 She was amazed by the surgeons’ ‘virtuoso skills, the doctors’ and nurses’ devotion, worthy of “heroes and martyrs” ’.109 Surgery became a new passion of hers; through Suvchinsky she ordered specialized medical books from Paris, which she then translated into Russian for the doctors. During her six-week stay in hospital, Yudina read Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett and copied out poems by Pasternak and Zabolotsky for her new medic friends. She befriended a twenty-two-year-old girl, Tamara Andrukhovich, with chronic heart disease. Yudina appointed herself Tamara’s godmother and became 273

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involved in her care. When Tamara died four years later, Yudina arranged her funeral with all religious honours. The critic Leonid Gakkel believed that Yudina’s impecunious existence was a relic of the ‘cultivated’ poverty of Petrograd in the 1920s.110 The now inbuilt habit of borrowing money to pay back ever-increasing debts caused a crisis in her relations with Mikhail Bakhtin. His wife Alyona declared that Yudina ‘had outlived her day’. They had a meeting in Moscow; afterwards Yudina was mortally offended: ‘I am overwhelmed by deep Rilkean sorrow, Mahlerian resignation, the silence of Mignon [. . .] All that we lived through together, where has it gone?’111 If Alyona had led the attack, ‘Mikh Mikh’ had not risen to Yudina’s defence.‘Why did you acquiesce silently as this Requiem was pronounced on me – in my living presence?’112 The quarrel was resolved two years later, when in June 1964 Bakhtin sent a peace offering – his newly published book based on his thesis, François Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, with a wonderful inscription to Yudina. His subsequent money loan helped pay for the funeral of their mutual friend Boris Zalesky, who had died in July after a debilitating illness. In late 1966, Yudina informed Suvchinsky, ‘The state of disgrace has been removed from me – for three and a half years I have had no real concert activity, although I played lots of unpaid concerts – for Khlebnikov, Favorsky and Akhmatova [. . .] I sold my books. I have worn the trainers, bought for 4 roubles to wear at the Hermitage bicentenary event, throughout the year, come rain come shine! They have become notorious.’113 Her rehabilitation started with an invitation to give some lectures at the Moscow Conservatoire in the spring of 1966. The young professor of piano, Vera Gornastaeva, was the initiator of this reconciliation, and assisted at a preliminary meeting with the Vice-Principal and Dean of the Piano Faculty, Mikhail Sokolov: Yudina addressed herself exclusively to me. The Vice-Principal’s and Dean’s words didn’t enter her consciousness. In a kind of polyphonic Theatre of the Absurd all voices were incoherent. ‘We would like to agree the themes of the lecture recitals, and ask you to discuss only musical topics,’ the Vice-Principal said blandly. ‘Yes only music, nothing excessive, you understand,’ the Dean added. ‘And I always told your teacher Neuhaus, Thomas Mann was a false prophet!’ Yudina addressed me threateningly.

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‘What do you mean, a false teacher?’ I mumbled in amazement. ‘Any deviation from the agreed themes could have unpleasant consequences,’ the Vice-Principal continued in a polite tone. ‘The main thing is to be absolutely specific, talk about musical and stylistic problems.’ ‘Thomas Mann is an Antichrist,’ Yudina thundered [. . .] ‘like Adrian Leverkühn he sold his soul to the devil – a teacher with a diabolical concept.’ The Dean interrupted, suggesting that Yudina analyse the programmed works. Leaving Thomas Mann aside, Yudina agreed: ‘I won’t repay your good action with a bad one.’114

The lecture series, entitled ‘Romanticism – Origins and Parallels’, was publicized chiefly by word of mouth. Nevertheless the Small Hall of the Conservatoire was brimful of students and musicians. As Bakhtin noted, Yudina upheld the Romantic tradition in her literary interpretation of music, rich in associations and imagery. And this despite the fact that her idols Bach, Stravinsky and Bartók, did not belong to the Romantic movement. For Yudina, Romanticism was a larger synthesis of literature, architecture, painting, philosophy and music, illuminated by the divine creative force. She told Bakhtin: I spoke of some 80 names, from Orpheus to Alban Berg, with Goethe and Shakespeare at the centre – I read Blok’s and Pasternak’s brilliant analysis of Shakespeare’s tragedies [. . .] and Goethe on Nature and Eckermann’s Conversations [. . .] I unmasked Adorno’s helpless, flowery interpretation of Beethoven’s Op. 111. In compensation, I quoted parts of Phaedo, speaking of the Platonic realm of the world beyond the grave. And Dante’s Paradiso gave the answer to why there is no third movement in Op. 111 – after all everything has been said on earth, the action is transferred to a different sphere of reality. Professor Kretzschmar in MannAdorno’s Faustus reduces the last sonata to ‘those chains of trills!’ And then what? Is there nothing more to say? While I – with God’s help – tell them, ‘Trills a background? Yes – the golden background in ancient Russian icons – suspended beyond earthly existence.’115

In the distilled utterances of the late Brahms Intermezzi she spoke of the elegiac nature of sorrow as something ‘always exalted, purified from the everyday, 275

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accidental, subjective and hermetic, yet averting dejection, overcoming despair’. In the world of Russian songs, Pushkin was best represented through Shostakovich’s superb setting of Stanzas (from the Four Pushkin Romances). On such themes Yudina opened a window onto a world that had been denied to the younger generation after some forty years of ideological censorship. In her last decade Yudina embarked on her literary activity. Her first publication in 1965 was her translation from German of Felix Weingartner’s Interpreting Beethoven Symphonies – work taken on for money. She collaborated, and argued, with the ‘unbearable’116 editor Pavel Vulfius, with whom she also started translating Stravinsky’s Diaries, something she felt it was her divine right to do. To Yudina’s mortification, the music publishers Muzgiz preferred to give the contract to another translator. Although she completed her translation of Joseph Szigeti’s memoirs, With Strings Attached, they were never published. Yudina now wrote a series of reminiscences and articles, the first of which was dedicated to Shostakovich’s sixtieth birthday. She lamented that ‘cautious editors eliminated Tyutchev, Andrei Rublyov, Lenin, Michelangelo, some theoretical analysis, Yevtushenko, gratitude for “the Hymn to Russian Women” in the 13th Symphony’.117 It was published in 1965 in this mangled version. Early in 1969 she responded to Alexander Tvardovsky’s proposal to publish her memoirs in the renowned literary journal Novy Mir by sending a list of twenty-one subjects – a summa summarum of her extraordinary life. However, Tvardovsky himself was being harassed and was forced to resign as the journal’s chief editor in 1970. Nevertheless, Yudina did write memoirs of her most extraordinary friends, as well as penning such serious articles as ‘Six Intermezzi of Brahms’ and ‘Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition’. For the most part what she wrote was only published after her death or following the fall of the Soviet Union. On 11 November 1966 Yudina made an official comeback to concert life with a recital at the Tchaikovsky Hall, playing Beethoven’s Op. 111, two sets of Schubert Impromptus and Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition. On 4 December a second recital in the same hall included Schumann’s Kreisleriana and Chopin’s 24 Preludes. The following year Yudina set about learning Bach’s Goldberg Variations aged sixty-eight, having been inspired by Andrei Volkonsky’s numerous performances. She first performed the work on 15 October at the Tchaikovsky Hall. Yudina marked in the margins of her score the association with the opening of Psalm 84: ‘How lovely is 276

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Your dwelling place, Lord Almighty.’ The Beatitudes, particularly ‘Blessed be the Pure in Heart’, provided the defining sentiment in her view, while the Trinity in its various guises determined Bach’s use of three voices throughout the work. Three was also the number of minor key variations, profound meditations on Christ’s crucifixion. The fifteenth Variation represented the Stations of the Cross – its G minor key associated in mood with the Bass aria ‘Komm süsses Kreuz’ from the St Matthew Passion, while images of Golgotha permeated the twenty-fifth Variation. In May 1967 Yudina wrote to her dear friend VEES, saying she was considering an invitation from the Alma-Ata Institute of Arts, for a decently paid position involving six trips a year, each of ten days’ duration, teaching chamber music, giving lectures and concerts.118 She did not accept – it was now beyond her strength. On 7 February 1968 Lyublinsky died unexpectedly from a heart attack. A grief-stricken Yudina dedicated her next Moscow concert to his memory. In fact, the programme had already been chosen. She believed that ‘there is nothing random in serious events. One could not have invented a more suitable funereal offering, which reflected Lyublinsky’s tastes and illu­ minated our perception of Death. The grandiose Diabelli Variations [. . .] Shostakovich’s Second Sonata, which I performed at a concert attended by Lyublinsky during the Siege of Leningrad. And most importantly, the world premiere of Stravinsky’s Orpheus in Leopold Spinner’s piano arrangement.’119 Orpheus stood as a memorial to ‘a Hero’s demise and apotheosis’. As Yudina was about to go on stage she told the Philharmonia’s director, Diza Kartysheva, that she was dedicating the concert to Lyublinsky’s memory. ‘That doesn’t concern us,’ Kartysheva replied. ‘Speaking is forbidden [. . .] Else I’ll lose my job.’120 When Yudina finished playing, the audience remained glued to their seats: ‘I repeated the brilliant, indescribably bitter, wonderful Aria of Orpheus. Then when I came out for the last bow, I addressed the audience: “Today I gave my promise not to speak, although there are many things one should say.’’’ The mortified Kartysheva complained to Yudina’s secretary, Serafima Bromberg, ‘What she said was worse than what she didn’t say.’121 Yudina’s curiosity about people and literature remained unquenchable. She was happy to renew contact with Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poet’s widow, soon to move back from Pskov to Moscow. She also made ‘new friends’ amongst dissident writers, forced to publish in samizdat. She got to 277

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know Andrei Sinyavsky, and early in 1965 she wrote to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose literary works she admired so much. They met several times; Solzhenitsyn was shocked to learn that the disgraced Yudina was without concerts, and asked Shostakovich to use his influence on her behalf. Anna Akhmatova suggested that his wife Natalia Reshetovskaya, an amateur pianist, could ask Yudina for piano lessons, and in this way they developed a warm relationship. Later Yudina got to know the young mathematician, Natalia Svetlova, who was to become Solzhenitsyn’s second wife. Svetlova came to see Yudina in 1967 on return from a trip to Poland, bearing greetings from a nun she had met. Now the Mother Superior of a convent outside Warsaw, the nun had enjoyed a friendship and shared spiritual interests with Yudina some fifty years earlier in Petrograd. When Yudina discovered that Natalia was not baptized she introduced her to Christianity and stood as her godmother. Natalia was a highly intelligent and interesting conversationalist, and also helped Yudina with practicalities like shopping. This friendship came to an abrupt end when Yudina discovered that Natalia was in a relationship with Solzhenitsyn, and was soon to bear his child. A complicated situation arose where the writer’s first wife Natalia refused to give Solzhenitsyn a divorce, and in this was manipulated by the KGB. Yudina was unaware of this side of events, but as divorce went against her Christian beliefs in this instance she reluctantly severed contacts with the writer and his new wife.122 In these years Yudina became increasingly involved in the Church. Her confessor, Father Nikolai Golubtsev, died in September 1963. She now took moral guidance from many priests, including the brilliant preacher, archpriest Vsevolod Shpiller, and Father Alexander Kulikov, both of whom served at the Nikolo-Kuznetsk Church in Moscow. She was also friendly with Father Nikolai Vedernikov, and Gerasim Prokofiev from Peredelkino. She revered the great religious thinker and preacher, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (Anthony Bloom), whom she met on visits to Moscow from London. He in turn introduced her to Tatiana Fogd-Stoyanova, a Slavist living in Amsterdam who became a close friend. In 1966 she got to know Father Alexander Men’, a young, erudite priest with a remarkable personality. In his view Yudina resembled ‘an old German musician from another age [. . .] toothless, with ardent eyes burning in her large head, her pastor’s white collar and black robe [. . .] For all her eccentricities, she was uniquely 278

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intelligent, she understood everything from half a word, was interested in everything and “remained young in spirit”.’123 Yudina told Father Men’ that through her playing she offered a theological understanding of the world, the spirituality ‘behind the face of music’. Yudina herself fostered the ambition to take a Master’s degree in divinity at the Moscow Theological Academy at Zagorsk, and contacted its director, Metropolitan Filaret. Filaret informed her that women were excluded from the courses. ‘My dearest, your knowledge will remain with you, your talents are well known. I invite you to perform for the Academy, play some Bach and reveal your perception of this great composer and Church-loving Christian.’124 This was not at all what Yudina had in mind. She hoped to give a whole series of talks and concerts at the Academy. Her only lecture recital took place on 16 October 1966. ‘Almost all the professors, students and seminarians attended [. . .] I was terribly nervous before the talk, but once I started to speak, I felt inspired by the Divine spirit.’125 Yudina was exceedingly offended that Filaret did not contact her again. In a letter to him she did not hide her disappointment: ‘On the exterior Maria Veniaminovna is like a bag of calamities, insults, defamations, constantly spat upon and repudiated.’ She proceeded to thank him – without intended irony – ‘for this Blow – which is perhaps the greatest Gift’.126 On 18 May 1969 Yudina played her last ‘official’ concert in Moscow, performing Brahms’ Second Piano Quartet at the Small Hall of the Conservatoire with members of the Beethoven Quartet – they recorded it later that year. Her last full recital took place on 25 May in Tallinn, replacing a planned performance of Messiaen’s piano concerto Le Réveil des Oiseaux, which the conductor Matsov had to cancel. Yudina substituted with a marathon programme: Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition and Stravinsky – Spinner’s Orpheus, each a work of symbolical significance – starting with spiritual contemplation in Bach, moving through the greatest Russian national music, and ending with the beloved Greek classics. A month later, as Yudina walked out of the Melodiya Studios, she was knocked down by a car and taken to hospital with multiple fractures. Her first thought was about the driver – he shouldn’t be prosecuted, it had all been her fault – although this was not the case. Three fingers of her right hand were seriously injured, but with therapy and willpower she regained partial use of 279

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them. As Drozdova observed, she managed to rearrange her fingerings and record Three Pieces from Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky in Kamensky’s version for piano in December 1969. At her last public appearance in October 1970, in memory of the artist Ivan Yefimov, she performed extracts from Stravinsky – Spinner’s Orpheus and Hindemith motets with the soprano Lydia Davydova. In her last, seventy-first, year Yudina clung to what was dearest to her, the spiritual leaders in the Church and her family. Her sister Vera and her nieces were a source of joy, just as her elder sister Anna was a cause for worry. After an operation she moved in with Yudina; her death in March 1970 left Yudina desolate. As Anna was dying, Yudina baptized her (such action by a layman/ woman was legitimate in extremity). At her funeral she conducted the Christian prayers (others claimed a Rabbi took the service), and later erected a cross by the graveside. Yudina also made friends with her neighbours, the pathologist Leonid Tsypkin and his wife, agnostic Jews from Minsk. She invited them to concerts and attempted to bring them closer to the Christian Church. Tsypkin started writing in the 1970s, not seeking publication either officially or in samizdat. He was to achieve posthumous fame when his remarkable novel Summer in Baden Baden was published in the West, a week before his death. Amongst his other works a fictional story, ‘Ave Maria’, is a clinically observed and ‘truthful’ account of Yudina’s last illness and funeral. A new friend, the music teacher Oleg Chernikov, helped Yudina in her final move from her ninth-storey apartment to a one-room ground-floor flat in the same building on Rostovskaya Embankment, just three months before she died. He was struck by her poverty, and by the number of homeless cats she fed. Yudina didn’t bother to lock her front door – ‘I have nothing here to take.’ Her only possessions were books and scores – and the notorious park bench.127 Once Chernikov sorted out an angry phone call demanding that Comrade Yudina pay outstanding fees for her piano hire – otherwise the instrument would be removed immediately. Early in November 1970 Yudina was admitted to hospital. A diagnosis of diabetes had been given a couple of years back; she didn’t talk about it, and was unable to provide herself with the required regime – the special diet alone, she quipped, made it ‘an illness of the rich’. The wards were full and Yudina was placed in a corridor. Delirious, drifting in and out of consciousness, she received the last rites from Father Nikolai Vedernikov, while remaining comatose. When Olga Florenskaya-Trubachyova visited, Yudina 280

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had regained lucidity, greeting her with the words ‘And Death too is a Feat!’ She entrusted to Olga the exact details of how the funeral should be conducted and her body dressed. Then Yudina was moved to a comfortable ward and seemed to be improving. Her death on the evening of 19 November was caused by an error in medication. At the Moscow Conservatoire a notice appeared on a piece of paper pinned to a poster advertising a concert of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto to be performed by Oleg Kagan, Natalia Gutman and Yelizaveta Leonskaya. A vigil was kept by Yudina’s body at the Nikola-Kuznetsk Church, where the Orthodox funeral rites were held on the morning of 24 November. Father Vsevolod Shpiller led the prayers, accompanied by a choir of three male voices. After the religious service, the body was moved to the vestibule of the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire for a civil ceremony at 1 p.m. Friends and colleagues – Viktor Pikayzen, Stanislav Neuhaus and Maria Grinberg – provided the music. Volkonsky’s group ‘Madrigal’ sang ancient liturgical works, and Sviatoslav Richter played Rachmaninov, recalling that Yudina had said this was the only composer he knew how to play! Representatives from the Conservatoire and the Gnesins’ Institute expressed their appreciation of Yudina’s work; no mention was made of her dismissals. As her nephew Yasha Nazarov remembered, the ceremony ended sensationally with the sudden appearance of a large wooden cross, held aloft as her open coffin was carried out of the building.128 At the Vvedensky Cemetery (also known as ‘The German Cemetery’) Yudina was buried in the grave of her former fiancé, Kirill Saltykov, and his parents. At the entrance gates the mourners gathered and processed to the grave, quietly singing, with the priest at their head. Tired of waiting, the gravediggers had vanished; the priest started the burial service. When the gravediggers reappeared they were tipsy, and it was getting dark. The remnants of the church candles re-emerged from people’s pockets; the singing continued under the light of their flickering flames. As the coffin was lowered into the grave, it was obstructed by a protruding stone, which at first resisted the gravediggers’ attempts to remove it. Only when the mourners started singing Yudina’s favourite prayer did the stone crack and the coffin slide into place. The great artist could now rest in peace. In his funeral oration Father Vsevolod Shpiller had addressed the concept of spiritual beauty, something central to Yudina’s understanding of life. 281

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Dostoevsky’s words ‘Beauty will save the world’129 implied the healing role of Art. For Yudina, life had a musical form, where the Theme of Man is extended through Variations representing his passage from earthly to eternal life. Nowhere was this more evident than in Yudina’s interpretation of Beethoven’s last Piano Sonata Op. 111. Here the introductory Maestoso is a philosophical questioning, leading to the C minor Allegro con brio ed appassionato, associated with life’s drama – in her case relentlessly driven forward. The few oases of serenity are condensed and short-lived, until the magical unravelling of tension in the last bars, setting up the luminous C major of the Arietta, Adagio molto semplice e cantabile as a transcendental ‘Hymn of Thanksgiving’. The variations, marked listesso tempo (not necessarily observed by Yudina), see a gradual heightening of expression through intensification of time values, leading to a symbolic use of the piano’s opposing registers (heaven and earth), and a long pianissimo sojourn in the seraphic heights. The climax arrives with the ‘trills’ (as it does in the final variation of Op. 109) and a swing into the key of E flat – the key of Gloria. Yudina equated this movement as ‘standing on the threshold of Eternity – at the very mouth of the grave’.130 Yet in her 1958 recording, her interpretation represents not so much a condition of serenity, but rather a process of transition towards the transfigured dimension of ‘Socratic Single Night’. After a life full of great friendships and love, interesting and inspiring events and ‘calamities, insults [and] defamations’ in her words to Metropolitan Filaret, Maria Yudina was now at rest in an undisturbed eternity, close to her vision of God’s Paradise adorned by shimmering trills and golden, filigree embellishments.

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ENDNOTES

ABBREVIATIONS AnthLBL  Luchi Bozhestvennoj Lyubvi (Rays of Divine Love), ed. Anatoli Kuznetsov, Moscow and St Petersburg, 1999 AnthMYSVM  Maria Venyaminovna Yudina, Stat’i, Vospominaniya, Materialy (Maria Yudina, Articles, Reminiscences, Materials), ed. Anatoli Kuznetsov, Moscow, 1978 AnthNevel’IV  Nevelski Sborniki (Nevel’ Collections), from various years, Akropl, St Petersburg, 1999 AnthPlSe  Plameneyushcheye Serdtse: Maria Yudina v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov (The Flaming Heart: Reminiscences of Maria Yudina by her Contemporaries), ed. Anatoli Kuznetsov, St Petersburg Centre of Humanitarian Initiatives, 2009 AnthRRCB  Routledge Research Companion to Bach AnthSLK  Shostakovich v Leningradskoj Konservatorii (Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatoire), vol. 3 AnthVY  Vspominaya Yudinu (Remembering Yudina), ed. A. Kuznetsov, Moscow, 2008 AnthVSChM  Vy Spasyotes’ cherez muzyku (You Will Be Saved Through Music), ed. A. Kuznetsov, Moscow, 2005 CCorr1  Complete Correspondence, vol. 1, Maria Yudina, Vyskokij Stoiki dukh (The Lofty Resilient Spirit), 1918–1945 CCorr2  Complete Correspondence, vol. 2, Maria Yudina, Obrechyonnnaya Abstraktsii, simvolike, i besplotnosti muzyke (Doomed to Abstraction, Symbolism and Disembodied Music), 1946–1955 CCorr3  Complete Correspondence, vol. 3, Maria Yudina, Zhizn polna smysla (Life Is Full of Meaning), 1956–1959 CCorr4  Complete Correspondence, vol. 4, Maria Yudina, V Iskusstve Radostno Byt’ Vmeste (The Joy of Togetherness in Art), 1959–1961 CCorr5  Complete Correspondence, vol. 5, Maria Yudina, Dukh Dyshit, Gde Khochet (The Spirit Breathes Where It Wills), 1962–1963 CCorr6  Complete Correspondence, vol. 6, Maria Yudina, Nereal’nost’ Zla (The Unreality of Evil), 1964–1966 CCorr7  Complete Correspondence, vol. 7, Maria Yudina, Pred litsom Vechnosti (Before the Face of Eternity), 1967–1970 CorrBPOF  Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg 1910–1954, compiled by Mossman, Secker & Warburg, London, 1982

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NOTES to pp. 1–19 CorrMYPS  Maria Youdina–Pierre Souvtchinsky: Correspondance et Documents (1959–1970), ed. Jean-Pierre Collot, Contrechamps éditions, 2020 CorrShostakovich MIVL  Mne ispolnilos vosemnatsats lyet! Pis’ma D.D. Shostakovicha – L.N. Oborinu (I am now eighteen! Letters from D.D. Shostakovich to L.N. Oborin) in Vstrechi s Proshlym (Encounters with the Past), ed. M.G. Kozlova, Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossia, 1984

INTRODUCTION  1. Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, p. 225.  2. Blazhennyj Ioann: Fortepiannoye Evangel Marii Veniaminovny Yudinoj (The Piano Gospel of Maria Yudina) Kiev 2012.   3. Maria Youdina–Pierre Souvtchinsky, Correspondence et Documents 1959–1970, Paris: Contretemps, 2019.

1  CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH: NEVEL’, PETROGRAD   1. AnthLBL, p. 25; Bakhtin, ‘Iskusstvo i Otvestvennost’, p. 1.   2. AnthLBL, p. 95.   3. AnthPlSe, p. 6.   4. Ibid, pp. 5–6.   5. AnthLBL, p. 604.   6. AnthVY, pp. 61–2.  7. Ibid.   8. AnthMYSVM, p. 17.  9. Drozdova, Uroki Yudinoj, p. 14. 10. AnthPlSe, pp. 94–7. 11. Ibid. 12. AnthLBL, p. 110. 13. Ibid. p. 111. 14. Ibid. 15. AnthPlSe, p. 26. 16. AnthLBL, Nevel’ Diary, p. 25. 17. Ibid, pp. 91–5. 18. AnthPlSe, p. 60. 19. AnthLBL, pp. 91–5. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. AnthPlSe, p. 26. 26. AnthLBL, p. 26. 27. AnthLBL, p. 94. 28. Ibid, pp. 45–82. 29. Ibid, p. 45. 30. Ibid, p. 47. 31. Ibid, p. 47. 32. Ibid, p. 48. 33. Ibid, p. 58. 34. Ibid, p. 49, p. 59.

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NOTES to pp. 20–38 35. Ibid, p. 52. 36. Ibid, p. 65. 37. Ibid, pp. 77–8. 38. Ibid, p. 80. 39. Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, p. 178. 40. Ibid, p. 173. 41. AnthVY, p. 16. 42. AnthLBL, p. 606. 43. Ibid, p. 616. 44. Ibid, p. 617. 45. Ibid, p. 616. 46. Ibid, p. 617. 47. Ibid, p. 625. 48. Ibid, p. 21. 49. Ibid, p. 606. 50. Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art, p. 290. 51. Ibid, pp. 94–5. 52. Ibid. 53. AnthLBL, p. 621. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid, p. 622. 56. Ibid, p. 621.

2  1919–1927: BAPTISM, UNIVERSITY STUDIES, PHILOSOPHICAL CIRCLES   1. Alexander Blok, Stikhotvoreniya,Poemy. Roza i Krest (Verses, Long Poems. The Rose and the Cross), Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1974, p. 211.   2. AnthLBL, p. 105.   3. AnthVY, p. 108.   4. Ibid, p. 59.  5. Ibid.   6. Ibid, p. 85.   7. AnthLBL, p. 112.  8. Shaporina, Dnevnik, vol. 1, p. 64.   9. AnthLBL, p. 113. 10. Shaporina, Dnevnik, vol. 1, p. 70. 11. Sheila Fitzpatrick, thesis, ‘The Commissariat of Education under Lunacharsky’, 1917– 1921, University of Oxford, 1969. 12. CorrBPOF, p. 58. 13. Haight, Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage, p. 57. 14. AnthLBL, p. 110. 15. Ibid. 16. Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, p. 123. 17. Ibid, p. 125. 18. AnthLBL, pp. 111–12. 19. Ibid. 20. Hemschemer, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, p. 263. 21. AnthLBL, p. 113. 22. Ibid, p. 107. 23. Ibid. 24. Ruben, The Life and Thought of Lev Karsavin, p. 104. 25. Ibid, p. 105. 26. AnthVY, p. 83.

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NOTES to pp. 38–62 27. Ibid, p. 88. 28. Ibid. 29. AnthLBL, p. 160. 30. CCorr1 Yudina–Zhirmunsky, 29 January 1921. 31. AnthVSChM, p. 7. 32. AnthLBL, p. 105. 33. Ibid. 34. Likhachov, Mysli o Zhizni, p. 120. 35. Bakhtin, Lichnost’ i tvorchestvo. 36. Likhachov, Mysli o Zhizni, p. 120. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid, p. 221. 39. Ibid, pp. 225–6. 40. CCorr1 Yudina–Rimsky-Korsakov, second half of 1924. 41. CCorr1 Yudina–Kazanovich, October 1924. 42. Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 107. 43. Drozdova, M. Yudina Religioznaya Sud’ba, p. 46. 44. CCorr1 Yudina–Kazanovich, n.d. 1926. 45. Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 114. 46. Vaginov, Kozlinaya Pesnya, p. 15. 47. Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer, p. 45. 48. CCorr1 Yudina–Kazanovich, October 1924. 49. CCorr1 Yudina–Rimsky-Korsakov, second half of 1924. 50. CCorr1 Yudina–Kazanovich, October 1924. 51. CCorr6 Yudina–Father Gerasim Prokofiev, 22 January 1965. 52. AnthLBL, pp. 642–50. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Pyman, Florensky: A Quiet Genius, p. 146. 56. AnthLBL, p. 158. 57. Ibid, p. 568. 58. Filippov, ‘Iz Proshlogo’, pp. 198–9. 59. Filippov, ‘Ob Ordene Russkoi Intelligentsii’. 60. AnthPlSe, pp. 160–1. 61. Filippov, ‘Iz Proshlogo’, pp. 198–9. 62. Ibid.

3  1921–1927: GRADUATION AND START OF A MUSICAL CAREER   1. Vladimir Favorsky, Ob iskusstve, o knige, o gravyure, Moscow: Kniga, 1986.  2. Pyman, Florensky: A Quiet Genius, p. 143.   3. Bogdanov-Berezovsky, ‘Yunost’ Novoi Kulturoji’, pp. 70–1.   4. CorrShostakovich MIVL Shostakovich–Oborin, 17 April 1925.   5. AnthMYSVM, p. 106.  6. Ibid.  7. Drozdova, Uroki Yudinoi, p. 14.   8. AnthMYSVM, p. 40.  9. Ibid. 10. AnthLBL, p. 114. 11. AnthMYSVM, p. 39. 12. Zhizn Iskusstva, 11 July 1921. 13. AnthLBL, p. 700. 14. Drozdova, Uroki Yudinoi, pp. 30–1.

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NOTES to pp. 62–84 15. Ibid, pp. 696–700. 16. AnthMYSVM, p. 40. 17. Savshinsky, Leonid Nikolaev Pianist, Kompozitor, Pedagog, p. 115. 18. Drozdova, Uroki Yudinoi, p. 41. 19. CCorr1 Yudina–Mikhoels, 27 March 1945. 20. Drozdova, Uroki Yudinoi, pp. 40–2. 21. Ibid. 22. AnthLBL, p. 298. 23. Ibid. 24. AnthVY, p. 26. 25. Ibid, p. 32. 26. Ibid. 27. Poret, Zapiski, Risunki, Vospominaniya, p. 156. 28. Documentary, Portret Legendarnoj Pianistki. 29. CCorr1 Yudina–Kazanovich, August 1923. 30. Vlasova, ‘Vy zhdyote Verdi’. 31. Ibid. 32. Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Dorogi Isskustva, pp. 99–100. 33. Poret, Zapiski, Risunki, Vospominaniya, p. 158. 34. Documentary, Portret Legendarnoj Pianistki. 35. AnthLBL, p. 148. 36. Poret, Zapiski, Risunki, Vospominaniya, p. 156. 37. CCorr1 Yudina–Nikolayev, 21 August 1922. 38. Ibid. 39. CCorr1 Yudina–Nikolayev, March 1925. 40. AnthPlSe, p. 34. 41. Ibid. 42. CCorr1 Yudina–Steinberg, 31 January 1925. 43. AnthVY, p. 100. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid, p. 180. 46. AnthLBL, p. 99. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid, pp. 98–9. 49. Ibid. 50. Drozdova, M. Yudina Religioznaya Sud’ba, p.7. 51. AnthLBL, p. 21. 52. Klemperer, Minor Recollections, p. 58. 53. Zhizn Iskusstva, no. 11, March 1924. 54. AnthSLK, vol. III, p. 375. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid, p. 363. 57. AnthLBL, p. 169. 58. Ibid, p. 168. 59. Fairclough, Classics for the Masses, pp. 123–7. 60. AnthLBL, p. 297. 61. Ibid, p. 219. 62. Berchenko, V Poiskakh Utrachennogo Smysla. 63. Ibid, pp. 146–8. 64. Ibid, pp. 160–5. 65. Ibid, pp. 172–5. 66. AnthVY, p. 127. 67. Drozdova, Uroki Yudinoi, p. 45.

287

NOTES to pp. 85–106 4  1928–1933: LENINGRAD–MOSCOW VIA TBILISI   1. CCorr1 Yudina–Shaporin, 11 July 1929.  2. Drozdova, M. Yudina Religioznaya Sud’ba, pp. 79–80.  3. Antsiferov, Iz dum o Bylom, p. 327.   4. Ibid, pp. 336–7.   5. AnthLBL, pp. 152–3.   6. See Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker, Music and Soviet Power, for detailed information on RAPM and ASM.   7. CCorr1 Yudina–Shaporin, 11 July 1929.  8. Ibid.   9. Ibid, 16–17 July 1929. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. CCorr1 Yudina–Gnesin, 30 August 1929. 13. Ibid. 14. CCorr1 Supplement to the year 1929. 15. CCorr1 fn Yudina–Gnesin, 16 April 1930. 16. AnthLBL, pp. 187–96. 17. Letter to EW from Josephine Pasternak, and AnthLBL, pp. 312–13. 18. Ibid. 19. CCorr1 Yudina–Gnesin, 22 January 1930. 20. CCorr1 Yudina–Mashirov, 11 March 1930. 21. Drozdova, M. Yudina Religioznaya Sud’ba, p. 81. 22. CCorr1 appendix to letter 121. 23. Ibid. 24. TsGALI archive. Fond 298, Op. 2, D. 37. 25. Ibid. 26. Drozdova, M. Yudina Religioznaya Sud’ba, pp. 84–5. 27. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 24 November 1930. 28. Ibid, 6 December 1930. 29. CCorr1 Yudina–Gnesin, 22 January 1930. 30. AnthLBL, pp. 128–9. 31. Ibid. 32. CCorr1 Yudina–Shaporin, 14 December 1930. 33. AnthLBL, p. 129. 34. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 7 and 8–10 May 1931. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. AnthLBL, p. 200. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid, p. 129. 41. Ibid, p. 130. 42. Ibid, pp. 180–2. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid, p. 650. 45. AnthVY, p. 86. 46. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 13–28 November 1931. 47. LBL. 48. AnthLBL, pp. 134–5. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. AnthVY, p. 87.

288

NOTES to pp. 106–128 52. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 30 December 1931. 53. Popov, Iz Literaturnovo Naslediya, p. 245. 54. CCorr1 Yudina–Aslanishvili, September 1932. 55. CCorr1 Yudina–Zalesky, 29 August 1932. 56. CCorr1 Yudina–Braudo, 5 November 1932. 57. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 31 December 1932. 58. Ibid, 25 February 1933. 59. Ibid, 11 February 1933. 60. Ibid, 19 February 1933. 61. AnthLBL, p. 150. 62. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 11–25 April 1933. 63. Shostakovich–Yavorsky, 25 February 1927. 64. Sergei Prokofiev Diaries 1924–1933, p. 519. 65. Ibid, p. 1,063. 66. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 23 July 1933.

5  1933–1936: MOSCOW   1. Anna Akhmatova, ‘Predislovie’ (Preface) in Requiem, trans. Elizabeth Wilson, in Anna Akhmatova, Collected Works, vol. 1, pp. 362–3.   2. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 16 September 1933.   3. AnthLBL, p. 633.   4. CCorr1 Yudina–Zalesky, 9 September 1933.   5. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 17 October 1933.   6. CCorr1 Yudina–Ossovsky, 16 September 1933.   7. AnthLBL, pp. 191–2.   8. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 17 October 1933.  9. Sovetskaya Muzyka, no. 6, 1933. 10. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 2 December 1933. 11. Ibid. 12. Shaporina, Dnevnik, vol. 1, p. 155. 13. Ibid. 14. CCorr1 Yudina–Ossovsky, 4 February 1934. 15. AnthLBL, p. 475. 16. Ibid. 17. CCorr1 Yudina–Ossovsky, 4 February 1934. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 26 March 1934. 21. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 4 March 1934. 22. AnthLBL, pp. 208–9. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid, p. 209. 25. Ibid, pp. 658–86. 26. Ibid, p. 297. 27. Ibid, pp. 190–1. 28. AnthMYSVM, p. 325, note 7. 29. Antsiferov, Iz dum o Bylom, p. 385. 30. Ibid, p. 386. 31. Shaporina, Dnevnik, vol. 2, p. 35. 32. Losev, Zhenshchina Myslitel’. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. CCorr1 Losev–Yudina, 16 February 1934.

289

NOTES to pp. 128–143 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. AnthVY, p. 122. 41. AnthLBL, pp. 182–3. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Solomon Volkov, St Petersburg: A Cultural History, London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1996, p. 387. 46. AnthLBL, p. 303. 47. Ibid. 48. Pyman, Florensky: A Quiet Genius, p. 143. 49. Ibid. 50. AnthLBL, p. 548. 51. AnthLBL, p. 158. 52. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, August 1934. 53. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 7 September 1934. 54. Ibid. 55. AnthVY, p. 89. 56. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, p. 168. 57. Ibid, p. 259. 58. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 10 February 1935. 59. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 22 January and 10 February 1935. 60. CCorr1 Prokofiev–Yudina, 3 July 1935. 61. AnthPlSe, p. 29. 62. AnthVY, p. 188. 63. Ibid, p. 91. 64. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 23 March 1935. 65. CCorr1 Skrzhinskaya–Yudina, 28 March 1935. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. AnthLBL, p. 651. 69. Ibid, p. 652. 70. Ibid, p. 653. 71. Ibid, p. 182. 72. CCorr1 Prokofiev–Yudina, 3 July 1935. 73. CCorr1 Yudina–Prokofiev, 12 July 1935. 74. CCorr1 Yudina–Yavorsky, 6 October 1935. 75. CCorr1 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 18 September 1935. 76. CCorr1 Yudina–Veysberg, 13 October 1934.

6  1936–1941: THE MOSCOW CONSERVATOIRE AND MUSICAL PROJECTS  1. Osip Mandel’stam, from Vosmistishii (eight lined verse), trans. Elizabeth Wilson, in Mandel’stam, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 200.   2. Rubinchik, ‘Genrikh Neigauz i ego ucheniki’.   3. AnthVY, p. 176.   4. Ibid, p. 170.   5. Ibid. p. 176  6. Monsaingeon. Richter. Écrits, Conversations, pp. 80–1.   7. AnthVY, p. 67.

290

NOTES to pp. 143–157   8. Ibid, p. 78.   9. Ibid, pp. 62–74. 10. Drozdova, Uroki Yudinoi, p. 43. 11. AnthLBL, pp. 296–300. 12. Drozdova, M. Yudina Religioznaya Sud’ba, p. 214. 13. AnthLBL, pp. 296–300. 14. Ibid, pp. 297–8. 15. Ibid, p. 289. 16. Drozdova, Uroki Yudinoi, p. 46. 17. Inger, ‘Pianistka Maria Grinberg’. 18. AnthLBL, p. 720. 19. Inger, ‘Pianistka Maria Grinberg’. 20. Drozdova, Uroki Yudinoi. 21. Ibid, pp. 103–5. 22. Ibid, p. 106. 23. CCorr1 Yudina–Yavorsky, summer 1938. 24. AnthLBL, p. 191. 25. Ibid, p. 188. 26. Ibid. 27. Shaporina, Dnevnik, vol. 1, p. 208. 28. CCorr1 Yudina’s Notes, p. 367. 29. Ibid. 30. AnthLBL, p. 158. 31. Yudina–Prokofiev, early January 1938, RGALI, Sergei Prokofiev Archive. Fond 1929, Op. 1, D. 765. 32. CCorr1 Yudina–Steinberg, 24 January 1938. 33. Ibid. 34. AnthLBL, p. 133. 35. AnthPlSe, p. 375. 36. Gavriil Yudin, AnthPlSe, p. 29. 37. Nice, BBC Music Magazine. 38. AnthVY, p. 70. 39. AnthLBL, p. 188. 40. Ibid. 41. Gorchakov, The Theatre in Soviet Russia. 42. Taneyev–Tchaikovsky, 11 April 1889, in Pis’ma P.I. Chaikovskogo i S.I. Taneyeva. 43. Sergei Protopopov, Tvorcheskii Put’ S.I. Taneyeva (The Creative Path of S.I. Taneyev), Sobranie Materialov k 90-letiyu S.I. Taneyeva (Collected materials for the 90th anniversary of Taneyev’s birth), Moscow/Leningrad, 1947. 44. AnthLBL, p. 189. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. AnthLBL, p. 108. 48. CCorr4: Yudina–Moisei Grinberg, 28 August 1959. 49. Yudina–Prokofiev, 10 October 1939, RGALI, Sergei Prokofiev Archive. Fond 1929, Opis’ 1, D. 765. 50. AnthLBL, p. 125. 51. AnthVY, p. 84. 52. Ibid, pp. 89–90. 53. Ibid, p. 110. 54. Takho-Godi, Zhizn i sud’ba, pp. 251–2. 55. CCorr1 Yudina–Saltykov, late June 1939. 56. CCorr1 Yudina–G.M. Kogan, 26 June 1939. 57. CCorr1 Yudina–Saltykov, 11 June 1939.

291

NOTES to pp. 157–177 58. Ibid, 6 July 1939. 59. Ibid. 60. AnthLBL, p.126. 61. CCorr1 Yudina’s Notes, p. 389. 62. Ibid. 63. AnthLBL, p. 108. 64. Yudina–Prokofiev, 10 October 1939, RGALI, Sergei Prokofiev Archive. Fond 1929, Opis’ 1, D. 765. 65. CCorr1 Yudina–Florenskaya, 3 August 1940. 66. CCorr1 Yudina–Myaskovsky, 30 September 1939. 67. Ibid. 68. CCorr1 Yudina–Yavorsky, 20 September 1940. 69. AnthVY, p. 278. 70. AnthLBL, p. 140. 71. CCorr1 Pasternak–Yudina, 8 February 1941. 72. AnthLBL, p. 164. 73. Ibid. 74. CCorr4 Yudina–Suvchinsky, 5 November 1961. 75. CCorr1 Yudina–Bakhtin, 10 September 1940. 76. Ibid, late March 1941. 77. Ibid. 78. CCorr1 Yudina–Bakhtin, 29 March 1941.

7  1941–1945: WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH   1. From Yudina’s Radio speech from Leningrad, summer 1943. RGB, Fond 527, Carton 2, ed. khr. 5.   2. AnthLBL, pp. 101–2.   3. Ibid, p. 126.   4. CCorr1 Yudina–Apresov, 3 February 1942.  5. Ibid.  6. Ibid.  7. Ibid.   8. CCorr1 Bobrovsky–Yudina, 1 April 1943.  9. Ibid. 10. MGK, Sto let Moskovskoi Konservatorii, p. 348. 11. Ibid. 12. Yusefovich, Besedy s Igorem Oistrakhom, p. 53. 13. CCorr7 Yusefovich. M.V.Yudina i kvartet imeni Beethovena, p. 445. 14. CCorr1 Yudina–Apresov, 3 February 1942. 15. CCorr1 Yudina–Steinbergs, 13 February 1942. 16. Yusefovich, Besedy s Igorem Oistrakhom, p. 53. 17. Nina Simonovich-Yefimova, letter to her son Adrian, 31 December 1941. 18. Rittikh, Tchaikovsky House-Museum 1941–42. 19. AnthVSChM, p. 180. 20. AnthLBL, p. 168. 21. CCorr1 Yudina–Steinbergs, 27 June 1942. 22. CCorr1 Yudina–Steinbergs, 27 June 1942. 23. AnthLBL, p. 104. 24. Ibid, p. 102. 25. Ibid. 26. CCorr1 Yudina–Apresov, 3 February 1942. 27. AnthNevel’IV, pp. 85–7. 28. CCorr2 Yudina–Mikhoels, 27 March 1946.

292

NOTES to pp. 177–195 29. CCorr1 Yudina–Steinbergs, 27 June 1942. 30. Ibid. 31. AnthLBL, p. 151. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid, p. 104. 34. Ibid, p. 105. 35. Ibid. 36. Zak, Stati, Materialy, Vospominaniya, p. 122. 37. AnthPlSe, p. 377. 38. Yusefovich, David Oistrakh Besedy s Igorem Oistrakhom, p. 54. 39. CorrBPOF, pp. 225 and 211. 40. Ibid, pp. 223. 41. AnthLBL, pp. 103–4. 42. Yusefovich, David Oistrakh Besedy s Igorem Oistrakhom, p. 55. 43. Ibid. 44. Shaporina, Dnevnik, vol. 1, p. 395. 45. CCorr2 Lyublinsky–Yudina, 21 February 1953. 46. RGB. Fond 527, Carton 2, ed. khr. 5. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Shaporina, Dnevnik, vol. 1, p. 426. 50. Ibid, pp. 408–9. 51. CCorr1 Yudina–Zalesky, May/June 1943. 52. CorrBPOF, p. 226. 53. Ibid, pp. 227 and 228. 54. Ibid, p. 230. 55. Shaporina, Dnevnik, vol. 1, p. 456. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid, p. 458. 58. Ibid. 59. Mendelson-Prokofieva, O Sergee Sergeeviche Prokofieve, pp. 246–7. 60. Ibid, pp. 598–9. 61. Ibid.

8  1945–1953: THE ANTI-FORMALIST AND ANTI-COSMOPOLITAN CAMPAIGNS   1. Nikolai Zabolotsky, from his poem ‘Beethoven’, trans. Elizabeth Wilson, in Zabolotsky, Stolbtsy, Stikhotvoreniya, Poemy.   2. CCorr1 Shostakovich–Yudina, September 1944.  3. Laskin, Peterburgskie Teni, p. 80.   4. CCorr1 Yudina–Molotov, undated, c. 1944/45.   5. CCorr1 Yudina–Moscow Conservatoire Directors’ Office, 27 August 1945.   6. CCorr1 Yudina–Union of Composers Council, September 1945.   7. CCorr1 Yudina–Moscow Conservatoire Directors’ Office, October 1945.  8. Ibid.   9. CCorr2 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 16 January 1946. 10. Yudina–Sergei Prokofiev and Mira Mendelson-Prokofieva, early December 1945; RGALI. Fond 1929, Opis’. 3, ed. khr. 489. 11. CCorr2 Yudina–P. Korobkov and A. Vasilyeva, after 8 January 1946. 12. CCorr2 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 16 January 1946. 13. RGB Archive. Fond 527, Carton 2, ed. khr. 11. 14. Ibid. 15. Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 322–5.

293

NOTES to pp. 196–213 16. AnthLBL, p. 151. 17. Ibid, pp. 153–4. 18. AnthVY, p. 163. 19. AnthLBL, p. 141. 20. Ibid, p. 144. 21. CCorr2 Yudina–Zabolotsky, 19–24 December 1946. 22. CCorr2 Yudina–Pasternak, 25 February 1947. 23. CorrBPOF, pp. 254–5. 24. Laskin, Peterburgskie Teni, p. 82. 25. CCorr2 Yudina–Pasternak, 4 February 1947. 26. CCorr2 Pasternak–Yudina, 4 February 1947. 27. Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, pp. 195–6. 28. AnthLBL, p. 316. 29. Ibid, p. 674. 30. CCorr2 Yudina–Pasternak, 7–8 February 1947. 31. Ibid. 32. CorrBPOF, pp. 254–5. 33. CCorr2 Yudina–Pasternak, 7–8 February 1947. 34. Ibid. 35. CCorr2 Pasternak–Yudina, 9 February 1947. 36. CCorr2 Yudina–Pasternak, 25 February 1947. 37. Ibid. 38. Documentary, Portret Legendarnoj Pianistki. 39. CCorr2 Yudina–Pasternak, 24 November 1947. 40. AnthLBL, p. 141. 41. Ibid, p. 637. 42. Vagner, ‘My Meeting with M.V. Yudina’, pp. 80–4. 43. CCorr2 Alpatov–Yudina, 1 February 1947. 44. CCorr2 Tomashevskaya–Yudina, 24 February 1947. 45. Vlasova, 1948 god v Sovetskoj muzyke, p. 271. 46. Yudina–Prokofiev, note of 15 February 1948. RGALI Archive. Fond 1929, Opis’ 3, ed. khr. 489. 47. Yudina–Mravinsky, 22 December 1948. Archive. 48. Yudina–Vigner, 23 November 1948. Archive. 49. Marijas Judinas, 26 November 1948, ‘Literatura un māksla’. 50. Yudina–Prokofiev telegram, 21–22 November 1948. RGALI Archive. Fond 1929, Opis’ 3, ed. khr. 489. 51. M. Zorokhovich, 24 October 1946, Krasnoye Znamya. 52. CCorr2 Yudina–Matveyev, 26–27 May 1948. 53. CCorr2 Yudina–Tilicheyeva, 18 December 1946. 54. CCorr2 Tilicheyeva–Yudina, 28 September 1948. 55. CCorr2 Yudina–Matveyev, 26–27 May 1948. 56. Yudina–Antsiferov, 6 July 1948. RNB Archive. Fond 27, ed. khr. 378. 57. CCorr2 Yudina–E.F. Gnesina, 13 August 1949. 58. Ibid, 5 September 1949. 59. CCorr2 Yudina–Lyublinsky, late January 1953. 60. Wilson, Shostakovich, p. 287. 61. Meyer, Shostakovich Zhizn, p. 309. 62. Wilson, Shostakovich, p. 287. 63. Ibid. 64. Akopian, Fenomen Dmitriya Shostakovicha, p. 449. 65. CCorr2 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 3 July 1951. 66. CCorr2 Yudina–Bakhtin, 9–10 August 1951. 67. Ibid.

294

NOTES to pp. 213–229 68. CCor2 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 3 May 1954. 69. CCorr2 Yudina–E.F. Gnesina, 14 July 1951. 70. AnthPlSe, p.104. 71. CCorr2 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 7 September 1951. 72. Ibid, 1 November 1951. 73. AnthLBL, p. 432. 74. CCorr2 Yudina–P. Yudin, September 1952. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid.

9  1953–1960: THE THAW YEARS   1. From ‘Posle Grozy’ (After the Thunderstorm), 1958, trans. Elizabeth Wilson, in Pasternak, Izbrannoye v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1, p. 460.   2. CCorr4 Yudina–Suvchinsky, 13–19 March 1961.   3. CCorr3 Zalessky–Yudina, 29 March 1954.   4. CCorr2 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 12 December 1954.   5. AnthPlSe, p. 382.   6. CCorr2 Stepanova–Yudina, 8 May 1955.   7. CCorr3, note to letter 337.   8. CCorr2 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 23 September 1953.   9. CCorr3 Kuznetsov, Introduction, p. 8. 10. CCorr2 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 2–5 August 1953. 11. CCorr2 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 13 September 1953. 12. CCorr2 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 3 May 1953. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid, 2–5 August 1953. 15. CCorr2 Yudina–Shrzhinskaya, 15 February 1954. 16. CCorr2 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, April 1954. 17. CCorr2 Yudina–Zalesky, 1 April 1954. 18. Ibid, 27 June 1954. 19. CCorr2 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 12–26 July 1954. 20. Ibid. 21. CCorr2 Yudina–Rugevich, 20 August 1954. 22. CCorr2 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 12–26 July 1954. 23. CCorr2 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 23 August 1954. 24. CCorr2 Yudina–Betty Dattel, 31 May 1955. 25. CCorr2 Merzhanov–Yudina, 20 June 1955. 26. CCorr2 Zbruyeva–Yudina, 15 December 1955. 27. CCorr3 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 26 August 1957. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Yudina–Bogdanov-Berezovsky, 25 January 1956. RIII Archive. Fond 82, ed. khr. 827. 31. CCorr3 Yudina–Bakhtins, 25 January 1956. 32. CCorr3 Yudina–Trubachyova, 1 February 1956. 33. CCorr3 Yudina–Shaporina, 27 January 1956. 34. CCorr2 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 7 February 1955. 35. CCorr3 Zalessky–Yudina, 29 March 1956. 36. CCorr2 Yudina–Pasternak, 15 January 1954. 37. AnthVY, pp. 129–30. 38. CCorr2 Yudina–Pasternak, 15 January 1954. 39. CCorr2 Pasternak–Yudina, 18 January 1954. 40. Ibid, 3 August 1956.

295

NOTES to pp. 229–245 41. CCorr3 Yudina–Pasternak, 3 September 1956. 42. Ibid. 43. AnthVY, pp. 115–16. 44. Ibid. 45. Markiz–Elizabeth Wilson interview, October 2020. 46. CCorr2 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 3 May 1953. 47. CCorr2 Yudina–Skrzhinskaya, 29 November 1955. 48. CCorr3 Lyublinsky–Yudina, 22 May 1957. 49. CCorr3 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 21 October 1957. 50. Ibid, 19 July 1957. 51. Ibid, 14 August 1957. 52. Ibid. 53. Yudina–Gauk. A. Gauk Archive, Moscow. 54. CCorr3 Gauk–Yudina, 17 March 1958. 55. AnthVY, p. 110. 56. AnthLBL, pp. 718–20. 57. CCorr3 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 8 December 1957. 58. CCor3 Yudina–Novozhilova, 4 and 6 April 1959. 59. Ccor3 Yudina–Bruni-Balmont, 23 December 1957. 60. CCorr3 Yudina–Shaporin, 23–24 January 1958. 61. CCorr3 Yudina–Novozhilova, 6 April 1959. 62. CCorr3 Yudina–Braudo, 15 November and 5 December 1957. 63. Yudina–Bogdanov-Berezovsky, 14 January 1958. RIII Archive. Fond 82, ed. khr. 827, ll. 21–6. 64. CCorr3 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 2 December 1958. 65. Ibid. 66. CCorr3 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 8 December 1957. 67. Ibid, 5 December 1956. 68. CCorr3 Notes, p. 176. 69. Prokhorova, Chetyre druga na fone stoletiya, p. 174. 70. CCorr4 Yudina–Kamendrovskaya, 17 September 1959. 71. Ibid, 17 September 1959. 72. Ibid. 73. CCorr4 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 20 September 1959. 74. CorrMYPS Yudina–Suvchinsky, 16 September 1959. 75. CCorr4 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 29 September 1959. 76. CCorr4 Suvchinsky–Yudina, 21 September 1959. 77. CorrMYPS Yudina–Suvchinsky, 19 October 1959. 78. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, p. 43. 79. AnthMYSVM, pp. 110–12. 80. CorrMYPS Yudina–Suvchinsky, 12 December 1959. 81. Yudina–Bogdanov-Berezovsky, 8 January 1960. RIII Archive. Fond 82, ed. khr. 827. 82. CCorr4 Yudina–Malko, 15 March 1959. 83. CCorr4 Malko–Yudina, February 1960. 84. Yudina–Rozhdestvensky, 23/24 February 1960. Elizabeth Wilson’s private archive. 85. CCorr4 Suvchinsky–Yudina, 17 March 1960. 86. Walsh, Stravinsky, pp. 528–9. 87. CCorr4 Blazhkov–Yudina, 15 February 1960. 88. CCorr4 Yudina–Blazhkov, 19 February 1960. 89. CCorr4 Yudina–Stravinsky, 29 April 1960. 90. CCorr4 Suvchinsky–Yudina, 12 May 1960. 91. CCorr4 Stravinsky–Yudina, 7 May 1960. 92. CCorr4 Suvchinsky–Yudina, 24 May 1960. 93. CCorr4 Jolivet–Yudina, 8 June 1960.

296

NOTES to pp. 246–258   94. CCorr4 Yudina–Bakhtins, 28 January 1960.   95. CorrMYPS Yudina–Suvchinsky, 5 June 1960.  96. Ibid.  97. Ibid.  98. Ibid.  99. Drozdova, Uroki Yudinoj, pp. 173–6. 100. CCorr4 Matsov–Yudina, 26 April 1960. 101. CCorr4 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 23 June 1960. 102. CCorr4 Yudina–Kogan, 1 July 1960.

10  1960–1970: THE FINAL DECADE   1. Shpiller, Oration at Yudina’s Funeral on 24 November 1970, in AnthLBL, p. 11.   2. P.A. Florensky, Stolp i Utverzhdeniye Istiny, pp. 585–6.    3. CCorr4 Bogdanov-Berezovsky–Yudina, 31 October 1960.    4. AnthLBL, pp. 724–9.    5. CCorr4 Suvchinsky–Yudina, 14 October 1960.    6. Ibid, 12 September 1960.   7. Ibid.   8. Ibid.   9. Ibid.   10. CCorr4 Jolivet–Yudina, 16 October 1960.   11. CCorr4 Yudina–Stravinsky, 28 November 1960.  12. Ibid.   13. CCorr4 Stravinsky–Yudina, 16 January 1961.   14. Interview with Elizabeth Wilson.   15. CCorr4 Yudina–Pärt, 30 October 1961.   16. CCorr4 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 23 May–1 June 1961.  17. Walsh, Stravinsky, pp. 439–40.  18. Ogonyok, August 1961.  19. Stravinskaya, I.F. Stravinsky i ego blizkie, pp. 86–7.   20. CCorr4 Blazhkov–Yudina, 1 July 1961.   21. CCorr4 Yudina–Suvchinsky, 13–19 March 1961.   22. CCorr4 Suvchinsky–Yudina, 27 March 1961.   23. CCorr4 Stravinsky–Yudina, 16 June 1961.  24. Walsh, Stravinsky, p. 440.   25. CCorr4 Yudina–Blazhkov, 7 July 1961.   26. CCorr5 Yudina–Balanchine, 10 November 1962, pp. 321–2.   27. CCorr4 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 1 June 1961.   28. CCorr4 Yudina–Chernobrova-Levina, 19 June 1961.   29. CCorr4 Yudina–Melodiya Studios, 13 July 1961.   30. CCorr4 Yudina–Suvchinsky, 21 May 1962.   31. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues and a Diary.   32. CCorr4 Yudina–Suvchinsky, 6 August 1961.   33. CCorr4 Yudina–Chernobrova-Levina, 19 June 1961.   34. CCorr4 Yudina–Bruni-Balmont, 20 June 1961.   35. CCorr4 Yudina–Krasheninnikova, 6 August 1961.   36. CCorr4 Suvchinsky–Yudina, 28 August 1961.   37. CCorr4 Yudina–Mokreyeva/Blazhkov, 19 September 1961.   38. Ibid, 20 September 1961.   39. CCorr4 Suvchinsky–Yudina, 23 October 1961.  40. Walsh, Stravinsky, p. 443.   41. CCorr4 Yudina–Blazhkov, 19 September 1961.   42. CCorr4 Yudina–the Suvchinskys, 26 December 1961.

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NOTES to pp. 258–268 43. CCorr4 Stockhausen–Yudina, 1 August 1961. 44. CCorr4 Yudina–Suvchinsky, 20 September 1961. 45. AnthVY, Gavriil Yudin, p.176. 46. CCorr4 Yudina–Pärt, 30 October 1961. 47. Ibid. 48. CCorr4 Suvchinsky–Yudina, 17 January 1961. 49. CCorr4 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 18 December 1961. 50. CCorr5 Yudina, note p. 37. 51. CCorr5 Yudina–Zalesky, 8 February 1962. 52. CCorr5 Yudina–Suvchinsky, 29 January 1962. 53. CCorr5 Yudina–Chernobrova-Levina, 18 May 1962. 54. CCorr5 Yudina, note p. 37. 55. CCorr5 Yudina–Blazhkov/Mokreyeva, 2 March 1962. 56. CCorr5 Yudina–Suvchinsky, 5–15 June 1962. 57. Stravinskaya, I.F. Stravinsky i ego blizkie, p. 91. 58. CCorr5 Suvchinsky–Yudina, 12 March 1962. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid, 26 March 1962. 61. CCorr5 Yudina–Suvchinsky, 4 April 1962. 62. CCorr5 Liephart–Yudina, 9 April 1962. 63. CCorr5 Zagursky–Yudina, 1 April 1962. RNB. Fond 1117, ed. khr. 2090, ll. 2–3. 64. CCorr5 Yudina–Stravinsky, 30 April 1962. 65. Ibid. 66. CCorr5 Yudina–Blazhkov, 20 July 1962. 67. CCorr5 Yudina–Stravinskaya, 28–29 August 1962. 68. Yudina–Bogdanov-Berezovsky, 25 October 1962. RIII Archive. Fond 82, ed. khr. 827. 69. Craft–Wilson, May 1986. Elizabeth Wilson personal archive. 70. Stravinskaya, I.F. Stravinsky i ego blizkie, pp. 100–1. 71. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, p. 274. 72. Craft–Wilson, May 1986. Elizabeth Wilson personal archive. 73. Synthesizer, named after Scriabin’s initials, invented by Yevgeni Murzin. See Schmelz, ‘From Pink Floyd to Scriabin’. 74. CCorr5 Yudina–Suvchinsky, October 1962. 75. Stravinskaya, I.F. Stravinsky i ego blizkie, p. 115. 76. Ibid, p. 126. 77. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues and a Diary, pp. 298–9. 78. Ibid. 79. AnthLBL, pp. 726–7. 80. CCorr5 Yudina–Suvchinsky, October 1962. 81. AnthLBL, p. 727. 82. CCorr5 Yudina–Suvchinsky, October 1962. 83. CCorr5 Yudina–Prieberg, 27 November 1962. 84. CCorr5 Yudina–Suvchinsky, October 1962. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid, 28 November 1962. 88. Yudina–Suvchinsky, 28 November 1962. 89. CCorr5 Yudina–Suvchinsky, October 1962. 90. CCorr5 Suvchinsky–Yudina, 7 January 1963. 91. Ibid, 5 November 1962. 92. CCorr5 Yudina–Blazhkov, 5 November 1962. 93. CCorr5 Yudina–Suvchinsky, 28 November 1962. 94. CCorr5 Yudina–Balanchine, early 1963. 95. CCorr5 Yudina–Suvchinsky, 5 November 1961.

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NOTES to pp. 269–282   96.   97.   98.   99. 100. 101. 102.

Ibid, 28 November 1962. Ibid, 28 December 1962. CCorr5 Suvchinsky–Yudina, 7 January 1963. CCorr6 Yudina–Shostakovich, 25 September 1965. Lubimov–Wilson, 2 January 2021. Elizabeth Wilson personal archive. CCorr5 Yudina–Kholodilin, 17 May 1963. CCorr5 The Teachers of the Khabarovsk Musical High School to the editorial board of Izvestiya, 7 March 1963. 103. Ibid. 104. CCorr5 Yudina–Kholodilin, 17 May 1963. 105. CCorr5 Yudina to Suvchinsky, 28 December 1962. 106. CCorr6 Yudina–Stravinskaya, 19 February 1964. 107. AnthVY, p. 198. 108. CCorr5 Yudina–Suvchinsky, late December 1963. 109. CCorr5 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 7–15 December 1963. 110. Leonid Gakkel, Yeshchyo Shest’ Lyet (Another Six Years), p. 57. 111. CCorr6 Yudina–Bakhtin, 11 August 1964. 112. Drozdova, M. Yudina Religioznaya Sud’ba, p. 213. 113. CCorr6 Yudina–Suvchinsky, November 1966. 114. AnthPlSe, pp. 392–3. 115. CCorr6 Yudina–Bakhtin, 1–14 June 1966. 116. CCorr6 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 6 April 1964. 117. Ibid, 30 September 1966. 118. Ibid, 14 May 1967. 119. AnthLBL, pp. 215–17. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. 122. Natalia Solzhenitsyna interview with Elizabeth Wilson. 123. Drozdova, M. Yudina Religioznaya Sud’ba, p. 213. 124. Ibid, pp. 214–16. 125. CCorr6 Yudina–Suvchinsky, November 1966. 126. CCorr7 Yudina–Filaret, 22 January 1967. 127. AnthLBL, pp. 731–8. 128. AnthPlSe, p. 577. 129. AnthLBL, p. 11. 130. CCorr7 Yudina–Lyublinsky, 11 September 1967.

299

APPENDIX

Yudina was viewed by many of her contemporaries as an eccentric or a Yurodivy – a Holy Fool. Naturally many legends grew up around her name. The story of her recording the Mozart A major piano concerto K.488 in one single night for Stalin is often the only thing people in the West know about Yudina, even if they have never heard her recordings. It has entered the popular imagination and has been taken up by filmmakers and writers. It appears in the opening scenes of Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin (2017). In France an interesting (if not always accurate) book by JeanNoël Benoit has the subtitle ‘The pianist who defied Stalin’. While in Italy, two books give prominence to the presumed relationship between Stalin and Yudina: Giovanna Parravicini’s biography Marija Judina: Più della musica, which emphasises the religious aspect of her life, and a recently published novel, Complice la notte by Giuseppina Manin, belonging to the genre of fiction based on research. In all my years researching Yudina I have yet to meet anybody who heard the story from Yudina’s own lips. Here I attempt to answer the million-dollar question: is it history or legend, fact or fiction? The story made its first printed appearance in 1979 in Solomon Volkov’s Testimony,* first published in English. Recently Volkov confirmed to me in writing that he heard the story not from Yudina, but from Shostakovich, who in turn claimed to have heard it from the pianist. At the time it did not occur to Volkov to doubt its authenticity. As far as I can ascertain, Yudina’s relatives, students (one could say disciples!) and friends – and I have spoken to many of them over the years – never heard any part of this story from * Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979, pp. 148–9.

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Yudina herself. Shostakovich’s widow Irina Antonovna obviously knew of it, presumably from her husband. She told me that she was inclined to think it a Baika (a myth). I also spoke with my teacher Mstislav Rostropovich about Shostakovich’s exploits as a storyteller. Apart from being the first performer and dedicatee of several important works by Shostakovich, Rostropovich was a personal friend. He too was sceptical. He knew the great composer as a wonderful raconteur, an artist able to vary a story with each telling, often embellishing it to the point of becoming unrecognizable. He quoted instances of other stories that he had heard from Shostakovich, which he didn’t for a minute believe. These were stories told as table-talk and not as documents for posterity. I started from the premise that there is no smoke without fire, and while on a research trip to Moscow in October 2019 I tried to find some answers. First of all the date of the Mozart concerto recording was previously given as 1944, later as 1948. In 2001, while copying the discs from 78 rpm shellac to digital, Pavel Grunberg, a sound producer for the firm Melodiya, was able to establish the precise date of the recording as 9 July 1947. The matrix was at this point restored. Let us first examine the story itself, as told in Testimony: Once Stalin called the Radio Committee, where the administration was, and asked if they had a record of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23 which had been heard on the Radio the day before. ‘Played by Yudina,’ he added. They told Stalin that of course they had it. Actually, there was no record, the concert had been live. But they were afraid to say No to Stalin.

I and my research assistant consulted the Radio archives, trying to discover what and when Yudina played and what was broadcast. The archives gave precise details of performances, artists, repertoire and duration during the war years and up to 1946. In 1947, the year relevant to our specific research, the Radio archives abandoned methodical listing, using far less precise archival methods – times of transmission are given and duration, but not necessarily details of repertoire transmitted or even names of the performers. In every instance some information is missing. Hence, looking up the 1947 data to see when a possible transmission of a Mozart concerto might have been made, I came up with these possibilities: 301

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a) 9 January: Late-night transmission of an unspecified Mozart concerto from studio. Unspecified performers. Duration 30 minutes: 00.46–01.16. b) 19 January: Symphonic concert of works by Mozart and Beethoven from studio. Unspecified works and performers. Duration 54 minutes: 22.00–22.54. c) 30 January: Mozart Romance from unspecified piano concerto from studio. Unspecified performers. (Probably second movement of D minor concerto K.466.) Duration 9 minutes: 5.20–5.29 a.m. d) 2 March: Performance by M. Yudina from studio. Unspecified repertoire, unknown if she was playing solo or with orchestra. Duration 16 minutes: 13.15–13.31. e) 2 April: Concert of Yudina broadcast live from Grand Hall of Conservatoire. Unspecified repertoire, not known if she was playing solo or with orchestra. Duration 1 hour 10 minutes: 20.40–21.50. f) 8 April: Instrumental concert from the Hall of Columns, with unspecified works by Bach and Mozart. Unspecified performers. Direct evening broadcast. Duration 1 hour 35 minutes: 20.14–21.49. g) 18 April: Chamber concert of works by Beethoven and Mozart from studio. Unspecified repertoire and performers. Duration 30 minutes: 16.15–16.45. h) 19 May: Concert performed by Yudina from studio. Unspecified repertoire. Duration 13 minutes 59 seconds: 17.46–17.59. i) 25 May: Mozart concerto (unspecified whether concerto was for piano, violin, horn or flute and harp), studio recording. Unspecified performers. Duration 30 minutes: 23.00–23.30.

Mozart’s A major concerto has a duration of 23.38’ in Yudina’s recording. Possibly in concert performance it lasted a minute or so longer, if she took slower tempi in the outer movements. We can immediately exclude c), d) and h). Of the listed broadcasts only three – e), f) and g) – come from live concerts, of which Yudina is definitely also playing in e), but we are unsure if an orchestra is also playing. Possibly Yudina played the work in studio broadcasts a), b) and i). The nearest date to the recording of 9 July is i), 25 May. Possibly Stalin heard this broadcast – possibly it was the A major concerto K.488 and 302

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possibly the pianist was Yudina. If the story is true and Stalin rang the Radio Committee after the concert, that would have left a good six weeks between the concerto being heard on the radio and its being recorded – hardly a panicked overnight job as claimed in Testimony: The committee panicked. But they had to do something. They called in Yudina and an orchestra and recorded that night. Everyone was shaking with fright, except Yudina naturally [. . .] Yudina told me they had to send the conductor home, he was so scared he couldn’t think. They called another conductor, who trembled, and got everything mixed up, confusing the orchestra. Only a third conductor was in any shape to finish the recording [. . .] Anyway the record was ready by morning. They made one single copy in record time, and sent it to Stalin.

The Radiohouse (DZZ) owned its own studios, large enough for an orchestra and soloist, and with good acoustics. So the least of the problems would have been finding a studio. The orchestra used for the recording was not the Radio Orchestra, as one would normally expect in a recording made for the Radio Committe. Rather, the orchestra that played was the State Symphony Orchestra of the USSR, known as Gosorkestr, Moscow’s most prestigious orchestra. It is hardly possible that the Radio Committee could have called up this orchestra to their studios at the last minute, whereas the Radio Orchestra musicians as employees of the Radio, would have been more likely to oblige out of duty. Musically Alexander Gauk was an obvious choice to conduct the concerto. He knew Yudina well, and had performed Mozart’s K.488 with her. He was chief conductor of the State Orchestra (Gosorchestra) from 1936 to 1941 (succeeded by Nathan Rakhlin, 1941–5, and Konstantin Ivanov, 1946–65), and worked regularly with the Radio Orchestra, becoming its chief conductor in 1953. He was dismissed as chief conductor of the Gosorchestra at the beginning of the Second World War because of his German surname (Gauk or Hauk), and taught at the Tbilisi and later Moscow Conservatoires in the intervening years. Even in a wartime military economy one doubts whether there was the possibility of recording and producing discs overnight. The Mozart concerto recording was made on shellac in 78 rpm. The ‘single copy’ would have comprised four discs, each with two sides – seven sides of the 303

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concerto, the eighth side being an extra, the finale of the Mozart C minor sonata K457. Testimony continues the story: Soon after, Yudina received an envelope with twenty thousand roubles. She was told it came on the express orders of Stalin. Then she wrote him a letter [. . .] Yudina wrote something like this in her letter. ‘I thank you Iosif Vissarionovich for your aid. I will pray for you night and day and ask the Lord to forgive your great sins before the people and the country. The Lord is merciful and He’ll forgive you. I gave the money to the Church I attend.’

Yudina stopped attending church services in 1927, when the schism occurred between the main Orthodox Church and the Josephite movement to which she belonged. The Josephites were literally decimated. For Yudina, the acting Patriarch Sergei was a traitor, and she broke all ties with the official Church, considering it to be infiltrated by Bolsheviks. She resumed attending Orthodox services and confessing only in 1956. As for the letter supposedly sent to Stalin, her friends and relatives believe that had she written it, it would have been suicidal. In other instances when addressing official institutions and personages, she used caution, and was careful in her wording, often simply because she wanted to protect her colleagues and friends. Yudina herself never lacked courage. Another argument I have heard from people close to her was that had she indeed written such a letter, she would have been unable to resist boasting about it, particularly after Stalin was exposed by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956. While in Moscow I visited the RGASPI (Russian State Archive of SocialPolitical History), which houses a large part of Stalin’s archive, scattered between various organizations. I spoke to the very helpful archivist, who informed me that their archive held no letters from Yudina to Stalin and had no information of their existence. I was put in touch with Oleg Khlevnyuk, who as a recent biographer of Stalin apparently had the greatest knowledge of the Stalinist archives. He confirmed that over his years of research he had never seen any mention or trace of correspondence between Yudina and Stalin. I realise that many Russian archives withhold material relating to Stalin from foreigners as a matter of course. It would have taken me a few years to visit them all. In addition, it is known that certain material relating to this 304

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period has either been deliberately destroyed or not been preserved in the archives. Testimony continues thus: They say that her recording of the Mozart concerto was on the record player when the leader and teacher was found dead in his dacha. It was the last thing he listened to.

In a film made for Russian TV on Kanal 1 (Channel 1, ‘Legends of our Time’) in 2010, its director and script writer Olga Kuznetsova visited Stalin’s dacha in Kuntsevo where he died. She found the catalogue (card index) of his phonographic collection, but no record of Yudina’s was listed amongst its contents, let alone the 78 rpm recording of Mozart’s A major concerto. All this leads me to believe that the story is untrue. At best it is a legend only partly rooted in truth, which through gross exaggeration has become unrecognizable.

305

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Note: All the translations from anthologies about Yudina and the seven volumes of Yudina correspondence are by Elizabeth Wilson.

ANTHOLOGIES DEVOTED TO MARIA YUDINA The following five Anthologies (AnthLBL, MYSVM, PlSe, VY and VSChM), referred to in the endnotes by a short acronym, are dedicated to Yudina’s life and work in the form of reminiscences, articles and correspondence. It is confusing as much of this material is repeated in more than one anthology, sometimes in varied form. As the same contributor can appear with the same different material in different anthologies, I only indicate the source I actually used. i)  Luchi Bozhestvennoi Lyubvi (Rays of Divine Love), ed. Anatoli Kuznetsov, Moscow and St Petersburg, 1999 (AnthLBL) In this anthology the editor has divided the material between various sections (indicated in bold below). In the endnotes, the anthology is referred to by its acronym, AnthLBL, and page number. To allow identification, each article/reminiscence is given page numbers. The titles are only given in English translation.

To the Memory of M.V. Yudina Vsevolod Shpiller, ‘Funeral Oration of 24 November 1970’, pp. 11–14

By Maria Yudina ‘Nevel’ Diary 1916–1918’, pp. 25–90 ‘The February Revolution and the Lesgaft Courses’, pp. 91–6 ‘Some Reminiscences about Leningraders’, pp. 97–120 Alexei Alekseyevich Ukhtomsky (‘Principle of Dominance and Eternal Memory’), pp. 121–4 ‘The Saltykovs: Kirill Georgievich and Yelena Nikolayevna’, pp. 125–7 ‘Fragment of Reminiscences’, pp. 128–38 ‘The Creation of the Schubert Song Anthology’, pp. 139–57 ‘Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky’, p. 158 ‘On Lev Platonovich Karsavin’, pp. 159–62 ‘On the Great Poetess (and martyr) Marina Tsvetayeva’, pp. 163–5 ‘The History of the Creation of a Russian translation of Rilke’s Marienleben’, pp. 166–76 ‘Alexei Maksimovich Gorky’, pp. 177–86 ‘Reminiscences of Boleslav Leopoldovich Yavorsky’, pp. 187–96 ‘Some Words on the Late, Treasured Artist, Vladimir Vladimirovich Sofronitsky’, pp. 197–202 ‘Fragment of Life’, pp. 203–11 ‘Boris Viktorovich Tomashevsky, The Artists Viktor Elkonin, Viktor Vakidin’, pp. 212–14

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BIBLIOGRAPHY ‘The Concert of 12 March 1968’, pp. 215–18 ‘Meetings with Marietta Sergeyevna Shaginian’, pp. 219–21 ‘Paustovsky’s Funeral’, pp. 222–5 ‘At Pasternak’s Grave 30 May 1970’, pp. 226–30

Articles and Lectures by M.V. Yudina ‘Dmitri Dmitreyevich Shostakovich’, pp. 231–5 ‘Six Intermezzi of Brahms’, pp. 236–56 ‘Pictures from an Exhibition by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky’, pp. 257–66 ‘Romanticism: Sources and Parallels’, pp. 267–95 ‘Thoughts on Musical Interpretation’, pp. 296–9 (Next two sections, Correspondence and Yudina’s Translations, not used)

Articles about Maria Yudina Sergei Trubachyov, ‘Yudina’s Relationship with Florensky’, pp. 543–75 Konstantin Zenkin, ‘Schubert in Maria Yudina’s World’, pp. 576–99 Lyudmila Maksimovskaya, ‘Town of Luminaries (Nevel’ and Yudina)’, pp. 600–14

Reminiscences about Maria Yudina Bakhtin, Mikhail, ‘ “She was a completely unofficial person.” In Conversation with V.D. Duvakin’, pp. 615–41 Andreyeva, Maria, and Mozhanskaya, Anna, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 642–57 Selyu, Yulian, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 658–95 Tilicheyeva (Otten’), Yevgeniya, ‘The Master Performer and Listener’, pp. 696–701 Drozdova, Marina, ‘Who Lived for the Best in their Times, Who Lived for all Times’, pp. 702–12 Grossman, Margarita, ‘The Main Teacher’, pp. 713–16 Druzhinin, Fyodor, ‘On Maria Yudina’, pp. 717–23 Tishchenko, Boris, ‘On Maria Yudina and on those Connected to her in my Memory’, pp. 724–30 Chernikov, Oleg, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 731–8 Trubachyova, Maria, ‘Yudina’s Last Days’, pp. 739–44 Nikitina, Olga, ‘Talisman’, pp. 745–6 Nazarov, Yakov, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 747–56 Vakidin, Viktor, ‘On Favorsky’s Portraits of Yudina’, pp. 757–9 Gostyev, Oleg, ‘Some meetings with M.V. Yudina (Commentary to the Iconography)’, pp. 760–5 Pomerantseva, Natalia, ‘The Word-Sound Logos’, pp. 766–71 Schnittke, Alfred, ‘On Maria Yudina’, p. 772 Szigeti, Joseph, ‘On Maria Yudina’, p. 773 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, ‘Homage to Maria Yudina’, pp. 776–8 ii)  Maria Venyaminovna Yudina, Stat’i, Vospominanij, Materialy (Maria Yudina, Articles, Reminiscences, Materials), ed. Anatoli Kuznetsov, Moscow, 1978 (AnthMYSVM)

Reminiscences of Relatives and Friends, pp. 14–130 Vera Yudina, Gavriil Yudin, Ariadna Birmak, Dmitri Shostakovich, Samari Savshinsky, I.S. Marshak, Alisa Poret, Nina Bruni-Balmont, P. Kutateladze, M. Bohaver, T. Charekishvili, S. Potapova, Valentina Konen, L. Mukharinskaya, Viktor Bobrovsky, K. Adzhemov, Yakov

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Zak, Serafima Bromberg, Kseniya Stravinskaya, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Valentin Skoblò, Mikhail Alpatov, Lev Ozerov

Reminiscences of Students, pp. 130–76 Anna Artobolevskaya, Alla Maslakovets, Ida Stuchinskaya, Mikhail Chulaki, Alexander Kuris, Marina Drozdova, Lev Markiz

Articles about Yudina, pp. 177–203 V. Renzin, ‘At the Start of her Path’ (Yudina’s Years of Study, 1912–1921) V. Krastin, ‘Bach in Yudina’s Interpretation’ Viktor Yusefovich, ‘Like-minded Thinkers. Yudina and the Beethoven Quartet’ Yudina’s own writings and articles, pp. 204–308 Materials and Documents, pp. 309–383 (last section), including letters to various correspondents. I do not give details of last two sections, as all the material is found (and referred to in text) in the other anthologies- with the exception of letters to M.O. Steinberg, pp.332–442. iii)  Plameneyushchee Serdtse: Maria Yudina v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov (The Flaming Heart: Reminiscences of Maria Yudina by her Contemporaries), ed. Anatoli Kuznetsov, St Petersburg Centre of Humanitarian Initiatives, 2009 (AnthPlSe) The articles and reminiscences are in three sections: Theme, Variations and Fugue. I note only the articles that are used. Theme Yudina, Vera, ‘Reminiscences of My Elder Sister’, pp. 5–14 Dzhalnes, Anna (Kozlenko), ‘ “Artist, do not sleep, do not sleep” (Reminiscences about my Aunt, Maria Yudina)’, pp. 15–23 Yudin, Gavriil, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’ (written), pp. 24–37 ‘Spoken Reminiscences’, pp. 38–44 Zvyagin, Boris, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina and her Family’ (interview with Anatoli Kuznetsov), pp. 45–53 Tilicheyeva (Otten’),Yevgeniya, ‘Master Performer and Listener’, pp. 54–9 Otten’, Vera, ‘The Guiding Star’, pp. 60–2 Bakhtin, Mikhail, ‘ “She was a completely unofficial person.” In Conversation with V.D. Duvakin, pp. 63–7 Zhiv, Leya, ‘From Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 68–93 Birmak, Ariadna, ‘My Meetings with Maria Yudina’, pp. 94–7 Tyulin, Yuri, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 98–100 Glebova, Tatiana, ‘About Maria Yudina . . . Reminiscence, Memory, The Past’, pp. 101–5 Shostakovich, Dmitri, ‘About Maria Yudina’, pp. 106–7 Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Valerian, ‘Yudina’s Sacrament’, pp. 108–9 Savshinsky, Samari, ‘Leonid Nikolayev’s Pupil’, pp. 110–12 Artobolevskaya, Anna, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’ (written), pp. 113–24 ‘Spoken Reminiscences’, pp. 125–36 ‘Remarks about Yudina’, pp. 137–9 Andreyeva, Maria, and Mozhanskaya, Anna, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 140–56 Variations Filippov, Boris, ‘A Fearless Christian (from his reminiscences)’, pp. 157–63 Blumensteyn, Anna, ‘Meetings with Maria Yudina’, pp. 164–7

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Uritskaya, Berta, ‘Remembering the Past’, pp. 182–5 Birukova, Yevgeniya, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 186–91 Dobrokhotov, Boris, ‘Mighty, Irrepressible, Inimitable’, pp. 192–204 Belza, Igor, from ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 205–10 Melekhov, Dmitri, ‘To the Memory of Maria Yudina, pp. 211–21 Alpatov, Mikhail, ‘Self-sacrificing and Ferocious’, p. 226 Tsvetayeva, Anastasiya, ‘Three Meetings with Maria Yudina’, p. 226 Dudintsev, Vladimir, ‘Not by Bread Alone’, p. 239 Ozerov, Lev, ‘On Wings’, p. 240 Rudneva, Lyubov, ‘On Shostakovich’s Trust and the Caprice played out by Responsible Colleagues in 1951’, pp. 242–54 Matsov, Mark, ‘The First Memoirs of a Musical Amateur’, pp. 259–70 Fogd-Stoyanova, Tatiana, ‘Maria Veniaminovna Yudina’, pp. 271–81 Reshetovskaya, Natalia, ‘Unforgettable Meetings’, pp. 305–15 Varbanets, Nina, ‘Opus. 111’, pp. 319–33 Skoblò, Valentin, ‘Maria Yudina in the Recording Studio’, pp. 334–41 Slonimsky, Sergei, ‘Some Words about a Great Pianist’, pp. 342–4 Apresian, Tsogik, ‘An Unforgettable Teacher’, pp. 345–51 Ter-Gevondian, Yelena, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 352–61 Karetnikov, Nikolai, ‘Some Words on Maria Yudina’, p. 362 Pikaizen, Viktor, ‘Creative Meetings with Maria Yudina’, pp. 366–7 Milstein, Yakov, ‘About Maria Yudina’, p. 368 Kogan, Grigori, ‘She was a Phenomenon’, pp. 372–3 Zak, Yakov, ‘Art Turned towards People’, pp. 374–8 Lothar-Shevchenko, Vera, ‘Nobility and Inner Strength’, pp. 382–3 Ponizovkin,Yuri, ‘A Personality United in Sound’, pp. 384–8 Gornastaeva, Vera, ‘A Study of a Life Fully Lived,’ pp. 389–98 Rozhdestvensky, Gennadi, ‘All My Life I Search for – and Find – the New’, pp. 406–7 Dolukhanova, Zara, ‘Meeting with Maria Yudina’, p. 418 Kondratyev, Andrei, ‘Yudina’s Life at Solomennaya Storozhka’, pp. 425–31 Vulfius, Pavel, ‘A Grand but Difficult Person’, pp. 432–7 Markiz, Lev, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 438–50 Druzhinin, Fyodor, ‘I Am Writing Akathists’, pp. 455–61 Drozdova, Marina, ‘From Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 463–9 Derevyanko, Viktor, and Neuhaus, Heinrich Junior, ‘Maria Yudina 2’, pp. 470–4 Krasheninnikova(s), Yekaterina and Maria, ‘Our Meetings with Yudina and Pasternak’, pp. 475–98 Stravinskaya, Kseniya, ‘Yudina and Igor Stravinsky’, pp. 499–508 Fugue Filaret, Metropolitan of Minsk, Patriarch of Byelorus, ‘Reminiscences of Maria Yudina’, pp. 566–7 Nazarov, Yakov, ‘Portrayals of Maria Yudina’, pp. 568–78 Martynenko, Albert, ‘Meetings with Maria Yudina’, pp. 579–87 Nikitina, Olga, ‘Sergei Trubachyov and Maria Yudina’, pp. 588–606 Gamazkova, Tatiana, ‘Father Alexander Men’ and Maria Yudina’, pp. 623–5 Blazhkov, Igor, ‘Spoken Interview with Anatoli Kuznetsov’, pp. 630–2 Jolivet, André, ‘In Memory of Maria Yudina’, p. 634 iv)  Vspominaya Yudinu (Remembering Yudina), ed. A. Kuznetsov, Moscow, 2008 (AnthVY) The Reminiscences of friends and families are divided into various sections of the book, the titles given in italics. In the endnotes, the book is referred to by the acronym, AnthVY, with page numbers. Here, as so many reminiscences are fragmentary and the same person is often

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BIBLIOGRAPHY quoted several times in a section, I give the names of contributors that I have referred to and only give page numbers to the section. Many reminiscences were given as interviews with the editor Anatoli Kuznetsov. A Prologue More Like an Epilogue, pp. 5–14 If One is to Speak of Her Diamonds, pp. 15–106 Contributors include: Anna Artobolevskaya; Mikhail Bakhtin; Boris Bitov; Yevgeniya Bozhko; Alexei Bykov; Rosa Chernobrova-Levina; Marina Drozdova; Agnessa Druzhinina; Valentina Friedman; Nadezhda Goldenberg; Andrei Kondrat’ev; Nikolai Lubimov; Lyudmila Maksimovskaya; Alla Maslakovets; Yakov Nazarov; Viktor Renzin; Raisa Shapiro; Irina Skrzhinskaya; Yelena Skrzhinskaya; Ida Stuchinskaya; Nora Stuchinskaya; Gavriil Yudin; Vera Yudina A Complete Synthesis of the Old and New Testaments, pp. 107–47 Contributors include: Lida Braudo; Anna Bromberg; Serafima Bromberg; Nina BruniBalmont; Mikhail Druskin; Yakov Druskin; Yelena Duvakina; Militsa Geygel; Yekaterina and Maria Krasheninnikova(s); Anna Mozhanskaya; Olga Nikitina; Yevgeni Pasternak; Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva; Sergei Trubachyov; Father Nikolai Vedernikov; Valentina Yasnopolskaya; Yevgeni Yevtushenko; Nikita Zabolotsky It Was Another World – Without Prize-Winners, pp. 148–73 Contributors include: Viktor Derevyanko; Yuri Fyodorishchev; Margarita Grossman; Iza Khantsin; Grigori Kogan; Ivan Kozlovsky; Alexei Lubimov; Yuri Ponizovkin; Iosif Schwartz; Irina Sofronitskaya; Igor Zhukov Everything is Deeply Thought Out, pp. 173–194 Contributors include: Karl Eliasberg; Leo Ginzburg; Karen Khachaturian; Mark Matsov; Roman Matsov; Gennadi Rozhdestvensky; Tatiana Shishmaryova An Unusual Spiritual Power, pp. 195–203 Contributors include: Irakli Andronikov; Philipp Gershkovich; Vladimir Kabakov; Nikolai Karetnikov; Gidon Kremer; Alexander Lokshin It Is Hard to Reject the Context of Yudina, pp. 204–13 Contributors include: Sergei Averintsev; Yelizaveta Dattel’; Nina Dorliak; Mikhail Dudin Not By Bread Alone, pp. 214–28 Contributors include: Vladimir Dudintsev; Tatiana Fogd-Stoyanova; Yelena Kondrat’eva; Marianna Kozyreva; Natalia Reshetovskaya; Alexandra Shatskikh; Pyotr Yefremov; Nikolai Zhuravlyov I Alone Work with the Gospel in My Hands, pp. 229–38 Contributors include: Father Dimitri Dudko; Father Andrei Kulikov; Father Vsevolod Shpiller; Father Nikolai Vedernikov v)  Vy Spasyotes’ cherez muzyku (You Will Be Saved Through Music), ed. A. Kuznetsov, Klassika - XXI Moscow, 2005 (AnthVSChM) I have referred less to this anthology, AnthVSChM, because much of the material appears in others. It is in five sections: 1) Biography; 2) Performance Art and Creative Contacts; 3) Publications; 4) About the Musician; 5) Sources. These are the articles I refer to: Yudina, Maria, Anketny List 1925 (Leningrad Conservatoire Questionnaire, 1925), pp. 5–7 Yudina, Flora Veniaminovna, ‘Reminiscences of My Sister Maria Yudina’, pp. 179–81

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BIBLIOGRAPHY CORRESPONDENCE Maria Yudina (Seven Volumes of Correspondence), ed. Anatoli Kuznetsov, Moscow and St Petersburg: Centre of Humanitarian Initiatives, published 2006–2013 Maria Yudina, Vyskokij Stoiki dukh (The Lofty Resilient Spirit), 1918–1945 (CCorr1) Maria Yudina, Obrechyonnnaya Abstraktsii, simvolike, i besplotnosti muzyke (Doomed to Abstraction, Symbolism and Disembodied Music), 1946–1955 (CCorr 2) Maria Yudina, Zhizn polna smysla (Life Is Full of Meaning), 1956–1959 (CCorr3) Maria Yudina, V Iskusstve Radostno Byt’ Vmeste (The Joy of Togetherness in Art), 1959–1961 (CCorr4) Maria Yudina, Dukh Dyshit, Gde Khochet (The Spirit Breathes Where It Wills), 1962–1963 (CCorr5) Maria Yudina, Nereal’nost’ Zla (The Unreality of Evil), 1964–1966 (CCorr6) Maria Yudina, Pred litsom Vechnosti (Before the Face of Eternity), 1967–1970 (CCorr 7) Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg 1910–1954, compiled by Elliott Mossman, London: Secker & Warburg, 1982 (CorrBPOF) Maria Youdina–Pierre Souvtchinsky: Correspondance et Documents (1959–1970), ed. JeanPierre Collot, Paris: Contrechamps éditions, 2020 (CorrMYPS) Mne ispolnilos vosemnatsats lyet! Pis’ma D.D. Shostakovicha – L.N. Oborinu (I am now eighteen! Letters from D.D. Shostakovich to L.N. Oborin) in Vstrechi s Proshlym (Encounters with the Past), ed. M.G. Kozlova, Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossia, 1984 Forthcoming publication: Ya vsegda ishchy i nakhoxhu novoye...neizvestnaya perepiska Marii Yudinoi (I always search for and find the New... Maria Yudina’s Unknown Correspondence) Ed: M. Drozdova, A. Lubimov, K. Zenkin, Moscow & St Petersburg, Nestor History, 2022

BOOKS AND ARTICLES Akhmatova, Anna, Collected Works, vol. 1, ed. G.P. Struve and B.A. Filipoff, Munich: Interlanguage Associates, 1967 Akopian, Levon, Fenomen Dmitriya Shostakovicha (The Phenomenon of Dmitri Shostakovich), St Petersburg: RHGA, 2018 Antsiferov, Nikolai, Iz dum o Bylom (From Thoughts of the Past), Moscow, 1992 Bakhtin, Mikhail, ‘Iskusstvo i Otvestvennost’ (Art and Answerability), 13 September 1919, Den’ Iskusstva, Nevel’ newspaper Bakhtin, Mikhail, Lichnost’ i tvorchestvo M.M. Bakhtina v otsenke russkoj i mirovoj gumanitarnoj mysli (The Personality and Works of M.M. Bakhtin as Evaluated by Russian and World Humanitarian Thought), vol. 1, St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Russkogo Khristianskogo gumanitarnogo Instituta, 2001 Benoit, Jean-Noël, Maria Youdina, La pianiste qui défia Staline, Paris: Les Éditions de Paris, 2018 Berberova, Nina, The Italics Are Mine, London: Chatto and Windus, 1991 Berchenko, R.E., V Poiskakh Utrachennogo Smysla (In Search of Lost Sense), Moscow: Klassika XXI, 2005 Berdyaev, Nikolai, The Meaning of the Creative Act, San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2009 Blazhkov, Igor, Kniga Pisem v tryokh tomakh (Book of Letters in 3 volumes), vol. 1, St Petersburg: Kompozitor, 2019 Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Valerian, Dorogi Isskustva (The Roads of Art), L. Muzyka, 1971 Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Valerian, ‘Yunost’ Novoj Kulturoj’ (The Youth of New Culture), Sovetskaya Muzyka, no. 11, Moscow Chamberlain, Lesley, The Philosophy Steamer, London: Atlantic Books, 2006 Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press, 1984

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Drozdova, Marina, M. Yudina Religioznaya Sud’ba (Maria Yudina: Her Religious Destiny), Moscow: Russian Patriarkh’s Publishing House, 2016 Drozdova, Marina, Uroki Yudinoj (Yudina’s Lessons), Moscow: Klassika XXI, 2006 Fairclough, Pauline, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2016 Favorsky, Vladimir, Ob iskusstve, o knige, o gravyure (On Art, Books and Engravings), Moscow: Kniga, 1986 Filippov, Boris, ‘Iz Proshlogo’ (From the Past), printed as Tri Yubileya, ed. Andrei Sedykh, New York: Almanakh, 1982 Filippov, Boris, ‘Ob Ordene Russkoi Intelligentsii’ (The Order of the Russian Intelligentsia), published in the anthology Tri Iyubileya Andreya Sedykh, ed. L. Rzhevski, New York: Almanakh, 1982 Flige, Irina, and Alexander Daniel (eds.), ‘Delo Meiera’ (The Case of Meier), Zvezda, no. 11, 2006 Florensky, P.A., Stolp i Utverzhdeniye Istiny (The Pillar and Ground of Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicity in Twelve Letters), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997 Frolova-Walker, Marina, and Jonathan Walker, Music and Soviet Power 1917–1932, London: Boydell and Brewer, 2012 Gakkel, Leonid, Eshchyo Shest’ Lyet (Another Six Years), Kult-Inform-Press, 2006 Goldstein, Darra, Nikolai Zabolotsky: Play for Mortal Stakes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 Gorchakov, Nikolai, The Theatre in Soviet Russia, New York: Columbia University Press, 1957 Haight, Amanda, Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage, New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1976 Hemschemer, Judith, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Boston, MA: Zephyr Press, 2014 Inger, Isaac, ‘Pianistka Maria Grinberg’ (The Pianist Maria Grinberg: Portrait of a Musician in the Soviet Interior), Znamya, no. 5, 1999 Ivinskaya, Olga, A Captive of Time, London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1978 Klemperer, Otto, Minor Recollections, London: Dobson Books, 1964 Kryukov, Andrei, Muzyka v Efire Voennogo Leningrada (Music in broadcasts from Wartime Leningrad), St Petersburg: Kompozitor, 2005 Laskin, Alexander, Peterburgskie Teni (St Petersburg Shadows), St Petersburg: Strata, 2017 Likhachyov, Dmitri, Mysli o Zhizni (Thoughts on Life), St Petersburg: Azbuka, 2016 Losev, Alexei, Zhenshchina Myslitel’, in Alexei Losev, Sobranie Khudozhestvennoj Prozy Vol. II, Moscow: Russkiye Slovari, 1997 Mandel’stam, Nadezhda, Hope Against Hope, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983 Mandel’stam, Osip, Collected Works, ed. G.P. Struve and B.A. Filipoff, Volume One: Poetry, Washington, DC: Interlanguage Literary Associates, 1967 Mendelson-Prokofieva, M.A., O Sergee Sergeeviche Prokofieve (About Sergei Sergeevich Prokofiev), Moscow: Kompozitor, 2012 Meyer, Krzysztof, Shostakovich Zhizn, Tvorchestvo i Vremya (Shostakovich: Life, Work and Time), St Petersburg: Kompozitor, 1998 MGK (Moscow State Conservatoire), Sto let Moskovskoj Konservatorii (One Hundred Years of the Moscow Conservatoire), Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Muzyka, 1966 Monsaingeon, Bruno, Richter Ecrits, Conversations, Van der Velde/Actes Sud/Arte editions, 1998 Nice, David, Prokofiev: A Biography from Russia to the West, 1891–1935, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003 Nice, David, ‘Review: Anna Vinnitskaya’s recording of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 2’, BBC Music Magazine, February 2011

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Parravicini, Giovanna, Marija Judina-più della musica, Milan: Edizioni La Casa di Matriona, 2010 Pasternak, Boris, Izbrannoye v dvukh tomakh (Selected in Two Volumes), vol. 1, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1985 Popov, Gavriil, Iz Literaturnovo Naslediya: Stranitsy Biografii (From the Literary Legacy: Pages from the Biography), Moscow: Sovetskaya Muzyka, 1986 Poret, Alisa, Zapiski, Risunki,Vospominaniya (Notes, Drawings and Reminiscences), vol. 2, Moscow: Barbaris, 2016 Prokhorova, Vera, Chetyre druga na fone stoletiya (Four Friends on the Background of the Century), Moscow: Astrel, 2012 Pyman, Avril, Florensky: A Quiet Genius, Continuum: New York and London, 2010 Rittikh, Margarita, ‘Tchaikovsky’s House-Museum 1941–42’, Russian Musical Gazette, no. 10, 1999 Routledge Research Companion to Bach, ed. Robin Leaver, Routledge, 2020 Ruben, Dominic, The Life and Thought of Lev Karsavin, Amsterdam and New York: Radopi, 2013 Rubinchik, Yuri, ‘Genrikh Nejgauz i ego ucheniki’ (Heinrich Neuhaus and his Pupils), Vestnik, no. 24, November 1998 Savshinsky, Samari, Leonid Nikolaev Pianist, Kompozitor, Pedagog (Leonid Nikolaev: Pianist, Composer, Teacher), Moscow, 1950, article ‘Postanovka ruk v fortepianonoj igre’ (Hand Positions in Piano Playing) Schmelz, Peter J., ‘From Pink Floyd to Scriabin’, in Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 Sergei Prokofiev Diaries 1924–1933: Prodigal Son, translated and annotated by Anthony Phillips, London: Faber and Faber, 2012 Shaporina, Lyubov’, Dnevnik (Diary), vols. 1 and 2, Moscow: Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye, 2012 Shatskikh, Alexandra, Vitebsk: The Life of Art, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007 Shostakovich v Leningradskoi Konservatorii (Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatoire), vol. 3, St Petersburg: Kompozitor, 2013 Stravinskaya, Kseniya, I.F. Stravinsky i ego blizkie (Stravinsky and his Close Family), Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Muzyka, 1978 Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary 1963, London: Faber and Faber, 1968 Takho-Godi, Aza, Life and Fate: Reminiscences, Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 1997 Taneyev, Serge, Pis’ma P.I. Chaikovskogo i S.I. Taneyeva (Letters of P.I. Tchaikovsky and S.I. Taneyev), Moscow: Jurgenson, 1916 Vaginov, Konstantin, Kozlinaya Pesnya (The Satyr’s Song), Moscow: YoYoMedia, 2012 Vagner, Georgi, ‘My Meeting with M.V. Yudina’, Nevel’skij Sbornik, vol. 4, St Petersburg: Akropol, 1999 Vlasova, Yekaterina, 1948 god v Sovetskoj muzyke (The Year 1948 in Soviet Music), Moscow: Klassika XXI, 2010 Vlasova, Yekaterina, ‘Vy zhdyote Verdi . . . Iz perepiski B. Asaf ’eva i N. Myaskovskogo’ (You Await Verdi . . . From the Correspondence of Asaf ’ev and Myaskovsky), Muzykalnaya Akademiya, no. 3, 2018 Walsh, Steven, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, London: Pimlico, 2007 Wilson, Elizabeth, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, London: Faber and Faber, 2006 Yusefovich, Viktor, DAVID OISTRAKH - Besedy s Igorem Oistrakhom (David Oistrakh Conversations with Igor Oistrakh), Moscow: Sovetski Kompozitor, 1985 Zabolotsky, Nikolai, Stolbtsy, Stikhotvoreniya, Poemy (Scrolls, Verse, Longer Poems), Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1987 Zak, Yakov, Stati, Materialy, Vospominaniya (Articles, Materials, Reminiscences), Moscow: Sovetski Kompozitor, 1980

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BIBLIOGRAPHY DOCUMENTARY FILMS Legendy Nashego Vremeni (Legends of our Time), 2010, LNV TV Channel One series, directed and scripted by Olga Kuznetsova Muzykant ot Boga (A Musician from God), 2009, directed by Yasha Nazarov Portret Legendarnoj Pianistki (Portrait of a Legendary Pianist), 2000, produced by Alma Mater TV company, Moscow, directed by Yasha Nazarov

ARCHIVES CONSULTED IN MOSCOW AND ST PETERSBURG Moscow GARF Gosudarstvenni Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Russian Federation State Archive) (consulted for Yudina’s Radio broadcasts) GTsMMK imeni Glinki Gosudarstvenni Tsentralni Muzej Muzykal’noi Kultury imeni Glinki (Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture) MGK imeni P.I. Chaikovskogo, Moskovskaya Gosudarstvennaya Konservatoriya imeni P.I. Chaikovskogo (Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatoire) RAM Gnesinykh Rossiiskaya Akademiya Muzyki imeni Gnesinykh (Gnesins’ Russian Academy of Music) RGAFD Rossiiski Gosudarstvenni Arkhiv Fono Dokumentov (Russian State Archive of Phonographic Documents) RGALI Rossiiski Gosudarstvenni Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art) RGASPI Rossiiski Gosudarstvenni Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoj Istorii (Russian State Archive of Social-Political History) RGB Rossiiskaya Gosudarstvennaya Biblioteka (Russian State Library)

St Petersburg Muzykal’naya Biblioteka Sankt Peterburgskoi Akademicheskoi Filarmonii imeni Shostakovicha (Musical Library of St Petersburg Academic Shostakovich Philharmonia) RIII Rossiiski Institut Istorii Iskusstv (Russian Institute of History of the Arts) RNB Rossiiskaya Natsionalnaya Biblioteka (Russian National Library) SPbGK imeni Rimskogo-Korsakova Sankt-Peterburgskaya Gosudarstvennaya Konservatoriya imeni Rimskogo-Korsakova (St Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatoire) TsGALI Tsentralni Gosudarstvenni Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva (Central State Archive of Literature and Art)

INTERVIEWS CONDUCTED BY ELIZABETH WILSON Between 1985 and 1989 Pierre Boulez, Edison Denisov; Lev Yevgrafov; Nikolai Karetnikov; Anatoli Kuznetsov; Albert Martynenko; Yakov Nazarov; Luigi Nono; Arvo Pärt; Gennadi Rozhdestvensky; Alfred Schnittke; Irina Semyonova; Natalia Shakhovskaya; Gavriil Yudin Between 2018 and 2020 Viktor Derevyanko; Marina Drozdova; Yevgeni Koroliov; Alexei Lubimov; Lev Markiz; Thomas Sanderling; Natalia Solzhenitsyna

INTERVIEWS CONDUCTED BY NADINE DUBOURVIEUX, 1987–8 Edison Denisov; Irina Movius

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SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

Yudina’s legacy is served by many recordings, a large number of which can be accessed on YouTube. For readers unfamiliar with Yudina’s interpretations, I have put together a selected list of the most recent compact disc issues, which should be easily available. That said, the quick turnover of compact discs that are issued and then withdrawn makes it difficult to keep completely updated. I also include some other recordings of Yudina’s additional repertoire, not least her interpretations of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition, which remain among her most important achievements. While not in any way complete, the list I provide will give some idea of the scope of her repertoire and recording activity. In the last couple of years, through the efforts of Alexei Lubimov and others, many of Yudina’s recordings from concert performances within the Soviet Union, East Germany and Poland have been rediscovered and are in the process of being released. These most recent recordings, including the new discoveries, are indicated at the beginning of the list. Yudina was an artist who enjoyed recording in the studio, and liked to play right through works as if performing for a live audience, with complete involvement and passion in transmitting her ideas. Nevertheless, many of her recordings come from live concerts, with the inherent advantages and disadvantages of such a system. Moreover, one suspects that the pianos played by Yudina in studio and in concert were often not in good condition or properly tuned. The earlier recordings in particular often show distortion of pitch and sound. Recent reissues have improved the quality through remastering of the original vinyl or shellac versions. We should also remember that Yudina lived in the pre-digital recording age, and up until 1961 all her studio recordings were made in mono. A Yudina discography is complicated to put together because many of the same works are issued on different labels in different countries, while the quality of the recordings varies enormously from label to label, from issue to issue. For those who wish to have access to a complete updated discography, including Yudina’s earliest shellac historical recordings and LPS, I suggest consulting the online discography compiled by the pianist and writer JeanPierre Collot: www.jeanpierrecollot.eu/maria-yudina/discography-of-maria-yudina/. His contribution to Yudina studies is of seminal importance, not only in the publication of his book Maria Youdina–Pierre Souvtchinsky: Correspondance et Documents (Contrechamps, 2020), but in his creation of a complete discography of Yudina’s recordings, which is ordered alphabetically by composer. Currently it is given in French, but will be translated into English in the near future. Should any reader wish to consult an updated Yudina discography in Russian, I refer them to the volume of hitherto unknown correspondence entitled Ya Vsegda ischu i nakhozhu Novoe . . . Neizvestnaya perepiska Marii Yudinoi (I always search for and find the New . . . The Unknown Correspondence of Maria Yudina), edited by M. Dorzdova, A. Lubimov and K. Zenkin. It will be available from March 2022, and will include an updated discography with complete lists of recordings ordered by chronology rather than composer.

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SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY Recent issues Maria Yudina: Anniversary Edition. Melodiya MEL CD 1002590, 2019, boxed set of 10 compact discs. CD 1: J.S. Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, 17 Preludes and Fugues, Nos 1–6, 8–12, 17–19, 21, 22, 24, BWV 846–851, 853–857, 862–864, 866, 867, 869, live concert at Moscow Conservatory Small Hall, 4 November 1950 (see www.youtube.com/ watch?v=rNl_vNVIpGM). CD 2: J.S. Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, 19 Preludes and Fugues, Nos 1–10, 12–16, 19, BWV 870–879, 881–885, 887, 889, 892, 893, live concert at Moscow Conservatory Small Hall, 4 December 1950. CD 3: J.S. Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Nos 20, 23, 24, BWV 865, 868, 869; Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903. J.S. Bach/Liszt, Organ Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543. Liszt, Variations on Bach’s Cantata No.12, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, S.180. Glazunov, Prelude and Fugue in D minor, Op.62. Studio recordings from the 1950s. CD 4: Mozart, Sonata in D major, K.284; Sonata in A major, K.331 (live concert, 6 October 1951); Variations in D major on a theme by Duport, K.573 (recorded 1947 or 1948). Beethoven, 12 Variations in A major on a Russian Dance, WoO 71; 32 Variations in C minor on an Original Theme, WoO 80. CD 5: Beethoven, Sonata No.5 in C minor, Op.10, no.1, recorded 3 May 1950; Sonata No.12 in A-flat major, Op.26, recorded in studio, 8 September 1958; Sonata No.27 in E minor, Op.90, recorded 1961; Sonata No.29 in A major, Op.101. CD 6: Beethoven, Sonata No.29 in B-flat major, Op.106 (recorded 1952); Sonata No.32 in C minor, Op.111 (recorded 1958). CD 7: Schubert, Four Impromptus, D.899; Four Impromptus, D.935. Schubert/Liszt, Am Meer, S.560. Studio recording 1964. CD 8: Mussorgsky, Meditation (Album Leaf), A Tear, Rêverie, studio recording, 9 September 1949. Myaskovsky, Yellowed Leaves, from Op.31. Szymanowski, Variations, Op.3. Webern, Variations for piano, Op.27, live at Scriabin Museum, Moscow, 1961. Volkonsky, Musica Stricta (fantasia ricercata). Prokofiev, Chose en soi, Op.45a. CD 9: Debussy, Sonata for cello and piano in D minor (with N. Shakovskaya). Prokofiev, Sonata for flute and piano, Op.94 (with N. Zaidel); Sonata for cello and piano, Op.119 (with L. Yevgrafov). Serocki, Sonatina for trombone and piano (with G. Khersonsky). Stravinsky, Circus Polka for a Young Elephant for two pianos (with M. Drozdova). Lutosławski, Paganini Variations for two pianos (with Y. Ponizovkin). CD 10: Scriabin, 10 Preludes, from Op.11. Jolivet, three pieces from the cycle Mana. Stravinsky, Septet for piano, flute, clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola and cello (with Leningrad musicians). Tschaikovsky, Concerto No.1, Op.23 (with National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, dir. N. Rakhlin). Maria Yudina Plays Instrumental Sonatas by Hindemith. Moscow Conservatory Records SMCCD 0235, 2018, compact disc. This and the other MCR titles listed below are from a continuing series issued since 2018. Hindemith, Sonatas for flute (with N. Zaidel), viola (with F. Druzhinin), double bass (with R. Azarkhin), horn (with V. Buyanovsky) and trombone (with G. Khesonsky). Maria Yudina Plays Schumann. Moscow Conservatory Records SMCCD 0241, 2019, compact disc. Schumann, Kreisleriana, Op.16; Des Abends, Op.12, no.1; Vogel als Prophet, Op.82, no.7; Fantasie in C major, Op.17. Maria Yudina Plays Mozart. Moscow Conservatory Records SMCCD 0242/0243, 2019, 2 compact discs.

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SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY Mozart, Sonata in C minor, K.457; Sonata in A major, K.331; Sonata in A minor, K.310; Sonata in D major, K.284; Fantasia in D minor, K.397; Fantasia in C minor, K.475; Sonata for violin and piano in A major, K.526 (with M. Kozolupova); Concerto No.23 in A major, K.488 (with State Symphony Orchestra of the USSR, dir. A. Gauk). Maria Yudina: Recital in Moscow, October 20, 1954. Moscow Conservatory Records SMCCD 0244/0245, 2020, 2 compact discs. Beethoven, Sonata No.17, Op.31, no.2; Sonata No.26, Op.81a; Sonata No.32, Op.111. Brahms, Sonata No.3 in F minor, Op.5. J.S. Bach, Organ Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543; Italian concerto, BWV 971, 2nd movement. Brahms, Waltz in A-flat major, Op.39, no.15. Prokofiev, ‘Juliet the Young Girl’, from 10 pieces from Romeo and Juliet, arranged for piano, Op.75. Maria Yudina: Rediscovered Recordings. Moscow Conservatory Records SMCCD 0270, 2020, compact disc. Mozart, Sonata for violin and piano in F major, K.377 (with M. Kozolupova). Busoni, Duettino concertante, a reworking of the finale from Mozart’s K.459 for two pianos (with G. Kogan). Mozart, Fantasia in D minor, K.397; Fantasia in C minor, K.475; one movement from Sonata in C minor, K.457. Schubert, Impromptus, D.899, nos 2 and 4; Impromptu, D.935, no.2. Mozart, Sonata in C minor, final movement, K.457. Maria Yudina Plays Bach: Live in Leipzig and Moscow 1950 & 1956. Moscow Conservatory Records SMCCD 0280, 2020, compact disc. J.S. Bach, Toccata in C minor, BWV 911, in two performances; Four Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier; Concerto No.1 in D minor for piano and orchestra, BWV 1052 (with All-Union Radio Symphony Orchestra, dir. K. Sanderling). Maria Yudina: Polish Diary. Moscow Conservatory Records SMCCD 0281, 2020, compact disc. Beethoven, Concerto No.5 in E-flat major, Op.73 (with the Symphony Orchestra of the Silesian Philharmonia, dir. V. Smetachek). Shostakovich, Preludes and Fugues in B minor and D minor, from Op.87. Lutosławski, Bukoliki. Serocki, Suite of Preludes. Chopin, Nocturne in C-sharp minor. Maria Yudina Plays Russian Music of the XXth Century. Moscow Conservatory Records SMCCD 0282, 2021, compact disc. Prokofiev, Chose en soi, Op.45a; Montagues and Capulets: Romeo Before Parting. Shaporin, Piano Sonata No.2 in F-sharp minor, Op.7. Sviridov, Partita No.1 in F minor. Kochurov, Adagio in G major, Op.5. Volkonsky, Musica Stricta (fantasia ricercata).

Other recommended recordings Historical Russian Archives: Maria Yudina Edition. Brilliant Classics 8909, 2009, boxed set of 8 compact discs. Many of the CDs repeat repertoire from recordings available in the Melodiya and Moscow Conservatoire recordings cited above. I highlight those CDs offering different repertoire. CD 4: Brahms, Rhapsody in G minor, Op.79, no.2; Intermezzo in A minor, Op.116, no.2; Three Intermezzi, Op.117; Six pieces for piano, Op.118, nos 1–4 and 6. Schubert, Three Impromptus. CD 5: Taneyev, Piano Quartet in E major, Op.20; Piano Quintet in G minor, Op.30 (with the Beethoven Quartet). CD 6: Prokofiev, Visions fugitives, Op.22, and instrumental sonatas. CD 8: Hindemith, Sonata for viola and piano, Op.11, no.4. Honegger, Sonata for viola and piano, H.28 (with F. Druzhinin). Shaporin, Piano Sonata No.2 in F-sharp minor, Op.7. Martinu, various pieces. Jolivet, three pieces from the cycle Mana.

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SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY Maria Yudina: J.S. Bach, The Goldberg Variations (20–25). Melodiya MEL CD 10 01874, 2011, compact disc. Studio recording 1968.

More Yudina recordings The Legacy of Maria Yudina. Vista Vera, 2004–15, 18 compact discs issued as volumes. Vol.2: Krenek, Piano Sonata No.2, Op.59. Hindemith, Sonata for two pianos (with M. Drozdova). Vol.13: Mussorgsky, three pieces from Boris Godunov (transcribed for piano by A. Kamensky). Medtner, Sonata-Triad, Op.11. Prokofiev, Visions fugitives, Op.22. Vol.14: Mussorgsky, Pictures from an Exhibition. Shostakovich, Piano Sonata No.2 in B minor, Op.61. Vol.15: Stravinsky, Concerto for two pianos (with V. Derevyanko); Duo Concertant for violin and piano (with V. Pikayzen); Sonata for two pianos (with M. Drozdova). Grandi opere suonate da Marija Judina. Edizioni RC, 2010, compact disc. J.S. Bach, Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903. Mozart, Concerto No.23 in A major, K.488 (with State Symphony Orchestra of the USSR, dir. A. Gauk). Brahms, Three Intermezzi, Op.117. Mussorgsky, Pictures from an Exhibition. Stravinsky, Piano Sonata. Russian Piano School: Maria Yudina. Venezia CDVE00515, 2013, boxed set of 16 compact discs. CD 3: J.S. Bach, The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988. CD 9: Beethoven, Piano Sonata No.16 in G major, Op.31, no.1; Piano Sonata No.17 in D minor, Op.31, No.2; Piano Sonata No.22 in F major, Op.54. CD 11: Beethoven, Piano Sonata No.32 in C minor, Op.111; Piano Concerto No.4, Op.58, with Brahms cadenzas (with Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, dir. K. Sanderling). CD 12: Beethoven, Piano Concerto No.5 in E major, Op.73 (with National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, dir. N. Rakhlin); Choral Fantasy, Op.80 (with BSO choir and radio orchestra, dir. S. Gorchakov). CD 14: Schubert, Piano Sonata No.21 in B-flat major, D.960. Schumann, Fantasiestücke, Op.12. CD 15: Brahms, Piano Sonata No.3 in F minor, Op.5; Waltz in A flat major, Op.39, no.15; Rhapsody in G minor, Op.79, no.2; Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op.24. CD 16: Mussorgsky, Pictures from an Exhibition. Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No.1 in B minor, Op.23 (with National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, dir. N. Rakhlin). Maria Yudina: A Great Russian Pianist. PragaDigitals PRD250342, 2016, compact disc. Beethoven, Variations and Fugue for piano in E-flat major, Op.35. Berg, Piano Sonata, Op.1. Bartók, eight pieces from Mikrokosmos. Stravinsky, Serenade in A major; Concerto for piano and wind instruments (with BSO radio orchestra, dir. G. Rozhdestvensky). The Art of Maria Yudina. Scribendum SC813, 2018, boxed set of 26 compact discs. Unfortunately, the quality of the recording tends to be less good than on other labels. The date of recording given in the liner notes usually refers to the final date of editing, rather than the date of studio recording. CD 4: Haydn, Piano Sonata in E-flat major, Hob.XVI.52, recorded 1951. Mozart, Piano Concerto No.20 in D minor, K.466, with Beethoven cadenza, recorded 1948 (with BSO radio orchestra, dir. S. Gorchakov); Concerto No.23 in A major, K.488, recorded July 1947 (with State Symphony Orchestra of the USSR, dir. A. Gauk). CD 10: Beethoven, Variations and Fugue for piano in E-flat major, Op.35; 33 Variations on a waltz for Anton Diabelli, Op.120. Recorded 1961.

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SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY CD 16: Schumann, Fantasiestücke, Op.12, recorded 1951; Vogel als Prophet, Op.82, no.7, recorded 1952. Schubert, Trout Quintet, D.667, recorded from a concert, 11 November 1960 (with members of the Beethoven Quartet, double bass V. Khomenko). CD 18: Brahms, Piano Quartet No.2 in A major, Op.26, recorded 1968 (with members of the Beethoven Quartet). Stravinsky, Concerto for piano and wind instruments, recorded 1963 (with BSO radio orchestra, dir. G. Rozhdestvensky). CD 21: Berg, Four pieces for clarinet and piano, Op.5. Hindemith, Sonata for clarinet and piano. Recorded 1966 (with L. Mikhailov). CD 23: Bartók, eight pieces from Mikrokosmos, recorded 1963; Contrasts for violin, clarinet and piano, recorded 1965 (with V. Pikayzen and L. Mikhailov); Sonata for two pianos and percussion, recorded 1962 (with V. Derevyanko, V. Snegiryov and R. Nikulin).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book came into being through the help, advice and inspiration of many people. For the initial idea to write about Maria Yudina I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the late David King, without whom I would never have embarked on this long journey. All Yudina scholars are deeply indebted to the late Anatoli Kuznetsov, whose contribution to the study of her life has been absolutely unique in scale and quality. I speak of his compilation of Yudina’s own writings, his searching out of friends, acquaintances and family for reminiscence material, and his systematic scouring of the archives. He put together, edited and published no fewer than five large anthologies dedicated to Yudina, as well as six large volumes of correspondence between her and a vast circle of correspondents. (The seventh volume was compiled and published after his death.) This can only be termed as an amazing feat, a selfless act of devotion. I express my deepest thanks to the following: Maria Veniaminovna Yudina’s heirs, Yakov Nazarov, Yulia Suvorova and Anna Kozlenko, for their kind permission in granting use of all material relating to their illustrious relative. Serge Prokofiev the younger, grandson of the composer, for permission to examine, refer to and quote from Yudina’s letters to Prokofiev, which were held in an archive at RGALI in Moscow that was previously partially closed to scholars. The Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatoire and its director, Alexander Sokolov, as well as particular gratitude to his vice-director Konstantin Zenkin – also incidentally a concert pianist, writer and scholar of Yudina interpretations – who did so much to facilitate my research in Moscow and St Petersburg. Yevgeni Platonov, director of the audio laboratory of the Moscow Conservatoire. The Russian National Musical Museum (RNMM) and its director, Mikhail Bryzgalov, and vice-director Yekaterina Kalinina for kind permission to use photographs from the Khrennikov Fund. The Musical Library of St Petersburg Shostakovich Academic Philharmonia for permission to use a photograph of a wartime poster. The Yaroslav Museum of Art for allowing a reproduction of the Poret/Glebova painting, The House Cut Open (Dom v razreze). Margarita Novogorodova, rights-holder for Anna Akhmatova, for graciously approving my use of some lines of Akhmatova’s verse. The wonderful pianist Marina Drozdova and her late husband, the singer Yuri Fedorishchev, for many years of true friendship. Marina has been a model and inspiration for me, in her knowledge, her musicianship, and not least for writing two indispensable books about Yudina (Yudina’s Lessons and Maria Yudina: Her Religious Destiny). She has provided me with all manner of help and advice throughout the time I worked on the book. Yakov Nazarov for his long-standing friendship and for generously allowing use of his own photographs of Yudina, as well as images from his photographic collection. Tamara Yankevich, widow of Anatoli Kuznetsov, and their daughter, Liza Stolovitskaya, for permission to use photographs in their possession.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The amazing musician, my friend Alexei Lubimov, who over the past two years has been more active as researcher and archivist than in his accustomed role as concert pianist. He has been consistently generous in sharing the results of his research and personal reminiscences, as well as allowing me to indulge in long discussions about Yudina and her musical interpretations. I hope to have been reciprocally helpful to him and Marina Drozdova in their work on their new volume of Yudina letters and materials, entitled ‘Ya Vsegda ischu i nakhozhu Novoe . . .’ Neizvestnaya perepiska Marii Yudinoi (‘I always search for and find the New . . .’. The Unknown Correspondence of Maria Yudina) to be published by Nestor-History in March 2022 in Moscow and St Petersburg. Additionally, Alexei, helped by various colleagues, has unearthed various previously unknown Yudina recordings in archives from Tbilisi to Leipzig, from Warsaw to Moscow. These too he has made available to me, thereby enormously helping my research. Victoria Postnikova for graciously allowing me to quote from unpublished letters of Yudina to Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, of which he had given me copies. Natalia Dmitrieva Solzhenitsyn for an interview about Yudina, a warm reception, and a wonderful conducted tour of the Solzhenitsyn Museum in Moscow. My wonderful research assistants: in Moscow, Ivan Porshnev, who has found and meticulously catalogued much valuable information from the Moscow archives, not least about Yudina’s radio broadcasts; and in St Petersburg, Anastasia Kasatkina for her help in finding letters to and from Yudina. The scholars and musicologists Larisa Chirkova, Yekaterina Vlasova, Roman Berchenko, Lyudmila Kovnatskaya, Olga Digonskaya, Olga Manulkina, Alexei Trifonov, Yaroslav Timofeev and Alexander Laskowski for their unfailing kindness and willingness to help in providing material and pointing me to the right sources. Ildar Galeyev, for so kindly providing images and written articles about Yudina. The following late musicians and writers, who provided information and gave me interviews: Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Natalia Shakhovskaya, Robert Craft, Boris Filippov, Gavriil Yudin, Nikolai Karetnikov, Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke and Irina Semyonova. The former students and assistants of Yudina: the pianist Viktor Derevyanko for his friendship, many discussions and telephone calls; Lev Markiz, violinist and conductor whom I recently interviewed over the phone; my colleague, the cellist Lev Yevgrafov, and the pianists Yevgeni Koroliov and his wife Lyupka for a wonderful interview. For hospitality and general encouragement I warmly thank Larisa Chirkova, the late Vladimir Skanavi, Natalia Gutman, Vladimir Tarnopolsky, Irina Snitkova, Pavel Lutsker, Irina Susidko, Olga Rostropovich and Michael Bird. For sharing reminiscences and discussions, I thank Eliso Virsoladze, the late Mark Lubotsky and Thomas Sanderling. My thanks to Oleg Khlevnyuk, for sending me an electronic copy of his book Stalin – Zhizn odnogo Vozhdya (2015) (Stalin: The Life of a Leader), and for answering my questions. My warmest thanks to the following Archives in St Petersburg and Moscow for allowing me to consult their collections: St Petersburg The Russian Institute of History of the Arts. My gratitude to Galina Kopytova and her colleagues. The Musical Library of St Petersburg Academic Shostakovich Philharmonia. Thanks for a warm welcome from Pavel Dmitriev. RNB, the Russian National Library (lovingly referred to as the ‘Publichka’), which provided much valuable information. St Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatoire Reading Room and in particular to Larisa Millar, Dar’ya Varul’, Yekaterina Khomchuk and colleagues TsGALI, the Central State Archive of Literature and Art and to Anastasia Lapina. Moscow GARF, the Russian Federation State Archive and I.V. Baikova. The Gnesins’ Russian Academy of Music archive.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS MGK, the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatoire), its archival staff, and in particular Eugene Platonov of the Audio Lab. RGAFD, the Russian State Archive of Phonographic Documents and Marina Lazereva. RGALI, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. Particular thanks to A. Shashkova, Galina Zlobina, Yekaterina Gunashvili and Svetlana Popova. RGASPI, the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History and to Anna Kochetova. RGB, the Russian State Library and its helpful archivists. RNMM, the Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture. My thanks to its director Mikhail Bryzgalov Kira Ivanova and Yekaterina Kalinina. Outside Russia My deepest gratitude is due to the Oleg Prokofiev Trust for a generous grant, which made possible a five-week research trip to Moscow and St Petersburg in September–October 2019. I warmly thank Dr Rosamund Bartlett for her consistent interest and for sharing her contacts. She has been behind me from the start, encouraging me throughout my long – sometimes painful – journey. She and her husband Dan Driscoll have read chapters, made critical and appreciative comments, and asked thought-provoking questions, so necessary to an author. Furthermore she read through the typescript at proof stage and made particularly useful corrections regarding transliteration and Russian spellings, for which I am most grateful. An enormous thank you to Pauline Fairclough for her warm and generous support, and for setting me on the road to publication. I have tried to incorporate her helpful comments and useful suggestions into my text, and thank her for the resulting improvements. My warmest gratitude to Gerard McBurney who has patiently answered queries, read excerpts of the book, passed on contacts, offered wise advice, comfort and good cheer – and provided a good laugh or two to lighten up some sad and dismal times over the last couple of years. I unfailingly learn from him, and hope the process is at least sometimes reciprocal. My thanks also to Dmitri Alekseev and his wife Tatiana Sarkisova who have allowed me to consult them on various pianistic and specifically Russian issues. I am most grateful to my friend Nadine Dubourvieux for making available her recorded interviews on Yudina – we share a long-standing mutual interest in the great pianist! I am no less grateful to Vyacheslav Poprugin for transferring these recordings from reel-to-reel to a digital format. My thanks to Gabriel Prokofiev, Frances Prokofiev, David Nice, Boris Berman, Anthony Phillips, Hermione Lee, the late Mark Lubotsky, Marina Frolova-Walker, Martin Anderson, Clem Cecil, Brian Elias, Niel Immelman, Vadim Sakharov Kathron Sturrock, Andrew Ball, Caroline Weichert and Ann Wilson for their sustained interest and support. My sister Catherine has encouraged and advised me all the way – my thanks to her, not least for suggesting the book’s title. I am most grateful to Brother Adalberto Mainardi for patiently instructing me in the convoluted history of the Russian Orthodox Church during the 1910s and 1920s, and to the Monastic Community of Bose (near Biella, Italy) for use of their library. A particularly warm thank you to Jean-Pierre Collot for all his help and for giving me permission to refer my readers to his updated and complete Yudina discography on his own website. He recently discovered an important cache of Yudina letters to Suvchinsky at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which he put together and edited as their complete correspondence covering the last decade of her life – a fascinating read.* It has been a delight to discover in him a new ‘Yudina’ colleague and friend. I wish to thank the Society of Authors for invaluable advice and for being there when needed. Not to be forgotten, the oasis of the British Library where I did much research when in London – thank you. * Maria Youdina–Pierre Souvtchinsky, Correspondance et Documents (1959–1970), Paris: Contrechamps, 2020.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS At Yale University Press, a heartfelt thank you to the commissioning editor, Julian Loose, who decided to take on my book, an act of courage and curiosity which I hope will be justified by the result. He has been there quietly encouraging me from the start, giving advice exactly at the point it is most needed. The whole Yale University Press team has been wonderful to work with and has guided me with great tact and sensitivity through all thorny issues. My warmest thanks to Katie Urquhart, Rachael Lonsdale, Lucy Buchan, Felicity Maunder and Percie Edgeler. Last but not least, an enormous debt of gratitude to Richard Mason, my copy-editor, who has patiently and painstakingly gone through the text, identifying large and small errors, and pulling me up on any sloppy writing or thinking. More than anybody, he has been responsible for putting order into all sections of this book. At home in Italy, my husband Francesco has supported me when I got discouraged, and he has sustained me in body and soul with his fantastic cooking throughout this time. Our daughter Sasha and her partner Mohamed have produced the best distraction in the world in my two wonderful grandsons, Elias and Rayan. My sincere thanks to all the above mentioned and to any others whom I may have inadvertently overlooked. Elizabeth Wilson, Cumiana, August 2021

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INDEX

Achron, Iosif, 35 Acmeist movement, 35 Akhmatova, Anna, 32–3, 35–6, 102, 103, 161, 185–6, 189, 197, 228 Akhmeteli, Sandro, 109 Akimova, Sofia, 94 Alikhanov, Abram, 232 All-Union Radio Orchestra, 114n, 116, 171, 234 Alpatov, Mikhail, 199, 204 Andreyev, Father Fyodor, 50, 52, 124 Andreyeva, Anna and Maria (Masha), 50, 136–7, 156 Andreyeva, Natalia Nikolayevna, 102–4, 105, 121, 136–7 Andreyevsky, Ivan Mikhailovich, 53, 177 Andrukhovich, Tamara, 273–4 Anosov, Nikolai Pavlovich, 171, 174 Ansermet, Ernest, 150 ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’ (anti-Semitic repressions), 176, 205, 230 anti-religious campaigns, 78 Antsiferov, Nikolai, 43, 85, 86, 124, 125–6, 199 Apostolov, Pavel, 170 Appolonov, Grigori, 179 Apresov, Vladimir, 169, 215 Aranovich, Yuri, 234, 261 Artobolevskaya, Anna, 64, 72, 110–11, 143, 199, 272 Artobolevsky, Georgi, 110–11, 168 Asafiev, Boris, 66–7, 75, 95, 242 Aslanishvili, Shalvo (Shaliko), 107 ASM (Association of Contemporary Music), 88 Asmus, Valentin, 247 Athonite ‘heretics’, 124 Auer, Leopold, 10 Bacewicz, Grażyna, 224 Bach, Johann Sebastian: bicentenary celebrations, 210–11; music performed in

Soviet Russia, 78–9; MVY’s interpretations of, 79–84, 144, 148, 208, 211, 276–7 ‘Bach Circle’, 75 Bakhtin, Mikhail: friendship with MVY, 23, 113, 213, 274; and the Bakhtin Circle, 23–7, 44–5; in Nevel’, 16, 22–3, 27; arrested and exiled, 85–8; on Faddei Zelinsky, 36; examination of thesis, 194–5; in exile, 163–4, 185; lectures at the Gnesins’ Institute, 231; on Pasternak, 202; on religion, 41 Bakhtin, Vsevolod, 43, 55, 85 Bakhtin Circle, 23–7, 28, 44–5, 164 Balanchine, Georges, 262, 268–9 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 240 Barshai, Rudolf, 210, 231 Barth, Karl, 142 Bartók, Béla, 253 Bashkirov, Dmitri, 141 Beethoven, Ludwig van: 125th anniversary, 220; MVY’s interpretations of, 58, 75, 98, 117–18, 130, 198, 206, 208, 255, 282 Beethoven String Quartet, 171, 172, 173, 174, 186, 279 Bekman-Shcherbina, Yelena, 79 Belavin, Metropolitan Tikhon, see Tikhon, Patriarch Belov, Vladimir, 156 Bely, Andrei, 25, 35, 42 Bely, Viktor, 137 Bentzon, Niels Viggo, 244 Berberova, Nina, 34–5 Berchenko, Roman, 81 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 1, 21, 41, 47, 124 Berg, Alban, 232 Beria, Lavrenti, 109 Bernstein, Leonard, 239–40 Bespalov, Nikolai, 214 Bezrodny, Igor, 210 Biek, Hermann, 56, 59 Birmak, Adriana, 9–10

324

INDEX Birman, Serafima Germanovna, 153 Bitov, Boris, 84 Blazhkov, Igor, 244–5, 254, 258, 260–1, 267 Blok, Alexander, 31, 34–5, 36, 42, 43 Blumenfeld, Felix, 10–11, 56, 140, 142 Bobrovsky, Viktor, 169 Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Valerian, 57, 67, 184, 187, 221, 236–7, 250 Bolsheviks, 32, 36, 47, 49 Borisovsky, Vadim, 172 Boulanger, Nadia, 235 Boulez, Pierre, 240, 242, 251, 272 Bradshaw, Susan, 4, 256 Braudo, Isai, 12, 69, 79, 108, 210, 236–7 Bromberg, Serafima Alexandrovna, 214, 223, 277 ‘Brotherhood of Saint Seraphim Sarovsky’, 42, 53, 86 ‘Brotherhood of Saint Sophia of Divine Wisdom’, 42 Bruni-Balmont, Nina, 236 Bruni-Balmont, Tatiana, 263 Bryusov, Valery, 44 Budylina, M.V., 147 Bulgakov, Sergei, 41, 124 Busoni, Ferruccio, 10, 70 Bykov, Alexei, 65–6, 203 Casella, Alfredo, 134 Chagall, Marc, 7, 27 Chepurin, Father Nikolai, 29 Cherepnin, Nikolai, 11, 14, 21, 33 Chernikov, Olga, 280 Chernobrova-Levina, Rosa, 151 Chopin, Frédéric, 224–5 Chukov, Nikolai, 48 Chukovskaya, Lydia, 200 Chukovsky, Kornei, 34 Chulaki, Mikhail, 205 Clark, Edward, 119 Clark, Katerina, 46 Cliburn, Van, 240 Cohen, Hermann, 24 Collot, Jean-Pierre, 5 Cooper, Emil, 33–4, 70, 75 Cordin, Lina, 205 Craft, Robert, 254, 256–7, 263, 265, 267 Cuban Missile Crisis, 268 Danblon, Paul, 233–4 Death of Stalin, The (film, 2017), 2, 299 Denisov, Edison, 271 Derevyanko, Pyotr, 164 Derevyanko, Viktor, 233, 235, 252, 260, 270

Désormière, Roger, 138 Diaghilev, Sergei Valentinovich, 219–20 Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaya, Olga, 37, 43, 85 Dobuzhinsky, Mstislav, 27 Dolivo, Anatoli, 121, 145, 152 Dolukhanova, Zara, 210 Dorliak, Kseniya, 74, 94 Drozdov, Vladimir Nikolayevich, 10, 56 Drozdova, Maria, 3, 4, 63–4, 144, 252, 270, 279 Druskin, Mikhail, 77, 81 Druzhinin, Fyodor, 234, 246, 253 Dubinsky, Rostislav, 230 Dubourvieux, Nadine, 4 Dudintsev, Vladimir, 238 Dyakov, Abram, 168 DZZ (Dom Zvuko Zapisej), 171, 302 Eden, Anthony, 174 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 239 Eliasberg, Karl, 155, 181, 182 Fairclough, Pauline, 78 Fateyev, Vasili, 74 Favorsky, Vladimir, 63–4, 122–3, 143, 152, 199, 203, 227 February Revolution (1917), 12–14 Fedorchenko, Esfira, 164 Fedotov, Georgi, 43 Feigin, Grisha, 246 Feinberg, Samuil, 79, 232 Filaret, Metropolitan, 279 Filippov, Boris, 53–4, 97 Filonov, Pavel, 25 First All-Union Congress of Composers, 207 Flier, Yakov, 141, 171, 180 Florenskaya, Anna Mikhailovna, 131, 160 Florenskaya-Trubachyova, Olga, 131–2, 159, 280–1 Florensky, Father Pavel, 1, 20, 50–2, 68, 104, 110, 122–3, 124, 129–32, 148, 159–60 Floriot, Marc, 4 Fogd-Stoyanova, Tatiana, 278 formalism, repression of, 204–8, 211–12, 216, 221–2 Franck, Semyon, 47, 124 Freidenberg, Olga, 32, 37, 180–1, 185–6, 199, 227 Frenkel, Naftaly, 125 Freud, Sigmund, 45 Fried, Grigori, 212 Fried, Oskar, 75–6

325

INDEX Friedman, Valentina, 66, 68 Fyodorishchev, Yuri, 197 Gakkel, Leonid, 274 Gandshin, Jacques, 12 Garshin, Vladimir, 185 Gauk, Alexander, 110, 112, 114–15, 203, 234, 302 Gerasimova, Marianna, 125 German Romanticism, 27 Gevorkyan, Minas, 153 Gilels, Emil, 141, 150, 151, 168, 187, 212, 226 Ginzburg, Leo, 133, 134, 135 Gippius, Karl, 213 Gippius, Zinaida, 41 Glazunov, Alexander, 9, 10, 33, 59, 60 Glebova, Tatiana, 68–9, 213–14 Glière, Reinhold, 167 Glob, Andrei, 161 Gnesin, Mikhail, 89, 90–1, 94, 118, 207, 208, 215 Gnesina, Yelena Fabianovna, 194, 214–15, 216, 217, 246, 247 Gnesins’ Institute, 173, 192, 203, 214–15, 216, 231, 235, 246, 247–8 Godowsky, Leopold, 142 Goldenweiser, Alexander, 140, 141, 166, 167, 186 Golubtsev, Father Nikolai, 230, 278 Gorky, Maxim, 35, 52, 87–8, 103–4, 129–30 Gornastaeva, Vera, 274–5 Gottlieb, Adolf, 248 Gould, Glenn, 231–2, 250–1 Grabovsky, Leonid, 258 Graham, Martha, 268 Greyvs, Ivan, 37, 42, 43, 85 Grinberg, Maria, 141, 144, 210, 270, 281 Grishtayeva, Kseniya, 156 Grossman, Maria, 230 Grunberg, Pavel, 300 Guchkova, Vera, 241 Gumilyov, Nikolai, 35 Gurvich, Iosif Mikhailovich, 26 Gutman, Jan, 25 Heifetz, Jascha, 10 Hess, Myra, 172 Hindemith, Paul, 235, 250, 269 Holquist, Michael, 46 homosexuality, repression of, 146 Horenstein, Jascha, 115, 116, 133 Horowitz, Vladimir, 11, 71 Hungary, Soviet invasion, 226

Iannucci, Armando, The Death of Stalin (film, 2017), 2, 299 Igumnov, Konstantin, 57, 140, 141, 146, 149, 167, 186 intelligentsia, Russian, 41, 47, 85–9, 125–6 Ireland, John, 119 Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 45 Ivanov-Razumnik, 42 Ivinskaya, Olga, 200, 206 Jackowski, Alexander, 212 Jews, atrocities against, 176 Jolivet, André, 244, 245, 251–2 Josephite movement, 49–50, 52, 55, 85 Kabalevsky, Dmitri, 137, 167, 211 Kabardinian folk songs, 167 Kagan, Matvei, 16, 22, 24, 26, 45, 70, 87, 164 Kagan, Sofia, 87 Kalafati, Vasili, 12 Kalantarova, Olga, 9 Kamendrovskaya, Tatiana, 239 Kamensky, Alexander, 56 Kanayev, Ivan, 45, 164 Kandinsky, Vasili, 25 Karetnikov, Nikolai, 271 Karsavin, Lev, 37, 37–8, 42, 47, 195–6, 227, 241 Kazan Cathedral Choir, 74 Kazan Conservatoire, 215–16 Kazanovich, Yevlaliya, 44, 66 Kazansky, Metropolitan Veniamin, 42, 47–8 Kerner, Anna, 94 Khachaturian, Aram, 205 Khachaturian, Karen, 263, 265 Kharms, Daniil, 67, 68, 197 Kholodilin, Alexander, 271 Khrennikov, Tikhon, 209, 254, 263, 264, 267 Khrushchev, Nikita, 226 King, David, 3, 4 Kleiber, Erich, 71 Klemperer, Otto, 71–2, 75 Klimov, Mikhail, 75, 77, 78, 133 Klin (city), 174, 186 Klyuev, Nikolai, 45 Knipper, Olga, 135, 137 Kochetkov, Alexander, 196, 197 Kochurov, Yuri, 187, 208, 221 Kogan, Grigori, 116, 146, 157, 226, 249 Kondrashin, Kirill, 171 Korolenko, Vladimir, 178 Koroliov, Yevgeni, 64n, 272 Koval, Marian, 211 Kozlov, Pavel, 248

326

INDEX Kozolupova, Marina, 171, 183 Krasheninnikova, Yekaterina and Maria, 229–30 Kremlyev, Yuli, 64–5, 73, 138 Krenek, Ernst, 232, 250 Krylenko, Nikolai, 102–3 Kulikov, Father Alexander, 278 Kushnaryov, Khristofor, 108 Kuznetsov, Anatoli, 3, 95, 221 Leipzig, 210 Lenin, Vladimir, 40, 47, 70 Leningrad (Petrograd), 31–3, 70, 71; siege (1942–43), 167, 175, 179–85 Leningrad (Petrograd) Conservatoire, 33, 56, 148–9, 167 Leningrad (Petrograd) Philharmonic Orchestra, 34, 70, 76, 107, 117n, 133, 188, 205, 208, 259 Leningrad Academic Capella, 75 Leschetizky, Theodor, 9, 72 Lesgaft, Pyotr, 13n Lesgaft Courses, 13, 14 Levitin, Yuri, 212 Likhachov, Dmitri, 40, 41, 42, 43 Linetskaya, Elga, 21–2 Lipkin, Seymour, 239 Lissitzky, Lazar Markovich (‘El Lissitzky’), 27 Livanova, Tamara, 211 Lodzinsky, Mikhail, 164, 227 Loiter, Yelizaveta, 179 Lokshin, Alexander, 208–10, 215 Losev, Alexei, 55, 118, 124–9 Lossky, Nikolai, 36, 41, 42, 47 Lothar-Shevchenko, Vera, 219 Lubimov, Alexei, 4, 64n, 141, 272, 273 Lunacharsky, Anatoli, 27, 28, 32, 33, 87, 145–6 Lutosławski, Witold, 224 Lyatoshinsky, Boris, 258 Lysenko, Trofim, 88, 121 Lyubetsky, Lev, 168 Lyublinsky, Vladimir, 182–3, 223, 249, 277

Maslakovets, Alla, 64, 77, 105–6, 110 Maslakovets, Pyotr, 104, 106 Masonic orders, 24 Matsov, Roman, 248, 258 Matveyev, Mikhail, 208 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 91 Medtner, Nikolai, 236 Medvezhya Gora (gulag), 125–6 Meier, Alexander, 41, 42, 43, 85, 88, 125, 126, 157 Melodiya Studios, 246, 256, 260, 272, 279, 300 Men’, Father Alexander, 278–9 Mendelssohn, Felix, 171 Mendelssohn, Mira, 206 Merezhkovsky, Dmitri, 41 Merzhanov, Viktor, 170, 224 Messiaen, Olivier, 237, 242, 244, 249, 252 Meyereovich, Mikhail, 208, 209 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 11, 42, 68, 101, 152–3, 157 Migai, Sergei, 171, 174 Mikeladze, Yevgeni, 109, 111–12 Mikhailov, Lev, 273 Mikhoels, Solomon, 63, 177, 205 Miklashevskaya, Irina, 70 Mirsky, Dmitri, 241 Mitropoulos, Dmitri, 120 Moholy-Nagy, Làszlò, 148 Mokreyeva, Galina, 245, 260–1 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 170, 191 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, 153 Moscow Chamber Orchestra, 231 Moscow Conservatoire, 146, 166–8, 173, 183, 192, 281 Moscow Radio Orchestra, 115 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 221, 222 Mravinsky, Yevgeni, 188, 205, 236, 251 Muradeli, Vano, 204 Muromtsev, Yuri, 209 Musgiz (music publisher), 146, 164 Music Technikum, 145–6 Myaskovsky, Nikolai, 57, 150, 160, 167, 205

Makarova, Shura, 53 Malevich, Kazimir, 27 Malko, Nikolai, 28, 76, 244 Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 277 Mandelstam, Osip, 17, 133, 161, 163, 225 Marburg School, 25 Mariinsky Theatre, 11, 33 Markiz, Lev, 230–1 Marshak, Samuil, 68, 177–8, 196 Mashirov, Alexei, 94–5, 96

Nalchik (city), 167 ‘Name-Worshippers’ (religious sect), 124 Narkompros (Commissariat for Enlightenment), 32 Nasedkin, Alexei, 64n Naumov, Lev, 141 Nazarov, Yasha, 4 Nest’ev, Israel, 211 Neuhaus, Heinrich, 93, 137, 139, 140–2, 146, 169, 212, 239

327

INDEX Neuhaus, Stanislav, 141, 246–7, 281 Neusykhin, Alexander, 199 Nevel’, Russia, 14–16, 22–4, 107; massacre of Jews, 176 New Viennese School, 232 New York City Ballet, 268 New York Philharmonic, 239 Nikitina, Olga, 83 Nikolayev, Leonid, 56–9, 70, 97, 178, 187 Nikolayeva, Tatiana, 210, 212, 232 Nixon, Richard, 239 Nono, Luigi, 272 Novosibirsk (city), 187–8 Nusinov, Isaak, 164 OBERIU (Leningrad absurdist group), 46 Oborin, Lev, 141, 144, 150, 173, 186 OGPU (secret police), 49, 125 Oistrakh, David, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 179–82, 226 Orlov, Alexander, 115 Ormandy, Eugene, 239 Ossovsky, Alexander, 97, 114, 120, 133 Pale of Settlement, 27 Pärt, Arvo, 253, 259 Pasternak, Boris: Dr Zhivago, 199–201, 229, 238–9, 249; first encounter with MVY, 92–3; friendship with Heinrich Neuhaus, 142; friendship with MVY, 185–6, 206, 228–9; meets Leonard Bernstein, 240; and MVY’s Schubert lieder project, 161–2, 201–3; death and funeral, 246–7 Pavlovskaya-Borovik, Vera, 92 Peiko, Nikolai, 212 Perelman, Natan, 56 Peshkova, Yekaterina Pavlovna, 52, 87–8, 102, 125, 129, 131 Petersburg Religious Philosophical Society, 41 Petrograd (St Petersburg), during the Civil War, 31–3 Petrograd Conservatoire, 33, 56 Petrograd University, 36–7 Petrograd/Leningrad Philharmonic, 34, 70 Petrogradsky Trial (1922), 47–9 Petrov-Vodkin, Kuzma, 42 Petrovykh, Iosif, 49 Petrozhitsky, Lev, 48 Pieck, Wilhelm, 210 Pigulevskaya, Nina, 43 Pikayzen, Viktor, 260, 273, 281 Platonov, Sergei, 86

Pollock, Jackson, 239 Polovtseva, Kseniya, 42, 43, 85, 88, 157, 163, 165, 207 PomPolit (association), 52, 87–8, 102, 131 Ponkizovkin, Yuri, 230 Popov, Gavriil, 78, 107, 205, 221 Popov, Konstantin, 193–4 Popova, Lyubov, 123 Poret, Alisa, 66, 67–8, 68–9 Preobrazhensky, Alexander, 75 Prezent, Isaac, 121 Prieberg, Fred, 258, 267 Privshin, Mikhail, 227 Prokhorova, Vera, 209, 239 Prokofiev, Sergei: Second Piano Concerto, 111–12, 115–16, 134–5, 138, 149–50, 151–2, 156; Romeo and Juliet, 150–1; collaboration with Meyerhold, 152–3; evacuated during the war, 167; music censored, 205–6; provides accommodation to MVY, 193; War and Peace, 186–7, 189–90; death, 218 Protopopov, Sergei, 123, 146, 147, 152, 154 Pumpyansky, Lev Vasilyevich, 16–23, 26, 28, 29–30, 43–6, 85, 86 purges, 85–9; in education, 216 Pyast, Vladimir, 35 Rabinovich, Isaak, 146 Rabinovich, Nikolai, 159 Rachmaninov, Sergei, 155, 171 Radlov, Sergei, 103 Raikh, Zinaida, 101 Raisky, Nazary, 154 Rakhlin, Nathan, 160, 234 Ramin, Günther, 210 Rank, Otto, 45 RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Music), 88, 108 religious music, Soviet banning of, 78–9 Renzin, Isai, 77 Resolution (1946), condemning ideological impurity, 195, 205 Richter, Sviatoslav, 141, 151, 171, 186, 226, 281 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 92 Rimsky-Korsakov, Andrei, 44 Rodchenko, Alexander, 123, 125 Rolland, Romain, 137 Rosenstock, Joseph, 135 Rosicrucian Order, 24 Rostropovich, Mstislav, 141, 210, 226, 300 Rozhdestvenskaya, Natalia, 171, 174 Rozhdestvensky, Alexander, 74–5

328

INDEX Rozhdestvensky, Gennadi, 209, 234, 242, 260, 263 Ruben, Dominic, 37 Rubinstein, Anton, 149 Rubinstein, Nikolai, 140 Rubinstein Prize, 61 Ruchevskaya, Yekaterina, 161 Rudneva, Lyubov, 212 Rugevich, Anna Sergeyevna, 149 Rugevich, Vladimir, 149 Russian Orthodox Church, 40–1, 47–50 Saltykov, Kirill, 155–9 Saltykova, Yelena Nikolayevna, 158, 167, 177, 191, 201, 208, 222–4, 227 samizdat, 201, 277 Sanderling, Kurt, 117n, 133, 188, 208, 222 Savyolovo, 163–4 Scherchen, Hermann, 118, 240 Schillinger, Joseph, 111 Schmitt, Florent, 132 Schnabel, Artur, 72–3 Schoenberg, Arnold, 269 Schubert, Franz, 161, 196–9, 201–3 Schweitzer, Albert, 81 Scriabin Memorial Museum, 179, 258 Sébastien, Georges, 115, 133 Second World War, 166–90 Selyu, Yulian, 122, 200 Serebryakov, Pavel, 210 Serocki, Karimierz, 224 Shakhovskaya, Natalia, 234 Shakty Trials, 88 Shapiro, Raisa, 21 Shaporin, Yuri, 48, 89–90, 100, 103 Shaporina, Lyubov, 31–2, 118, 126, 147, 167, 182, 184, 188, 208 Shatsky, Stanislav, 140 Shcherbachov, Vladimir, 74, 97, 108, 111, 221 Shebalin, Vissarion, 167, 173, 205 Shervinsky, Sergei, 196–7 Shirinsky, Sergei, 174, 186 Shishmarev, V.F., 195 Shostakovich, Dmitri: studies at Petrograd Conservatoire, 56–8; at MVY’s graduation performance, 60; on MVY’s influence, 62; on Nikolai Malko, 76; Bach’s influence on, 79; at Prokofiev’s performance of his Second Piano Concerto, 111; composition lessons from Yavorsky, 146–7; music censored, 170, 189, 205, 206–7; support for MVY, 191; at Bach’s bicentenary celebrations in

Leipzig, 210; 24 Preludes and Fugues, 211–12; Ninth Symphony, 189; Second Piano Sonata, 178; Seventh Symphony, 167, 176, 181; Tenth Symphony, 221–2; Thirteenth Symphony, 269 Shostakovich, Sofia Vasilyevna, 227 Shotinov, Konstantin, 168 show trials, 47–9 Shpiller, Father Vsevolod, 278, 281 Shtarkman, Naum, 141 Silver Age, Russian, 80 Silvestrov, Valentin, 258 Simonovich-Yefimova, Nina, 122, 173 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 278 Skoblò, Valentin, 272 Skrebkov, Sergei, 211 Skrzhinskaya, Irina, 38, 124, 132–3, 137, 156 Skrzhinskaya, Yelena Cheslavna, 30, 37–8, 46, 97–9, 104, 106, 113–14, 156, 178, 195 Slatin, Ilya, 8 Sluchevskaya, Lida, 199 Smetácek, Václav, 224 Socialist Realism, 78, 89 Sofronitsky, Vladimir, 56, 57, 60–1, 71, 101, 102, 179, 257 Sokolova, Valentina, 124 Sollertinsky, Ivan, 28, 46, 70, 78, 110, 188 Solomennaya Storozha (housing cooperative), 213–14, 234, 243 Solovki monastery, 40 Solovyov, Vladimir, 19, 80, 114 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 125, 131, 249, 278 Sosnovskaya, Yelena, 53, 177–8 Souvchinsky, Pierre, 163 Soviet musical life, 88–9 Soviet propaganda, 188–9 St Petersburg Conservatoire, 9 Stalin, Iosif, 2–3, 41, 85, 146, 170, 181, 187, 190, 203, 218, 299–304 Stalingrad, 179 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 152 Stanislavsky Theatre, 193 Starogorodsky, Metropolitan Sergei, 49, 55 Stasevich, Abram, 155 Steinberg, Maximilian, 12, 57, 123, 149 Stiedri, Fritz, 109, 148 Stockhausen Karlheinz, 240, 242, 258 Stolyarov, Grigori, 173 Straszyński, Olgierd, 224 Stravinskaya, Kseniya, 261, 263 Stravinsky, Igor: music performed in USSR in 1920s, 77–8, 133–4, 155; MVY performances of, 242–3; MVY

329

INDEX corresponds with, 245; music censored, 248–9; MVY’s championship of, 252–6; 80th birthday celebrations, 260; return to USSR, 263–8 Stromin, Albert, 86, 87 Suvchinskaya, Marianna (née Karsavina), 241 Suvchinsky, Pierre (Pyotr Petrovich), 5, 240–2, 243, 244–5, 252, 254, 257–8, 259, 267–8 Svetlova, Natalia, 278 Sviridov, Georgi, 212 Symbolist Movement, 34 Szymanowski, Karol, 118, 142 Tagantsev plot, 35 Tager, Sergei, 116 Talich, Václav, 107 Tamarkina, Rosa, 141 Taneyev, Sergei, 73, 140, 152–4, 236; Oresteia, 193 Tarlé, Yevgeni, 86, 106, 194, 227 Tatlin, Vladimir, 123 Tchaikovsky Hall, Moscow, 170, 173, 174, 189 Tchaikovsky Museum, Klin, 174 Teitelbaum-Levinson, Frieda, 8 Thibaud, Jacques, 10 Tiflis (Tblisi), 108, 167 Tikhon, Patriarch, 40, 47, 49 Tikhvin (city), 180 Tilicheyeva, Yevgeniya Oskarovna (née Otten), 13, 16, 19, 30, 43, 60–1, 62, 85, 136, 207 Timofeyev, Leonid, 164 Tishchenko, Boris, 250–1, 265–6 Tolstoy, Alexei, 88, 103, 118, 130, 185 Tolstoy, Ivan Ivanovich, 37 Tolstoy, Lev, 25 Tomashevskaya, Irina, 204 Tomashevskaya, Zoya, 191, 199 Traill, Robert, 241 Trotsky, Leon, 17 Trubachyov, Sergei, 51, 129 Trubetskoi, Sergei, 132 Tsvetayeva, Marina, 162–3, 197 Tsyganov, Dmitri, 174, 186 Tsypkin, Leonid, 280 Tyulin, Yuri, 58 Udintsev, Boris, 213–14 Udintsevna, Yekaterina, 213–14 Ukhtomsky, Alexei, 99–100, 148 Union of Composers, 170, 192, 196, 208, 255, 265

Usachevsky, Vladimir, 258 USSR State Orchestra, 115 Ustvolskaya, Galina, 235 Vaginov, Konstantin, 45; The Satyr’s Song (1927), 46–7 Vagner, Georgi, 203, 219 Vakhrameyev, Metropolitan Filaret, 143 Vanadziņš, Nikolajs, 12 Vedernikov, Father Nikolai, 278, 280 Veysberg, Yulia, 44, 138, 175 Vigner, Leonid, 206 Vinogradova, Vera, 56, 59 Virsoladze, Eliso, 141 Vitebsk, Russia, 7, 24, 27, 28, 70 VKhuTEMAS (institute), 122–3 Vladimirov, Vyacheslav, 118, 135 Vlasov, Vladimir, 190 Volfila (religious-philosophical circle), 40, 42 Volkonsky, Andrei, 235–6, 246–7, 260, 272; Musica Stricta, 253 Volkov, Solomon, Testimony, 299–304 Voloshinov, Valentin, 16, 24, 45, 70 Voronezh, 133 Voskreseniye (religious-philosophical circle), 40, 41, 42–4, 53, 85, 149 Vuchetich, 214 Vvedensky, Alexander, 197 Vykhodtseva, Yevgeniya, 262–3 Vyshinsky, Andrei, 103 Wagner, Richard, Tristan and Isolde, 11 Waiman, Mikhail, 210 Walter, Bruno, 71 Walton, William, 235 White Sea-Baltic Canal, 125–6 World Festival of Youth, Moscow (1957), 232–3 Yagoda, Genrikh, 125 Yakhontov, Vladimir, 179 Yaunzem, Irma, 94, 179 Yavorsky, Boleslav, 79–82, 92, 115, 123, 145–7, 152, 153, 154, 159, 178–9 Yefimov, Ivan, 122 Yershov, Ivan Vasilyevich, 33, 94 Yesenin-Volpin, Alexander, 209 Yesipova, Anna Nikolayevna, 9–10, 72 Yevgrafov, Lev, 230, 234, 246 Yevlakhov, Orest, 187 Yevtushenko, Yevgeni, 202, 228, 269 Yudin, Boris, 22, 66, 107, 108, 121, 122, 222

330

INDEX Yudin, Gavriil, 4, 8, 12, 15, 73, 141, 237 Yudin, Lev, 27, 157 Yudin, Pavel Fyodorovich, 121, 214, 216–17 Yudin, Veniamin Gavrilovich, 7–8, 19, 26, 30, 176 Yudina, Anna, 13, 257 Yudina, Boris, 66 Yudina, Flora, 13, 257 Yudina, Maria Veniaminovna: birth and childhood, 6–9; musical education, 8–12; takes part in February Revolution (1917), 12–14; Jewish background, 17, 176–7; romantic relationships, 17–21, 23, 46, 90–1, 135, 155–60; Orthodox faith, 19–20, 28–31, 53–5, 229–30, 278; and the Bakhtin Circle, 26, 28, 44; studies at Petrograd (Leningrad) Conservatoire, 29, 34, 38–9, 56–9, 59–61; attends Petrograd University, 36–9; member of Voskreseniye, 43–4; and the Josephite movement, 50, 53; teaches at the Petrograd (Leningrad) Conservatoire, 61–6, 71; interest in vocal music, 74–5, 145; membership of LASM (Leningrad Association of Contemporary Music), 88; recital debut in Moscow, 93; dismissed from Leningrad Conservatoire, 94–7; travels to Alma-Ata, 104–6; teaches at Tiflis Conservatoire, 108–12; health problems, 14, 112–14, 192, 273, 279–80; moves to Moscow, 113–24; professor of piano at Moscow Conservatoire, 140–4; interest in architecture, 147–8; Schubert lieder project, 161–4, 196–9, 201–3, 204; in Moscow during the Second World War, 166–79; performances during the war, 170, 172–4, 182, 184–5; in Leningrad during the siege, 180, 182, 183–5; travels to Leipzig for Bach’s bicentenary, 210–11;

home in Solomennaya Storozhka, 213–14, 234–5; literary interests, 238, 273, 276; recital tour in Poland, 223–4; championship of new music, 252–3, 269; support for Stravinsky, 252–3, 256, 259–62, 263–8; poetry readings, 259–60; denunciation and ban from performance, 270–1; rehabilitation, 274–5; lectures on Romanticism, 275–6; last public performances, 280; death and funeral, 280–2; alleged recording for Stalin, 2–3, 299–304; choice of repertoire, 58–9, 73, 77, 107, 117–20, 133–4, 147–51, 155, 174, 186–7, 203–4, 206, 224–5, 232, 236, 245, 250–1, 255, 259, 276–7 Yudina, Raisa Yakovlevna, 7, 21 Yudina, Vera, 7, 13, 30, 107, 135, 263, 280 Zabolotsky, Nikolai, 162, 191, 197–8 Zagursky, Boris, 183 Zak, Yakov, 141, 149–50, 151, 168, 171, 179, 180 Zakharov, Vladimir, 211 Zalesky, Boris, 45, 108, 114, 227, 274 Zalessky, Emilyan (Milya), 121, 132, 163, 164, 185, 219, 227 Zamyatin, Yevgeni, 35, 42 Zayaitsky, Sergei, 161 Zbruyeva, Nina, 122, 124, 196, 225, 227 Zelinsky, Faddei Frantsevich, 36 Zhdan, Valya (née Yasnopolskaya), 86, 136 Zhdanov, Andrei, 189, 204, 205 Zhiganov, Nazib, 215 Zhirmunsky, Viktor, 39 Zhukov, Igor, 141 Znameny Chant, 74–5 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 42, 189 Zubakin, Boris, 16, 24, 26 Zuckerman, Viktor, 146

331

332